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Some of you might have noticed, how some time ago I added subtle reputation counters to the game. Now I feel like it's a good time to develop them further and I gonna talk about them for a bit. 

Unsurprisingly, Strive was always planned as an "actions and consequences" type of game in mind. I do not respect 'good-vs-evil' mentality in any form, so instead I try to go for 'kind-vs-mean' and sometimes even 'grey-vs-grey', although last one is pretty hard to make on reasonable level as we are already kinda involved into every story and our benefit is the main driving reason. 

Anyway, reputation system in its core is very simple and initially was planned as a future countermeasure to limitless attacks and kills of strangers. I didn't quite done anything last time with it though, as punishments require actual work both writing and coding put into them. But besides just punishments, I also made reputation differ depending on your location, so for enslaving someone near Gorn, your Wimborn reputation does not suffer in a bit. 

Now we are getting to actually using that system. Firstly, primal idea behind of reputation - provide player with choices and different ways to play the game. Player MUST have an option to play meanest possible way, and that also must give some benefits (some black market sort of things perhaps). But on the other side there must be consequences for either play style. Secondly, reputation should be obvious. If player decides to go nuts, it should be apparent, that game treats you accordingly and not only make some minor changes on the background. 

After measuring my options and how I can achieve such thing, I think most reasonable option, not involving hundreds of optional encounters written, is to make every slave to (initially) have an affiliation with some group. Bad reputation with their native group would make them threat you worse and wise-versa. Affiliation will obviously not affect everyone, and for example, monsters won't have any real concern what others think about you. This partly will resemble and maybe even replace caste system, as I'm not quite satisfied with it yet (although, arguably, because it depends on more content worth exploring), however, it won't be permanent: slaves living with you will eventually grow less concerned about your global reputation and switch to your usual loyal servants, however, those working in public will become more affected by your reputation. This also suggests, that slave employment might see some medium rework, but that should be very easy (and worthy of work). 

Of course, there still will be daily events and random encounters tied to reputation, but I don't think they are impactful enough on their own.  Overall, currently I'm aiming on improving overall exploration and management aspects while also polishing existing parts (there's a lot I want to make look and feel better, next version will have new inventory and item usage system). Let me know what you think about these ideas in the comments or if you have something interesting to suggest. Next time I'll be talking about my long time enemy - endgame gold and equipment.

Comments

Anonymous

Hi! In current version imho it's pretty hard to play mean slaver, mostly because you have one "core" variable (Locality) so unlike Free Cities there is no way to "subdue slave with fear". Addition of second core variable would solve this issue but I know it would require huge dev effort and big rebalancing of a whole game. Your idea seems to be pretty easy to counter with: 1) "just hold slave for a little longer in jail" 2) keep high reputation in main city (where slaves are employed) to avoid public jobs penalty and go berserk in two other cities. Without much effort you can add additional encounters like "faction XXX ambushed you" so you have additional fight during exploration to decrease gains from slave catching raids or make them more dangerous. Addition of spellcasting enemies who can reduce energy or mana with magic would be sufficient punishment. By the way can you please elaborate what exactly affects "reputation"? Protagonist of game is a slaver so it had inherently bad reputation connected with his profession. Even if he treats slaves nicely and is generally 'good' I bet no one wants to be enslaved anyway. I presume this reputation, using D&D notion, is rather between "chaotic" and "lawful" not "good" and "bad", am I right?

maverik

Technically, there IS a way to subdue with fear, but thing is, it usually have heavy impact on confidence/courage and you generally don't want it, so making slaves loyal is the usual approach. True, it can be countered, but right now it's not very penalizing to keep slaves in jail which can be easily changed (also I don't think affiliation will changed at all if slave is kept in jail (you can't really change their opinion about you if they are kept imprisoned 100% of time). Secondly, I want to make other locations more valuable than they are right now, so some service, shops, etc will go over there. Reputation is affect by: killing people (non-bandits are more impacting), enslaving peaceful people (travellers etc), doing repeatable quests, some daily events. There will probably be more options to change reputation, but for now that's mostly it. Slavery is not inheritably terrible thing in game setting as you are not just enslaving people, but also have to take care and responsible of them to some extent and economy wise there's more people than easily accessible food and many have to choose between 'sell their freedom' or 'die from hunger' (that is not mentioning any sort of war prisoners or criminals who are also subjects to be used as slaves). As slavery is regulated by laws and government, overall it's not as terrible, as it might initially appear. I don't exactly like 'chaotic-lawful' system because of how blurry it appears to me. Again, I'd rather say it's somewhat 'mean-kind' for some sidequests already in the game, but realistically, when I'm faced with adding some option to the game, line of thoughts is "what options I would like to see in this situation?", or "what option could make for an interesting idea/scene", hence why I mentioned grey-vs-grey.

Shaun Holmes

I don't understand, what do I need to train them in as I tried all sorts of training and still wont go away, should be a special kind of training as it not very clear

Anonymous

Unless something's changed recently, I believe it's Potion of Regression to clear Uncivilized, and then Slaver's Guild training to clear Regressed

Shaun Holmes

no potion of regression in game.

Shaun Holmes

would help if they told you more of what they did as well

Shaun Holmes

There is no potion of regression in any of my games and I completed all quest weird

maverik

Has been added in latest version, and can be bought from Ayda in Gorn

Shaun Holmes

Think I will play from start and try to get a basic help guide as it not easy to try and figure things out.

maverik

I plan to launch wiki in this month (and also redo some on the tutorial and help section)

Shaun Holmes

Cool. that would be a great help.

Anonymous

I haven't been able to get the patch to properly be applied to the game. TO be clear: 1. Download base game, 3.32 beta 2. Open the game directory and remove the data.pck 3. Replace it with a data.zip, which is the patch 0.4.0c 4. Play?

Shaun Holmes

Chris d you to create a folder put strive 2 in it, then unzip data zip 0.40c to that folder and it should work fine. I had the same trouble and it solved it. hope this helps

Shaun Holmes

Ty for help Maverik I finally got it and now know how to do it. 5* for help

maverik

Yes, you either replace it, or unzip it into same folder (should work for windows, not sure so much for other OS)

Darkfirephoenix

I think that capturing/enslaving bandits should give you "good" reputation as you are removing criminal and dangerous individuals from the area. (without killing em that is) Even killing/letting em run should give you a little bit of "good" reputation, as you removed a threat PERMANENTLY/drove them off. Now going around and attacking friendly people/travelers should give you "bad" reputation in the same measures compared to doing the same thing to bandits. Now I want a mechanic that would allow you to get slaves on your travels via peacefull means like rescuing a person from bandits and then offering themselfs to you cause they would have no other option (except maybe begging/living on the streets and being at risk constantly)

maverik

I did plan to add daily event for quite some time which would make rescued people show up and reward you one way or another tbh.