Team Nessassity Mods - Can Princess Finish Writing This Report Before Endwalker Comes Out? If You See This In 2021, It Means That, Against All Odds, She's Done It! Yatta! (Patreon)

And to the astonishment and surprise of the entire universe, this MMR is actually going up on time! Good job, Me!
I'm sure Future Me will have no reason to come back here and edit this premature victory cheer, right?（*＾ワ＾*）

Right? RIGHT?

[Future Me]: Wow... I actually didn't need to. Good job, Past Me! You did it! Now just keep doing that consistently every month and maybe Self-Esteem Me will come back to us one day... (≖ ︿ ≖ )

Anyways! It's November! And that probably means all the things everywhere are about to come out and grab our attention as we enter the holiday season, but surely we'll be able to get all of our work finished, wrapped up, done and dusted before anything big gets in the w-

...okay, but-

Oh for butt's sake... ≧﹏≦

OKAY! There is NO time to waste, I guess we're just going to have to treat this month as APOCALYPSE-LEVEL EMERGENCY and get a lot of work done to meet our November milestones, so today's Monthly Mod Report is going to be unusually short, sweet and to the point!

Can I do it? Is it actually possible? We're about to find out together!

WITHOUT FURTHER................... ado!

Veiled Realms

So last month we launched the Community Wirting initiative meant to help us fill in the gargantuan gaping black hole that is the mod's event quota. It didn't seem to draw a lot of interest, but since it doesn't really have a deadline (all approved events will make it in, even after the mod's official release) it's not urgent. But if anyone is interested, I'd like to remind you to check out the Guidelines document for the instructions and our Discord should you have any questions or need help of any kind!

That aside, progress on the rest of the mod has picked up the pace in recent weeks! Writing up those narrative guidelines actually helped me settle on a clearer direction in terms of the "lore" of Veiled Realms, which in turn has informed a few big improvements to previously... generic-feeling mechanics.

Specifically, the way vampiric powers work, who they can affect and how the difficulty factors should be calculated have all received a complete makeover.

Previously, vampiric powers functioned like this:

• Feeding on a character gave the vampire a Blood buff with quality based on the health of the target
• Using powers on a character could be done either for free, which would result in a weaker version (example: makes the target more vulnerable to Schemes) or Blood could be spent to manifest a more powerful and specialised effect (example: gain a special Hook on the target or make them unable to expose the vampire's Secrets)
• Spending a higher-quality Blood buff would improve the chances of a buffed power succeeding
• Anyone could be targeted by powers
• The difficulty of using powers was based on a contest of stats between the vampire and the victim
• Aside from the automatically accrued Menace and Stress on every attempt, there would be no consequences for failing
• After using a power on a character, a cooldown would be imposed before that character could be affected again
• Vampirism Lifestyle perks included ways to lower the cooldown and affect the difficulty of using powers under specific circumstances

As you can see, it was very... standard, I guess? Exactly what you'd expect from a "magic system" in a video game like CK3.

But... that's pretty boring, isn't it? Also... after spending so many months setting up the Feeding event system, it also felt a little wasteful to just leave it as an optional way of generating "vampire mana" to "augment spells".

So I started thinking how to make our rendition of "vampire magic" feel a bit less like magic in an RPG. I wanted to come up with something that not only felt more viscerally vampiric, but would also be fun to use, not too complicated to the players, and somehow still work within the mechanical framework of CK3 and Veiled Realms.
The solution came to me as I was rewatching Shiki to copy a few of the hunting scenes into our feeding events. And... it turned out surprisingly simple:

Why treat Feeding and Powers as two separate systems?

In the end, which of these scenarios feels more immersive and offers more engaging gameplay?

Duchess Mathilda visits her dungeon to snack on a random peasant, and then heads over to the council chamber to bewitch the Bishop.

or

Duchess Mathilda takes a major risk and has to contend with guilt as she stalks and sinks her fangs into the neck of the Bishop and then proceeds to take advantage of his dazed state to implant vile suggestions in his mind.

The first scenario is very, very likely how most players would have ended up optimising their feeding routine and power usage. It does, after all, offer the greatest benefits at almost no risk. Feeding on a prisoner is always successful and rarely results in immediate consequences, but you typically can't get anything useful out of manipulating them.
On the other hand, bewitching powerful characters can bring great rewards, but trying to hunt down a well-protected Bishop while playing a deeply religious character would offer many challenges and potentially risk life, limb, reputation or even far-reaching diplomatic ramifications.

Bearing this in mind, I consolidated the two disparate but indirectly synergistic systems into one closed loop. As a result, this is how it works now:

• Feeding on a character gives the vampire a Blood buff with quality based on the health of the target
• Blood can no longer be spent. It now provides passive Stress relief for a length of time based on quality
• Feeding on a character inflicts them with the Enervated debuff
• Only characters with the Enervated status can be targeted by powers
• Using a power consumes Enervated, so there no longer needs to be an internal cooldown
• If unused, Enervated disappears after roughly a month
• Powers no longer have a random chance to fail. They now work automatically, but the Stress cost is no longer static and is now impacted by the vampire's and victim's relative stats, as well as various other factors.
• Vampirism Lifestyle perks include ways to prolong the Enervated status, reduce the Stress impact and [more effects pending]

And as an added bonus, since powers can now only affect characters you've recently fed on, they no longer need to be displayed in the Interaction dropdown for everyone in the world, significantly reducing UI bloat ɷ◡ɷ

All in all, I think the experience of feeding and utilising vampiric powers (I really need to come up with a better word for it, I've used "powers" so many times in this Report, it's starting to no longer feel like a real word >.>) will both feel and play better. The balancing of cost/benefit should be more logical and thus bring more satisfaction/pain, the flavour should be stronger and the most heavily-invested system in Veiled Realms (feeding) will be a more prominent part of gameplay without becoming more annoying or feeling forced.

But... ultimately my self-review can't determine how it actually feels to actual players, so please let me know how you feel about these changes! And if there's anything else you'd like to see, please don't hesitate to leave your suggestions.

Elves of Stellaris 

You may be happy to know that last month's little teaser was just the beginning! Nessa Shipyards went into overdrive and over the past couple of weeks has produced a lot of new Dark Elven ships! And we've discovered that the new, golden solar pattern lends itself SO well to many different designs!

But... you don't need me to tell you about it. Why don't we just take a look?

First, an oldie-but-goodie, the Dark Elven Battleship with a new (SHINY) coat of paint for the Solar shipset! It wasn't designed for this kind of pattern, but with how well it turned out, it looks like it was born this way!

And speaking of born, this one was just recently! It's a new Battleship variant with a few experimental features we wanted to try! You may have noticed the layered plating and another iteration of custom-fit thrusters! It's been a while since we got to work on one of the heavier ship classes so Nessa was very happy to finally get a chance to spread her wings and create a new tool of mass devastation n_n

Speaking of, there's nothing quite as devastating as a Titan, and it looks all the better with a coat of SHINY GOLD! It is admittedly an older model (which you can tell by the standard-issue thrusters it's still using) but it's still holding up surprisingly well! Who knows, perhaps one day we'll find an opportunity to retrofit a thing here and there ^^

And here's the complete collection of Dark Elven ships to date! And... huh! It's almost complete! There are still a few things missing/pending reworks, but if you're a long-time Dark Elf player, congratulations, you have lived to see the day they no longer borrow most of their ships from Elves! And perhaps soon we will purge the last remaining few traces of disgusting xeno taint n_~

SO be sure to keep an eye out for more news on everything Team Nessassity is working on! And the easiest way to do that is joining our Discord and following my Twitter o(≧o≦)o

And for those of you who are continuing to support us on Patreon through the ups and the downs, thank you a billion trillion times! I cannot express how much it means to me, and I hope that whatever it is that keeps you entertained, we can keep doing it forever <3

In the meantime, thank you and have fun playing Paradox Games (and others that may or may not be coming very soon and will probably consume our lives too <.<)