Factions need work

[sirfalstaff44]

If you check the encyclopedia, the factions have a ton of flavour. There's the ponderous and mysterious Vanguard of the Stolen Keys, the greedy First Dawn Company, and the innovative Brass Order. The lore says that the Brass Order and the Vanguard despise each other, and even suggests that the First Dawn Company will seek to economically enclose new settlements to ensure dependence on them for supply lines (and thus fatten their profits.)

Exactly none of this comes through in the gameplay, where they're just represented by generic towns on a map that you might or might not be able to trade with, depending on distance.

It's a missed opportunity, and I hope that future versions will involve deeper faction interactions. Ally with the Vanguard for forest secrets? Ply the Brass Order with gifts for new technologies? Will you be able to successfully guard your caravan routes against Brass Order encroachment and monopolization? These are the sorts of choices and dilemmas I'd like to see.

[Spacesuit Spiff]

That'd be cool. That whole trade system is fairly barebones tbh.

[Alexander]

Agreed. I'd love more internal politics in the game.

There's one more problem with the factions as they are now. The whole competition for the Citadel resources stuff. Viceroys supposedly collect resources to upgrade the Citadel, right? So where do the resources claimed by other factions go, then? Why the Queen gives citadel resources to the factions, while it is the factions who are supposed to collect the resources for Her Majesty? I saw an AtS review on YouTube where the reviewer said that other factions work for other Smoldering cities, which, indeed, would make a lot more sense.

Unfortunately when I try to think of improvements that would address these problems, I always come up with ideas that require full overhaul of the map and of the metaprogression system. Not sure it is a good idea at this point. Sometimes less is more.

[Narandia]

Originally posted by Alexander:

There's one more problem with the factions as they are now. The whole competition for the Citadel resources stuff. Viceroys supposedly collect resources to upgrade the Citadel, right? So where do the resources claimed by other factions go, then? Why the Queen gives citadel resources to the factions, while it is the factions who are supposed to collect the resources for Her Majesty? I saw an AtS review on YouTube where the reviewer said that other factions work for other Smoldering cities, which, indeed, would make a lot more sense.

Half the upgrade paths are named after the factions too, so I'd say its more a case of gameplay and story segregation (like you contributed to these citadel structures, rather than building them). Or perhaps the resources gathered by the other factions go to general maintenance, housing etc elsewhere in the Smoldering City and those structures are a form of limited collaboration.

That said, I would definitely like there to be more flavor to how these factions operate on the map. Even just a preference to settle near specific modifiers and/or in specific biomes, or affecting what their settlements will want to trade for more.

One idea I had would be a system where you could use their settlements to embark from but at the cost of some of the score earned going to theirs, or some of the citadel resource rewards being deducted. Maybe even a special form of collaborative settlement where the faction gives you some related starting conditions but also giving you some special orders in place of the normal pool.

[Alexander]

Originally posted by Narandia:

That said, I would definitely like there to be more flavor to how these factions operate on the map. Even just a preference to settle near specific modifiers and/or in specific biomes, or affecting what their settlements will want to trade for more.

One idea I had would be a system where you could use their settlements to embark from but at the cost of some of the score earned going to theirs, or some of the citadel resource rewards being deducted. Maybe even a special form of collaborative settlement where the faction gives you some related starting conditions but also giving you some special orders in place of the normal pool.

I was thinking somewhere around these lines. But the problem is that the map is a glorified biome picker now. Most of the times at the end of a cycle I see faction settlements forming straight lines radiating from the City indifferent directions. The map needs more "relief" to add meaning to the cross-faction interactions. And no, map modifiers don't actually cut it either because you'll get pretty much the same amount of modifiers in any direction. Competing with other factions by sabotaging their settlements is not much fun either, because the only thing I need to do is to successfully finish a settlement. Beating other factions without sabotage is, at least, a challenge.

In my opinion, in order to make faction interaction a thing AtS would need a big overhaul of the map, a new system of additional settlement goals and either an overarching campaign goal or a change to the metaprogression.

I also planned to create a discussion about the factions and a lump of ideas about how to make City's internal politics interesting, then I decided against it. The game is approaching the point of feature bloat, and the roadmap is finished anyway. Maybe it is for the better.

[Narandia]

Originally posted by Alexander:

And no, map modifiers don't actually cut it either because you'll get pretty much the same amount of modifiers in any direction. Competing with other factions by sabotaging their settlements is not much fun either, because the only thing I need to do is to successfully finish a settlement. Beating other factions without sabotage is, at least, a challenge.

The point I was getting to there was to give the factions more distinct tactics to consider. Right now the only difference is that Brass Order generally gets more points than the other two for no reason other than being your biggest rival, which in turn makes them your primary target to sabotage. It would be more interesting to have to consider the map in terms of which faction would do best if they get to certain modifiers before you can, or which one would be your biggest concern when going for a specific score bonus (not that there is really enough there to work with atm anyway).

In my opinion, in order to make faction interaction a thing AtS would need a big overhaul of the map, a new system of additional settlement goals and either an overarching campaign goal or a change to the metaprogression.

Agreed, some significant changes to the world map system would be required. Especially since you only really get to explore a small portion of the map each cycle and direct competition quickly becomes limited once factions push out further. Only way to expand your reach quickly is to spam quick settler difficulty settlements that only take 3 years or so, which isn't much fun.

[Alexander]

Originally posted by Narandia:

The point I was getting to there was to give the factions more distinct tactics to consider. Right now the only difference is that Brass Order generally gets more points than the other two for no reason other than being your biggest rival, which in turn makes them your primary target to sabotage. It would be more interesting to have to consider the map in terms of which faction would do best if they get to certain modifiers before you can, or which one would be your biggest concern when going for a specific score bonus (not that there is really enough there to work with atm anyway).

When I considered my ideas about the factions, I often asked myself "OK, suppose this nice idea is actually implemented. Would I actually care about it myself, while playing?" Currently factions rivalry works in a way that as soon as you pick a settlement to sabotage the corresponding faction automatically becomes an outsider. So while I like the idea of your idea, I just don't see the circumstances where the faction differences would actually matter. That circumstances would have to be created first, and the unique traits of different factions would be defined against them, similar to how the traits of the species are defined against the hostility, reputation and production systems. While we barely have the map system, any traits the factions might have will just hang in the void, completely irrelevant.

Your idea of faction/modifier synergy is a step in that direction, though. I actually like it
But it doesn't change much by itself, unfortunately.