Spell of Mastery Progress
I think for now I will run it in a Dwarf Fortress mode.
Since it will be easier to balance it on a smaller scale.
I will retain one neighboring city for the trade though.
Since the core mechanics requires either city or traveling.
Currently I'm converting the two huge item classes to use ECS.
They will be usual units.
That makes sense since items do appear on world maps.
While wounded allies and stunned enemies are transferred in inventory like items.
That is the feature from XCOM I want to retain.
I also have dwarf fortress style base building.
And it requires units to carry terrain chunks around.
The dwarf fortress mechanics changed a lot since I began.
Initially I had dungeon keeper style room placement claiming mechanics.
Like the blood pool on the screenshot, which had Warcraft 2 style resources.
I had dorm, library and other rooms functioning.
But the room-based base was really problematic and silly.
So I replaced it with The Sims style smart objects.
In fact, several games worth of non-fitting mechanics were scrapped.
Dwarf Fortress base-building mechanics isn't really important in itself.
But it is useful to test gameplay and just something a player may do
in several scenarios. Although I'm a huge fan of Tecmo Deception and DK.
And it became kinda important since I included the squad mechanics.
And that allowed for stuff like captives, ransom, prisoners and live shields.
So it asks for a prison style bases to keep the cisgender folk, before they can
be sacrificed to the true gods, who accept sacrifices only on specific astrological events.
Not that sacrificing captives is the main way to progress.
I just want to include the little children sacrifices, like Tolkien included Tom Bombadil.
For the integrity of soul and for the game completeness sake.
Need to include as many taboo elements as possible.
I don't plan to sell the game on Steam anyway.
But I do consider selling it for BTC, so I wont have to pay taxes to Dutch government.
And they will deduce any income from the welfare, so I'm not incentivized to do any work.
Bitcoins also allow to sell unique game versions, which will make it hard to pirate.
Basically a customer will have to fill in a form with exclusive features,
only their version of the game will have.
