I am developing a game using SFML and the SFML GUI library TGUI, maintained by Texus. TGUI does most of the heavy lifting but SFML manages non-GUI things like the game map images.SFML loads the game map, colors the various filters of the map, and loads things like the background image in the character and race designers.
Substack design blog:
https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/Old wiki with pages for a lot of individual mechanics:
https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/wiki/Axioms_Of_Dominion_WikiI teetered between classifying my project as 4x or grand strategy but compared to games in the genre, its quite different so neither really fit.
Broadly the game consists of you managing a bunch of provinces and their resources and the populations therein. However you may choose to play without owning provinces but simply owning buildings and/or various characters. A merchant may only own buildings while an archmage may own buildings as well as subordinate mages. However the most common mode will be players who own provinces as well as buildings and characters.
Unlike Grand Strategy games in the Paradox style or 4x games like Dominions4, Civilization, and Age of Wonders, in Axioms you will be dealing with all the systems and institutions of an organized state. You will need to deal with religion, education, economics, politics, and diplomacy. You will need to maintain national intelligence as well as magical and technological research.
In comparison with the hardcoded and simplistic modifiers of Paradox and the click and wait mechanics, my goal is to more realistically simulate the issues confronting the ruler of an organize state. In contrast with 4x games in general I strive to avoid linear or even branching tech trees. I wish to do away with hard coded historical government types and simplistic modifier based religions and cultures.
As a ruler you will deal with the issue of acquiring territory but once acquired you will not simply hit the "core" button, the "change culture" button, or any such thing as in Paradox games, nor will you instantly obtain all the resources of a new province or city as in Dominions4 or Age of Wonders. Each province has a set of populations and important characters. Each population or important character in the game has an opinion, respect level, and fear level for every population and important character they interact with. In the case of acquiring a new province for your nation you will now have to deal with potentially rebellious populations. In order to benefit from new provinces you will need to subdue or integrate your new subjects.
Subduing new subjects is pretty simple. Stationing troops, carrying out punishments and reprisals, imprisoning rabblerousers, and shipping in settlers to change the demographics are all options. Generally these actions or threats of them are more successful the higher your fear score with the population is. Fear is generated based on what you've said you will do and followed through on, or just instantly did to control the populace. Executing or imprisoning important characters, decimating, the Roman way, populations, and so forth. Your new subjects will weigh the obligations you impose on them vs their fear of your response to disobedience.
Integrating populations is more difficult. Unlike other games where new provinces or populations are integrated over time or with the click of a button and/or the expenditure of monarch mana, here you will need to literally integrate new populations into society. You may appoint bureaucrats into your government from conquered populations, assign important characters with the appropriate background, allow open worship of foreign religions, levy various taxes and military drafts, and so forth. However other populations will of course dislike their loss of power and privilege as new groups are given those things.
Populations have nationalities, races, factions, religions, and castes. For instance pluralist dwarf farmers of nation x and religion y. Dwarves will gain opinion/respect of you based on the rights and responsibilities you assign them in your nation. They will also have their opinion modified based on how you treat others from their nation and their coreligionists. Similarly for farmers. As pluralists they suffer fewer penalties if you treat all subjects more equally.
You'll also need to manage your economy. Each province has various resources, some more common than others, based on their biome/climate/terrain. You'll need to manage food supplies as well as materials for housing and other buildings. You'll also need to manage production chains somewhat like Patrician, Anno, or a city builder game like Emperor or Children of the Nile. However there is no actual building placement. This resource system will also feed into military logistics. No more sending off 100k troops to the other side of the world willy nilly.
Magical and technological research are the next major system I'll give an overview of. You grow in knowledge based on the nature of your nation, your application of research resources, be that money or educated populations, and what you find in Dominions4 like secret sites. Generally sites will hold magical tomes containing knowledge of spells. There might be technological secrets as well. Nations will accrue tradecraft skill for things like agriculture. If you have lots of well watered plains and river deltas you'll slowly become more proficient at agriculture there over time. However mountain agriculture will not be raised unless you are performing agriculture in mountains. Consider Japanese and Incan step terrace agriculture to the kind the Egyptians knew. Both magical and technological advancements apply to the industrial world as well as the military one. Magical road building or structure raising for instance. One thing you'll need to do is build and maintain roads and harbors and airship routes and so forth. In theory you could find a rich trade route, find a natural harbor and go Waterdeep on that thing. It shouldn't be necessary to build a sprawling empire to do well. A wealthy city state should also be possible.
As far as politics and diplomacy and espionage go, all important characters have the goals of gaining land or wealth or w/e, but both character types like mages and merchants and individual characters have more specialized goals. These are divided into open and secret desires. A merchant may openly wish to break into a new market or a mage to acquire spellbooks and grimoires. But a noble may secretly desire to be king or to marry off his daughter to a lord who will treat her well. Part of the espionage game is figuring out the secret desires of others as well as their actual plots like coups, assassinations, sabotage, and knowledge theft. If you marry the noble's daughter and make her happy you may have his loyalty, but if you ever betray his confidence through divorcing her or something, he may hate you forever. Alternatively you can find a different noble to marry her off to, perhaps your espionage has uncovered his unimpeachable character and you have other desires spouse wise. Other political issues involve opening national trade, allowing foreigners access to your libraries and universities and so forth. Nations and characters in favor of free trade or scientific exchanges will favor other nations who follow that path. This is one thing lacking in many ostensibly nation building games. What motive besides fear or an alliance do I have for not attacking some other nation.
A lot of more standard 4x fans will not want to actually manage their empire and I respect that. But I've known many people who wished for more internal management in their strategy games and I know I'll have fun.
Example shots of in game and the main continent of the scenario map:
http://imgur.com/coFrnoV40 province map for early testing, saves on load time.
http://imgur.com/HTKVLkXGiant picture of 2860 main continent. Game will generate maps on own but this is for scenario and later testing. The colors are because the game gets the province you selected based on the color. The actual map will not be colored that way. Also 160 inland ocean provinces.
Will have better pictures and maybe video up when I am farther along. Game is playable, or will be again once I finish upgrading to TGUI0.7, but most features are not enabled.
