Full notes
Full Star Dynasties update
Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.
What changed
- Security
- Server
Star Dynasties changes
Star Dynasties has been out for a month now, and it’s time to share where we’re going to take it going forward. To start, we’re planning an update, later in October, which is going to focus on Security and the Spy Network assignment. Let’s get into the details.
Security
As a ruler in Star Dynasties you have a variety of tools to achieve your goals and win the game. You are bound to find a few cohesive ways to go about your journey, mixing and matching tools in ways that are thematically or mechanically synergistic.
Our goal is to make every part of that toolset interesting and helpful, so that you can focus on the elements that you enjoy using, without being disadvantaged. Even if you want to roleplay a character without necessarily taking the optimal path to success, and Star Dynasties gives you plenty of opportunities to focus on personal relationships and events that bring your character and their family to life, it is not a fun experience to be forced into weak or uninteresting options to do so.
Looking at the current state of the game we feel that, while we can improve in all areas, Administration, Military, Diplomacy, and Technology all offer tools that make them useful and interesting. However, we’re not happy with the state of affairs in Security.
Stories about spies, schemes, blackmail and betrayal are important to the fantasy that we are trying to portray. But the tools you have to get involved in intrigue are insufficient. The secrets system in the game is a good base to provide this intrigue, but as it stands we’re not making enough use of it.
Secrets
First, we are changing the risk associated with secrets so that it is more intuitive. The probability that a secret is passively discovered will be entirely based on its discovery difficulty (i.e. whether it is Easy, Medium, Hard, or Very Hard to discover), as shown in the following table. Note the final numbers may change after more playtesting and balancing.
The list of secrets now also shows the honor consequences of a secret being revealed.
This means that you can more easily determine whether you want to take the risk when an action will create a secret. And if the risk is too high, you can compensate for it using the Cover up Secret assignment, if you have the resources.
While the probability that a secret is passively discovered will be based on its discovery difficulty, you can increase the chance that it is you that discovers these secrets by increasing your personal Security skill, or by increasing the Security score of your house.
The other way to discover secrets is by using the Spy Network assignment.
Spy Network
Having a Spy Network on a system gives you a chance to discover the secrets of all the characters on that system, but in the current build it has a major flaw. Let’s take an example where an assassin comes to your home system, murders one of your house members and then leaves. The secret is associated with the assassin. That means that the only way to use Spy Network to discover that secret would be to run it on whichever system that assassin is currently located. This is clearly impractical, since you probably have no idea who the assassin is in the first place!
In the update, secrets are going to become associated with a location as well. In our previous example, running Spy Network at the location where a character got murdered will give you a chance to discover who killed them, making it a much more effective investigative tool.
Another way in which you can use Spy Network investigatively is that it will now gradually give you visibility of the members of a ruling house where it is installed, revealing new characters to ally with or murder.
Spy Networks are also about to become more powerful, increasing the risk that your secrets are discovered by enemy rulers using them. How can you protect yourself from this risk? First, increasing your house’s Security score will give your enemies a flat penalty to the effectiveness of any Spy Network on your system (visible when you mouse over your House’s Security score). Secondly, we are extending Spy Network so that you can now run it on your system. When you do so, it increases the defensive bonus against enemy Spy Networks. You choose whether you want to devote a high Security character to play defense, or to use them offensively instead. Another option is simply to observe whether a high Security character visits your system - that should make you suspicious.
With Spy Network becoming more powerful, you will discover more secrets. And boy, are there going to be more secrets to discover. We’re now modelling more of the skulduggery that nobles in our world get up to, so any Security character worth their salt should be stumbling over indiscretions using Spy Network. What will you do with these secrets once discovered? For rulers, you can already use a secret to blacken their name, or to blackmail them if there is something directly you want from them, such as their vassalage. But if you discover the secrets of a ruling house member, you’re now going to get a new tool to take advantage of it.
More about that in our next dev blog, where I’ll also talk about some improvements we are making to honor.
Source
Changelog.gg summarizes and formats this update. How we read updates.