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Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest (No SV, you are the Waifu)

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It's Summerfest here at Sufficient Velocity (although not from where I'm typing this, brr!), which means it's time for another update!


Current Progress​

Nominated for this quarter's grand modding discovery is figuring out how to mod Terra Invicta's UI. I promptly proceeded to use this power for good by adding tooltips to everything. Not only is this relatively simple and aesthetically pleasing to do, it also expands the scope of what can be done with modding, as it allows modders to display information in its own area rather than being limited to piggybacking on existing tooltips.

It's still a very clunky process that requires a lot of trial and error chasing down references to get the modded UI bits to show up properly - and don't ask when I'm going to try adding entire new windows to the game!

Regions​

Regions are a little weird in Terra Invicta - while they exist as their own discrete entities in the game's code, they don't have their own dedicated UI and the relevant information about them is scattered in various places, mostly in the UI for nations. This places a limit on how mechanically complicated one can reasonably make regions before they become too messy to manage - but thanks to the ability to add tooltips, this limit has gotten higher!



This extra column isn't actually something I added - it's a vanilla feature that only ever shows up for Servants players. (All hail Daddy Hydra!) Since the Servants obviously aren't present in this mod, I felt quite safe in repurposing this UI for something else.

As you can see, how the environment works is getting a bit of a makeover in this mod. Nations still pollute and the world still warms based on those emissions, but the steady percent-based bleeding of GDP to global temperature anomaly has been abolished, on the grounds that this already kind of happened during Impact. Instead, the main mechanical impact of climate change is to worsen the environmental integrity of regions, which in turn has effects on a bunch of other aspects of regions, such as how fast armies can deploy there and how happy your citizens are.

Also added to the list of environmental metrics is nuclear fallout. While vanilla already tracks nuclear detonations per region throughout the duration of a campaign and penalizes population growth there accordingly, this is a more granular implementation that dissipates over time. This doesn't actually obey the seven-tens rule, since that works too quickly to be interesting on the scale of a strategy game, but the math involved is similar enough. In general, if you can refrain from nuking a region for 7 years, the fallout of previous strikes (and other nuclear events, watch your reactors!) will reduce low enough to be ignorable. I'm sure players will be capable of doing this.

Populations​

The most significant aspect of regions in Terra Invicta and Project Valkyrie Core is, of course, their populations. For most factions, populations are the main method through which you obtain more raw Research output to supercharge your way through the tech tree, so it is desirable to have more of them.

The treatment of refugees is a significant issue in the BAHHSCQ setting, and the mod aims to make it a significant game element in turn. At the start of the scenario, massive portions of the world's population are classified as refugees; refugees are created whenever anything slightly bad happens to a region. Regions are likewise classified as unwelcoming or welcoming based on their Migration Index calculated from a bunch of different values: the short of it is that quality of life is good and war is bad. Every month, refugees will attempt to migrate from unwelcoming regions to welcoming ones, travelling through adjacent regions until they find a nice one to settle down in. Once there, they'll naturalize into citizens over time, which can be sped up by using the Welfare priority - and make a nice addition to the nation's economy in the process, for more and less scrupulous factions alike.



In the future, we plan to expand the system so that there are more direct mechanisms to steer the flow of refugees across the globe, such as being able to directly change refugee policies in nations, using navies to kidnap evacuate refugees from conflict zones across the oceans, and upgrades to Arcologies to encourage migration there.

Arcologies​

The other half of your populations live in the Arcologies, under your faction's direct rule. This unfortunately means that you are also responsible for their care and well-being, starting with the basic task of feeding them so they don't starve. This takes the form of a familiar mechanic from TI: Arcology dwellers will consume Water and Volatiles, and you can build agricultural modules to offset their sustenance costs.

However, given that you're now responsible for millions rather than dozens of inhabitants, some adjustment of the scale involved is needed. The current design assumes that you aren't literally producing all that food yourself, at least in the beginning of the scenario; you're merely making up for the shortfalls caused by the loss of trade and ruining of prime agricultural land by Impact. This does mean that should environmental conditions worsen - say, if stratospheric aerosols are heightened after using a couple of nukes - then the nutritional requirements of your populations will increase correspondingly.

On top of this, module crews at Arcologies (as opposed to all those lazy layabouts everywhere, making KBBQ and ice-skating) are considered to be directly employed by your faction, and still demand their salary in cold, hard cash. This value scales with the PCGDP and Inequality of the host region, which means that you too can enjoy the experience of outsourcing critical functions to impoverished nations! There's also a discount if the host nation is ideologically favourable to your faction, as then your crews clearly aren't doing this for the money.



Still, all these troublesome humans will continue to put a sizeable dent in your faction's resource balances for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, there is something you can do about this, and that something is automation! With the right tech and modules, large fractions of your workforce can be made obsolete, saving hundreds or thousands of space monies per month! Sadly, you're still expected to feed these people even after they've stopped working for you, but that too can be addressed using the right tech and modules. Really, there's nothing that science can't do in this mod!

Oh yeah, and we also implemented a whole heap of Arcology modules to replace the ones from the base game. The design philosophy is a little different in this mod: most modules do multiple things at once, and larger modules aren't necessarily straight upgrades over smaller ones, with some advanced modules being unlocked with the intent that they can be slapped onto cheap outposts to better hold off the Antagonists.
The dichotomy between building modules with Boost versus space resources has also been repurposed, seeing as this mod isn't really about humanity's space future anymore. Instead, you can spend Higgs to construct modules at a vastly accelerated rate. The downside is that there aren't many places to get Higgs in this scenario.

Warfare​

For those players who don't like to produce all of their resources themselves, there is another alternative. The nigh useless Raze Region operation in vanilla has now been revamped to let you plunder your enemies during wartime. All you need to do is move in your armies, click the button, avoid being killed for a couple of weeks, and you'll come away with a nice haul of the targeted region's resources and GDP for your own use.

This will also inflict collateral damage and no doubt cause everyone to hate you, but who cares about that?



Naturally, as Arcologies now coexist on the geoscape with nations, armies can be used to siege enemy Arcologies as a means of inducing them to surrender. This takes a couple of weeks, and will attack modules in the outer sectors of Arcologies to clear a path to the inner sectors, so that larger Arcologies are more resilient than smaller ones. It may be prudent to dispatch councillors to bomb specific modules which are likely to cause you trouble: some are not guaranteed to be destroyed on the first go.

If you need to soften up the target first, there's always ye olde nukes High Yield Weapons. Using one against an Arcology will blow away random modules, again with the outer modules targeted first before moving onto inner modules - though bunker buster projects will eventually be added to bypass this. Some additional changes have been made to nuclear weapons: fortifications and Arcology defenses no longer completely block nuclear strikes, but instead reduce their damage. Valkyrie Groups can, in turn, be deployed to act as spotters and increase the damage inflicted. It is generally unlikely that armies will be instantly destroyed by a single strike, encouraging you to use them more often and more tactically, as befits combat in the BAHHSCQ setting.

The global GDP losses from using HYWs was removed for this mod, as it doesn't make sense for the post-Impact world.



HYWs now also apply Military Attrition to the targeted nation, which is a new mechanic that aims to simulate the noted phenomenon of modern warfare exploding all of your shiny hardware that took years to build in a couple of weeks. Nations accrue Attrition when their armies regenerate HP; it goes away during peace and stalemates. The Military priority can also be used to remove it, if you are maxed out on Miltech; if there is no Attrition to remove, the nation will instead slowly build up Military Reserves which provide a buffer against future Attrition.

Factions​

With all these other cool features that got worked on in the past three months, it's a miracle that any work was done on the factions starring in Project Valkyrie Core. You know, the people we're going to spend a whole strategy campaign playing as. Seems like that ought to be an important feature to devote a lot of development time effort to. :thonk:

Well, it will be… in the next couple of months or so.

One of the things this mod aims to do is ensure that the five factions are not only narratively but also mechanically distinct. A lot of cool mechanics are planned for this, which I will hopefully get to show off in the next update. In the meantime, there is this!






In addition to the unique bonuses they grant, selecting a nation as your headquarters provides a few perks to help you keep hold of it during the game: your missions there get a buff, your CPs there are automatically defended, and your international diplomacy there occurs much faster.

Amusingly enough, this feature was inspired by Long War, which in a sense is where this whole journey began.



There are also a whole bunch of less flashy mechanical modifiers applied to each faction, which I should probably get around to explaining to the player at some point. Most noteworthy of these is that they all have their own designs for the nations under their control, which manifest in their preferences for Democracy, Cohesion, and Inequality to be at certain levels. Should this be the case, the factions in question are rewarded for following their professed tenets: their workers will be more motivated and productive, and their Control Points will be cheaper and easier to hold.


Future Scope​

So what next? Well, as said above, the next big focus for the mod's development will be the five factions, their storylines, and their mechanics - as well as those for the United Nations and the Antagonists. So much to do, so little dev time!

But before that…

Alpha Testing
​
Yes, it's that time at last! The mod has reached a point where enough features have been added to make it at least somewhat playable, but with absolutely no idea whether these are going to be fun to play with - let alone balanced. Those are questions which can only be answered by giving the mod to testers and letting them go wild with it.

As such, we are now opening the mod to alpha testers! To sign up, simply message me here or on Discord and we'll get you set up with it. Once it's ready, anyway, still a few touches that need to be put on it as of typing this post. Hopefully that'll all be taken care of in the next week or so.

Just to set expectations: the mod is still far from complete. A lot of major and minor features are yet to be implemented, content still needs to be written let alone put into the mod, and the AI still needs to be wrangled into actually being able to play in a scenario that's very different from what it was designed for. What you can do in this version of the mod is to make the biggest numbers you possibly can, and then brag about them online. :V

Have a very Sufficient Summer, and see you all again soon!
 
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