Hello and welcome to this weeks Dev Diary! 
Today I would like to reveal more features for the RTS - Citybuilder -title.
Dynamic Borders
Border systems are quite rare in RTS games, but not entirely new idea either. Empire Earth 2 had static borders for predetermined regions, which you needed to conquer before you could utilize them fully. Stellaris had borders, which grew according to the influence of the planets you have conquered and by building certain buildings on the planet boosted the accumulation of influence or other resources. Later on they changed borders to be static around the planet and the borders no longer expand due to influence. What I would like to see in my RTS - City builder is similar to how the border system used to be in Stellaris, but toned down a lot, in order to not have instant absorption of the rival territory by having huge influence differences.
Instead, as you advance through the territories with your troops, they will expand your border along the path they take and encircled border areas will join together as a bigger whole, so there is no need to march on every inch of the land you want to conquer. By building on the conquered areas, the conquered area will be solidified as your core lands on a certain range, which depends on the building you just built. The influence of the buildings will not grow further than your border, to prevent this passive outgrowth of the borders, but will solidify your claims in the near regions.
Threat System
As you gain territory and depending on your military might and relations/decisions with any other player / AI Bot, your neighbors might consider you a threat. If you are aggressive expansionist, other tribes near you will consider you more likely as a threat to them and might seek alliances from their neighbors, essentially creating coalitions in defense against you. Eventually, if you act in a threatening way, they will try to "cut you down to size", meaning they will try to defeat you in order to diminish your regional power and possibly divide your lands to either new smaller nations or integrate your land in their own region. Alternatively, by a peaceful play style, you can unite similar minded tribes under your banner and grow to be a unified kingdom or republic, which will enable you to convince different tribes to join your kingdom/republic more easily.
Culture Groups
Just like in Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis -series, there will be several cultures and culture groups, which will play a part in how likely they are willing to co-operate with you. Unlike in the fore mentioned grand strategy games, the cultural differences will not be such a huge obstacle, but will have some limiting factors in place. For example, in trades, cultural differences are not so limiting factor and a Bot will accept beneficial trade deals without considering cultural differences. They might be more hesitant when it comes to trading cultural or religious items, in which they might not see any worth.
Religion Groups
Just like culture groups, religion groups will be one of the layers on determining how close your own religion/belief system is to other tribes. The system will have at least 3 layers;
- Type of the religion - Monotheism, Polytheism or Indigenous belief system.
- Religion Group - Which subgroup of Polytheism, Monotheism or Indigenous belief system the tribe has.
- Worship - which deity/deities, saints or spirit(s) the tribe mainly worships at any given time - customizable.
The more similar the belief system of the tribes that are trading together is, the more likely they will have good trading relations and possibly even religious trading, which slowly influence each of the tribes religious values, bringing their people closer together and possibly merge to be one tribe, if both cultural and religious similarities become close enough and relations are at maximum.
Conclusion
Just to stress again for those that haven't read earlier Dev Diaries - these are only goals to be achieved at some point of development. As I'm new to game development, I will do the logical choice of starting out simple and adding features and mechanics little by little, in order to have a playable version as soon as possible and potentially gather funding much more efficiently along the development.
This is it for this weeks Dev Diary - Thank you for reading and I'll see you on the next one
And as always, you can check out every possible mid week announcements about the project on these official channels;
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