Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

Another month draws to a close, so that means its time for another update! This month mostly was about boring systems work. Unfortunately it doesn't make for riveting reading or scintillating screenshots, but I'll do what I can.

Many games start with war and combat. It makes a certain amount of sense, as games thrive on two or more sides competing. In Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex, the warfare systems appeared relatively late, as I didn't want to end up making a full-on wargame. As a result, a lot of work was required to get war properly into DGR. But first, maps!



DGR has had a political map for some time. This map has been shown before; it features counties that shade themselves according to which kingdom controls them and borders that likewise thicken themselves if they are external rather than internal. Since siege warfare is a big part of war in this game, I found it useful to have a resource that shows what was actually captured.



Perhaps unsurprisingly this required a bit of a refactor in the map code. It is better now and new map modes can be added easily in the future also! I'm kicking around an economic map mode, but I want to avoid making information too easy to come by. Medieval kings struggled for accurate information after all.




Summoning armies was never easy. Nobles technically owed military service connected with the lands they held, at least for a fixed number of days per year. In reality, actually getting nobles to show up with men where the king willed and when the king willed it was difficult at best. Some lords refused to show up, or showed up late, or showed up with less men than they were obligated to bring. So it also is in DGR.






I experimented with several ways of handling military exercises. Most of them ended up not meeting expectations in one way or another. It ended up taking a fair bit of time before I found the solution that was there all along: events, just like everything else in the game! The event system is robust enough to handle it, and it doesn't require a departure from the way the rest of the game works. There will probably be more on this later.

(As an aside: as a proof of concept of the technology behind this event system in DGR, years ago I made a working, dynamic item shop solely with events. It can accommodate quite a lot of needs.)




Quite unexpectedly, I discovered that there was a local game dev community where I live. In case you missed the last update, I actually got the opportunity to give a talk about procedural and interactive narrative at their first annual summit. Should that make it to YouTube, I'll definitely post a link.

That's about all for now. More next time!

Sorry for the short notice, but I will be attending the first annual Game Development Summit hosted by the Tri-Cities Game Developers group. More info here.

I realize that there is a very slim chance that anyone reading this will be in this part of Northeast Tennessee, but if you are please come on down! The even takes place this Saturday, January 11 from 3 PM to 6 PM at the Johnson City Public Library in Johnson City, Tennessee. I will be giving a brief talk on interactive and procedural narrative, both generally and as it is specifically used in Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex.

As I understand it there are plans to record the event. Should the video make it online, I'll be sure to post a link.

Welcome to another monthly update, yet again only slightly delayed by the holidays! For those who also celebrated, I hope everything went well. Here's to a new year; may 2020 be the best one yet!

There are a few new features I'd like to discuss, but first some background.



I briefly mentioned a difference between individual and group scores in a discussion thread (aside: did you know there is a discussion forum?), but realized I never went into detail. Dei Gratia Rex simulates many things, but it does not use the same granularity for everything. Your family, tenants-in-chief and their families, advisors, and certain characters which have ongoing stories are relatively fine-grained simulations. They are characters with personality traits, relationships, and any other properties that are appropriate to have. For everyone else, their interests are boiled down to a single score.



If you're familiar with Reigns, it is a similar, though not identical, concept. In DGR there is nothing bad about having high scores and low scores do not generally mean instant death. Having very low scores does however open you up to very bad events that are otherwise impossible. It might be possible to right the ship, but going too low in any of these does put you in danger of a premature end to your rule. Balancing competing interests is hard for a ruler.

Particularly sharp-eyed readers may notice that compared to previous screenshots, the one above is missing a value. More on that later.




People on the whole prefer peace to war. This holds as true of the 12th century as the 21st. However war then, as now, was common. Also in common between the two periods is the need of rulers to justify their wars both to their own people and to other states. In the 12th century there was also the added wrinkle of the Church actively trying to dissuade Christian princes from fighting against each other. In order to finish the conquest, an ambitious king will need to gather reasons: casus belli.

Some strategy games dispense with these altogether. Others have casus belli systems, but force their players to pick one and only one. In DGR, occasions for war are multifaceted affairs. Generally wars will have a number of reasons, some strong, some weak. These combine to form an overall case for war.



With a strong enough justification, there is little opposition to going to war; without such justification there is resistance. Of course it is possible to go to war without any reasons. This is not recommended; see above about group scores.






Medieval warfare is often popularly presented as a gallant affair of heroic knights charging at one another. This did indeed happen… rarely. Attrition warfare was actually the order of the day. This meant raiding, siege warfare, skirmishing, and generally avoiding pitched battles. No medieval commander would willingly give battle unless he thought victory was easily attained. Consequently, war in DGR is also primarily comprised of siege and chevauchée, since economic damage is as important for forcing peace as is defeating armies.

Infantry is levied from the free farmers and burgesses of the counties. First a base number is derived from the amount of productive land there. This is then modified by the group scores described earlier. This amount is next reduced by a rate determined by ruin caused to a county. Ruin can come from a number of sources, but the most common is warfare. Cavalry is provided by the nobility (again modified by group scores, but also individual relationships). Each of your vassals has a certain amount of wealth derived from the manors which they hold. If they are deprived of this wealth, or if their manors are badly damaged, they lose the ability to provision knights and men-at-arms. Protecting your own land against economic damage is important if you wish to be a conqueror.

As a king, you also have a certain amount of household knights, the number of whom can be raised and lowered over time. Hiring temporary mercenaries is also an option. Both of these tend to be expensive though.

After making all these systems, I realized that the level of simulation for military matters was fine enough grained that a group score for the military was superfluous. There really were no other factors that were not captured in what I described above. Additionally I found that this nebulous "military" score was only referenced in three previous events that I had written. Given all that, it was an easy thing to drop.




I'm trying really hard to get the game out this year. Economic realities of my own mean that this is probably not going to be a choice, but rather a requirement. I don't have a specific date yet, but I'll definitely announce it when there is one!

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Welcome to another monthly update, only slightly delayed by the holidays!




In the previous post I mentioned what I am now calling “continuations events.” These are small story hooks that can trigger on previous events and give delayed consequences. At this point I think it might be helpful to back up a bit and discuss terms. There are many common patterns found in interactive narrative. The first, dating back to physical books like Choose Your Own Adventure books or gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, is branching narrative. In its purest form it is known as the "Time Cave" pattern. It typically looks like this:



It's very intuitive. Unfortunately it has a big problem: combinatorial explosion. Imagine a game that presents an event with two choices, each leading to another event with two choices. At a depth of 10, there would be 1024 choices! Despite that amount of content, a player would only make 10 choices and have a very short game. This is not really tenable for a game of any length. A common solution to this, used by Telltale Games and others, is shallow branches. This is know as the "Branch and Bottleneck" pattern.



This is a much more reasonable approach for writing interactive narrative. Unfortunately, on replays, players tend to realize that the decisions that feel weighty the first time around are in fact usually not. The path is a little different, but it all collapses to the same set of bottlenecks.

A solution to this is to create “storylets.” There are many definitions for this, but the basic idea is a discreet, self-contained chunk of story. These can be Time Caves, Branch and Bottlenecks, Gauntlets, or any other pattern, but they must above all be brief. How do storylets solve anything? Using the power of simulation and random numbers, these storylets can be arranged in unpredictable, though plausible, ways. This is variously called the "Floating Modules" pattern, probabilistic-driven narrative, and probably other things as well; whatever it is called, this is the approach used in Dei Gratia Rex.



DGR is by no means the first game to arrange its narrative around simulation-driven storylets. King of Dragon Pass did this back in 1999, and even it had some forbears. Since then, different takes on the approach have been tried in such diverse places as Reigns and Crusader Kings 2, to say nothing of the recent KoDP spiritual successor Six Ages.

Circling back to continuation events: those are floating modules that may or may not be triggered by previous choices in events, though experienced at a delay. Much of the month's work went into writing these.

If you'd like to read more about these narrative patterns, I'd highly recommend Sam Kabo Ashwell's post on the subject. For an even deeper dive than that, Emily Short has written extensively on this and many related topics. Here is a recent post; read that and follow the links to previous material.




One of the bullet points for DGR is “hard historical fiction.” The reference there is of course hard sci-fi. By that I mean the game is a work of fiction and not a pure simulation, but at the same time I am making every effort to avoid the grossly ahistorical. Some research revealed that mass peasant levies — present in just about every medieval game I have played which has armies in it — are about as historically veracious as horned viking helmets, at least in 12th century England.

The Anglo-Saxon period did indeed have the fyrd. This isn't quite the pitchfork-wielding peasant horde of the popular imagination, but it was a large mobilization of commoners. It was however a fairly unique institution created to solve a specific problem, and in any case it withered under Norman rule. That's not to say that peasants didn't fight. The Assize of Arms, which historically appeared at the tail end of our time period, gives clues as to how things worked.

What I'm currently working on is turning the historical facts into a system that both fits the gameplay mechanics and is also fun.




There were also some other changes. Some stubborn bugs were squashed. Info windows were expanded and improved. There are also some experiments with larger coats of arms; this is still very much a work in progress, as the SVG I wrote for the randomized coats of arms assumed a much lower resolution.



That's probably about everything worthy of note from November. More next month!

Since the Steam page has been created, I've done very little in the way of marketing. That is something that will be a struggle going forward, I fear. Nevertheless, despite the lack of spreading the word, ~300 people have added the game to their wishlists. That's very helpful and I'm honestly blown away by the support. Thank you very much.

When DGR was in its earliest stages, everything was procedurally generated. For a game about alternate history that's not exactly brilliant, so at some point I decided to move the dial a few clicks towards the historical. Minor lords and titles are still created via procedural generation, but now there are some historical characters. The player's family in particular has fixed names and non-random traits. During the end of last month, most of that transition was completed.

The map has existed in some form from a very early version of the game. Unfortunately it wasn't very useful other than showing which kingdom owned which county. This was improved during the month: hovering over a county now creates a tool-tip telling what county it is, and clicking that county brings up information about who holds manors there. Here is a gif of it in action (ignore the debug console on top):


Beyond that, the rest of the time was spent writing content for the itinerant court phase. One thing we have in DGR but which is absent in other games is itinerant court. In continental Europe and especially the German realms, it was not uncommon for a ruler to spend most of their reign traveling from place to place within their lands. England, especially post-Conquest, was considerably more centralized, but this mode of governance was not entirely alien either. In game terms, this allows you to handle more local matters.

Gameplay wise, this phase is split into two types of event: a random event while traveling, then a matter to judge. The first part isn't terribly difficult to formulate, lots of good and bad things can happen when moving about. What matters did monarchs actually handle in local courts though? This proved a little difficult to pin down. Luckily, the National Archives (specifically the British version) preserves about 16,000 individual petitions. These were not necessarily local matters to be clear, and worse most were outside our time period. Writs of novel disseisin or mort d'ancestor for instance didn't even exist in our time period, yet they made up a significant body of the petitions I read. Still, there was plenty of material to work with.

The bulk of both types of these events is done. I'll probably add more later though. The next step, begun today, is adding small story hooks. As a player, I love it when a game remembers my decisions later. Much of this is accomplished mechanically in DGR, but I thought it would be worth the effort of having small events that trigger later based on smaller decisions. I'm adding these to the itinerant court section now, and might retrofit some previously written content to use them.

We'll see where that takes us!