Diplomacy is Not an Option News

"That does it! I'm leaving!" - Princess Shankhar was packing her favorite basalt figurines into a bag. These handmade statuettes were standing on the floor around the family hearth.
Each one represented a month of living together. According to the customs of the Sarranga tribes, the first one was carved by a woman and given to the man on the day she realized she was ready to entrust him with her heart. If he accepted the gift, the next month it was his turn, which symbolized that he was happy to share his life with his beloved. The third one was given by the woman again, which meant that she was still not disappointed in her beloved, and so on. All figurines had their place around the family hearth and their meaning.
Every sixteen months the collection had to be completely renewed. As no matter how big the family hearth is, seventeen not to mention eighteen figurines - are a bit too much. Thanks to their placement, one always trips over them, in addition, they make cooking a risky business. How can you put a deer on a spit when you're surrounded by symbolic figurines, falling of which is a bad sign?
"For hunting?" - the princess' beloved, a young man named Kazakhrutla, was sitting by the window, staring at the melancholy drizzle. And at fishermen carrying heavy baskets of fish on their backs. Kazakhrutla was pondering how to make life easier for them. "I wish..." thought Kazakhrutla, "...to do so they wouldn't have to carry the baskets on their backs. But how? Skis maybe? No, that's only when it's raining, when there's mud and slush all around. I need something else".
"No, I'm going to my place. I'm going home!" - Shankhar had long ago gotten used to the fact that Kazakhrutla was a slowpoke. She felt alright with him being in his own thoughts and not paying attention to her. But eight figurines ago she believed that Kazakhrutla was a thinker and that one day he would invent something after all. That's what he said, accepting the first basalt statuette from her hands: "I am a thinker. Someday, Shankhar, I will invent something very useful."
She hoped it would be some kind of weapon to help Sarranga tribes to fight and even defeat the Undead. But Kazakhrutla thought differently, in a down-to-earth way. In addition, none of his "inventions" ever left the nappies of his mind to take shape, let alone being useful to the tribe.
Shankhar liked that Kazakhrutla was not with her for title and position in the tangled hierarchy of the Sarranga. It was quite an enviable position though - the princess' chosen one was allowed to enter the Palace of the Chiefs in the glorious city of Ninende. Fair to say Kazakhrutlu wasn't interested in her title and privileges. But neither was he interested in hunting and cleaning. There was also no use going to him for advice on how to settle a dispute between two of Shankhar's subjects. Not a single piece of advice had ever turned out to be helpful in the eight months they had been together. In a word, this chosen one was a lazy, slacker, and scalawag. So Shankhar collected the statuettes she liked, which symbolized that her heart was no longer entrusted to her beloved.
"Are you going for a long time?" - Kazakhrutla asked. He was accustomed to the princess being away on business in her native settlement for a day or two. However, his thoughts were with the shape of the sun disk peering through the clouds. The thinker was indeed on the verge of inventing the wheel. Who knows, maybe he would have even invented it someday. We'll never find out. Because Shankhar had walked away from Kazakhrutla that day, throwing the lad into the despair of an extreme degree.
"For forever!" Shankhar took the basalt dragon, the very first statuette she had made.
"How's that?" asked Kazakhrutla.
"Just like that!" - replied Shankhar, taking her sword off the wall and leaving the house. She slammed the door.
"And who's going to cook the fish?" - said Kazakhrutla melancholically.
Shankhar decided to reach her home settlement via the shore road. Because it was a safer choice. One never meets a ghoul by the sea. For some reason, the Undeads usually attack in the forest. And because Princess liked to walk in the rain and look at the sea horizon.
So she was walking, cursing Kazakhrutla, swearing off the time she lost with him and the need to look for a new chosen one. Because according to Sarranga customs, a woman cannot stay alone longer than sixteen months. Where she was supposed to find this new chosen one, as Kazakhrutla seemed to her the most clever member of Sarranga tribes?
Suddenly something in the sand caught her attention. As you know, nature doesn't like corners. And a wide piece of wood, thrown on the shore, had a very unusual form. It was wide and flat. Rectangular at one end and bitten on the other...

The sea monster was exceptionally curious but very inexperienced. An excusable thing to say about the being that only lived in the world for the fourth day. Natural curiosity and youthful merriment caused the beast a lot of trouble. Just imagine: who would want to swim in a race against a fifty-foot monster with the appropriate breadth of the maw? Of course, no one would. Don't even try to convince some coralfish, that it's not going to be your prey. In truth, coral fishes don't work for sea monsters nor as a snack, nor as an appetizer. But fishes are mostly dim-witted and taciturn creatures. Perhaps that is why the monster could not make friends with them.
Having seen him, squids were letting out ink, disappearing in an unknown direction. Sharks were scurrying away and whales were rushing to the surface. In general, everyone was scattering from him. Which made Monster feel lonely all the time. And quite often, hungry. So hungry, in fact, that he almost always had a nasty feeling in his stomach. This, however, had no effect on his character. Despite the troubles, Monster remained optimistic, humble, and well-mannered.
On the fourth day of his life, Monster swam the familiar route, at a depth of about twelve feet, hoping to reap couple or three cheeky hogfishes, which recently made hunting near the coral reef a trend for themselves. The sun was pleasantly warm on Monster's back, the water was clearer than Inverland moonshine, and the beast was in a good mood. He was already anticipating his next treat. If it could drool, it would drool. But it could not, so it only squinted reverie.
Suddenly the sun stopped warming its back. "A cloud and nothing more," Monster decided. It would have swum on, but then a sound it had never heard before caught its attention. A low rumbling or creaking sound. The beast lifted its eyelids.
Right above him, a large and very strange fish was floating and casting a shadow, barely touching Monster's dorsal ridge with its belly. The beast became curious, so it moved up and followed the fish. The fish did not react in any way. More sounds were added to this creaking and humming. Somewhat of the roll call of dolphins, coming from the part of the fish that was above the surface of the water.
"Maybe we can be friends?" - Monster thought. And licked the fish in greeting. Its belly was in a state of disrepair - all covered with barnacles, crustaceans, and algae. It tasted disgusting. And there was disgusting slime on the tongue. "How can you be so filthy?" - Sea Monster grimaced. Suddenly something pricked him at the very ear. It didn't really hurt. More like made Sea Monster a bit sad. But How would you feel in his shoes? Just when you started getting to know someone, you got pricked in return. The beast knew that some fish were defending themselves that way. He also knew that some of them were electrocuted. But to do it like this, cheekily and without a real cause?
"What an impolite fish," the beast decided and was about to dive deeper when something pricked him again, at the other ear. The sounds similar to the roll call of dolphins became louder. Then a third prick followed. This, the third one, really pissed Sea Monster off, because the needle of some kind (now the beast saw what it was pricked by) hit it right next to its eye. "That's it, you asked for it," Monster finally lost his temper

Guys, thank you very much for taking part in the drawing contest! We were very pleased to see such an activity of yours. You've sent us your creations on different social networks, so to pick a winner was not an easy task. However, it's time to share the results with you:

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I will send the key to each winner. Thank you for being with us!

Guys, we need to know your opinion. A few days ago we released the December update. And would like to get feedback. We are especially interested in your opinion on the late game in Endless Mode. How many days did you last? Were you able to fight the reinforced waves of enemies? Did the new infinite sources of Stone and Iron help you? Maybe you have some wishes or ideas? Please, specify which maps you are talking about.

Diplomacy is Not an Option has been in Early Access since February 2022. In other words, almost a year. During this time we've gathered a lot of stories about the development of the game. About the difficulties we encountered. About how our plans were revised. Today we will share a couple of such stories with you.

[h2]Mountains (and their refreshed models)[/h2]

Of course, everyone has seen mountains in our game. But what stands behind them? Visually, when creating mountain models, we relied on a number of principles: readability of resources (?deposits?), simplicity of form - the model should not be overloaded with details, "picturesqueness" - actually the way these mountains look on the map and how their different models fit together and suit the environment.
All of the above define the amount of work that needs to be done to make the mountain models. Or in our case, to redo them.
Over the past year, we have made several attempts. The first was in spring. At that time we tried to assemble models from prefabs (a kind of template). The process was long, with lots of torment and created versions included. But in the end, based on your feedback, we decided to focus on improving the game mechanics. Visual adjustments could have waited at that point.
We came back to the issue only in autumn. This time with a brand new approach. Mountains were to be made not by artists, but... by programmers. We hoped to come up with an algorithm for mountain generation that would solve the problem once and for all. For both, the existing biomes and those yet to be created. However, having again wasted a lot of time, we didn't get a truly satisfying result.
At the end of autumn were looking for prefabs. Again. And who might have thought - it worked! In fact, you can now see the result in Diplomacy is Not an Option's current build.
What does this mean for us in practice? Firstly, it means that we are good enough to achieve our goal. But in the other hand, it means that it will now take a lot longer to create a new biome. After all, each biome needs its own hand-assembled mountain models.

[h2]About the front line[/h2]

Surely you know that troops and buildings have attributes. You can even see them - attack, defense, health (durability), etc. However, there are also hidden properties that remain unseen for players.
For example, the mass of a troop. Or there are 10 or so other attributes that affect how different game entities interact in space, such as how much space each unit takes and how they behave when they face each other or enemies.
Depending on how you adjust these settings, their behavior can vary. For example, a heavy Trebuchet moves a light swordsman when it moves. Knights can hold the ground in battle without falling back against the enemy. It's these parameters that make it easy for cavalry units to run through enemy crowds where archers get bogged down.
During one of the experiments on the unit collision model, some of the settings accidentally "leaked" into the main version of the game. This led us to watch in amazement as the enemy squeezed through the front line, pushing the player's troop formation backward. Playing with these settings was not exactly fun, but we actually enjoyed the visual effect. So we came up with adding one more parameter - the coefficient regulating the force of squeezing. We adjusted it so that melee units would hold their position better than ranged ones.
What does that mean in practice for you? During battles against numerically superior opponents, the front line shifts back, which makes the game look more realistic. However, this improvement appeared in the game because of a leak of experimental hidden parameters. With their subsequent refinement.

This concludes the telling of 'fun facts' from the history of DiNaO development. Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much for being with us! Good luck in all your endeavors in 2023!

See you soon!
Yours, Door 407 team.