Events in Great Houses of Calderia

[h3]Events in a strategy game like Great Houses of Calderia? Of course![/h3]

We all know events are important in strategy games. Hopefully, there will be a ton of events in Great Houses of Calderia. Have a look at what the event will look like in the game.

All the images shared are Work In Progress.

Great Houses of Calderia is based on an ambitious design – to be a Grand Strategy game mixed with RPG. RPG is a broad genre term, but in our game, it means that all your trials and tribulations and strategic ambitions have to be performed by a member of your house.

[h3]Events back Early 2022[/h3]


As our world is inspired by Renaissance, our nobility is also more akin to wealthy merchant families of Venice rather than the medieval royalty, that lived in their ivory towers and had everything given to them on a silver platter. That means that the main characters of our game, your family, have to get their hands dirty every now and again, as they negotiate with other families. Another difference between the Renaissance and Medieval times is the freedom of individuality and desire for comfortable (or event hedonist) lifestyles.

You as a player of course have the control to command the members of your family to do the gameplay actions you want, but as nobles are fickle and selfish people, it sometimes feels like herding cats. This is what we represent with Events.
 
There are roughly three different types of events in Great Houses of Calderia: Delegation-, Life- and System Events. System events are basic and informational, they just tell you about things you need to know, like someone reaching the age of adulthood, or the growth of your population. They have no options to choose from and not much story in them either. Delegation and Life Events however are the salt of Great Houses of Calderia, because you never know what may happen.

All gameplay interactions with other noble families in Caldera have to be done via Delegations. You may want young singles to court each other, in order to arrange a marriage and an alliance with another family. You might want to establish a deal for trade caravans to deliver your resources for the next 6 months. You might want to find suitable individuals in your rival’s court, that could spy for you...


For any of these actions, you need to assign a member of your family to perform that task. They will happily do it, but the outcome is not always what you might want. Let’s say you wanted to establish a trade deal. You select a member of your family to try to make that happen, but sadly that poor sod is a drunkard by their nature. You might find yourself in a situation, where that person didn’t even arrive at the negotiation table but rather was found passed out behind a local tavern. That trade delegation has suddenly changed into a PR disaster that you must now handle. The reputation of your family name comes before individuals, but it’s the responsibility of the members of that family to uphold that reputation. Maybe next time you’re going to be wiser, or maybe the drunkard has learned their lesson.
 
When your family members are not on delegations, they live their lives and do their appointed tasks in your Fiefdom. However, even when doing nothing significant, life goes on, and you will be presented with Life Events. Life events are moments in life where something unexpected has happened to the members of your family, and you are given a chance to decide how they handle the situation. Life events can vary from suspicions of a cheating spouse to winning a hefty amount of money, by cheating at a game of dice.


Whatever event you get presented with, it’s always advisable to consider what the character is good at (their stats) and what kind of personality and habits they have (their traits). A simple event with a few outcomes doesn’t mean that you would always get the same result out of them. Great Houses of Calderia features quite a complicated dynamic event engine, that allows an event to have lots and lots of possible outcomes (40 000 in theory), and even the most simple ones we have usually have 10-20 different outcomes. I won’t go into all the details of how things are calculated (maybe in a future post), but I’ll tell you the general principle.

Every option presented you have calculations based on various factors in the game. How big is your Diplomacy skill? Is it better than your opponent’s? By how much? Are you in good relations with each other? Are your personalities compatible with each other? Do you have relevant traits to the event? How easy is the option depending on the situation at hand? How much luck is involved?


All of these factors (and more) create an output number between (-100) & (+100) for both X and Y values. All the possible outcomes that an event has been plotted into a 2D-coordinate system, and depending on where the choice calculations landed, the corresponding result will be given to the player. So, events are simple on the surface, but quite complex beasts under the hood.


Join our Discord to get involved in the development of Great Houses of Calderia: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J

- Great Houses of Calderia Team -