Game Design - The Most Cost Effective $2.50 I've Ever Spent

I'm a real 4X games buff. Up to a certain amount of complexity, anyway.

Civ (well, except 7), Endless Space, Age of Wonders, etc. all of those, I enjoy. I don't mind a learning curve, but I just don't have the time any more for the really heavy duty ones. Victoria, Crusader Kings, or Europa Universalis are a bridge too far, I'm on the fence about Stellaris.

To feed this craving, I poke around various game sites' sales, hoping to find another hidden gem. In the last Steam winter sale, I found this beauty, Shadows of Forbidden Gods. It was developed by Bobby Two Hands, published by Forbidden Oaks Games Limited, released 2023.

Yes, it only cost $2.50, and I've logged 97 hours so far. Which is a phenomenal ROI.

The Game

The game takes place in a randomly generated fantasy world. Warring kingdoms, heroes, invasive orcs, a dark god whose thousand year slumber is ending, and a chosen one destined to oppose the dark god.

It a living world, like a light Crusader Kings III (remember my complexity comments). The world just chugs along. Nations fighting wars, religious strife, individual vendettas, etc.

The difference here is that you play as a servant of the dark god, sending your agents out into the world to quietly subvert the population and spread shadow throughout the realm.

The Gameplay

First, you pick which dark deity you serve. There are nine, each with its own custom mechanics.

She Who Will Feast Manifests as a giant rampaging snake, destroying cities and hamlets.

Iastur The Laughing King

Thrives on the madness created by his book, a la Necromonicon.

Cordyceps Hive Mind

Infects the populous, turning some into your drones and unleashing an insect plague to cause chaos.

Then you select some game options and proceed to subvert all that is good and holy.

At first, you only have a singe agent or two that sneak about, infiltrating settlements to bend them to your will. Your malign influence, shadow, starts to spread from elder god's tomb, corrupting all it touches. Your slumbering god can cast one or two spells, fairly low power ones.

As you infiltrate more settlements, more actions become available to your agents. You can desecrate a holy site, assassinate a ruler, or start a plague. In the later game, you can completely take over a nation to be your dark empire.

As more of the world becomes enshadowed, the seals that hold your god in check break. As seals break, you get can recruit to new agents (up to about 5), and your god gets more spells and more spell power to cast them. Eventually, the last seal breaks, releasing your god to wreck havoc.

This is the courtier, a unique agent expert at manipulating nobles and rulers.

You can recruit unique agents or more generic ones. Unique agents have special traits, but once killed are gone for good. Generic agents can be recruited multiple times.

Sounds simple, right? Except that your agents gain Profile and Menace as they move through the world. Oh, and that pesky Chosen One is trying to fight back the darkness and seal your god up for another 1,000 years.

Profile is how visible your agent is to the people of the land. Higher Profile means a greater range of visibility. The more your agent is perceived, the greater the chance some hero will try to disrupt you.

With a Profile of 11, The Supplicant's actions are visible throughout this entire valley.

Menace is how harmful your agent is perceived to be. The level of Menace dictates the strength of the heroes' response. At higher levels of Menace, a hero will raise with an army of knights to hunt your agent down.

Each action your agents take give them a certain amount of Profile and Menace, depending on the action. The more effective your agents are, the more at risk.

Infiltrating the palace is not very visible or menacing.

Placing a mystic construct that gushes shadow is not very visible, but fairly evil.

Your agent's Profile and Menace can be reduced to the minimum by laying low. Those minimum values do creep upward over time until the agent's actions can no longer be hidden.

Somewhat tied to Menace is global Awareness of the dark gods return. By the time Awareness hits 100%, everybody in the world can see the end coming. Awareness also functions as 'political capital' that The Chosen One uses to build their alliance.

You have to balance active progress and stealth until your position is strong enough to operate openly. It's a very compelling game loop, especially with the amount of content available. 97 hours in and I'm still finding subtleties and tactics. I've cursed entire bloodlines, raided border settlements with my Orc horde, and triggered a volcano.

The Part I Really Want to Talk About

The above is all really just place setting for what I really want to discuss, which is how the AI works. How do I know how the AI works? Simple, it's all displayed right there in the game.

The AI Structure

Each game entity works the same way. No matter if the entity is a hero, city or nation. For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to use NPC to refer to heroes, cities, or nations.

Each NPC tracks a stack of potential actions weighted by the Motivation of each action. Actions available to placed in the stack depend on the character class and other attributes of the NPC. When a new action is needed, the action with the highest Motivation is selected and executed. Upon completion, the Motivation for that action is lowered, and it goes to the bottom of the stack. Actions are constantly being added and removed from the stack, and their Motivations can change based on game events.

You can see the the action stack for any NPC by selecting it.

In the picture above, you can see, on the right, that Lightbringer Jielongx Buan is currently driving out an invasion in the underground. Next, he's likely to explore the ruins for treasure. Then, he's not sure what he's going to do. All of his motivations are 0 or less. Probably he'll be messing with Dwarven politics, though.

Here's another NPC:

Mediator Tong Long is currently attempting to save Duchess Shua Buan from the shadow engulfing her soul. Then he's going to move to the next town over to quell unrest. Following that, he'll guard another hero, have a lie down, then give money to the church. He feels more strongly about doing good than Lightbringer Jielongx Buan, who is just mucking about in the tunnels.

Just by clicking on an NPC, you get their story. What they're doing, what they're planning to do, what they care about. I love that you can get such a personal view.

Motivation, Likes and Dislikes, and The Living World

Motivation for any NPC action can be modified by the NPC's Likes and Dislikes, actions executed by other NPCs, or (and this is the important one) actions taken by the player's agents.

But let's leave the player out of it for a moment. In the size game that I usually play, there are around 30 roaming hero's, as many settlements, and 6-10 nations. Each of those NPCs' actions could potentially affect each other NPC's Motivations, Likes and Dislikes.

Likes and Dislikes can be specific game entities, or abstract concepts. Ser Lenyang Long really hates Shadow and Mediator Gngtai Yung. He's not too fond of the entire country of Hang, either.

If the player stays home and does nothing, the world advances. NPC 1 Likes Danger and Hates NPC 2. NPC 1 executes the attack action on NPC 2. NPC 2 is the cousin of the queen, who gains a Dislike of NPC2 and already Dislikes Cooperation. The queen will then order a Brutal Crackdown on NPC 1's home city. The Duke of that city gains a Dislike of the queen and already Likes Ambition. The Duke will declare his city independent and start a civil war.

It works the other way, too. A hero Likes Cooperation and Dislikes Unrest, so she'll go to a foreign city in turmoil and attempt to calm the waters. The rulers of 2 nations both Dislike Orcs and Like Combat, so they will ally to fight back the Orcish raiders on their borders.

This action system is an emergent behavior generator. It creates a living world that the player must influence (frequently indirectly) in order to create an environment suitable for the awakening of their god. Given the multitude of NPCs in a game, the actions of players' agents can have unforeseen results.

Agents of the Dark God In the Living World

So, how do the player's agents interact with this world? Two ways, really. All actions that agents take affect the game world, and generate Profile and Menace for them.

Let's start with the Profile and Menace effects. Regardless of what the result of an action is, there is a change in the agent's Profile and Menace values. After the action is complete. those values change. Any NPC in the agent's profile range will become aware of that agent, and will drop a response action into their action stack. The Motivation of that action is dependent on the agent's new Menace value.

The Motivation starts pretty low. NPCs are not likely choose that action while anything else is going on.

Remember our very busy Mediator Tong Long? Attacking my agent, The Courier, is on his to do list, but very low. I had page down twice to find it.

Motivation will increase as our agent's Menace increases. Until the agent purposely lays low to reduce it. Then the Motivation for the response lowers, making it unlikely to be acted upon.

Actions that the agents have game effects aside from the stat increases. These effects can target an NPC directly. Killing them, adding adding a Like/Dislike to their list, or even adding actions to their stack directly.

Remembering that cities are just NPCs, this is a view of the City of Jiao's stack one turn before The Courtier performs a Political Gridlock action.

And this is after the action is complete. Note that the currently executing action has become Political Gridlock with a 10 turn duration. The Courtier has paralyzed this city for 10 turns.

Agent actions can also add Modifiers to settlement locations. A Modifier is a transient property assigned to a world location, which can affect other attributes of the location (Population, Defense). Modifiers can grow or shrink, depending on circumstances.

A list of Modifiers for the town of Yang. A lot of underground activity and political turmoil.

The list of Modifiers for a location tells a story in the same way the action stack tells a story about an NPC.

All of this can affect the various NPCs, potentially changing their behavior. Action stacks are constantly changing. High priority actions are inserted, Motivations are raised or lowered based on other actions, and so forth.

Observations

The AI structure here is what really fascinates me about this game.

The AI has a very sparse structure. There is virtually no filter between the AI mechanics and the information presented to the player. It's all right there in the UI. And yet, that does not limit the interactions of the game world. I'm still finding intriguing combinations at almost 100 hours in.

Of course, there is a lot of content in this game. A lot. I haven't touched on religion, Elves or magic, for instance.

The AI structure helps there, too. By its very nature, it is compact and modular. In fact, during the early access period, Bobby Two Hands encouraged modders to expand the world, and much of that content was added to the game before release. With full credits given.

I am just in love with the simple elegance on display here.

But How Does It Play

Complexity

Well, there is a learning curve. It's not terrible, but it is significant. The game rewards persistence. Be warned.

You are faced with baffling range of choices on first playthrough. Actions do have detailed tooltips, but until you understand the game terms, that doesn't help much. The tutorial is underdeveloped in this regard. Fortunately, there are a lot of online resources to help with that.

The amount of information available is staggering, and it can be difficult to manage. There are a host of map overlays and search functions to manage the information avaialble to you. Unfortunately, UI access to those functions is inconsistent and poorly organized. It feels like the UI was updated piecemeal as features went in. No solid high-level functional view in evident in UI design. It's not a fatal flaw, but it can be annoying.

Another way to control the onslaught of information is choosing a smaller world during setup. You can specify the size of the world in the X and Y directions (8x8, 42x42, 16x24). Smaller game worlds have a more manageable data load by definition. After a couple of smaller games, you should have enough experience to tackle a big challenge.

The limited number of agents you control also helps here.

Practically, even though detailed information is available on every NPC, you tend focus on the areas in which your agents function. It's relatively straight forward to track every coming an going in a group of three settlements in full detail. The whole game board, not so much. You do get notifications about major world events that you can research as necessary, so this strategy is highly effective.

The Game Loop

The early game is tense. You have one or two agents. Every Profile or Menace gain is significant. You are constantly assessing risk, walking the tight rope between effective action and anonymity. The tension is addictive.

Then the escalation starts.

Shadow gradually creeps across the land, dulling the senses of anyone it infects. This gives you more leeway in the enshadowed areas. But it also causes Awareness to grow. As Awareness grows, so does the severity of the response from the NPCs. The Chosen One will build an alliance to defeat you. With luck, you have created a solid base by then from which to strike back.

Once you've enshadowed a nation, you can recruit The Monarch. The Monarch is an unique agent who can create your Dark Empire. Now you have armies you can direct to conquer your neighbors or raze their cities. Awareness shoots through the roof, of course, but your agents are still governed by their individual Profile and Menace. They are still capable of subtle manipulation. After all, who cares about a single rogue sorcerer when an army is knocking on your castle door.

The breaking of the seals binding your god also contributes to the escalation. Breaking a seal increases your maximum power, the number of agents you can recruit, and gives you access to more powerful (and correspondingly more visible) spells. Typically, by the end game you are engaging in majorly destructive behavior. Your giant snake god. is rampaging through the land, your hives are pouring out swarms of destructive insects, or the lure of material goods causes entire populations to flock to your mountain for willing sacrifice. Depending on your god, of course.

Victory

To win the game, you need to accumulate 200 points before turn 500 (or before the Chosen One reseals your god in their tomb). Points are awarded for enshadowing population, driving rulers insane, or just plain killing people. So may ways to win.

Replayability

Replayability is quite high.

Each of the nine gods has different mechanics, and the playstyles diverge radically.

Different sized worlds also offer unique challenges. Some actions require a nation's cities being a minimum distance apart. It's a no go on smaller maps, but dynamite on larger ones.

There are also a large number of features that can be turned on or off during game setup. based on personal taste. I always turn off Elves, because they are dicks, and don't add much to my playthroughs. At least on the 32x32 maps I usually play.

Wrap Up

As a 4X connoisseur, I am thoroughly entranced with Shadows of the Forbidden Gods. It's a master class in game design. You take a simple mechanic, make it modular (and editable) enough to affect other game systems, then build in content until you ship.

The fact that Shadows of the Forbidden Gods does all that in plain sight just adds to the magic.

Highly reccommended.

-- Lex