With another development cycle comes another release for Equestria at War. In this release I focused on creating a brand new nation called the Kingdom of Wittenland.
The Kingdom of Wittenland is in a precarious situation. It is in the middle of several different nations which can be both friends and foes to it. The design brief for this nation was relatively freeform compared to my previous design work for Equestria at War. I could do pretty much anything I wanted, but was told simply to not go crazy. Thus, I kept things restrained and fell back to what worked best, a strong internal narrative.
Wittenland is a nation which is based in the far east of the map, where modernisation has not had much effect yet. To mirror this, I took inspiration from history. Specifically I researched the early medieval period and decided to describe their society as somewhat Carolingian. The empire of Charlemagne was flawed by Germanic tradition and the adherence to old Roman boundaries. So i weaved this into the narrative for my nation. Wittenland has suffered decline in recent years due to being stuck with an ancient economic system which is not fit for purpose. This gives players a reasonable explanation as to why the nation is so far behind, and a flavour of what they are doing. After all, capturing that immersive feel is important during a Hearts of Iron 4 campaign.
One of the principle issues with Hearts of Iron 4 are the slow and rather cumbersome mechanics. After working with it for a while, I can safely say that it has 4 major mechanics which it leans on. The first, is the actual warfare element of the game, and that works very well on its own. The second, is research and the third is construction of factories and equipment. Both of these are not especially exciting in the vanilla game. Most of the time it is a fire and forget choice, however more often than not it plays into a deep meta game strategy that is done before a major war. Equestria at War's development system, means this is much less important, as technology and construction are severely hindered. This has the unintended side effect of there being less to do at the start of a game, and it makes the game more boring.
In order to combat this, a designer must lean on the fourth pillar of Hearts of Iron 4 game design, and that is the focus trees. These national stories need to be able to shoulder more of the excitement, so they need to be much richer and much more interesting than something in vanilla. Thus, narrative and storytelling become much more important to make up for sacrificing the effectiveness of two distinct elements of gameplay.
With the focus tree much more important. The AI had to be better at using it to present the player a challenge. Hearts of Iron 4's national focus AI is poor at best. It takes into account what foci it can do, and then randomly picks between each national focus using percentage weights which can be assigned to conditions. However this approach is very limiting when you are dealing with a large range of possibilities. Instead I developed an AI schema which will allow Wittenland to take advantage of an emergent situation and adapt accordingly. Instead of thinking about what foci it can take, it reads in information about the world and picks out of a general group of foci that relate to that. This makes for a much more dynamic and adaptive AI which can pivot based on what it needs and any one time.
