So what even was That Which Sleeps?
I'll answer the question seriously. TWS was kickstarter project for a civ clone who's basic premise was this: "What if instead of controlling civilizations, you controlled individuals outside of civilization who could do various actions to influence the civs indirectly".
The idea was that you played as an ancient evil that was sealed away who is now waking up and trying to slowly rebuild their power. You would recruit agents to do your bidding, dispose of them when they outlive their usefulness or become too much of a liability, and repeat until you achieved world domination. Think Sauron's Saruman, Voldemort's Peter Pettigrew, Bill Cipher's Gideon, or any corrupted paladin that tries to serve a demon in hopes of a reward that never comes.
The agents had a good-aligned counterpart known as heroes, who are individuals who act to oppose you and spread general goodness. They started off unaware of your existence, but would end up fighting your agents anyway without seeing the greater purpose behind their villainous actions. They weren't going stay ignorant forever though. Everything you did left behind clues, and if the heroes found enough and pieced them together, they would eventually start working to stop you for good.
The most important thing that tied this all together was that while you were conducting your schemes and trying to rule the world, the AI would play Crusader Kings II amongst each other in the background. By that, I meant that every country and organization was run by individuals with their own personalities and goals and various events would happen in the world as they tried to achieve their goals. Borders would be redrawn as countries went to war and conquered each other. King's would get assassinated and replaced. Children would be born and grow up. New laws would get passed, either regressive or progressive. The whole idea behind this game was that you would be given a living and breathing world, and then be tasked with destroying it in whatever way you saw fit.
This game never ended up actually existing though. When the Dev launched his kickstarter, he claimed the code was %90 complete and the only thing he needed was art, but that was a blatant lie. And it was a lie he kept going for a while. He kept sharing stories about interesting events that happened in his prototype version of the game, stories like this:
Q:Have you got any examples of funny/unexpected/terrible AI behaviours in game?
It's interesting because where do you draw the line between "bug" and "feature" when it comes to an AI that is meant to be derailed. We designed the game so that small changes ripple outward, and simply giving the King a particular mental disorder can throw entire regions into chaos (or it may lead to his ouster and replacement by a Council of Enlightened Sages, unfortunately). My favorite behaviors are related to how far Heroes will go for those they love - I've managed to trick heroes into thinking a Noble had their love assassinated so then they go storming in and killing the nobleman, generally being executed right afterward. Other times they'll go on suicidal crusades against you, plunging into the badlands looking for your seal - or they'll stalk your agents and try to rally the world against them.
On the societal front one of the hardest things to balance are cultural shifts - so if a culture values something you tend to get people in charge who have that trait/personality. Originally their were ways to abruptly shift that, so you could make the people loathe that trait and suddenly entire nations would burst spontaneously into riots to purge their leaders. We made it a BIT MORE GRADUAL after a long spate of that. We also had an Orc Adventurer who Conan the Barbarianed his way into being King of a massive human kingdom in the Depthsscenario - I never "fixed" that because it seemed to work as expected (and will rarely occur).
If you want TERRIBLE well then, the AI took a rocky path to get to where it is. My favorite terrible AI bug was when told to Raid a general would simply turn around and start burning his own farmland - we later took the buggy behavior and used it as a basis for "Scorched Earth" tactics, but for a long time you'd see campaigns completely derail when the generals would just go crazy and start burning down their own country. We had a bug once where Sages with competing knowledge would just go crazy if the other completed it first and try to kill them no matter what - and considering that sages rarely have good combat ability it led to the most pathetic series of "attack" events in the log. We've since changed vengeance/anger paths so that the more cunning agents will pursue Plots to discredit/blackmail/coup their foes instead of going for a duel or ambush.
If you play the Standard Scenario you generally have a basic level of understanding how the game is going to play out, which was our goal - to make it a challenging experience that relies on your learning the patterns of the world. Manipulating the nations that hate eachother, targeting wise kings, timing a crippling famine at the right moment - but even inside that structure there's so many explosive elements. The moment you take a "radical" choice like killing the King and his immediate family, you get the unexpected - like one time I had cursed the King's Family, the Barons declared him unfit, split into two nations, and began to fight a civil war. Meanwhile the Tribes had united behind a Hero, who they proclaimed their chosen king, but he was Cylarian, the barons have a diplomatic summit after a bloody battle, declare the Cylarian hero their king (I didn't see this result but I'm assuming its because he is friends with all the barons and the heroes that were acting as diplomats), making him the king of both powers, he then went on to marry the daughter of the elves (at this point he's simply a diplomatic monster)... overthrows the Elvish Council and declares himself King.... now his ego and diplomatic skill are both max, he manages to Annex Elerion into Cylaria (still only three crowns) - I'm just watching this happen, because I'm spellbound, I don't want to interfere because I need to know what can possibly happen. The united three kingdoms attack Arden, recapturing the farmlands, he makes peace and turns Arden into an ally.
Long story short, he discovers I'm rising and crushes me. Despite the fact that he was simply taking over the world he was friendly with every hero, so no one was stopping him. I ended up adjusting how heroes see other friends if they're growing too powerful, but the completely random events that lead up to this were otherwise "expected" to function that way. In addition, later builds implemented the Balance of Power desire which makes nations take a more critical eye at people who are growing stronger.
Now that's an outlier but still somewhat understandable based on the scenario setup, if you add in the Game Modes you get some real crazy stuff. I have a lot of favorite Modes, but on the North Burns playing with "Liberty" is a really fun way to switch it - it makes revolutions and slave revolts much more common and you get to see the world rip itself apart and remake itself.
that likely never happened. One wonders whether the game was a scam to begin with or if the game died due to stretch goal overdose. One thing that is clear was that the guy wasn't very good at making games, and this project was way too ambitious.
It's a sad story, I personally believe that Paradox would have done a wonderful job delivering on this concept, but as is often the case with "large collaborative art projects" (video games, movies, tv shows), the people with the best ideas rarely ever have the resources to properly execute on them.
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Topic: The small random questions thread [WAAAAAAAAAAluigi] (Read 892519 times)