Some words on becoming an outcast. I want it to be the hardest mode and not necessarily fair. Becoming an outcast is after all a desperate situation, but I agree that players should have more options. As a stopgap, for now events will be slightly more likely to happen in territories when you are an outcast and you're also somewhat more likely to get a chance to leave any territory. In the future we'll definitively get to make more strategic choices there.
To make the system less of a death row sentence for characters forced into Outcast status, there should be a greater reduction in local tension. I've found Outcast mode to be most dangerous for characters that didn't start there, because they usually ended up there due to too much local tension. Now they're asked to fight off the same stuff that killed them before, but without their armies.
If a relic is in a territory when it gets destroyed, its suppose to resurface eventually right? Cause I just collected all the available relic pieces but nothing is happening, so I guess that means that there was a relic piece in a territory that got destroyed?
Pieces resurface eventually indeed, but they must also be researched before you can do anything with them.
I'm curious about the details of the resurfacing. Do they resurface in terrain that is currently in existence? Is there a message about their resurfacing? How long, generally, should it take? I know it's a lot of detail that breaks immersion, but it's hard/impossible to bug test if we don't know how things should be working.
Anyone else think that the powerful unit scale is heavily towards the Influence? They get Thing from the Deep, but the Order only gets a couple BFGs (big f^cking guns). Without combined arms, Order just can't compete. But with combined arms and good terrain, daylight, and Court Battle Advantage, they can sometimes win (depends on who gets the first two attacks).
Top tier units are purposely biased towards the Influence, but I've tried to make the middle tier stalwart units, specially military ones, better overall than their influenced counterparts. I believe it makes gameplay more varied and interesting.
Like I said, if the combined arms of various middle-tier Order troops can defeat the top-tier of the Influence, then it's ok. But now, it seems that even combined Order troops can't best the Influence top-tier if the Influence is in favorable terrain, no matter how many advantages exist for the Order faction. In one game, I had to wait for The Thing From The Deep to attack me in order to destroy it. In my current game, I can't even do that, because I have no local tension and the opposing unit is in the last Influence-held territory, which is in danger of being destroyed if I launch an attack. Didn't think that my game would be stopped by something called "Kitten Spiders". It's not that they're a threat to my unit: They just have too much resistance to destroy in the three of five attacks that I get, and they're fast enough that I probably won't get any more.
EDIT: I finally found the right mix of luck and units to beat the Kitten Spiders. Still not sure I could reliably beat The Thing From The Deep if it was in certain terrains, but I'm thinking it might be possible infrequently.
I should also point out that as far as I know, if a land is destroyed and turned to wasteland, then the player can
never become governor. Essentially, the land still counts as needing to be under player control, but it can never be under player control, thus no governor. Granted, I've never gotten the proposal to become governor, so I'm not sure exactly what it needs, but I have controlled all territories but those destroyed and not gotten the extra +.1 merit per turn. Not sure if that is working as intended, but that explains why I'm asking for order vs. influence balancing, so I can dislodge all Influence forces.
EDIT: Found out that if the land goes to wasteland on the turn that I capture it, then it's ok. I'm getting what looks to be an extra .5 merit per turn. Still no decision to become governor, although I could probably just wait for Emperor.
If wasteland territories don't count towards those territories needed to become governor, the player can just destroy those territories with defenders they can't beat through multiple losing battles. Not sure if that is desired behavior either.
EDIT: Now that I control all the territories, I'm bleeding wealth. Minus 600 per turn, no matter what I do. I guess I'm now required to make up for the missing colonial wealth, or maybe the game wants me to fix the wasteland territory. Some sort of balance sheet/income report would be nice so I knew why this was happening. To clarify, I'm losing from 700 to 1000 AU per turn, it varies. It may be due to the way I obtained my last territory: it went wasteland, but I was then offered the chance to capture it, which I did. So, the territory still appears on the map, but it's affected by nothing. I've set aside the save.