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[Jalak]

How strong are your military-minded minions supposed to be in comparison to the various armies walking about? Can your armies hold out on their own so long as heroes don't get involved, or do you need to make sure you have sheer numbers, or an agent around, to keep them alive?

Also, when a clue is left behind, either leading to you or an agent, do the heroes that find these clues go on a "quest" where they travel to different parts of the world (most likely shadowing an agent) and get slowly closer to figuring things out (assuming they don't get distracted)? Or is it more of a case where each clue adds to some sort of vague "threshold" where, if the number of clues collected go beyond it, they figure things out and hunt you down? Is it also possible for a hero to find a clue, not know what to do with it (or care) then just throw it away? I don't suppose there's some sort of agent "conspirator" you can have whose job is specifically to make sure these left clues don't go anywhere, or distract the heroes who have them.

[Cthulhu]

It seems like the clues aren't as much pieces of the puzzle (like a letter from the corrupted dude) but fact statements that the heroes retain and can share and compare and stuff to eventually draw conclusions.

Like "The Rake was trying to poison the town's water supply with a pack of goblins" or something.  And then if somebody else has seen the rake doing something else they can put those clues together and get a better picture of what's going on.  I might be totally wrong.

But it does sound like there are useless clues and ways to disrupt clues and such.  I distinctly remember hearing that the Rake can commit horrific but senseless acts of violence to create high-priority dead end clues that distract heroes from what's actually going on.

[KingDinosaurGames]

You're both right to an extend - clues are both part of a "threshold" but also individual factoids.  Different facts breed different reactions, and work together to create conclusions.  How the hero or leader acts on his conclusion depends on his individual personality. 

As far as ignoring them, some clues can only be obtained by people sensitive to that type - for instance a warrior would have no idea what to do with an Arcane clue and would simply ignore it.  Most clues are simply "digested over time"  by heroes, but other clues require "Lore" to be used in order to research the clue.  Stopping heroes either at the point of the clue, distracting them with misleading clues, and corrupting points of Lore are all viable strategies.

You're dead on with the Rake's ability, he starts a series of pointless ritual murders that distract people.  Very, very useful if you want to cast a long ritual spell nearby and need to be without distractions from annoying heroes.  Another example is one of the Peddler's default traits (which can be acquired by others) which lets you shift the blame for an action to a Hero that is wanted by the kingdom or part of a hated culture.  Seeing a scapegoated hero get lynched is one of my favorite events.

[KingDinosaurGames]

On the military side that varies Scenario by Scenario, while you could build a scenario where you have a small core of elite units vs the hordes of terrible good guys our current Two Scenarios principally deal with your more traditional fantasy scenario of the poorly trained but numerous orc hordes vs the far more prepared but outnumbered humans.

You can gain elite units, you can train your crappy goblins to be capable fighters, or you could rely on more powerful agents and ritual spells to turn the tide.  In general, the forces of the world are much stronger than you, but if you want to push for early military victories you'd need to be sure to isolate your enemy and strike them while they're weak.  The big issue is that for each action you take to strengthen yourself militarily, you are sacrificing actions that could be taken in the world at large.  It's all about the opportunity cost, and a balanced approach between the two seems to work best.

The more typical scenario involves the gradual decline of the human forces over time as you wage proxy wars with smaller orc tribes, lizarmen, and other demihumans even while they face famines, refugee problems, and political discord. 

Keep in mind that this game takes place over a short period of time, it is very costly for the human nations to raise new trained units.  When an elite unit dies for the human players, it is gone.  The interesting part of the game is that losing a "war" is often a good thing for you, as long as you've weakened them in the long term.

[Jalak]

This is great, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, mine and everyone else's. If this gets annoying, let me know.

On that note: how common are heroes supposed to be? Do we have the potential of finding one on each POI, or are there only a half a dozen heroes worth mentioning? How strong can they get, anyway? Will ignoring and being ignored by a group turn out to my ultimate advantage (in not having to deal with them until I'm ready) or theirs (in them becoming too strong since I did nothing to stop their questing)? How hard is it to kill them, by questing in "black" POIs or direct confrontation?

[Ghazkull]

on another note will it be possible to turn yourself into the good guy in the eyes of the world? AKA Let's say you have the super-powered elves hanging around and you start to create some massive ritual that will cause a horrific plague for example.
Meanwhile the heroes are slowly getting behind who is responsible for all of this and you just turn the clues around casting the elves as the perpetrators of that ritual and make it look like you tried to stop them. Which causes "The Alliance" to instead ally with you against the Elves. Would something like this be possible?

[Jalak]

From what he said about how the ancient clues work and how you can redirect them, I'd imagine that the most you could do would be to shift blame, rather then make people think you work for the forces of good (especially since they'd probably think it a bit suspicious that they're being helped by "someone" they can't see and the arcane-savy ones might even recognize the magic you're using to help them). Now, what you could probably do to get people to think highly of your agents, on the other hand...

Edit: Actually, you raise a really good question of how the alliance system works, namely in regard to how other nations and heroes react to it. Now, judging by the way you've spoken about it before, I'm assuming that the alliance isn't "absolute" when it forms, as it takes time for heroes  and nations to follow the Chosen One to war, much less recognize a threat to their very existence. It stands for reason that some nations, organizations and heroes wouldn't have a lot of motivation, or even evidence, to drop everything and join this new alliance.
So, let's say that there are two countries not in the alliance; one corrupted by you and the other "clean". However, both are allied with each-other conventionally or have some other sort of obligation to help each-other out. Now, the alliance forms and figures out that the corrupted one is working for you and attacks.
The clean nation has now found itself obliged to help their "friend" in their hour of need. Hell, from their point of view, this alliance has just made an aggressive, completely unprovoked attack against their allies. Clearly, the reason for the creation of this "alliance" is just some excuse being used to wipe them all out!

So, yeah, an alliance of several major powers suddenly rising up to support some "prophesy" of vaguely defined doom would scare the other powers quiet a bit, especially since, from their point of view, they are all following the word of one extremely charismatic man who may even be a bit insane (How do they know the prophesy of doom isn't referring to THAT VERY SAME HERO!?). It would be pretty neat if a sort of "neutral bloc" of some sort could form between closely-tied nations in order to counterweight this sudden super power and protect their own independence and interests. The Elder God could even try to encourage other nations to join in on this isolation and convince the world the Chosen One is just some nutter.

[Lukeinator]

PTW

[jhxmt]

Posting to watch - based on the devlog, video and responses in this thread, I'm really interested in this so far. 

[KingDinosaurGames]

On Heroes: At game start you have two kinds of Heroes, your basic regular heroes that begin at level 1 and then "Champions".  Champions are always shown on the map because they are famous - they are very powerful and they work for a nation.  Which means instead of following one of the three hero AIs they follow the commands of the nation's leader.  Heroes can become Champions later in the game, and you can also "disgrace" Champions back down to heroes. 

In the North Burns the game currently starts with 30 heroes being randomly spawned, this number is absolutely subject to change and is still being balance.  Right now I'd say about 2-3 of them die to random causes, and another couple end up too critically injured or mentally unbalanced to be effective, so its a little over 10% that will get neutralized without your interference.  If I play to just throw up random obstanes everywhere I get that number up to 30-40%, but the Heroes that survive are stronger for the challenges and level up a bit faster.  We wanted it to be tactical in who you pursue, and what objectives you choose to defend.

Avoiding a group vs dealing with them is actually an answer I can't give, I'm not sure what the ideal strategy is.  If you just pursue your own agendas you'll bump into enough heroes that you don't have to go looking for them, which often leads to that scenario where you are plagued by 3-4 recurring Adventuring Groups which you end up handling, but then there are some other heroes who have little idea of who you are but get summoned in to help when an Agent's threat gets too high.

I will say that having a balanced view of the world through infiltration is essential to finding and targetting the groups that are working on campaigns you want to stop.  To give an example, there is a long campaign that returns the dwarves to their homeland in the mountains north of Cylaria - if this happens they begin to upgrade the weapons and armor of Cylaria, they fix the High Gate and close it to your minions, and all adventurers involved get a perk.  Very, very, very bad - especially if you are going a war route through the north.  The process of this campaign involves a hero meeting with the dwarves down south, then a grand meeting of adventurers, then they go off to get some artifacts, then they go to the mountains.  Havin infiltration at ANY of these key points, or on ANY of the heroes involved, or on the KIGNDOMS that the heroes ask for help from will let you see this campaign is going on.

Heroes in the right configuration and level are difficult to kill by standard agents - but if you come at them with The Baron and some Giant Minions you can pretty much crush any low-medium hero with ease, and then a higher level hero might flee with an injury (which is semi-permanent).  Heroes (and Agents) heal slowly over time, so wounding them is a great way to get yourself some breathing room.  If you played the game to Kill Heroes, you'll be able to "build" an agent appropriately - there are also agents specifically meant to murder heroes and they are very good at what they do.

You can't ever "be a good guy", this was part of a system that we lost because it was too complex (though it will be a stretch goal for KS).  However yes you CAN trick the heroes and other nations into going after other benevolent powers, especially if the cultures hate eachother.    However, Agents can be seen as allies of a nation and heroes - they can gain "Welcome at Court" which means they are friends of the nation, and they can donate gold, food, and even mercenaries to show their support for the king and gain some influence.  One of the main benefits of this approach is that if a hero comes tot hat kingdom to say "that agent is working for a dark power" he may find himself ignored, jailed, or even beheaded.  In addition, if you get attacked there, the Royal Guard will come help you in battle.

Jalak you really nailed our idea behind the Alliance - it is a response to something dire in the world, but to those who don't share the same belief they look at it with suspicion.  This is the suspicion you need to leverage to ensure that the Alliance remains as weak as possible, and you also don't want to be too overt with your powers which may convince the other nations that they are also under great threat.

The Alliance can target a mundane threat, and then dissolve - it can also simply dissolve under discord and lack of threat which makes nations hesitant to form an Alliance in the future.

[Oscuro1987]

PTFW!

[Lukeinator]

Will there be a mac version?

[ScriptWolf]

So what causes new Heroes to be generated ? And is the 30 you currently have both for heroes and champions or is there a different pool so when someone becomes a champion a new hero arises.

You mention heroes going on epic quests to stop you and use dwarfs as a example, what happens if you corrupt a dwarf nation can you go on your own quest to bring them back to their homeland and use them and make them evil?

[sjm9876]

Is it possible to give heroes quests if you infiltrate a nation without it being noticed?

[KingDinosaurGames]

The number of heroes is just for the beginning of the scenario, during the game randomly some low level heroes will spawn (configurable) and events can cause more powerful heroes to emerge - however the initial stable of heroes are the majority of the heroes that will be present.  The game's strategy relies heavily on the resources on the game map being difficult to replace, and this applies to heroes as well.  If you kill all the heroes well, you've killed all the heroes - they are kaput.  (this is essentially impossible to do I think, even in my most brutal anti-hero playthroughs I've only killed up to half of them).  So there is no hard cap on heroes, not even a soft cap (though Nations will seek to replace dead Champions).

You CAN give quests to heroes via a Leader's decision - when a leader choice comes up you see the many options he has, and you can push him towards a particular one with your influence.  This is a key component to disrupting politics in the world.  More powerful when it fcomes to launching quests is manipulating Orders, any heroes part of that order will respond to your quest, which can even be a call to kill a particular hero/leader.

About corrupting the dwarf nation - we don't have events of that type because we split "Agents do Challenges" and "Heroes do Quests" as the blend of proactive actions vs reactive.  However, when the quest happens you may interfere with it - which can result in positive responses.   Results like the dwarves are lost along the way, or a great evil arises in their ancient homeland (clearly derivative) which can then aid you, etc.  So this brings in the "Reactivity" element to the quests - interfere with the heroes agenda to your benefit.  Proactively you can perform your own challenges to create new situations, such as having your corrupted dwarves raise an elite unit, cause them to become hostile to magic, or use your magic to work with them to forge a mighty artifact - things heroes may come to stop.