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[thegoatgod_pan]

That Which Sleeps, as everyone remembers was a fake kickstarter promising a game where you played a Cthulhu type villain slowly corrupting the world into apocalypse via mortal agents.

Sleeps never actually came out, but “Shadows Behind the Throne” has, it is on steam and it is good.

Visually it is a little janky and there are some bugs but it does what it says on the lid and is actively developed.

My experiences were:

Almost destroy the world with a swarm of deep old ones and corruption, but lose when humanity rallied into a morally upright alliance.

Almost destroy the world via a conspiracy, my tendency to sacrifice my own nobles to fuel an apocalyptic winter weakened the state and the empire crumbled.

Successfully destroyed the world by being very very subtle and sneaky and just poking humanity into having their own wars, but keeping all the dead people in corpse groves until i was ready—the world ended with one human city holding off two continents of zombies but not my ambassadors who broke the minds of the nobility.

[Damiac]

Be careful calling that which sleeps a scam, there are still senseless fanboys who will say your negativity is the only reason it's not out yet ;p

[E. Albright]

I'd say moreso be careful about calling it a scam because the difference between a scam and a failed project with poor design and PR is not necessarily clear to onlookers.

I remember playing a very early alpha of Shadows Behind the Throne. Janky is a fair appraisal, but it felt like it had potential. May give this a look-see.

[Cthulhu]

I've tried shadows a few times but always bounced off, mostly due to the sheer amount of options and numbers.  It's like picking a wife in Crusader Kings, I have no idea what I want or what options are good and bad and I eventually throw up my hands.

That Which Sleeps on the other hand was a scam.  The motivation behind it is debatable, I still have enough good faith to say it was a "lying for jesus" type scam where he thought he could pull it off if he got the money, but somebody reverse engineered the "mod tools" and found the full game files.  There was no actual game code, just plugins and a bit of code to generate the scenes we saw in the kickstarter trailers.  So whatever his motivations were, when he posted the kickstarter and said the game was almost done save for updated art, he was 100% lying.

[E. Albright]

That's a fair appraisal of SBtT - and looking at the Steam page for it, it looks like it's gotten worse in this regard, not better. Alas.

(Also, what The_Explorer said. We don't need to start ANOTHER flamewar thrad that gets locked about this.)

[The_Explorer]

I'll be honest. I don't think posting about a game (which does look good), and calling another game a scam (whether true or not) in the title starts off the thread too well. Maybe think of changing it a bit with more a focus on the game itself.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I had no idea people still had feelings about that Kickstarter. I just figured I'll never see that money again and that the game promised too much anyway, and moved on--which is why I got excited when Shadows actually delivered some of the things it promised.

I've tried shadows a few times but always bounced off, mostly due to the sheer amount of options and numbers.  It's like picking a wife in Crusader Kings, I have no idea what I want or what options are good and bad and I eventually throw up my hands.

I think that you are right on about the interface excess, but honestly, those numbers are barely relevant. With cities you only care about Infiltration 0-100%. Everything else doesn't matter except behind the scenes--not like you care who wins battles between the two mortal cities, or whose economy is booming--you just want people dying and nobles competing (unless you actually do--and then it is right there in the interface)!  With people you want to know about Shadow to see how corrupt someone is and if it is at 100%, and if you decide to get into the politcs game, Prestige matters, because that=your puppet's vote share. Everything else is meh. Ignoring all the other numbers will not affect success at the game.

I just pick a location because I like the sound of it (a librarian in the far north has an unsavory dream and begins reading~create new agent), make an agent and see how long they can go before they get burned at the stake--you really can't lose, you can just be forced to try again, muttering about how human heroes stopped you this time, but in an eon you will rise again, and this time you'll make sure the entire north pole is planted with zombie trees.

I had a blast running around a Seeker, looking for forbidden lore backed by a Merchant and a Vampire who softened up cities by infiltrating them and corrupting the ruling class, until I was ready to reveal the secret-not-meant-to-be-known to the world thus collapsing three empires that stood since the dawn of time. Another time, it was all disease and zombies. Straight up loving terraforming the world to winter via battles and rotten nobles too.

You pick two "Names" at char gen, which determine your overall strategy and abilities, and if you win a game, you access a pick any-and-all Names option too.

They are (briefly described):

"Promise of Teeth"~Vampire lord type stuff:  manipulate evidence and enemy agents
"Winter's Scythe"~Eternal Winter:  make the climate colder when mortals fight mortals, or when you sacrifice corrupt lords
"Priest in the Deep"~Cthulhu:  raise ocean armies of the deep ones but keep them hidden except with madness and in forgotten towns until you are ready
"The Wretched Birth"~Living Flesh:  be a continent-sized flesh monster that wants to keep growing and eat the world
"Merchant of Nightmares"~ Fear machine:  foster fear and hatred and feed off it.

Some are clearly synergetic (e.g. Fear+Winter=sit back and watch the world eat itself)
Some are a bit less so (e.g. hiding evidence via subtle manipulation is a lot less useful when the Southern continent is growing tentacles that eat cities).

You also operate via agents: some you can create yourself and some you can corrupt.

The ones you create are:

Vampire: master infiltrators that leave less evidence than anyone
Seeker:  travels the world reading books and doing nothing useful until they gather 12 secrets, at which point in one action they can drive any lord mad and in three, corrupt them utterly.
Hierophant:  can charm and corrupt nobles making them your pawns.
Red Death:  creates and guides plagues
Plague Doctor:  gathers corpses from cities and battlefields, plants them in creepy forests, raises armies of the undead.

You can also recruit people created by the AI:
Knights help lead armies, merchants can run around generating prosperity and corrupting nobles but are really fragile, investigators can accuse and banish actual witch-hunters, and nobility vote and make decisions on the level of the nation, opening up the possibility of declaring an openly evil Dark Empire.

[Aoi]

Are the features being discussed here for the original one, or the one labelled "Shadows Behind the Throne 2" that's on Steam?

(Also if anybody's lazy and wants a link they can click instead of searching: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1511830/Shadows_Behind_the_Throne_2/ )

[Cthulhu]

I managed to get a dark empire with enthralled sovereign playing as cold/politics names.  Even with everyone in the empire broken and your enthralled running the show you still can't get them to do anything, and it takes a ton of work just to get there while the rest of the world does nothing.  The most I was able to hit with death of the sun was like eight battles, which managed to abandon one settlement with apparently no political effect.

I dunno, maybe other names have a bigger effect but right now politics really feels like it takes too much effort for too little result.  You'll blow all your political capital getting them to set offensive stance only for them to immediately switch back.  Meanwhile the other nations have no problem ganging up on you.

I think if you get to the point where you completely control a nation it should just let you do whatever you want with that nation.  I don't see why a dark empire is still having votes and political squabbles.  When I first went dark empire it was cause they were about to vote out my enthralled sovereign and I thought, you know, she'd suspend elections or something.  Nope.  The nation also continued to be a dark empire after she was removed, everybody apparently deciding to just go along with it even before they were broken.

Dunno.  There's some good stuff but the systems are still wonky and it's unbalanced in a way that makes it not really any fun.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I’m talking about 2, as I understand it to be a more comprehensive version of 1 and the only one sold on steam.

Dark Empire stuff is fun—after you declare, all the non-shadowed nobles desperately try to overthrow the ruler so it is good to lay foundations before you declare. 

The Winter stuff is slow—battles add up gradually, or in a big burst around the battle/sacrificed noble.  You can make the north uninhabitable very quickly.  Conversely, the southern cities initially **improve** from winter, because they are too hot by default.  It is a slower playstyle for sure.

[Cthulhu]

Yes they tried to overthrow at first, but then after they overthrew it was still a dark empire and shadow continued to stack up until the entire hierarchy was broken and I just enthralled the sovereign.  Even then a dark empire is just a regular empire but everyone hates you.  People still fight and squabble, you still can't get people to vote on anything.

I think a good change would be making "broken" more powerful.  All it does is make them ignore evil shit, which is good, but not scalable.  Once you've got the entire kingdom you don't really gain anything except points towards winning.  I dunno, might be too strong to make broken nobles automatically vote with your enthralled, but if the entire noble hierarchy worships me and the kingdom is openly devoted to me, why are they voting against my interests?

[E. Albright]

They may worship you, but that doesn't mean that advancing your interests is more important to them than advancing their own interests. See e.g. most of medieval history WRT actions and relationships with, within, by, for, and against the Church. People. What a bunch of bastards.

[Damiac]

I'd say moreso be careful about calling it a scam because the difference between a scam and a failed project with poor design and PR is not necessarily clear to onlookers.

I remember playing a very early alpha of Shadows Behind the Throne. Janky is a fair appraisal, but it felt like it had potential. May give this a look-see.

It's the same as the difference between fraud and being wrong. Were intentionally false claims made?

The tws kickstarter said they already had a working game that needed art assets. This was a lie. They didn't think they had a working game, they said they did so as to get people to give them money.

That's the literal definition of fraud.

However that's unrelated to shadows behind the throne which is not a scam.

[Cthulhu]

They may worship you, but that doesn't mean that advancing your interests is more important to them than advancing their own interests. See e.g. most of medieval history WRT actions and relationships with, within, by, for, and against the Church. People. What a bunch of bastards.

I dunno, I feel like if God was directly talking into their brains they might've gotten shit done.  That also has historical precedent.

It also doesn't make for very rewarding gameplay, considering how much work it takes to create a dark empire.  I'm also not a huge fan of the Fear name, though maybe I'm doing it wrong.  It seems like a lot of the abilities are based on differences in fear between nobles, cutting at relationship values when people don't fear the same thing.  But probably due to limitations in the current AI, it's actually pretty rare to have any divisions like that.  Everybody in a given nation will usually fear the same things at the same values.  The only opportunity I've found to actually do significant damage is when you have a paranoid noble since he'll automatically get fear of Enshadowed Nobles at 200 and can start charisma bombing the sovereign for not taking the dark noble threat seriously.  That's good, and can start a civil war if enough nobles drop into red relationship with their liege, but that's about all I've found you can do easily.

[E. Albright]

It's the same as the difference between fraud and being wrong. Were intentionally false claims made?

The tws kickstarter said they already had a working game that needed art assets. This was a lie.

This is an unproven assertion. We do not know if they had a working game. They may have, and wrecked it trying to add stretch goals to an engine that did not support them (endless mode, wasn't it?). If they had bad version control, they may not have been able to roll back to a working version even if what they were promising now did not include said stretch goals; i.e., they were committed to adding something they could not deliver and did not previously have a working version of. Everything about their process suggests poor software engineering practices, so poor version control would follow from that - though again, they had at that point committed to delivering something that was more than what they claimed to have initially. Couple that with a mental breakdown (and the dev's behavior screams clinical anxiety and depression; possibly even something like Avoidant Personality Disorder), and it's easy to accept the idea that there was no demonstrated fraud. Not least b/c the "reverse engineered mod tools" mentioned above as ironclad proof don't necessarily reflect the dev's full code base, just their Kickstarter tech demo's codebase. We're fully into "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" territory here. All we know for sure is that they failed to deliver. Frankly, that's enough.

But as you said despite chosing to go on this tired, beaten digression, that's unrelated to Shadows Behind the Throne. Which is why it would have been better for OP to never even broach the subject. Barring something along the lines of discovery in a civil lawsuit, there's no way the public can actually know whether it was incompetence or fraud, and all we can do is speculate based on necessarily incomplete information - even if some of us have concluded those speculations are incontrovertible facts.

(I'll dip out of the thread here.)