War 2.0 - The war'ining.

What a crazy week, I had a large speaking assignment on thursday and it ate up all of my day tuesday-thursday morning really putting me a bit behind. But being a few days late isn't the end of the world, and I think I have some cool stuff related to battle to show off.

As this game is all about conquest, military is an important part, just as important as the diplomatic side (which I will deal with next week).

I already went over a large amount of military stuff last week, but I feel that I can just wrap this up with a bit more information. Movement goes along a hexagonal based grid system (thanks for stealing my idea civV) which allows for a great deal of freedom, and each hexagon ties into the tile modifiers. You can go to war with a enemy unit if it is in a adjacent hexagon. Battles take place at the end of the turn, and most battles will take a number of turns to finish as you only get one base attack per unit per turn (this can be modified with cards). I would really like to have the battles animate similar to this where you see the units and the terrain attack each other, but that may be a bit of effort. If you wish to skip all the battle scenes you can just tap the button and It will give you your complete summary.

Also since information and distance plays into the game heavily, you wont always be able to see your battles take place right away. If you are close to home base of course you can see things go down, but the further you get from your nation the harder it is to see battles take place, and you get stuck with simple (you won/you lost) screens to keep you updated. This becomes less problematic as you upgrade your tech later on, and you can completely remove this with a card that makes your ruler supreme military commander.

Conquering Nations
So you are at war to take over your rival nation huh? Well as you fight your way through territories you have to take down the main city to capture the territory. Each city takes two base turns per one population size to bring until control. So if you have no modifiers and you wish to capture a territory with a population size 2 it will take your army 4 turns to take over. However while this happens the opponent does not have any access to that territory for income or anything.

As you take nations your map color creates horizontal lines showing your current conquest. You can then demand a nation cede them to you for peace, become a vassal, or just continue them and annex the entire nation.

News Wire
Time for some innovation! I wont go completely into this all the way yet (as I am still trying to figure it out gameplay wise) but this is the first phase of every turn. The game basically plays as follows:

News Wire -> Buying/Playing Cards -> Diplomacy and Military -> End turn (everything goes through)

The news wire is basically the overview of your nation, it shows everything that has happened to it over your previous turn in an headlined format, and you can tap the headlines to get a more detailed account of events. The crux comes in that reading in depth things that happen cost you points (haven't come up with a proper name for them yet). These points limit you to having to pick and choose keeping up to date with your nation as you try and make decisions. Of course you can get cards to augment your point total allowing for more information to disseminate but you have to be really selective in being able to cut through everything happening and determining what is most important for you to know at the given turn. Remember, due to logistics information also takes a certain amount of time to reach your nation, so you might be reading things that happened a number of turns ago (although it will always say the date a certain event occurred).