Part 247: Mechanics - Interface

Interface

Okay, the interface in this game is awful. Let’s be honest about it. However, there’s also a lot of extraneous stuff you really don’t need to know about, so I’ll explain some of the really simple stuff you’re probably going to see a lot. The players (I’m looking at you other chumps ) can explain stuff as it comes up if it’s needed, it’s possible we’ll never even bother with some of the extraneous menus and such.



Okay so, I’ll try and go over stuff really quick. In the top left there is a panel (Hoburgdorf) that displays all the information for the province. The most important parts are its population and (dependant stat) income. Higher population means more income, but only if you tax the province (currently set to 0 in this picture.) It also shows the scales in the province (3 doves, 2 saws, 1 snowflake, 1 brown clover, and one purple sphere) we will get into those later when people start talking about their gods and stuff. There are other things, but really the income is the most important part of that panel.

In the top right there’s your current stockpile of resources both mundane (treasury/gold) and magical (magic gems). You use these to summon or recruit units, they’re the most important thing in the game. The treasury is your current balance of gold, the income – upkeep is your earned gold for next turn. Gold and gems carry over.

On the left there is a list of commanders along with their current orders. As you can see there’s a bunch of random bullshit over there right now, but whatever, we can mention when commanders are doing something important (casting a ritual, it’s always casting a ritual).

On the far right there’s the menu panel, those aren’t really important, but below it are all of the current notable sites in the province. The fortification, laboratory, and temple can all be built, but the other four are magic sites that provide bonuses (gems, gold, and sometimes really important things like discount sites, but we’ll get into that later).

The majority of the image is the actual map. Provinces are outlined by the fuzzy tan-ish lines. The flag indicating who owns the province is the centerpiece of each one, white flags are non-player owned. Red arrows indicate a unit is moving from province to province. Grey arrows mean they’re sneaking (they won’t be shown on the map to enemies and can move through enemy territory). The random blurry white x’s (crossed swords) indicate a battle happened in that province this turn. That’s all, we’ll get into the rest of the stuff later.

Edit: And for what it's worth. Here is the map we're playing on, it's a wraparound.