Oct 10, 2024

Dev Diary #35 - Ways of War: Tomes and Wildlife

Age of Wonders 4 - fangirlcrazily

Hello again! I am Luis Ferreira, a senior designer at Triumph Studios. This time we are going over the Tomes and Wildlife that will be available to you on the first pack of our second expansion pass, Ways of War.

Tomes

Tome of Discipline

The Tome of Discipline is a Tier I tome of Materium and Order affinities. This tome is all about channeling inner strength and conducting its magic to empower or heal your units.

The Monk is a Fighter that conducts the tomes empowering magic into its strikes. It punches its enemies and on a third strike in the same turn it triggers a Spirit explosion on the target that also hits adjacent enemies. They have a Leap free action ability which allows them to jump up to 2 hexes, which helps them position and trigger that explosive third strike. Additionally, it also has a Meditate ability which heals, removes 2 Negative Status and places them in defense mode, making the monk a nice allround unit to have!

The minor transformation Inner Mastery grants a small bonus to status resistance while also giving your racial units increased healing in battle.

To further help sustain your units you need a healing spell to trigger Inner Mastery’s extra healing. Mantra of Purification is a powerful spell that does just that while also removing all their Negative Status Effect.

The Tome of Discipline has two unit enchantments. Empowered Strikes grants shield, polearm and fighter units extra damage and gives a similar effect to the Monk, where the third strike in a turn causes it to have a chance to stun their target. Focus Aim gives an ability that as a free action grants the unit True Strike for that turn, meaning their attacks cannot miss.

Tome of Shades

At Tier II and giving Materium and Shadow affinities is the Tome of Shades. This tome is all about blinding enemies in combat and then eviscerating them in their moment of weakness.

The Shade is a Tier III skirmisher with a kit that is all about poking enemies from afar and then going in for the kill. Throw Shadow Dagger is a ranged ability with a chance to Blind and when this unit is ready to engage in melee their main ability Fatal Strike is there to finish their enemy off, as its damage increases based on the missing Hit Points of their target.

Living Shadows is a minor transformation found on this tome that grants evasion against ranged attacks while also retaliating against attackers by attempting to blind them.

Shadow Blades is what makes all these Blind status pay off. Melee units with this enchantment ignore 50% of the target’s Defense and Resistance if the target is Blind, vastly increasing damage done against high defense targets.

Tome of Prosperity

Prosperity is a Tier IV Nature and Order tome. This tome is all about protecting your units and it also grants access to the Prosperity wildlife units which we will talk about in more detail later. It focuses on applying a new status effect called Grace: When a unit with this effect is hit by an attack, they regain 10 Hit Points and lose one stack of this effect. It can stack up to five times.

Summon Prosperity Dragon grants access to a new tier 5 unit of the same name. This is a powerful support mythic unit and so its spell costs extra gold in order to cast. The other Prosperity units are accessed by building this tome’s special province improvement, the Shrine of Prosperity.

The two enchantments from this tome both give Inner Grace. This ability grants a stack of Grace if a unit starts its turn in combat without a stack of it.

Staves of Grace gives an ability called Cleansing Rain which dispels negative status effects from friendly units and positive status effects from enemies in a 1-hex radius. It additionally gives all support abilities a stack of grace in addition to their other effects.

Tome of Calamity

The other side to the Tome of Prosperity is the Tome of Calamity. Also Tier IV, this Chaos Shadow tome is all about Accursed Fiend units, Ruin provinces and the Ghostfire effect.

Ghostfire is an existing effect but it was rarely used, it functions like Burning but deals 2 Fire and 2 Frost damage per stack. Additionally it doesn’t remove the Frozen status from an enemy like Burning does. To help this work a bit more smoothly, we’ve also made it so that if any Burn stacks are present on the unit or any are added while Ghostfire is present, they are converted to Ghostfire.

Summon Calamity Dragon summons a T5 offensive mythic unit. Like summon prosperity dragon, it also has an extra cost in that it can only be cast on an owned province and it will ruin it, as if it was pillaged. The Accursed Shrine gives access to the Accursed unit wildlife line, which we will talk about very soon, and it also makes it so all the Ruins this tome can causes can benefit your lands!

Accursed Armors applies to your melee units and makes them tougher while making their bodies cursed with calamity magic: melee attackers against this unit have a chance to suffer from Ghostfire and Misfortune. Accursed Projectiles gives your ranged units attacks a chance of applying Ghostfire while also adding Fire and Frost damage to their projectiles and magic.

Wildlife

In this content pack Wildlife is split between the forces of Prosperity and the forces of the Accursed. There’s also a new Inhabitant Trait, Land of Conflict, that places more of these two wildlife families in the world!

Prosperity Units

The prosperity units are a group of Celestial Dragon units, meaning they have Dragon Rage, Inspiring Killer and Control Loss Immunity as well as having Inner Grace inherent to them.

The Blessed Dragon is a Tier II Support Unit. Its Graceful Rain heals and grants a stack of Grace to all units in a 1-hex radius!

The Radiant Guardian is a Tier III Shield Unit whose special ability is its Radiant Transposition. The unit enters defense mode and swaps places with a friendly unit, dealing damage to all adjacent units after swapping. The ability also has a chance to apply Pacified to enemies, which disables their attacking abilities.

The Tier IV Righteous Judge is a Mythic unit with Zeal and a powerful melee attack that can apply Sundered Defense and Resistance. Its Righteous Judgment ability is a free action ability that doubles its damage against Condemned enemy units. If the double damage doesn’t trigger, then the target becomes condemned so that you can smite them harder next time you use this ability.

The Prosperity Dragon is the pinnacle of the Prosperity units, a Tier V support unit that has a long range main attack and that can give all friendly units in combat Grace while also removing one negative status effect with its Rain of Prosperity ability.

Bestow Mask of Prosperity links this unit to another and all the damage that unit takes is transferred to the Dragon with a 35% reduction. Additionally the linked unit and the dragon gain 1 Grace each turn while the link is active.

When linked to a unit the Prosperity Dragon gains the Recall Mask of Prosperity ability which breaks the link but for each Grace stack the Dragon has it heals 10 Hit Points and gains a stack of Regeneration, making the Dragon not only a great support unit but also tough.

Accursed Fiend Units

Accursed Fiend units are a new type of Fiend unit. They count as fiends for the sake of spells but have their own resistances, to Fire and Frost, and are weak to Lightning instead of Spirit. Unique to accursed fiends is their Accursed Body ability that makes it so melee attackers have a small chance to gain Ghostfire when striking them.

Of note, we updated the other fiend units to be known as Infernal Fiends, so we can make the distinction on spells when referring to Infernal Fiends, Accursed Fiends or both by just referring to Fiends.

The Accursed Ogre is a Tier II shock unit. Its Cursed Charge always applies a stack of Ghostfire while pushing and moving the ogre into the hex the target was in.

The Accursed Blade is a Tier III Polearm Unit. Like many in this line, its main attack applies Ghostfire while its Frozen Flame ability attacks all adjacent enemy units with a chance to Freeze them.

The Accursed Trickster is a strong Battle Mage unit. Its Maddening Phantasm is a full action ability that has a high chance to cause Insanity on a single target. Tricky Escape applies three stacks of ghostfire to a nearby enemy and makes the trickster teleport four hexes away from the target. On reaching 50% or lower of its hit points the Trickster clones itself. The copy deals less damage but acts like Astral Reflection in that if the original dies the copy takes its place!

The Calamity Dragon is the Tier V that sits at the top of the accursed fiends family. Like the Prosperity Dragon its main attack is a long range ability, but the Calamity Dragon deals more damage and also applies Ghostfire.

Its Ghostfire Storm ability places a Combat Enchantment that immediately deals Fire and Frost damage and applies two stacks of Ghostfire to three random units. This effect then repeats for the next 3 turns.

Force Mask of Calamity links the dragon to an enemy unit and gives them a stack of Ghostfire each turn. If the dragon is attacked while linked, the linked enemy sustains fire and frost damage.

Rip Mask of Calamity is available while the link is active which when used removes the link and deals damage for each stack of Ghostfire the linked unit had.

Conclusion

And there it is, tomes and the wildlife! I didn’t go over everything that a tome has but I hope this gives you a taste of what you can play with in the future, when Ways of War releases on the 5th of November! Hope to see you there, and join us next week for another Dev Diary!

Get Expansion Pass 2:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3181480/Age_of_Wonders_4_Expansion_Pass_2/

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Oct 10, 2024

Goats!

Farming Simulator 25 - Smorgasbork

With Farming Simulator 22, we created some buzz by bringing you bees to improve yield through the advantages of good, old pollinating. For Farming Simulator 25, we really went back to the drawing board in front of the animal pen. Which animals are missing? Worms? Bears? Dragons?

Sadly, those didn't make the cut - neither did Pink River Dolphins, Echidnas, and Leprechauns. But we went through your as well as our own wish list and instantly thought 'okay, we goat this, GIANTS Software! Let’s take the chance by its horns and create something goatally awesome. Water buffalos!'

But let’s not bleat around the bush. You know about the water buffalo already. Check out the Water Buffalo Preview if you don't.

Click for Water Buffalo + Dev Interview

In addition to this mighty animal of South(east) Asian descent, we wanted to give livestock owners another option to choose from. We goat your back, farmers!

The Road to Goat

Good Goats Take Time

You want to get goats right and the most complex thing are their legs and rectangular pupils. First, we almost created a Dahu by accident - a mythical creature. You can learn more about it from Katie. Right, you don't know who she is, do you? You'll find out soon enough.

One wrong slider and shorter legs on one side and you have a fantastical beast! Once the legs were up to snuff and we banished the Dahu back to its folkloric existence (or did we?), we had a squad of 2D & 3D artists working non-stop on the pupils. All so these beautiful animals could do what they do best - stare.

Then our artists and programmers build other parts of an anatomically correct goat in different stages from newborn to adult, so you can enjoy one of the most anticipated farm animals! Before we show you the mini goats, here are some real facts about real goats:

Why Goats Are Awesome

Goats? Great!

Goats are incredible climbers. They're known for their agility, even scaling steep cliffs and trees. If you think you're good at bouldering, look at goats!
Rectangular pupils give them nearly 360-degree panoramic vision, helping them spot predators and navigate challenging terrain.
They're curious and intelligent. They can learn how to open gates or manipulate objects. Good to have an eye on them.
Goats are highly social and form close bonds within their herds, or even humans and other animals.
Each goat has a unique voice. Just look at all those screaming goat videos. So not only mother goats could recognize individual goats go by their bleat.

Best Goats: Baby Goats

What more do you want?

Best Cheese: Goat Cheese

New Productions & Products

Goat milk is not everyone's cup of milk, but those who like it, love it. Its distinct, slightly tangy flavor is not as sweet and mild as your regular milk from a cow, but that's why it's so unique in taste and profitable in production!

While keeping goats for the sake of it is awesome enough, new productions allow you to process their milk and go for fine goat cheese! It's worth it, you goat to believe it!

Want to try goat cheese for real? Try it with fruits, nuts, honey, and herbs like thyme, rosemary and basil. You can put it in almost every dish just like regular cheese. From salad and stuffed in peppers to pasta and pizza.

Bonus Interview

The Man Who Stares at Goats

What inspired the decision to add goats to the game?
Goats have been a popular request from our players, especially in certain regions where they play an important role in animal husbandry. They also work well with our production chains and new products that players can craft, making them more interesting for everyone.

What unique behavior will goats exhibit compared to other livestock?
You will notice many new animations from our Character & Animation team, who have done a great job bringing the animals to life. As goats are particularly lively and looking at our improved animation system, we thought Farming Simulator 25 would be incomplete without them. Especially the kids are jumping around like you would expect young goats to behave which is quite nice to watch.

How did you research real goat behavior to design their in-game actions?
One of the benefits of having a lot of people working on Farming Simulator who already had a lot of experience with real-life farming is that it is easier to bring those elements into the game. There's already an underlying sense of what's authentic, and that includes animals like goats when we digitize them.

But to really bring their virtual counterparts to life, we also look at a lot of videos of goats in various environments and discussed their behavior together. In the end, artists, animators, and programmers had to be in sync.

What challenges did you face when creating goats in general?
Goats are active, excited and playful creatures when you follow them around. So, the challenging part here was of course to make their movements look realistic and animate them properly. I think, our team did a good job here and goats add to the liveliness of the farms.

Why do you think goats are impressive farm animals?
Goats in particular like to let you know that they have distinct personalities. As I said before, they are playful. Because they are also incredibly curious and intelligent, always exploring their surroundings, they can be quite challenging livestock to keep. But they make up for it in providing valuable resources like milk, and they’re known for their hardiness in different environments.

Thank you for reading this preview. Goat day.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2300320/Farming_Simulator_25/

Oct 10, 2024

Update Patch Version 2.58 Announcement

NARUTO TO BORUTO: SHINOBI STRIKER - Will

To provide an even more fun and enjoyable gaming experience, NARUTO TO BORUTO: SHINOBI STRIKER has been updated to version 2.58.

===================
Update Patch Version 2.58 Details
===================

■Adjusted Weekly Mission Rewards

We have adjusted Weekly Mission rewards to suit Battle Events.
Be sure to check the Weekly Missions for details.

■Rebalanced Ninjutsu and Secret Techniques

[Attack Type]
▶Teleportation Jutsu
- Removed increased ninjutsu attack power effect on activation.
- Added increased close range attack power effect on activation.

▲Wind Style: Rasen Shuriken
- Decreased ninjutsu activation time.
- Reduced time required to cancel this ninjutsu when activated on the ground into another action.
- Increased ninjutsu projectile speed.
- Increased ninjutsu tracking ability.

▼Dynamic Entry
- Increased ninjutsu cooldown time.

▲Truth-Seeking Scorch
- Decreased ninjutsu cooldown time.

▲Eight Inner Gates Formation
- Increased the attack power increase effect on activation

▲Baryon Mode
- Reduced time required to cancel Ninjutsu 2 into another action when this secret technique is activated.
- Added increased attack speed effect on activation.
- Added increased evasion range effect on activation.

[Ranged Type]
▼Inferno Style: Flame Lightning
- Reduced ninjutsu damage on hit.

▼Fire Style: Giant Flame Bombs
- Reduced Secret Technique gauge needed for activation.
- Fire Style ninjutsu now have increased damage after this Secret Technique ninjutsu is actived.
*Does not apply to Inferno Style Ninjutsu.

▲Steam Imp
-Reduced the time required for clones to explode after getting close.

▲Secret Red Move: Performance of a Hundred Puppets
- Reduced Secret Technique gauge needed for activation.

[Defense Type]
▼Kamui Climax
- Increased ninjutsu cooldown time.

▼Demon Hunter
- Increased ninjutsu damage.

▼Water Prison Jutsu
- Increased Secret Technique continuous damage.

▲Water Prison Rosary Bondage Jutsu
- Increased Secret Technique continuous damage.

▼Fire Style: Bomb Blast Dance
- Reduced Secret Technique gauge needed for activation.
- Enemies hit by this Secret Technique are unable to use Substitution Jutsu.

[Heal Type]
▲Strength of a Hundred: Hard Light
- Added increased close range attack power effect on activation.

▲Insect Jamming Technique
- This Secret Technique's debuff effect can no longer be removed by any "remove harmful effects" effect.

▼Feather Illusion Jutsu
- Increased Secret Technique gauge needed for activation.

▲Vapor Style: Solid Fog Jutsu
- Added reduce movement speed effect on hit.

▼Izanami
- Increased Secret Technique gauge needed for activation.

■Rebalanced Weapons
[Attack Type]
▼Claw Edge "Kurama"
- Shrunk the hitbox of midair attacks.
- Increased the time required to cancel midair attacks into another action.

▶Scientific Ninja Tool "Valiant Threads"
- Adjusted the motion that enemies take when hit by the midair Strong Attack.
- Increased the number of midair attack hits.

[Ranged Type]
▼Inferno Sword "Flame Control"
- Increased the time required to cancel midair and strong attacks into another action.
- Adjusted the motion that enemies take when hit by the Strong Attack and midair Strong Attack.

▼Hanzo's Sickle
- Adjusted the motion that enemies take when hit by the midair Strong Attack.

Oct 10, 2024

Dev Diary #131 - Famines, Starvation, Harvest Conditions

Victoria 3 - Commissar_roach

Hello and welcome to another dev diary! I’m Alex and today I bring you famine, starvation, ruin and disast– I mean, happy Thursday!

Back in dev diary #126 we mentioned how for 1.8 we’re looking at how the availability of food affects the people in your country. Up until now, if food prices were high, that would lead to Pops dropping in Wealth. As a consequence of that, Pops would become unhappy and have their birth and mortality rates change. In extreme cases they would drop below Standard of Living 5, which would mark them as Starving and make their mortality rate be higher than the birthrate, resulting in the Pop’s population decreasing over time.

This is fine, but it created some problems we wanted to tackle. For one, Pop Needs don’t have shortages, so when the price caps out at +75%, that’s it. Food is always available, it just gets expensive. Another issue is that the starving status is directly tied to what Standard of Living the Pop has, meaning that regardless of why Standard of Living drops below 5, the pop is marked as Starving. Even if food is essentially free and the actual issue is that clothes are expensive. Lastly, the effects of starvation don’t scale as much as they probably should, so even at SoL 1, Pops can live on quite a while.

With all that in mind, there’s three main features we’ve added to flesh out this aspect of the game:

Starvation
Famines
Harvest Conditions

Below we’ll go into each of them in detail. Everything mentioned in this dev diary will be made available for free when update 1.8 arrives later this year.

Starvation, now ✨dynamic✨

As mentioned, up until now starvation has been a fixed status tied to specific SoL levels. In 1.8, all pops will have a metric for Food Security instead, which measures to what degree that Pop has access to sufficient and nutritious food. If a Pop’s Food Security gets too low, it will first be considered to be in a state of Mild Starvation. Here, Pops will start getting some penalties to their birth rate and mortality. If Food Security drops even lower, this status will change to Severe Starvation, where the Pops’ population starts decreasing fast. To be clear, both Mild and Severe Starvation penalties get progressively worse as Food Security drops, so it’s not a hard threshold where suddenly the full effects are applied.

You can now at a glance tell how much you are forgetting to feed your population while building another workshop. The map mode shows for each state if there are a lot of Pops starving there (proportional to total state population) as well as if they are mostly suffering from mild or severe starvation

Now you must be wondering: “Okay, but what actually is Food Security? How is it measured?” We’ll get there, don’t worry, first I need to talk about Pop Needs though.

If you’ve spent some time with the game, you know that the way Pop Consumption works is that at different Wealth levels Pops need to satisfy certain Needs. These Needs can be things like Basic Food or Simple Clothing for poorer Pops or Luxury Food and Drinks for richer Pops. Each of these needs can be satisfied through a set of different goods. In the case of Basic Food, it can be satisfied by consuming different amounts of Grain, Fish, Meat, Fruit or Groceries.

Basic Food Shortages

As mentioned, shortages currently only affect buildings while Pops are completely unaffected. In fact, we even only mark goods as having shortages at all if they are consumed by buildings.

In 1.8 that is changing somewhat: we’re introducing shortages for goods in the Basic Food Pop Need category. The calculation for if a good is in shortage is the same as before: if the number of buy orders exceeds the number of sell orders by too much it’s considered a shortage, so no surprises there.

What is somewhat different is that we’re also adding a shortage value to the Basic Food Pop Need itself. This is calculated essentially as the average shortage value for the goods in the Pop Need weighted over how much Pops are actually consuming each good. In other words, if 90% of your Pops’ food consumption is Grain and 10% is Fish, a Grain shortage will have a much stronger impact than a Fish shortage.

Nothing has really changed here, but I needed to break up the wall of text and wanted to remind you that this tooltip is in the game

I’m sure some of you will be wondering if this means other Pop Needs will also be getting shortages - and the answer is no (for now at least). Contrary to building shortages where we can just add throughput penalties if goods are in shortage, for Pop Needs we need to consider what role the goods play to be able to determine what penalties a shortage in those Needs would entail. For now, we’re only doing this for Basic Food (with the penalty being Starvation, more details below), but having a defined way of dealing with and calculating shortages for pop consumption definitely opens the door for other Needs having shortages in the future (maybe heating or clothing, for instance?).

To help you keep track of the starvation levels in your country, we’re introducing a new panel which quickly shows you how many people in your country are starving and if you have any famines or shortages active. Additionally it also gives you information about active harvest conditions that might be affecting your states and what proportion of total basic food pop consumption each good has.

Food Security

With the background of how Basic Food Shortages are set up, we can finally go into the details on how Food Security works. As mentioned above, this is the metric we use to determine whether a pop is starving and how strong the effects are. Food Security is a value between 0 and 100%, where at 0% the pop is in a state of severe starvation and at 100% the pop has full and easy access to all the food it requires.

What determines a Pop’s food security is mainly a combination of two factors:

How much the Basic Food Pop Need is in shortage in the state in question
How much money the pop is spending on Basic Food compared to their whole buy package at base price

We’ve already covered the shortage part, so let me explain the second factor some more: At different wealth levels, pops need to buy different amounts of goods from a number of Needs. What we’re doing here is taking the total price for all those needs while considering only unmodified base prices and then comparing it to how much the Pop is actually spending on Basic Food.

Here’s an example: a pop at Wealth 9 needs to consume goods to cover for their Simple Clothing, Crude Items, Basic Food, Heating and Intoxicants needs. The total value of what they need at base price is 314. After considering market availability and all of that, food is actually very expensive though, meaning the pop is spending 220 on Basic Food. We then simply compare their real food expenses with their total base price expenses: 220 / 314 = 70%. That is a lot of money going towards food!

You might be rich enough to consume a country’s worth of Fine Art output, but you’ll be quickly reminded you can’t eat statues when food runs out

Food Security then is a value that starts at 100% and is reduced by the two values above. If in addition to the 70% Basic Food Expense Share, food is also in a 20% shortage, the food security for the pop in question will be 100% - 70% - 20% = 10%, putting them firmly into severe starvation.

The reasons we went for this set of calculations in particular are primarily the following:

It means that as pops increase in Wealth, they’ll be less affected by increasing prices (due to food becoming a smaller part of the pop’s total buy package)
It means that the effects of starvation can become increasingly worse even after the price caps out and shortages become more severe
It means that there being literally no food in a state will affect rich pops as well even if they have a bunch of money, because you can’t eat money. (rich pops don’t consume basic food, but the shortage factor still affects them)

All of this leads to starvation being something that primarily affects poorer pops, but in the right (or wrong, I guess) circumstances it could also affect rich pops, or it could even affect no one. Have enough food and prices will be so low that food won’t be the primary concern even for the poorest in society. This is of course easier said than done, as getting your grain prices down to -75% price should be very hard for any reasonably large country. Still, it’s not mechanically impossible.

As part of decoupling starvation from Standard of Living we also had to update the Standard of Living icons and names for some of the levels

Famines, a political classification

If Starvation is what happens to your pops when they don’t have enough food, Famines are simply a political classification that comes up when enough pops are suffering from starvation. Specifically, we look at two metrics:

How many people in total are starving in the state in question?
How many people are specifically suffering from severe starvation in the state in question?

The goal here is that a famine should feel serious and encompassing. It should both affect a significant portion of the population in the state, but also be severe enough. In fact, this kind of classification is loosely modeled after real world classifications today (albeit with different values as the 19th Century had a different standard for such things).

As a primarily political classification, famines don’t have any direct effects on your pops. A bunch of Stockholm bureaucrats finally noticing that people in the Dominion of Norway are starving and calling it a famine doesn’t on its own make any difference for the poor Norwegians. Instead, a famine being declared is more of a political event. It can act as a starting point for narrative content surrounding famines and how to deal with them for instance.

Famines also act as a warning signal for the player. They tell you how long they’ve lasted, how many people are affected as well as estimations for how many deaths and unrealized births the famine has led to so you can feel extra bad for neglecting them.

When a famine is declared you can see it front and center in the new Food Security panel

Harvest Conditions

On top of the revised mechanics for starvation and famines, we also wanted to add some more volatility and unpredictability to the game with Harvest Conditions. These conditions are occurrences (often tied to weather, but not necessarily) that can happen to your states and primarily affect your agricultural sector. Here’s a breakdown of different aspects of harvest conditions:

An example of what a harvest condition can look like. The Effects described are further multiplied by the intensity in each specific affected state

Effects

While a lot of the effects will be tied to increasing or decreasing agricultural throughput, the effects are not strictly limited to agriculture. Floods and Wildfires might have drastic effects on your infrastructure for instance. Additionally, conditions are not necessarily negative: a pollinator surge could increase your fruit production or optimal sun conditions could lead to a particularly good harvest.

For Floods and Droughts we added some effects to the 3D map itself, so you can be more immersed while thinking about how you failed your country and let your people starve

Regional limitations

Harvest conditions happen on a state region level, but are often limited to certain parts of the world (Locust Swarms won’t happen in Northern Europe and Frosts won’t happen in Egypt for instance).

Duration, Range and Intensity

Harvest conditions have variable durations, range and intensity. One drought might be milder and limited to just a couple of states, while another affects a large area for a long time. Intensity acts as a multiplier to the base effects conditions have.

If you’re curious about what harvest conditions are active around the globe you can look it up on your Victorian era weather app of choice

Incompatibilities and Synergies

It wouldn’t make much sense if a drought suddenly happened in a region affected by torrential rains, so most harvest conditions have a set of other conditions they’re not compatible with. A drought will never happen in a state affected by a flood, nor will a flood happen in a state with a drought. A heatwave could lead to an increased chance of a drought happening and subsequently even a wildfire. In such a case the drought would replace the heatwave and later get replaced by the wildfire.

We’ve also made changes to some existing content so it meshes with the new Harvest Conditions and Starvation. Numbers are still WIP, but should give you an idea of where we’re taking it

That’s it for me! Hope you enjoyed learning more about how we’re dealing with famines and other aspects of human suffering. Join us two weeks from now for the anniversary week marking two years since we launched Victoria 3! (Two years already!? Who turned on Speed 5?)