Warnament Dev Update #2: Political Institutions & Map Lenses

Hey everyone! We're here with yet another edition of Dev Updates for Warnament. In case you've missed our introduction: Warnament is a grand strategy game, made by a solo dev Denis Makhortov. It is as deep as classic games in the genre, but only takes minutes to get into action. You can play out historic scenarios or create your own: take control of a nation on a global map and take it to glory by taking over territories and achieving military, technical, cultural, or political advantage. It is a spiritual successor to Cold Path, another game with a similar philosophy.

Observing the Regimes

Written by: Denis Makhortov / Editor: Georgii Kurgan

Political institutions play a huge role in Warnament and work in mysterious (not really) ways. They were one of the biggest things we've been working on recently.

There's a total of 6 branches of regimes in the game. At the start of the campaign, a player chooses one of them and then progresses through different political institutions, associated with the selected branch. Each branch has 3 final choices, and a player will have to eventually pick 1. For example, if a player selects Communism, they will end up with 3 choices:

• War Communism - fits great for fighting in wars

• Socialism - has a bonus to population growth

• Permanent revolution - gives a bonus for provoking revolutions in other countries

Each institution gives certain bonuses and fits certain playing strategies. Thus, those who choose peaceful ways of national building might feel comfortable playing as Trade Republic or a Democratic state. Monarchy and Communism work better for those who want to be able to defend themselves. And those actively looking for a fight will probably end up establishing Fascism or Theocracy in their domain.

Map Lenses: A Colorful Way for Looking at Things

So, we've added multiple ways of viewing whatever's happening on the global map. Here's the current list of viewing modes:

• Standard: shows who's who (and who owns which province) on the map

• Diplomacy

• Economics

• Population

• Army

• Culture - shows the shares of the population by the country which they associate themselves with. Useful for monitoring separatist trends in newly captured or border regions

• Resources

• Water - dims the landscape to help the player concentrate on what's happening in the seas

To keep the main screen of the game tidy, detailed information about each province is provided via hints which appear on hovering over a province: currently it shows income and expenses of a province along with a tip on the principal source of income:

Now What?

At the moment, we're working on improving the menu of country overview, so a player could quickly assess what's going on in their domain:

What's Next?

In the upcoming weeks, we'll be implementing a system of global events, which will add diversity to scenarios - both created by us and designed by the players. Think of them as historic milestones which get triggered at a certain moment of the sessions: some country asks you for military aid, or someone "suddenly" invades one of their neighbors… A player will have a choice on how to act in each of these events, which will definitely lead to certain consequences as the scenario unravels.

We'll keep you posted as the development of Warnament progresses forward. To keep in touch, Sign up on the website to get a notification once the free demo is out. Or join us on Discord to participate in the development directly!