You can read about what Syphilisation is here and the manifesto for the game here.

Work Done

The first major task was tying the random quests to the regions. The regions already had some degree of autonomy. You don’t settle an area, instead the region develops itself and will come under your control if you put in the work. These regions now generate quests regularly. Completing them strengthens your influence in the region. Neglecting them will shift the region back under the control of the environment. This should help emphasize the autonomy of the regions, but currently just is not communicated well enough. I need to figure out how best to surface this to the player.

The next major task was overhauling the way population growth works. Earlier, you would place a new citizen down automatically every time a settled city grew and the last one would be removed when you built a unit. Now, the city stores a number of free citizens and the player can allocate them to working the region through a project or to be built into a unit. This makes the system more active and adds a good swords or plowshares decision point to the game. It also doesn’t feel bad in the way that losing citizens did earlier.

The final major task for the week was playtesting. I’ve playtested less than I would have liked over the past couple of weeks so this week, I made it a priority. A lot of this time is still spent in code as I fix up small broken things all across the game, but things are definitely coming together. I had a really interesting game where I picked up the Establishment tech much earlier than normal and so was able to settle cities extremely early in the game and the whole thing held up quite well, which is very reassuring. There’s still a ton of work to be done here though.

Interesting Fact

This is the full text of Gandhi’s letter to Hitler in 1939, asking him to reconsider his approach and not plunge the world into war. The Government of India did not allow it to be sent.

DEAR FRIEND,
Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state.
Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Anyway I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you
I remain, Your sincere friend,