I felt that the system for building out the report had two main issues; it rewarded just stuffing the report full of every point that you could make and it treated all of the facts as interchangeable. I wanted a system that encouraged you to interact much more with the facts.
This overhaul starts with the fact research system. You can still get facts through the research tech tree as before, but the random facts that you get through research has been collapsed into a single option. I've removed the subthemes of success, failure, hero, villain, beauty and modern. Instead, you choose the topics that you want to research and get facts on those topics.
When you get three facts that share a topic, you can combine them to form a view on that topic. Below, you can see three facts on The Siege of Sidney Street and later strikebreaking combining to form a single view. This concerns a gunfight between London authorities and two criminals and was the first time that the military had been called in to help with a police matter. Churchill, who was Home Secretary at the time, came under a lot of criticism at the time for thrusting himself in the spotlight. Arthur Balfour said at the time "He was, I understand, in military phrase, in what is known as the zone of fire—he and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right hon. Gentleman doing?"
This mechanic becomes more interesting when it comes to situations like the one below, where I'm trying to put together a view on the UK in the 1940s and one of the available facts concerns Kipling sulking.
I know that Kipling was an active part of British politics for the entire time period that the game focuses on and was often talked about after it and so would be an effective thread with which to connect different topics, as I do below to connect the UK in the 40s and the UK in the 50s.
These connections are particularly important as they reduce the complexity of the report. A very complex report scores a lot less than a well-connected one and so is graded much lower. Thus, when playing, it's important to make sure that you only add something to the report if you think that you can make it fit. Of course, as with any group report, you might find that your coworkers' enthusiasm has them putting in things that you may then struggle to integrate and it may so happen that you come across a point yourself that you don't want to leave out.
Check the feature out and tell me what you think. I'm going to spend a little more time polishing this feature so if you have anything that you would like to see for it or for the report in general, this would be the perfect time for that. Of course, if you have something else in mind, I'm always happy to get feedback of any kind.
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