NOTE: THIS VERSION WILL BREAK SAVES. STEAM'S LEGACY BRANCH NOW HAS V0.3, TO ALLOW IN-PROGRESS GAMES TO BE CONTINUED

The first part of the bloodlines update is now out, bringing with it new gameplay mechanics, new UI improvements and new bugfixes.

The core of this this update is the interpersonal relationships between the humans of the world. The first connection either a ruler or a hero will have is to their family, and the game now automatically generates family links, which the NPC AI then uses to make decisions. These links then come into play with the vengeance system, in which the relatives or friends of a dead hero can become enraged at their killer, and vow revenge. This should allow your agents to build up enemies over the course of their evil careers which actually have relevance to the narrative.

This system is then built on in a number of ways, including NPCs gaining hatreds towards the things which are harming their world, and especially those close to them. A hero can now gain a hate of orcs if orcs burn their home town, or a hate of shadow if their friend falls to shadow. NPCs will also mourn their fallen friends and relatives, and this can affect their psychology, with a new set of events, which can drive them insane or motivate them to fight longer and harder against the coming end. The end-goal is that NPCs should have personalities which reflect what has happened to them, as opposed to randomly generated ones, and for the player to have some degree of control over this (although a major random factor will always exist). A couple of agents will already have families generated for them, The Trickster and The Courtier, and events now allow the game to consider the effects their crimes have on their families.

As the work on this update continues, more human interactions will be introduced, allowing the game to have a complex emergent narrative, as heroes and agents fight one another and social dramas unfurl in response. In the longer-term, various curses are planned, to allow entire families to bear terrible burdens which they pass from parent to child, inflicted on them by the dark forces of the world (or by their own crimes). This will play into the planned 'endless mode', which will play out over thousands of in-game turns, allowing your agents and heroes to fight across many generations, their bloodlines slowly warping and changing as the families spend too long facing the inhuman horrors of the universe.

Modding also slowly approaches, with internal testing now underway for a full mod which was developed, put on a test version of the steam workshop and successfully deployed. Initially this will only feature the narrative events, but as the game develops so too will the tools available to the modders. Hopefully this will allow players to customise their game in ways I could never imagine, to suit their own particular ideas of how a Lovecraftian apocalypse should look.

In detail:

Gameplay:

-Conquest victory now requires you to reach a given 'score', which is gained from various sources. Insanity in rulers and heroes now counts, shadow outside Dark Empire is reduced in value
-Vinerva can now expend gift to Manifest herself, destroying the settlement and adding a score-gaining location where it was
-Reduced Vinerva wilderness spirits HP from 70 to 50
-Vinerva gains power 'pheromones' allowing her to lure rulers and heroes into accepting gifts they otherwise wouldn't
-Chosen One now gains +2 defence, +1 attack
-God unlock rework, now only requires She Who Will Feast to have been won to play as the 'complex' gods
-Human characters can have family relations to existing characters when created
-Reduced merchant event menace/profile from 10/10 to 4/4
-Heroes now have a major need to rest after not catching an agent (timing out their hunt agent task)
-Events can now occur as humans interact with each other
-You can no longer summon Iastur's tome if a hero is binding it
-Agent recruitment point gain buffed from once per 55 turns to once per 45
-Reduce the menace and profile gain for the Monarch, to make The Dark Empire the one taking and dealing the damage via military
-Heroes now bind Iastur faster
-Number of new interpersonal events
-Heroes can now sabotage rulers they hate, if they have a personal dislike for them
-Rulers can now sabotage visiting heroes/agents if they hold a personal dislike for them, their house or their nation
-Vinerva's temptations now expire on use, to avoid rulers spamming them, especially if pheromones are present

Other:

-Ruler/heir popouts can now be held open, to allow mouse-over inspection of ruler traits and items
-Heroes now have their home location highlighted in teal on the hero finder view
-Events can now place markers in the 'modifiers' section to indicate for example the presence of a Seer Daughter
-Family view now available for units and location rulers
-Moved person info to left of event popup
-Added prince/princess title to characters whose parent is sovereign of a nation
-Iastur's power when heroes are casting 'weaken Iastur' now works correctly
-Events allow you to zoom to concerned people, to determine who is being discussed
-Added toggle to hero UI to compress similar challenges, so it doesn't lag when loading a hero with many possible options

Bugfixes:

-Fixed Orc Warlord sometimes having a human soul
-Fixed Trickster ability description
-Tutorial objective no longer persists if you quit out of the tutorial and start a new game
-Trickster's misleading clues now get consumed correctly
-Bugfix to Warlord abandon raiders
-Fixed duplication exploit of the Laughing Tome by co-ordinating timing of 'pick up' and 'summon'
-Iastur's tome no longer causes insanity in regions with no human population
-Rulers no longer fund high menace agents
-Fixed issue in which the tutorial could be broken by not taking the gold from the vault
-Fixed issue in civil war where dukes weren't changing sides and getting immediately executed