Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation cover
Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation screenshot
Steam
Genre: Simulator, Strategy, Indie

Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation

Syphilisation v0.53 - Quests and AI Update
This update has a lot of AI work in it. Now that the systems of the past few sprints are in the game, the game is a little harder. There are just more balls to keep in the air at any given time. I like that the game keeps you this busy now, so I decided to improve the AI to make the game a little easier. Given the cooperative nature of Syphilisation, AI improvements can do a lot to make the game easier and it also just feels good to have the other players do some of the work themselves instead of just waiting for you to do everything.

Now, they contribute a lot more to the report than they used to, so it's a lot easier to end up with a decent final score. I still have to do more to get them to take over roles in the group. They don't develop anywhere near as much as they should.

Additionally, I revamped campaigns a bit so now the camps that oppose you have their units teleport to them. This was meant to make the campaigns more challenging, but those units don't do enough currently to protect objectives. I'm going to try to add some defensive thinking to them and we'll see how that plays.

I also updated the quest system to be less rigid. Now, the game asks you to complete objectives and gives you some leeway in how exactly you choose to do so rather than asking you to complete specific techs or actions. Try it out and tell me if you prefer this or the old system.

Finally, I updated the responsibility mechanic so now camps that produce too much or too little for the era are semi-autonomous. This makes the late game much smoother as you no longer have to manage a bunch of camps that produce meaningless amounts of currency.

As always, try it out and tell me what you think about the changes or the game in general. My next sprint is going to be more AI work and consolidation, so this is a great time to get things that bother you fixed.

Update 2023-05-04
Just bugfixes.

Syphilisation v0.52 - Conversation Upgrade
The major change of this update is a restructure of the conversation options in the game. I've been working on getting the number of campaigns in an average game to the right number for a while. In Syphilisation, you used to be able to start a campaign against another player by completing a build action. This was the only way to start a campaign that was completely under the player's control and not the result of an in-game event.

This was also the best way to build a relationship with another player. You could choose to learn about someone else or compliment them or try to dominate them in this way. However, this ended up being more campaigns than was fun to play. You would often find yourself with expression to burn but not in the mood for a full-fledged campaign against another player.

So, with this update, I've put in conversations. When you complete a conversation build action, you get to choose a player and an approach. The other player then chooses an approach to respond to you with and depending on whether they match or not, the results will differ. So, you can choose a riskier approach that is more likely to erupt into a campaign or a safer approach with a smaller bonus and either way you will get something that matches your assessment of your game state. I've had a lot of fun with this feature and I would love to hear what you think.




In addition, I've moved a bunch of aspects into requiring a preliminary campaign and sometimes a preliminary wonder as well. Campaigns now conclude as soon as the last camp has been pacified and not on the next turn. There are now more incentives for brutality, more conversations around the report and more talking with the other players. Finally, there are the normal playability tweaks.

Try it out and tell me how you feel about the new changes or the state of the game as a whole. My next update is going to be entirely small fixes, but the sprint after that will most likely be a complete AI overhaul. The AI in place now is pretty placeholder and I look forward to seeing how the game plays with something more sophisticated instead.

Update - 2023-04-16
This is a pretty minor update. There are some updates to the tutorial and some small bugfixes. I also tweaked up pollution a bit, so watch out for that. Preserves convert into districts faster now as well. Finally, delivering fabric doesn't drop the entire stock at once, but instead only drops what is needed.

Syphilisation v0.5
I built Syphilisation with the aim of making a postcolonial 4X game. Taking an ideological lens to an established genre allowed me to derive novel mechanics and generate a game that plays out in fundamentally different ways. There are a lot of assumptions rooted firmly in the 4X space and designing a postcolonial 4X game pushed me to examine them and helped me come up with alternatives.

The 500 update brings the game to the point where I feel it hits all of the notes that I want from a postcolonial 4X game. All of the bones of the experience I wanted to make are now in the game. There are still a lot of things to be fleshed out, a lot of features to add, both large and small and a ton of quality of life improvements to make but the core of the game is now fully present.

Some things don't come through fully though. This last update revamped the pollution and inspiration mechanics, but they're both understated right now. The interpersonal dynamics also need a little bit more space than they currently have. I'll write out a full rundown of what's left to do sometime next week.

However, I'm very happy with where the game is right now. It took a lot of work to get to this point and for the first time, I can look at the game and see that it does everything that I wanted it to. I didn't even know if this would be possible when I started working on Syphilisation and I had to learn a lot to get the game to this point but now I feel like I can actually put it out there as a postcolonial 4X game and really feel that it delivers on that promise and that's very exciting for me. I hope you have fun with it!

Update - 2023-03-12 - Late Game Flow
The late game flow is now mostly where I want it. Actions on cities will immediately take fabric now.

I also:
- Inverted the currencies that camps will accept
- Shared the timer between the anomaly and the quest and removed quest production requirements.
- Set conversations to sometimes just give you points.
- Added new wonders.
- Upgraded the fact screen.
- Added a minimap option for fabric.
- Added assorted fixes and QoL updates

I'm gong to focus on pollution and spirituality for the next sprint. Both of them feel too understated at the moment. I have some minor features and a lot of QoL stuff left to put in, but the pollution mechanics should be the last of the fundamental changes.

Update 2023-02-24
Syphilisation is now stable (?) up to turn 100. There are a bunch of small quality of life changes that I have listed, but it pretty much works for the full playthrough and plays somewhat close to what I want.

I'm going to make some important tweaks to the eXploitation phase in the next sprint. It hasn't really been updated for the new camp system and so could use some more fitting together.

Update - 2023-02-18
Minor update with stability fixes and some UI upgrades.

Update - 2023-02-12 - New Camp Stability
This update has a lot of work to make the camps more playable.

- You can now see currency breakdowns for cities and camps.
- Cities now have their own build menu, preventing game states where you cannot do anything.
- Updated the fact event flow.
- Gave units additional health
- Smaller unit images.
- More actions for combat units to spend charges on.
- Buildings for preserves to move them into other camps.
- Better quest indicators.

Additionally, there are a number of small tweaks for playability and stability fixes. Tell me what you think.

Update 2023-01-20 - Camp Production
I’ve moved the production from the cities to the camps. Earlier, most of the production was through the cities. Camps generated most of the production currencies used by the cities and would occasionally complete their own quests and so produce something, but all of the actual production flowed through the city. With this sprint, I changed it so that it is the camps that manage the production instead.

The player can choose the production of camps they control that are connected to a city they control and each camp has a separate construction queue. I felt that the earlier paradigm was too centralized and I didn’t like how colonial it felt. Empowering the camps felt more in line with the rest of the game.

This resulted in a dynamic that I’m really excited about. Camps start as preserves, which use all of the production of the tile, and then industrialize into more specialized camps, which produce more of a pair of currencies, but nothing of the rest. With this new system, that means that they start out having the ability to produce using any of the three production currencies, but once specialized, can only use the production currency of that specialization. This increase in production but loss of flexibility is a dynamic that I’ve been trying to get into the game from the start and this feature does so in a way that I really like.

A lot of the flow has been broken by this change. I need to tweak a lot of the parameters and figure out some minor code changes to smoothen the whole thing, but I’m really happy with how this rough update works and I’m looking forward to getting it fully in shape.
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