Hinterlands

Hinterlands is a new feature which is not currently in the main game. Hinterlands is only active on the test server. You can find a link to this test server under the "Player Information" section on the in-game account page.

Hinterlands changes how regions are controlled by realms. Administrative Power (AP) is a new region stat which represents how much influence your realm has over the region’s administrative bureaucracy, and how much influence the bureaucracy has over the populace as a whole. The realm with the most AP in a region is the region's owner; however, a realm needs at least 25% AP in order to be able to control a region. A realm also needs at least 50% AP in order to have a Lord and Knights in the regions they control.

Realms can affect not only their AP in a region, but also the AP of the region's owner. This is accomplished by taking various actions, such as Looting, Civil Work, and Police Work. Civil Work and Police Work can now be done in all regions and will increase your realm's AP. There are also new actions which will affect the AP in a region: Attack the Administration, Release Prisoners, Help with the Harvest, and Rebuild from Looting. Additionally, courtiers now have the ability to increase their realm's AP through the new actions: Assign Administrators and Streamline the Administration. All actions mentioned in this paragraph replace the current takeover actions. There are no longer explicit takeover actions.

All regions a realm controls now fall into two control types: Core and Hinterland. A realm's core regions are those which are well-managed and are, generally, closer to the capital. For now, a well-managed region simply means a region with a Lord and at least one Knight. A realm's hinterlands are all those regions which do not meet the requirements of being a core region. The hinterlands produce less gold and food than core regions.

Administrative Power

Administrative Power (AP) is a new region stat which represents how much influence your realm has over the region’s administrative bureaucracy, and how much influence the bureaucracy has over the populace as a whole. The realm with the most AP in a region is the region's owner; however, a realm needs at least 25% AP in order to be able to control a region. A realm also needs at least 50% AP in order to have a Lord and Knights in the regions they control.

Takeover

There are a number of actions that can affect both your realm’s AP and the region owner’s; however, there are no longer any explicit “takeover actions”. All of these actions can be taken at any time; however, an active takeover increases the AP effects of the relevant actions.

The actions taken during—and recently before—the takeover are remembered by the peasants, and will affect the status of the region after the takeover is complete.

You support a takeover by either helping the region, in order to make them like you better, or attacking it to make them like the owners less. Takeover requirements are likely to be wildly unbalanced right now.

Looting

The most obvious way to support a takeover is looting, which has also been completely reworked. All looting now targets specific estates within the region. Looting has also been simplified down to: Steal Gold, Steal Food, or Pillage and Maraud. There is still an option to attempt to slaughter peasants, but it is only available for realms you have declared Hatred against.

Peasants (and minor nobles) will now keep small amounts of gold and food for themselves. The two most important effects of this will be:

• Looting will now target the gold the peasants hold, rather than the tax vaults (which should really be better guarded than they have seemed in the past)

• The food the peasants eat is the food that they hold. This means that starvation will not hit quite as quickly, but it also means that there is a limit to how fast food can be distributed once they have been starving.

Decreasing Administrative Power

New actions have been added to Attack the Administration (either simply threatening them until they flee, or actually murdering bureaucrats) and Release Prisoners (currently only affecting commoner NPC prisoners—that is to say, it decreases Control and AP, it does not allow early release for player characters in prison)

Increasing Administrative Power

There are also several positive actions you can take with units:

• Civil Work and Police Work can now be done in any region, and will improve your realm’s AP there
• New options to Help with the Harvest and Rebuild from Looting have been added
• Additionally, options to Assign Administrators from the capital and Streamline the Administration have been added that are specific to Courtiers

Region Control

Region revolts now depend entirely on Independence, the aforementioned Anarchy debuffs, and low AP

Core

Core regions have to follow some specific requirements, but are otherwise what you have come to expect from regions owned by your realm.

The first requirement is that they must be well-managed. At present, this still simply means that they have a Lord and at least one Knight, but I’ve already got plans to change this to be based on each noble being able to “manage” up to a specific number of peasants (which will mean that most non-city regions can be “well-managed” with only a Lord).

Hinterland

Hinterlands regions produce much less than Core regions—currently, 20%, both Gold and Food. Importantly, however, this only applies to Food after the peasants have eaten their fill, so regions that can feed themselves as Core regions can still do so as Hinterlands. They just won’t produce much for the rest of the realm.

Red Tape Penalties

Regions outside the Core suffer Red Tape penalties, which come in three basic varieties:

• Inefficiency, which reduces production, and can occasionally cause problems with recruitment centres and workshops
• Corruption, which occasionally causes shipments of food or gold to go missing
• Disaffection, which causes loyalty and control to suffer, and can occasionally increase Anarchy
• Anarchy is a fourth variety, which is only generated in specific circumstances (not directly just from being outside the Core), and increases the chances of the region revolting.

There are also some other unique effects of these, beyond simple region stat debuffs. The Courtier ability to Survey Administration is now specifically for removing these debuffs.

Compact Realms

The second requirement is that the realm’s core must be compact. What this means, mechanically, is that the game looks for concentric “rings” of regions that are owned by you and well-managed working outward from the capital. Once it reaches a “ring” that is not complete, it stops. That means that even if you had a region or two farther from the capital than that with a Lord, unless the broken ring is “fixed” within a certain amount of time (currently fairly generous), they will gradually decay until they are ungovernable by a Lord, and become Hinterlands regions.

There are some exceptions to this. The first is that regions belonging to your allies and federation partners are ignored for purposes of determining whether you have a compact realm core—thus ensuring that you don’t have to go to war with your neighbouring ally just to hold onto your regions.

The second exception is based on something I’m calling Special Administrators. Once you have at least one full ring of core regions outside your capital, you will start getting a Special Administrator for every complete ring. Each one of these can be assigned to a well-managed region. Once a region has a Special Administrator assigned, it improves its “ring number” and that of all regions around it, thus making it possible to extend your region in a less round way. If a Special Administrator is assigned to a city, it becomes effectively a mini-capital, with the city itself getting a better “ring number” than an equivalent non-city region would, and control then spilling out from there in concentric rings just like from the capital.

Other Changes

Damaging & demolishing recruitment centres now works differently: it’s much harder to do permanent damage, but much easier to disable them for a short period and clear out the recruits currently in them.

Travel time is reduced by 2/3 within your own realm, and increased by half in realms you are at war with (including rogues). We recognize that this may cause some issues on Dwilight; we plan to be conducting a review of travel times on Dwilight some time during the Hinterlands play-test, with the intention of ensuring that they are not too great a burden. Within your realm, you can take special advantage of this speed boost by moving up to 2 regions in a single turn.

Test Server

The next major feature package for BattleMaster, named Hinterlands after its most prominent new feature, is complete in draft form, and needs play-testing to ensure it won't cause an undue level of disruption when it is brought live to the main game. Because of this, a special, temporary, play-testing server is available where you can help to make sure it gets a proper level of testing. This will be a much more volatile experience than the game as a whole, with major balance-changing updates potentially coming frequently and with little warning. All players who have been in the game at least a month are welcome to join the play-test.

Please be aware that as this is a play-test, there are some differences between it and the usual way the game works.

• First of all, the play-test will be temporary. Everything that happens here will be completely wiped away once I have enough data to feel reasonably confident that the balance of Hinterlands won't massively wreck the game on the main server when I send the code live there.

• The play-test is completely separate from the main game. Nothing done here will affect the characters, families, or continents in the main game in any way.

• Because this is a play-test, while I do want to see more or less "normal play", there will also be things I specifically need tested. As such, I may sometimes ask particular players or realms to do things that aren't particularly beneficial to them militarily, so that I can get better data.

• Depending on my available time, there may be certain time windows where I run several extra turns on the play-test in order to get faster feedback on particular features. I will try to announce these clearly, along with what I want tested, ahead of time.

• While the rules of the main game all apply here, and we still won't allow "names" like @@DragonSlayer782@@, or characters roleplayed as being non-human, we will be somewhat less strict with the level of silliness allowed in the play-test.