A Year(Currently 40 Turns) In The Life Of An Axioms Character
What will the gameplay be like turn to turn, for all characters regardless of type/class
Axioms is a game that blends a lot of genres and simulates far more different systems than the genres it is a composite of. There is some base building, some rpg, some management, some social simulation, some map painting, and some politics and intrigue. And magic. A shit ton of magic. But what is the general gameplay experience really like?
General Gameplay
So different kinds of characters have different stuff to do but all characters have the same core stuff to deal with. Let us give each character 1000 Attention Points for now. Every action takes attention points but this can vary quite a bit cost wise.
Pretty much every character in the game from 14 year olds at an academy to 50 year olds on a throne and 200 year olds in their wizard towers needs to maintain relationships with other characters.
So you have some friends and a spouse and you need to engage in actions to maintain those relationships. So since a turn is 10 days, aka a week, you have ~20 “activities”, in this example, you can do a day. So reading the last post about Characters you might think of a ride through the country or something. Costs 40 Attention Points, let us say. So your goal is to engage your spouse and maybe 7 core friends in the most efficient activities to raise the relationship.
Activities And Excursions
Maybe there is a penalty for doing the same activity over and over modified by how much the person loves the activity. So if someone loves Nature, Horses, being Active, and Travel then Horseriding is 90% compatible. So you get 9.00 relationship points, then 8.10, then 7.29, then 6.56, then 5.90, then 5.31, then 4.78, then 4.30, then 3.87. These aren’t finalized numbers I just want something simple to get the idea across.
That was 0.9 * activity in a row. Maybe we give you 2 steps back if you change break that up. W/e the final numbers are isn’t that important. A less compatible activity would be a carriage ride since you aren’t active. Conversely someone who doesn’t like getting sweaty but is otherwise the same would prefer the carriage. Regardless that could be 8.00, then 6.40, etc. So you can’t just stack mediocre activities.
This is the part of the game most similar to dating/academy/farm/town sims but with more context and more detail in exchange for dropping walking around town, hand written dialogue, and character splash art. So Academagia, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Rune Factory and stuff like that.
Many of these games are a little more rigid. You have daily slots in Academagia and in the others you have story beats that don’t vary. So Axioms with the Attention Point system gives you more flexibility and lets you choose to do various different things. Certain kinds of Characters might end up doing fewer relational things and more management or military and so forth.
Upper Class Politics
One great thing about the openness of Axioms is that you don’t have to be an emperor to have stuff to do right. You naturally move to a state where you only interact with your direct vassals and family because you don’t have enough Attention Points.
The higher the power you have the more other high level characters take you seriously and the more you have access to Interests of the upper classes and the more likely you can fulfill desires relevant to them.
At a lower level you might focus more on relationships and economics and crafting with your personal time and such whereas later you have vassals or minions to do some kinds of stuff. Are you a mage lord as a count? Well you can still do it as a Duke but you might also be better hiring someone more specialized. Important to note that Count and Duke are examples of potential titles and not fixed titles that everyone deals with like in Paradox games.
Academies And The Youth
Obviously the typical younger character won’t have piles of responsibilities outside their education and creating social connections. Something like Academagia is a great education/socializing example to look at here.
So you’ll spend most of your time in the social sim and rpg aspects of the mechanics rather than strategy and management. An Academy, depending on the procedural generation, would usually consist of classes, maybe independent study or tutoring, and then free time.
Axioms allows for “Exploration” and “Adventuring” for all characters but this may be more common with youth characters supervised by faculty plus maybe some sneaking out and such. I’m looking at stretching the Location system to enable the ever popular magical room, maze, forest, cave, hidden temple stuff you see in Academagia or Cultivation Simulator and other such stuff.
But you’ll spend like 80% of your Attention Points on socializing with other students and with faculty plus maybe “friends from home” and “locals from the city” like merchants.
Whether this is magic or martial or merchant school or maybe just a general noble scion school you’ll have unique activities like classes and tutoring and all that. So Interests will often be stuff like favorite classes or subjects. There won’t be school sports probably because that is just too much detail since the game is not specifically an academy sim.
Special Opinion Modifiers
So in previous posts I’ve discussed how there is a core Opinion value between each character pair that is aware of each other. This includes Opinion Impacts from race, religion, polity, ideology and so forth as well as their unique political and diplomatic interaction Impacts. There are also Honor, Trust, Respect, and Fear which are non-personal modifiers.
I am planning at this point to add Affection, Devotion, and Passion which are for personal friendship and family relations, romantic relations, and physical relations respectively. These will function similarly as the impersonal modifiers and add a sort of “flavor” to relations beyond raw Opinion. I am thinking that they will each have their own raw value that will be modified by something like 40% general Opinion, 20% general Opinion, and 10% general Opinion.
There is a currently existing mechanic from my work on this game years ago called Authority which is specifically related to the support of characters and populations for the liege of the province they reside in. I am thinking of shifting some general Opinion into that where appropriate. Basically the goal is that there is a specific Opinion Flavor for various connections between characters that is buffed by general Opinion.
Romance
So for young nobles that are thinking of courting you’d have Affection, Devotion, and Passion all relevant but they could be superceded by general and political factors. A male aristocrat might want to try and build some level of these up even if he didn’t absolutely require them to make things easier.
A male or female noble scion might accept a less than ideal match based on these values because their beloved father requested them to marry someone or because of pure political power of the potential spouse but if they hate or fear them too much they might not.
Similarly if the value is high enough a character might overlook that most people dislike or distrust a character because of “love”. Such dislike might be caused by low social standing/jealousy, or because that character is a bad person but the love interest is fooled by romantic attention, and so forth. And obviously personality traits matter here alot.
Using spies to find out the interests of a young woman and then pretending to them and taking her horse riding or w/e and spending lots of attention, they aren’t called attention points for nothing, might manipulate her into believing you are similar and connected.
Or a character could ask a mutual friend or just one of her friends about her and convince them to tell them things out of sincere feelings. The interaction would be a Secret, unless the character told her, and the Secret would contain the impression of the other character of the suitor. Depending on social stats and skills and such the friend would have a different opinion of the interaction. If you blackmailed the friend or threatened them this would be recorded. Maybe it never gets out or maybe it does.
Of cource characters could bond through circumstance as well. Live at same school, naturally interact due to similar interests, get assigned to tasks by faculty at the academy, find out they have friends in common, maybe they grow up together and thus are naturally in contact. So childhood love or friends and later it gets romantic.
I don’t think you could do what romance writers call enemies to lovers very easily or well but there is a large possibility space for emergence so maybe? I’m not super focused on romance stuff personally, I’m just describing how the existing mechanics can enable a complex romantic situation. Well as long as you can accept that their is no dialogue in the game. Lots of dating sims hinge on good scripted dialogue which is impossible in Axioms.
Friendship
Friendship functions very similar to romance except for the specific Passion boosting romance actions. You can threaten or manipulate your way into friends or do it sincerely or get friends from circumstance.
All Opinion Impacts which are the data class that contains general Opinion as well as special Opinion Modifiers have a baseline value that you get right away and either an incrementing or decrementing value. This can get complex. Every 4 turns lose 3 points, or w/e. When it hits 0 disappear and you can be capped or uncapped.
So you need to both build relationships as mentioned in the Activities/Excursions section with relevant and ideally varied interactions and also maintain them as they decay. Decay is lower as lower values so that you can have many casual friends/relationships without sucking your Attention Points dry.
But you will have trouble maintaining large numbers of very strong relationships. Especially for high powered characters the balance between the social simulation and the strategy/management/rpg aspects is very zero sum.
Delegation
Characters with lots of responsibilities will have to resort to sending minions or friends to manage their interactions. This is of course realistic. Envoys have been a key part of politics for ages. Sending a particularly important subordinate can substitute for the ruler personally. Other Characters, like real life historical figures, would be aware that getting a visit from such as such subordinate is better than from some other person.
To some degree the tiered vassal structure naturally lends itself to this. As King you are bros with ~ 70%+ of your dukes, unless you are in danger politically, or you marry kids to their kids or your wife is friends with their wife, and they in turn have the loyalty of the counts and barons who you mostly only see on special occasions.
The time of more important characters is also more valuable than that of less important ones. The same action by a king to a baron is worth more than from the duke or from another count. At least in Axioms. Since it isn’t a historical game I don’t have to deal with historical scholarly disputes and can do what is more helpful for fun gameplay.
Mechanically, since European aristocratic titles are not hard coded game features, characters evaluate the “importance” of other characters through a variety of factors and apply a scaling modifier for non-personal interactions. Maybe a guy who rules 10 provinces among himself and his vassals gets +50 opinion from a guy who rules 1 provine while a guy who rules 4 provinces gets only +40 opinion from the same 1 province ruler. These numbers are purely for example.
Conclusion
This post is already 2000 words so I’ll cut it short here. I’ve strayed a bit in various spots from the ostensible topic in any case. Suffice it to say that the social simulation is very detailed compared to other games and that this allows for specific kinds of results that are based on historical and fantasy fiction and not just because I want to be complex and confusing for no reason. Also the interface does a thorough job of tracking the relevant data and presenting to the player, or the NPCs, an appropriate amount of the information based on what they would plausibly be aware of.