Hello again, and welcome to this week's dev diary.

As powerful as the new mission system is, producing unique and exciting missions for more than a few countries in the space of one update cycle was not something we felt we would be able to achieve. As a result, we felt it would be worth spending some time creating some varied mission templates that could occur for every nation, and that would be capable of targeting different regions or areas depending on position.

We have initially produced two main archetypes that any nation can pick; one focusing on conquest, and the other on infrastructure and internal development.

Conquest Mission:

The conquest mission will select a region that feels appropriate to your current map borders, and guide you through the conquest thereof.


(One example of the conquest mission)

Some branches will be chosen randomly, and others on a situational level. For example, a nation bordering uncolonized land may receive a task to colonize it, or a republic or monarchy bordering a tribe may receive a mission task to fortify the border. We've tried to make the tasks you'll see within this mission as varied as possible while retaining the overall structure - all whilst basing it off the same script structure.


(another instance of the same conquest mission, which this time has generated a different type of tree)

You'll find that families and governorships take a role in some of these tasks, accentuating the importance of favoring the right people. In a similar vein, I took a look at prototyping something we intend to work and build on in the future: namely, the conversion of national decisions into short, story-focused mission chains. In this example, I've converted the decision to reform from a tribal government form into a bespoke mission tree. The mission selects a family to represent those amongst your nation that favor a republican ideal, and another to represent the nascent monarchists.


(the tribal reformation mission that becomes available once you take the Tribal Reform Decision)

The mission framework allows this decision to become a short, paced story; guiding the player through a period of instability and political chicanery, ultimately (and hopefully) resulting in attaining the government form of your choice.

The capacity for telling stories in this way should not be understated, and we've elected to include this prototype mission in the upcoming Livy update as bit of a taster of possibilities for the future.

Development Mission:


Once you have a large enough country for the infrastructure mission to be able to deduce meaningful tasks it will become available and offer a number of branches for how to improve the infrastructure in a particular region. What these branches will actually entail, and even the name of the mission itself will depend largely on what the specific region is like.

This means that while the mission itself will repeat (up to once per region under your control) its content will vary in part or in total, but the overall structure will remain similar.

Starting Branches:


Starting branches are dependent on the resources of the provinces you control in the region. They may relate to things like:

Building up an agricultural focused province.
Facilitating maritime trade and naval matters in a province with many ports.
Turning a particularly populous territory into a city, and building up its infrastructure a bit.
Building up a Mining Region.


Sometimes there is more than one way to progress through these branches, the agriculture focused path for instance lets you decide what to use the newfound surplus for (spend it to increase pop happiness or build up a local Food Depot for your armies to stock up from in the province).

Optional Side Branches:


In addition to there being more than one way to progress through branches there are also optional side branches to the development mission. Things that may or may not be available (depending on what the provinces are like) and that you can go for if you want to spend the resources to get extra things. Some examples here are:

Prospecting for more minable trade goods.
Building up a shipbuilding industry in a naval town.
Importing horses to set up a Military breeding program.


Main Branch, the center of the Governorship:


The main branch of the Infrastructure Mission is devoted to the growth and development of the Regional center. What this means will again differ depending on the circumstances, if it is a foreign culture region then the mission will focus on building up a center of loyal pops of your own culture and religion, for instance. If the region is that of your capital it will instead focus on the embellishment of the capital city itself, and acquiring resources to create suitable monumental architecture there for an Empire such as yours.

The theme of the main branch will also decide what the mission itself is named. Making it clear from the mission selection screen what type of mission you can expect and what the branches in it might be.



There is also an optional side branch to the main branch which will only show up if the region contains a particularly holy place to your religion, such as the Oracle of Delphi for the Hellenistic faith, or the Anu Temple of Uruk for a Chaldean country. This branch will let you embellish the shrine itself and eventually decide on a way to fund the priesthood there in the future, with options ranging from setting up enough religious endowments, to setting up a religious subject state under a scion of one of your great families.



Overall the various tasks in the Development Mission makes use of a number of tasks, with some focusing on very concrete actions such as constructing buildings or making provincial investments, while others are timed tasks that require an initial investment and will then let you react to events over time that pertain to how you want to solve particular problems.



To conclude, we've been working on a little extra for the Livy update, which I'll just leave here...
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?attachments/burningcity-gif.526573/

You can also read this Dev Diary and comment in the forums.