Hello fellow co-conspirators!
An up and coming secret society doesn’t necessarily know everything that is going on in a region they plan to conquer. This is why knowledge and awareness are the most important tools for any would be world conqueror. In Puppetmaster this is represented by the Investigation System.
So far in our posts, I’ve been showing the full network of units, like this:
But at the start of a level, a player will see something more like this:
That’s right, at the bginning only the lowest level unit can be seen. Even more, if a player hover over them this is what they’ll see:
That’s right, all of their information is scrambled. Its only be researching and converting units that players get to have a better understanding of how the network is laid out. The main reason we added this mechanic is to avoid overwhelming players at the beginning of a match with too many options (most of which they are too week to confront anyway. By limiting the information they have available, the desicion process of the players is more streamlined. In addition, now that players have to work and spend resources on gathering info, it bring out interesting desicions on how to best spend your budget: preparing vs acting.
How do you discover the rest of the network you ask? Well you can always convert a unit:
Each converted unit adds one point to their neighbors investigation level, but this is risky. Failed missions have heavy penalties in Puppetmaster. The other option is Surveillance, but that’s a topic for next week’s post.
Happy Conspiring!