Hello everyone and welcome to yet another developer diary. Today we will discuss the first action part of the game and that is the thievish phase.

Hello everyone and welcome to another developer diary. Today we will discuss the first action part of the game and that is the thievish phase.

Thievish phase is overseen by the governorate’s thief general, who has, based on his race and unlocked skills, an attack value and a defence value. These come into play whenever the general conducts an offensive move or is targeted by one. So let’s talk about them.

The phase itself is divided into two parts. In the first part, governorate has access to actions. These actions are Building contact net, Espionage and Gang war. Success of these actions is determined by comparison of the attack value of attacking governorate’s thief general and defence value of the defending governorate’s thief general. If the attack value is higher, then the action succeeds, otherwise the defending governorate is safe from the effect of the action.

Attacker can use each of these actions only once per count. If he’s targeting governorate A with Espionage, he can’t target governorate B with Espionage. But he can use the remaining two actions on any governorate, like Gang war on governorate C.

Espionage obviously finds out a bunch of useful things. Building contact net, if successful, adds influence with the targeted governorate. You can spend influence on crimes, which is something we will talk about in a minute. Gang war lowers the influence and gold cost of crimes against the targeted governorate.

Now to the second part, in which the governorate has access to crimes. Crimes cost gold and influence and if the attacking governorate has both, are always successful. That means you have to first succeed in Building contact net before you get access to crimes. Attacker can target the enemy governorate with only one crime per type of crime per count. That’s a very complicated way of saying that you can send as many Sabotages as you want, if you have the resources for it, but you can sabotage each governorate only once. In case any governorate is targeted by several Sabotages during the same count, only the strongest will be considered.

However, you can’t keep your influence indefinitely as it deteriorates by 1 every count (but not under 0). Example: Governorate sends building contact net on Monday. It is successful and after the count gets 3 points of influence to spend on Tuesday. If they’re not used, influence deteriorates by 1 the next count and it is only 2 on Wednesday.

This concludes the thievish phase and next time we will be back with the magic phase.