Axioms Of Dominion: Now With Multi-Threading

Discuss the development of other free/open-source games, as well as other games in general.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Axioms Of Dominion: Now With Multi-Threading

Post by axiomsofdominion »

Axioms Of Dominion is a project I got about 40% through and then had to let go for life stuff. Now I have roughly a year where I shouldn't have anything else to do so I'm hoping to release in late 2022 or very early 2023 if I run into serious issues.

I'd advise reading the wiki for a broad overview: https://axioms-of-dominion.fandom.com/w ... inion_Wiki
Here is the blog link: https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/

This is a fantasy geopolitics simulator that is broadly comparable to CK2+Vicky2+Dominions4+more. As a fantasy game it has tons of magic stuff but the focus is on DIP mechanics.

Diplomacy(foreign affairs)
Intrigue(shadowy affairs)
Politics(domestic affairs)

I have a Substack which can be located by searching the game name in Google.

I have a goal of enabling 40000 provinces on very new PCs but the game is perfectly functional around 14000. I have a major goal of playing an almost purely combat free couple millenia taking down a major empire in the world from the inside. I'd expect an average top tier empire to have roughly 7000 provinces on larger maps if you run history for 4000-8000 years. Anywhere from 15% to 40% of a larger map. What constitutes an empire or even a kingdom is much more fluid and dynamic than in existing games. A 7000 province empire would have something like 10 ~100 province substates at the core, 40 ~50 province "major vassals", and then 200 ~20 province periphery/border vassals. Of course you can fiddle those numbers a bit but that is a good illustration of my goal.

Several of the substack posts relate the very detailed political sim I am designing to make this goal plausible. I still have a few major and a few minor things to talk about on the blog. There is a Fandom wiki that has a few dozen pages on various major and minor systems. It hasn't been changed much since mid 2015 when I had to pause working on the game until now.

Most of the backend stuff is done and I'm primarily figuring out the equations for mechanics, doing all the UI stuff, and getting the AI to function. I expect I'll do a UI theme, smooth out map generation, and maybe polish up the art assets at the end.

The game is turn based with attention points. So you have like 1000 attention points per turn, still testing the proper amount and the costs for actions. I wanted to do a time based system but it is hard to code and people will just get mad anyways. It is a province map style like Sovereignty or Paradox games.

There is a very detailed population simulation which interacts with the character mechanics. Ideology covers almost a dozen areas, Propaganda impacts ideology and religion and the military, there's a Quality Of Life system regarding food variety/quality and material goods plus shelter, Religion ties into both magic and diplomacy/politics, population is where your troops come from and there is a logistics system.

https://imgur.com/a/AlPew
Those are some early maps. The top one almost looks like Europe/Africa/Near East. Maps are generated procedurally as will the world be if you don't start on world creation but run history for a few centuries or millenia.

The magic aspect is highly integrated and very expansive. It impacts every game system in various ways. I have a substack post about just magic. My substack is free for anyone to read. Magic can build roads, discover secrets, troop movements, and other knowledge from distant provinces, change the weather and climate, be used in various enchantments, etc. There is even a cool The Runelords(think that is the right series) inspired magical transference/pacts thing where you can empower your soldiers or other people with the powers of captured, or tamed, magical creatures. Or sentient captives. Strength, mana pool, speed, physical features like scales or claws, etc. And you can do evil mad science [censored].

Speaking of evil Axioms allows you to play a truly ruthless tyrant rather than just a good boy. Fear, blackmail, military threats, second class citizens, slaves, etc.

The culture system allows a something like a society that reveres dragons, character secretly captures a dragon, transfers dragon traits to himself, become leader of confederation of tribes. Someone finds out, and can blackmail him, reveal him, kill him and become dragon king themselves, etc.

You can destabilize a society by cutting off their access to a prestigious food resource that is a traditional staple of cultural diet, say cinnamon, assuming the leader has depleted his political capital and put himself in a risky position. Much more detailed example on the blog.

The trade off is graphical sugar, no voice acting or 3d models, random world gen vs handcrafted map, although players/modders can make scenarios if they want, I just don't plan to release official ones but there is mod support.

A stretch goal, well not really since there isn't a kickstarter, if I finish the main stuff early before release date is to integrate a "History" system that records important actions and can be loaded/interpreted by a wiki type program to allow you to read "history books" about the game world. The "simulated" history mentioned earlier is just starting a game with no player or observer and letting the AI play a few centuries or millenia and then picking a point jump in. Player could look at data files in theory but the idea is that you only know what your AI guy knew when you swapped in.
Last edited by axiomsofdominion on May 17th, 2022, 8:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game

Post by axiomsofdominion »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... medium=web

Just wrote a blog post about the RPG-adjacent parts of the game, somewhat high level. Planning to do more focused ones with details in a couple months.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

These are just working visuals except maybe the icons. I plan to finish the UI skinning and other art type stuff once the code is finalized.

Debugging some stuff:
https://imgur.com/a/23cnnra

A Randomly Generated Map:
Image

Unique colors for province detection on maps:
Image

Icons:
Image
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... medium=web

A post about religion in Axioms. My goal is to make religion both a detailed and integrated part of gameplay. Just as you can substitute diplomacy or intrigue for military prowess religion provides a variety of new options both for expansion and for playing tall in a sort of unique way.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/s ... pment-blog

Have a new more development focused section of my substack. Don't quite post actual code but get pretty close.

Also been thinking about what to do after Axioms. Either a Majesty1+++ game or an open source turn based party rpg depending on my financial status.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

So still been doing stuff the last 3 weeks. Got a pile more design posts and some other stuff.

Been working on social occasions, getting the basic military stuff working, and agreements between characters. The goal is to get basic functions out and slowly layer mechanics on top till it is all done.
KingBigMac
Posts: 12
Joined: May 20th, 2018, 4:10 pm

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by KingBigMac »

I don't have anything particularly useful but,

Glorious project, keep on chugging.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

Thanks. God so much chugging. 50 hours a week for like 50 weeks. My poor fingers.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... medium=web

I wrote a commonly requested post about how Axioms represents the rise and fall of empires. Basically to get a system that is both realistic and fun you need quite a bit of simulation detail from a variety of domains like ideology, culture, quality of life, and warfare.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

I've written several posts, and also some nice code heh, since I posted here last. There are several posts on magic, a post on the mechanics of the intelligence network/intrigue/spying system, and a few posts on social interactions.

Think of Axioms like Kudos 2+Academagia+Crusader Kings plus a few extra things. The social interaction aspect is I think totally unique in any genre. It is not however a dating sim/visual novel. There is no hand written dialogue or stylized art assets for characters or backgrounds. Axioms is focused on mechanics over graphics. Not to say it will look terrible but that graphics will mostly be confined to the map and the UI icons.

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... medium=web

That is the primary social stuff post.

https://imgur.com/a/g6EGR5P

That is 2 pictures, one of a map mode and another of the intelligence UI. Which will be fancied up once all the mechanics are stable. Currently the UI is mostly optimized for me checking that code is working. But people always ask for pictures.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game(Now with RPG-adjacent systems blog post)

Post by axiomsofdominion »

Wow haven't posted here in over a month. I got a lot of work done over the last month. Specifically in the last 3 days I've been optimizing stuff. First for RAM, cut the RAM usage on the primary source of RAM bloat by 93%. This was the class that tracked Opinion Modifiers between two characters. It was only ~57 bytes but since you can have hundreds of millions of instances that was too much. Got it down over 3 days to 4 bytes. That took a decent amount of code refactoring. The other thing I did was just dumping any and all string comparisons in key nested loops and all heavily used loops. I always knew strings were bad but I guess in previous programming I never tried to compare millions of strings in a short time. Int based IDs, int based IDs everywhere. also pointer comparisons. Very convenient. Now I can run through 100000 characters in less than a second. Instead of double digit numbers of seconds. Strings bad.

My actual gameplay programming goal is getting the NPCs to be move variable. But I had to clear out the performance and RAM issues first. Will save tons of time in the end. Characters can currently engage in a few high level goals with a few variations on carrying them out. I'd like to get into the range of 40 or so high level goals by the end of the week and maybe 160 or so lower level actions that get you to the goal. This is mostly social simulation plus some strategy stuff like vassalizing. Then I can get more of the basic economic stuff which will then enable the complex military actions.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: Now With Multi-Threading

Post by axiomsofdominion »

Got a bunch of work done on multithreading. Roughly 80% improvement in speed for AI Planner plus it runs on player turns.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: Now With Multi-Threading

Post by axiomsofdominion »

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... non-landed

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.com/p ... dventuring

Two posts about the tactical rpg adventuring/delving aspects of Axioms. You can do these things with landed or political characters although more commonly they are done by characters who are professional adventurers.
axiomsofdominion
Posts: 15
Joined: October 28th, 2016, 2:18 am

Re: Axioms Of Dominion: Now With Multi-Threading

Post by axiomsofdominion »

Spent a week so far working on the turn based adventurer combat system. Getting fancy effects to function is a pain in the ass for sure. Stuff like afflictions/maladies propagating to new entities, localized time manipulation, various stacking stuff, bonus effects from multiple effects on the same entity, etc. Regeneration and modifying stats like movement were also a hassle.
Post Reply