Game about trying to end a war. News takes time to travel, as do your treaty proposals. Figure out what each faction wants and try to end the war before too many die. Click to start. Mouse controls. Drag provinces onto the treaties, or scouts onto the map. Map is colored based on faction control before the war started, and you must update it as news comes in. Double click to toggle control color.
Tutorial: You are playing as the diplomat of the red faction, able to send treaty proposals to the green and blue factions. The game ends when you are able to get an accepted treaty from both of them. The other 3 factions(Orange, Purple, & Pink) are caught in the middle of the conflict and don't have armies. You can drag map tiles onto the treaties to offer or request control of that province, as well as dragging the icons below the treaties to offer or request aid in one of the five industries.
The map shows the state of the regions before the war broke out, and you need to update it as news arrives in order to keep track of who controls where. You can send out your scouts to get specific knowledge about a given province, but otherwise you only learn about battles. Each faction has one army that you can roughly track by moving their flags to where you have heard of them doing battle.
In order to make a treaty that will be accepted, you need to figure out what the other factions want out of the war. You can do this by tracking what kind of places their army is attacking, or looking at the production of the places they control and finding out which of them they are missing or low on. You are able to see what your own countries goals are by hovering over the scroll in the right corner above the clock.
You can adjust the speed of events by clicking on the letters below the clock, choosing between slow, normal, and fast game speed.
Information takes time to travel in this game, and can be delayed by battles and bad roads, so the order you receive news is not always the order in which it happened.
A number of things are tracked at the end of the game, so you can try and make a treaty as fast as possible to save the most lives, or you can seek to get the best treaty for your own faction. Time and casualties erode the political will of each of the factions, so the other factions will be easier to convince the longer the war goes on.
It was clear enough to see what was happening. Red was my country, and it was always losing the wars. I did really like how it took time to get specific information, a good use of the signal theme.
@TopperVideoGames The black screen was probably a crash, there isn't a traditional game over in the game, just a worse outcome for the people the longer the war lasts. A part that I probably should have explained better is that figuring out what kind of resources the other nations need is a big part of finding the right treaty. Their army will try and capture places that have the resource they are missing, and if you look at the economy of each space, you can kinda figure out which ones they have a lot of and which they are missing and probably trying to acquire with the war.
@Lizz That makes sense. I planned to do more explanation of goals and systems, but ended up working on core gameplay until the literal last minute to get it done in time for the jam.
It says "we desperately need food, we desperately need tools" who are "We" are we one of the factions? What color?
Great game! :)