Skill / Mechanic: Infusion - do not disclose other alignment values

[Meric]

Currently when standing on an infused tile it says "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Good to a depth of 24 points" regardless of which alignment you represent.

Suggestion
I would suggest that if the tile is not infused to your alignment then you should only see: "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil".

If we really must have indicators of depth I think they should be more nebulous and wooly with the deepening descriptions reflecting greater depth and broken up by thresholds of 100 such as:

1-100 - "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil - the high noon sun seems dimmed and the birds no longer sing"
101-200 - "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil - corrupted flora has begun to sprout from the ground"
201-300 - "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil - evil contraptions and machinery can be seen about the area"
301-400 - "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil - the screams of the tormented can be heard all around you"
401-500 - "This location is infused and aligned to the forces of Evil - the forces of Stygia rule over all in this damned place"

Holding the skill Psychic Bloodhound could let you know the rough depth of opposing infusion to the nearest 50 points.

Maybe reducing between the thresholds could result in a little bonus 5xp and 10xp for an alignment flip.

Rationale

• Thematically knowing your sides infusion depth makes sense but knowing the depth outside your alignment should be clouded in a degree of mystery

• Not knowing how deep a tile is makes it more interesting when engaging in territory dispute

[Fellis]

Not a bad suggestion, I have some work I want to do to make infusion much more engaging, but I need to see what people think of it first. If people hate the mechanic (as measured like 6 months from now) then I don't want to sink dev time into it.

If this was implemented, we would probably make some skill allow you to see the value, psychic bloodhound maybe.

[Kandarin]

This suggestion would create unnecessary information asymmetry. Veteran players who are well-connected with powerful factions would know what all the thresholds mean, having hashed out the numbers in private research, and they'd keep that knowledge close to their vests. Non-veterans would be confused. We should not do this change.

[kylinn]

Instead of local flavor descriptions, what about something like SH barricade descriptors like lightly infused, moderately infused, strongly infused, very strongly infused or some such? That would still leave the mystery in while not needing to parse out local descriptions.

[Alyss]

I don't like this at all personally. I agree with Kandarin* that it's a really weird place to put potentially-hidden information since it's important to the core gameplay and this would only slightly obfuscate it anyways. I also think the 30 CP tax for Psychometry is pretty insane even with what it does currently.

*Well, I don't think the veterans would be sad enough to try, or certainly be successful in keeping the rough breakdown of the info from becoming public domain pretty quickly, but it's still another part of the knowledge barrier for new players or people engaging with it for the first time.

[Nova]

The amount of hidden information that you need to spend build points on is already pretty nutso.

[Meric]

This suggestion would create unnecessary information asymmetry. Veteran players who are well-connected with powerful factions would know what all the thresholds mean, having hashed out the numbers in private research, and they'd keep that knowledge close to their vests. Non-veterans would be confused. We should not do this change.

Before you yeet the baby out with the bath water I never said this couldn't be fully accessible information. Even if it was just left to the players it would be on the wiki inside of a few days - just like exploration badges etc. Alternatively, you could even put a full breakdown of the thresholds on the wiki as part of the change to completely remove such a risk.

You could even make it blatantly obvious in game and reduce it down to:

• This area is: "loosely...", "lightly....", "moderately...", "strongly...", "completely...infused to evil". It would then be no more obfuscated than barricade strength.

• Or "this ground is infused by more than (100, 200, 300 etc) points to the forces of evil".

• It could even be an increasingly filled bar / circles like as seen with HP and MP bars (attached).

The threshold suggestions in the first post are just to flavourfully and thematically show how the area is shifting as infusion depth grows and should be really rather transparent to any player seeing it.

The suggestion is to remove absolute values when viewing opposing infusion. What that looks like could be a range of options as above which are very accessible to all caliber of players and no more challenging than understanding barricade strength.

Its not designed to be some vague secret held by vets its just designed to be more flavourful than watching 410 change to 380 after you spend 30ap and give a slight degree of mystery to the nature of the opposing alignments infusion depth.