Adding Elephant Duel for Southeast Asia

[JonZone]

After reading about the dev diary about Mandala government, as a Southeast Asian myself, I am very excited to play in my home region with the unique government. Since this is still a work in progress, I would like to suggest adding a cool and historical flavor to the warfare of this region: Elephant Duel

I'd like to award you:

DEVELOPER AWARD: ELEPHANT DUEL - COOLEST SUGGESTION SO FAR
That being said, at this point we're mostly finishing up the things we have and making sure that you will actually have a DLC to play when summer is over.

 

[JonZone]

The end of Q4 still seems far off now, but does this mean we should tamp down on hopes for feedback that expands or adds on to features of the current shared design? What I mean is that while ministers and wanua are still explicitly coming together design-wise according to the DDs, are other things such as ritsuryo/soryo government more or less already set in stone?

Modifying existing features is easier than adding new features at this point!

I'm just a programmer currently chiseling away at Japanese UI, so the game design isn't really my forté, but right now I'd probably say that we're not exactly in need of even more content to finish for this DLC

It's already absolutely enormous and honestly, as someone who's looking forward to playing this thing, at this point I'd rather have everything that's already in to function well and be somewhat balanced!

 

[JonZone]

If this isn’t under NDA, I’d like to ask out of curiosity — are there already pieces of code being tested that relate to game systems planned for 2026?

Not that I know of.

Are the future systems still only on paper at this stage

Yes.

is there already some code — even if it's just early test code that’ll probably be rewritten from scratch five times before release?

I would say the following:

1. Test code, except in rare circumstances, don't end up on our main branch, so usually a programmer doesn't leave a system unfinished before starting something new.
2. We very rarely rewrite code from scratch, sure it might need refactoring, but from scratch? Something must go very wrong for that to occur.
3. We have to be realistic when deadline strikes - and things that would need to be rewritten two more times from scratch to work would realistically end up on the chopping block in those cases.