Servant of the Lord

Please don't say I shouldn't learn art and programming at the same time, I really enjoy both so far (even if programming is tedious!). The people of reddit kept telling me I was an idiot for doing both.

If you enjoy both, and are progressing in both, just continue with it! I often (including less than 15 minutes ago) make 2D art in-between compiles, and as programming breaks. It's a different enough skillset that it uses different parts of my brain and switch from one to the other doesn't feel like work.

tank.FireProjectile(Direction("North-westerly"));

Instead of a fixed number I was thinking about "focus points" that you can accumulate and manage a bit (resource). You can have max 15 focus points, you get +5 per turn and can use them anytime (this would not force the player to deal with audiences every single turn which might be more convenient/fun).

That does seem like it'd make better gameplay, as long as there is an upper cap of focus points (the suggested 15 max sounds good).
You could then even have certain audiences take 2 focus points on rare occasions.
 

Representation of the throne room (audiences interface)
I have a trouble with that one and need advice.
Generally, I want a picture of an imperial throne and siome guards on the audience screen, that's very climatic. Then there needs to be an overview of people/audience requests. I think I can fit 2 rows of 6 each if I make it small (check the first picture, it's for another part of the game, but overall direction of the UI should be the same http://www.gamedev.net/topic/643014-personnel-strategy/ ) but I'm not sure if that's enough size to fit any info.
...
The audience petitions would need some quick button to "deny" it, for quick disposal.

Here's a possible layout:

(Note: the thrones I just stole from Google Images as placeholders - they are almost certainly copyrighted)

 

You could even color-code each audience box based off of department category (blue = civil service, green = military, white = science, etc...).

I haven't written any articles myself (way too busy), but I've greatly enjoyed reading some that others have posted.

A few are too subjective and not fact-based enough, but the majority are great.

 

I agree with article notations (and I saw that thread, but didn't have any real input to add so I didn't comment).

 

I might get burned at the stake for saying this, but I would recommend adding another ad right here to help support the site, since articles are so vertical anyway. Just as long as it's one additional ad, not twenty. I don't want ads to fill up the entire vertical space, but a second one wouldn't degrade the page experience to me, and if it gets you guys 30-40% more revenue per article and isn't intrusive, that'd be great.

 

Also, the social buttons at the bottom of the page needs to be bigger. Right now they are about 16x16, but they should be 24x24 or maybe even 32x32. Note: I'm not talking about a site-wide increase! The social buttons are currently the right size for forum threads and the rest of the site! But for articles, larger share buttons would be appropriate. [example]

 

At the bottom of certain articles, it'd be nice to have a link that says something like, "Have programming questions? Ask for help on [the forums]!", to redirect traffic back to the forums. The link should go to the correct subforum. "Have art questions unrelated to this article? Our [Visual Arts subforum] can answer them!". "Recruiting for a team? Post in our [classifieds]!", "Looking for a job in the industry? Check out the [Breaking In subforum]!"

What if audiences had "time limits" to them? Suppose the player sees a brief synopsis of the people requesting audiences and the reasons, limited to say, 12 audiences visible to the player each turn (so as to not overwhelm the player):

 

General Reng | War Effort | Requests more resources

Habil De`ack | Society | Average public health is gradually declining

Admiral Talia | War Effort | Requests permission to invade a neutral nation

Lieutenant Thompson | War Effort | Report on the Fourth Fleet on the northern front

High Engineer Vernes | Production | Report on ship production of the new ship designs

Treasurer Francis | Administration | Warning about dwindling treasury funds

...

 

The player only has "time" for 5 audiences a turn, so chooses 5 out of those 12 synopses, (granting 5 audiences out of the 12 people waiting) and gets the fuller text (limited to a paragraph), and the counselor opinions (limited to two sentences each, max 3 opinions).

Some of the audiences have a time-limit. Invading the neutral nation might be relevant for 3 turns. Most audiences only have a 1 turn time limit, but super-important choices may have 2 or 3 turn limit (the petition will show up for 2 or 3 days in a row hoping you'll choose him from amongst that day's 12 petitioners). After the time limit (usually just 1 turn), the petition is auto-resolved. If a decision needs to be made, it'll automatically be made (perhaps a random choice from the possible options that would've been presented to the player). If it's a warning or a report, it'll just be dropped from the queue.

 

Further, it'd be nice if on turn 5, Admiral Talia requested permission to invade the neutral nation, and on turn 7 he returned to report on how it went, to provide a sense of continuity.

 

 

If you have 200 turns, reduce the number of audiences the player can accept in a single turn (3 audiences?), and decrease the number of possible presented audiences (7 presented?), and increase the number of turns each audience is active for (2 turns instead of 1, even for normal audiences). Every turn the player has a second opportunity to respond or review someone's petition that he didn't have time to get to yesterday, or he can have an audience with one of the three new people requesting audiences that filled the hole left by the three he responded to yesterday.

 

7 possible audiences, each lasting 2 turns, over 200 turns, is 700 unique events, plus say, 300 more resulting from optional choices. 1000 total, maybe 1200 (less, when you count audiences that persist for longer than 2 turns). At two paragraphs of text apiece (one paragraph for the description, and two sentences per counselor with only 1-3 counselors commenting on it), you could probably two or three events together a day in your free time as a creative break while programming, and on days focused on content-creation, you could probably make a decent event every 15 minutes or so, with maybe 20 done as a day's work, if you make it easy on yourself by making it simple to create new events. Since the unique content sounds primarily text-related (people talking to you, you responding, the result possibly shown later), you really could create alot of unique content quickly, and even recruit a friend or sibling to help - it's not a technical thing they have to learn, they just have to be a good writer.

 

Alot of the report-type events would mostly be procedurally generated anyway. "Your majesty, we now have %ship_count% ships in %area%.", repeated once every 20 turns is 10 audiences, and zero creativity required in writing. Most of the report-type audiences would be similar. "My lord, %mineral-type% harvesting is now at %harvest-capacity%. Your humble servant the head foreman sends his regards.". Though you'll probably want two or three stock variations for those report-templates that are repeated alot, you still cut down your "unique events" a great deal. The easier you make it on yourself to create the unique content, the more you can create. It'll be the choice-giving audiences (petitions rather than reports) that provide the most creative challenge, but even so, 20 minutes every now and then during programming breaks could probably get you two or three of them done a day.

Or maybe I'm just completely mis-estimating the requirements, or the nature of the game.