Map

Where all the strategic elements of Loveless take place.

Anatomy
A 32x32 board full of empty spaces which can be filled with units called "blocks". Every block has a number of spaces between 1x1 and 4x4 and has an owner. A space may contain a single demon army and some form of land at once, and also has an owner. The board begins with no blocks, and is first filled with the eight kingdom's headquarters and some wild blocks.

Blocks
A block represents one chunk of land; they are created whenever a neighboring block has at least one space cleared. A wild block is owned by barbarian demons, and is filled with spaces that contain enemy encounters. When all of a block's spaces are owned by a single kingdom, that land is considered owned by that kingdom, and becomes stable. An unstable block will continue to revert to a wild block until all of its spaces are conquered by some kingdom. When two or more kingdoms own spaces in the same block, it is considered contested land.

Spaces
A space represents one singular plot of land in the world. They make up the contents of a block, and are the atomic unit to make up a map. Owned and cleared spaces can be improved with the following buildings: Sometimes, a block will spawn with a space that already has something on it, like an abandoned temple; explore these spaces, you might find something interesting, like a legendary demon.
 * Soul Farm
 * Sets up some wilderness to be continuously exploited, garnering souls, demons, and allowing for more encounters; assign some demons here to have them work on defeating these encounters.
 * Settlement
 * A place for demons to live and work, granting you tax revenue and services; you can enter these places and explore them, potentially finding useful items and useful services like markets and priests.
 * Bastion
 * Walls off the space, preventing enemies from crossing it; the enemy must spend a turn to tear it down, and if you have an army parked there, must go through them first. Bastions give friendly armies on them improved defense and resistance, making it harder for enemies to break through.
 * Temple
 * Spreads your culture to surrounding spaces, infecting enemy kingdoms with it and countering enemy temples; they transform enemy spaces into your spaces, peacefully.
 * Palace
 * Acts as the hub for your kingdom's central government; there may be only one per kingdom, and if a new one is built, the last one becomes abandoned, and can then be torn down to be replaced by another improvement. Can only be performed by the king.  Good if you want your palace in a more favorable position on the map.

Kings & Leaders
Every kingdom has a number of leaders who call the shots; they each get a turn, and can command armies and build improvements.

They represent the internal power struggles a kingdom might face, and naturally, the more of these a kingdom has, the easier it is for an enemy kingdom--particularly one which is internally unified--to defeat the internally tumultuous one.

Creation
Every kingdom starts with 3 leaders, and one of them is assigned king from the start; the player controls one of these, but the other two are controlled by AI. These leaders may try to steal the throne from one another, as the king will inevitably have more power than the others, gaining tax revenue both from the kingdom's subjects and the other leaders. New leaders may crop up if there's an equality of levels and soul-income in the strongest demons, leading to a "too many chiefs and not enough indians" problem, but through inequality, the number of leaders can be kept low, granting more control to the remaining leaders, leading to less chaos; thus, leaders are encouraged to keep their subjects as poor as possible, while not upsetting the subjects with overly restrictive or crushing levels of control, when seeking to better control the situation, but are encouraged to reward their subjects and encourage them to act independently when they want to expand quickly (i.e. more economic activity), since every leader needs to make a move before a turn is over.

King
The king counts as a type of leader, and has all the powers of a normal leader, except they collect tax revenue and set the taxation rate throughout the kingdom (plus they get this really neat crown over their heads, so you know exactly who they are.) This gives them a huge bonus in souls, thereby allowing them to have the biggest armies, and under normal circumstances, this lets them stay in power indefinitely--but of course, as they try to conquer neighboring kingdoms and lose resources and units in the process, those leaders get relatively closer in power to the king, and thus a coup may occur.

Assassination
Both the king and the leaders may try to kill off other leaders or the king before they become too much of an issue. This is considered treasonous by the king--after all, less competition for the stronger leaders means bad news for the king, as there's less in-fighting between leaders and less tax revenue, and trying to kill the king is pretty straight-forward--and may also draw attention from other leaders who considers the assassin to be a threat in themselves. Care must be given before you decide to kill an ally preemptively.

Contracting
An allied leader can also be offered a contract, which will give you control over that leader and their armies, as an alternative to assassinating them; it's more expensive, both to initially offer and then the upkeep, but if you have the souls to spare...

Armies
These are groups of demons which can move on the map and perform a variety of actions. They are represented by their commander, who may either be a leader, or a delegate thereof.

Creation
Every kingdom starts with three, who act as either the king's personal army or the king's most loyal servants. They are effectively armies-of-one at the start, and grow as you contract more demons. Once an army has at least one more demon, they can be split off and turned into their own army, using any other demons that may be available.

Traversal
Armies are barred from crossing a space that has an enemy army on it or an enemy bastion, but may cross any other space, owned by them or not. They may stop on a space that has no other army on it. Armies may move up to ten spaces per turn.

Consolidation & Size
Two armies can become one army if one army lands on the same space as another friendly army. This will combine all units into one cohesive army, transferring over all demons and legions. Armies can be larger than how many generals can fit into one battle--you would simply pick which ones you want to use in a battle.

Blocking
An army of significant size cannot be passed through by an enemy's army; if entering this space would initiate a battle, the enemy must use their turn to resolve it. That said, if there's no hope for one to win, then the smaller army is simply run over and killed outright, and no turn is spent.

Attacking
An army can virtually include a kingdom's entire fighting population, but only 15 of them can enter battle at once, so any extras are saved for a different turn. By entering the space an enemy army is on, you initiate a battle, which is then resolved using Loveless's tactical battle system, or the opponent retreats, moving to an unobstructed nearby space and letting you have the one they were on; if no spaces are available to move to, they are forced into battle.

Turns
A single turn consists of every leader moving exactly one of their armies, and performing some action on the space moved to; each kingdom takes turns doing this in order. Possible actions include building land improvements, entering some location to explore, getting into a battle with barbarians or some other kingdom, or doing nothing. If entering a location to explore, the turn won't end until you leave, and likewise, battles must be resolved before the turn is over.

Goals
The idea is to wrestle control over your own kingdom by overtaking your own palace (i.e. become king), and to work your way to other kingdoms so you can take out their palace, while guarding against enemy kingdoms and allied leaders from taking it back. Once you own the space that contains another kingdom's palace, it counts as domination and you now own all of their blocks, though the ex-king/queen might still be around and may try to take it back until you kill them (though without any kind of revenue, they likely won't keep their armies for long.)

Once all kingdoms are owned and a One Hell Government is formulated, a portal at the center of the map opens, leading to the final challenge. This can occur with either the player or some other leader, though if not by the player, it may be extremely difficult, or even impossible, to rebound.