Help us develop the most detailed multiplayer civilization-like game imaginable

The Game Room
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(Thread Posted with fluiddruid’s permission)

I and some other programmers have an open source project (the Aceituna Project) to develop a Massive Multiplayer Strategic Game.

The basic idea is to build a game where the players can manage troops and cities as in civilization, but also buy, transport and sell goods (like in Machiavelli the prince or Merchant Prince) or build factories and mines to produce the goods. or all at once or in any combination they like.

To that we will add a lot of detail normally left out of strategy games to avoid overwhelming the AI (since this game will be exclusively multiplayer there will not be AI).

Some examples:
[ul]
[li]Every unit will be equipped with weapons, armour and equipment at the players choice (he will not have a “phalanx” unit, instead he can (if he has the necessary goods) produce an infantry unit equipped with long spears and big shields and call it a phalanx)[/li][li]Every unit must be supplied with food (and other necessary goods depending on its equipment) by taking it from the terrain they occupy (“living of the land”) or from depots or transport units that carry the necessary goods.[/li][li]The combat system will consider the equipment of each unit, the relationship between the attacking unit equipment and the defending unit equipment (as in cavalry not being very effective against pike infantry), the terrain, and the relationship between the terrain and the units equipment(horses have problems in swamps and forests, pikemen do not work as well in rugged terrain, etc)[/li][/ul]

The game will be built using Java and Project Darkstar technology
At this moment we have about 4 people working on it, we need more programmers, and also Graphic Design people, Web page developers, etc.
Also, if you are not a programmer or graphic designer, but nonetheless want to contribute ideas please feel free to join us!.

If anybody is interested, please send me a PM or go through or google group at http://groups.google.com/group/aceituna-project

For more info you can go to:

our design document

The FAQ

Our forums(not very lively at the moment since we mostly talk via gmail)

Our wiki

Currently the project is on it’s first development cycle, you can see a roadmap for it on

http://svchb.net:12004/projects/roadmap/aceituna

Thanks.

Frodo.

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just posting to add a link to our web site

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Interesting.

How do you propose to handle battle between players/civilizations when people are not online? For instance, a player would presumably, when online, build a city, develop the land, mine for resources and essentially build a kingdom of sorts with a finite border. In Civ, this happens concurrently with all “players” on the same turn-based timeline. In a MMORPG setting this concurrency is lost and one developed civilization could be out roving and potentially attacking a infant civilization. In traditional MMORPGs an offline player’s avatar is simply gone into the ether, but in a Civ-style game those lands and cities are going to be finite and permanent once a player claims them. If that player is offline they would presumably be off limits to other players as they’d be defenseless. How do you handle that? How do you prevent a player from being landlocked if all players on his borders are offline? I suppose a more succinct question is how do you propose to handle “ownership” of a finite 2-dimensional land space?

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it works like this, you can move your units when you are logged into the game, BUT, only until they ran out of “Time Units” (time units are expended with each action the unit takes), time units recharge with time, say 1 per hour, lets say you want to attack a player that is not logged in:

You move your attacking unit to a map tile next to the player’s unit, expending 4 of its 10 time units.
You attack with it, using 5 of it’s time units.
Now you dont have time units in that unit to do anything else, so you have to wait some number of hours until they recharge.

In the mean time, the other player logs on moves his units until he rans out of time units , he may counterattack or retreat, or anything he wants, then he logs off and some time later you log on, see what happened and react.

And so the game flows.

To avoid having to log in with too much frequency we will have to finely tune the amount of time units recharged per hour and the time unit cost of each action.

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Seems like a user who plays very infrequently or takes an extended time off would create serious issues in that system.

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why?

if he plays very infrequently the other players will continue playing without him, all his units and buildings will stand still until he logs again, other players will probably destroy/capture every thing he owns if he takes too long to log on again, but that’s fine.

The idea is that you’ll need to logon once a day or so to efficiently manage your empire/business.

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So if you get busy in real life or take a vacation, you risk losing everything you’ve spent months building up?

I’d take a second look at that one.

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You can delegate your empire to other people in the meantime, the game will include a Owner/Controller concept, making it easy to give Control of your empire/business to another player (or a number of them) without losing it, once you are back you can take control of everything again.

I know that does not solve the problem you mentioned above, but is the best i can think off.

I dont like “Vacation” rules as I’ve seen in other games (“Freezing” everything a player owns for a while) because they are extremely unrealistic, for example: why cant i attack a city just because it’s owner is on vacation?

Nevertheless perhaps a variant of that system could be implemented, that is not so unrealistic, yet solves the problem?.

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I know this strays a bit into AI territory, but could you give the vacationer the option of assigning basic orders during his absence? For example, you put all units in “defend” mode where, if attacked, they respond with their basic attack against the attacking unit.

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Just posting to remind myself this thread exists. I’ll have something to say shortly.

That being said, how will you be handling air and sea units, especially in regards to transport?

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I read Colleen McCollough’s “Masters of Rome” series, and I always thought one interesting addition to a strategy game would be the inclusion of money, not as an abstraction, but as an in-game resource. A “talent” of gold is the amount of gold an average person can carry on their back.

If you want to pay your troops you can’t just transfer funds from your gold stock like ordering something from Amazon. Instead you’ve got to load up bars of gold onto mules and carry it to where you want to spend it. And that gold shipment can be attacked by pirates/bandits or other players.

Capturing the enemy’s camp should be a constant goal when fighting a battle. You can seize gold, food, weapons, seige engines, camp followers, and so on.

It all depends on how abstract the combat system is. In SMAC and early CIV, each unit had an offense strength used when attacking, a defense strength used when defending and a movement rating, plus a few special abilities either baked into the units in CIV or added in the design workshop on SMAC. But the design workshop approach resulted in nonsensical units. To get offensive units you’d give the best weapon and no armor. To get defensive units you’d give the best armor but no weapon. Because of the science fictional setting this wasn’t so jarring, but it made no sense. If you’re in a medieval tech setting, you wouldn’t give your elite city guard plate armor and belt knives and think you’ve got an uber defensive unit.

It would be really cool to introduce some biodiversity. In Civ IV you can get something like this if a civ doesn’t have access to horses they can’t build horse units, if they don’t have access to elephants they can’t build elephant units. It would be cool if your game world included several types of animals for domestication that could result in different combat or logistical units. And if you move an animal unit out of its ecological comfort zone you should get much higher attrition and need much higher logisitical support. So you can cross the alps with your elephant troops, but will the elephants be alive afterwards? You can cross the deserts with your horses, but the horses will need much more water than camel troops. And you shouldn’t enter tundra unless you’ve got reindeer sledges or mammoths.

One simple way to handle absent players is with some sort of feudal system. An absent player’s forces can be handled by either his liege lord or his vassal, depending on how he’s deputized it. A liege lord might have certain rights and restrictions on what sort of orders they’re allowed to give, while a vassal might have different rights and restrictions.

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Exactly, Exactly, Exactly :smiley:

Almost all of those concepts are already in the game :):

Supply for troops must be carried by transport units, money plays a huge part (you can even play as a trader, a banker or a manufacturer).

You’ll need a given resource to build a given equipment.

And the Owner/Controller system is (will be) designed to be used as a feudal system if needed :slight_smile:

The part about animals and terrain can be implemented i think, check this http://svchb.net:12004/wiki/aceituna/Equipment

The unit’s horses count as Equipment, and since there is an Equipment/Terrain relationship you can make them unable to pass certain Terrain Types or make them need more supplies.

I like how you think :), keep the ideas coming!.

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Air and Sea units are basically normal units with the appropiate Equipment, obviously some especial rules will be needed to manage them.

As for cargo, all units will have a cargo capacity determined by their Equipment and the number of people on them, Units will be able to transport other units if their cargo capacity exceeds (cargo capacity of transported unit) + (configurable number x number of people), probably also affected by the transported unit’s equipment.

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Thats a good idea, we were talking about implementing some very basic AI in the units, allowing the player to give assigning basic orders in response to a given event, combining that with some kind of vacation rule could help avoid the worse effects of extended absences.

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Very impressed by the attempt. The execution will hinge on how you handle all these conflicting priorities, probably one of the main reasons why a MMOStrategic game has not really come to pass (tho I am aware of several freeware-type games of this type). I’d personally be interested in a fantasy-oriented realm myself.

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53rd Sheep Cavalry, attack! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think I would find it tedious. I have barely enough patience in Civilization to wait for the AI to make it’s moves, let alone two dozen real players spending an hour developing their strategy or micromanaging their civilization.
My recommendation would be to make it somewhat like Sins of a Solar Empire in that it is quasi real-time and heavily automated. Basically, it should take some time to deploy large amounts of forced accross the world. So you could conceivably build your armies, tell them where to deploy and send them off. You have the option of handling battles yourself or letting the AI do it. Go get a snack and come back in a few hours and see if they are where they should be.

If it’s like Civilization, battles mostly consist of two icons indicating what type of army they are knocking together until one is defeated anyway.

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thanks!.

I think we can do it, the Project Darkstar platform manages concurrency, persistence and connectivity, thus removing a huge load out of our shoulders, i think we can build the basic idea first and then tweak it until it handles the most important things right and compromises where needed.

As for the fantasy realm, we plan to make the game very configurable so it should be possible without even modding it, and anyway the server and the client are open source so they can easily be modified to add fantasy concepts :).

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Clearly the more time you spend online, the better your empire will do. The more you neglect your civlization, the more likely it will fall into ruin.

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well, the idea is that you dont have to wait, tipically it should go somewhat like this.

once a day (in your lunchtime, or after diner for example) you log on, and see what happened while you where offline, you make your moves and countermoves, and then log-off, rather, rinse, repeat.

But yes it will require patience, it’s not a RTS, but i think that civ fans would like it, i am one and i have been dreaming a game like this since civ1 (adding the multiplayer part when i saw an similar “time unit” based game called Space Conflict)

Also you can give orders to your units and then log off, for example you can send an unit to attack a city, the unit will move until it has no more TUs, you logoff but, once the unit has enough TUs it will continue to move towards it’s destination even if you are not online