Here’s an idea. In addition to time units, you should probably have some kind of political units that need to be spent in order to take actions. It’s unrealistic to have a player able to give any order and have it blindly obeyed - no society works like that.
A player would accumulate political points during the game. If he’s managing his subjects well, they’ll be pretty responsive to his orders - he’ll have accumulated a lot of political capital and the cost of his orders would be low. Of course there’ll also be social inertia - a country that’s been at peace for a generation might be reluctant if the player decides to declare war on a neighbouring country. You could probably design a system where keeping things the way they have been is a low-cost political action but making changes costs more. The more radical the change, the higher the political cost.
You might also be able to model different types of political systems. A democracy would be stable and self-running, but the people would be resistant to following orders. A totalitarian system might make it easier for the player to have his orders obeyed but then he’s got to support the higher cost of a police-state system as well as deal with underground resistance to his rule.
On a practical note, here’s another thing that bugs me about Travian:
There’s no ability to get a good high-level view of your empire. You’ve got to switch between villages to see how many resources and troops are in each one, and what’s being built there. And the way they’ve designed it, you can’t even open each village in a separate tab because the server gets confused, and always thinks you’re looking at the last village you clicked on.
Such a high-level view would be a great addition to your game if it’s not there already.
I was thinking about something like that but couldn’t find an clear way to express it. I do love the “born on” idle timer concept for units/resources.
The problem I got hung up on was mixing resources with different amounts of idle time. Say it takes 2 gold and 4 hours to upgade an object. I set my miners to work and log out. I log back in 4 hours later. I’ve got 2Au and the object has 4TU banked. Immediate upgrade! But wait. One of the Au is 2 hours old and the second Au only just came from the mine.
And then I remembered another thing that has always annoyed me about these games: having to have 100% of the required resources on hand before you could even START a project. Why couldn’t I start the upgrade with 1Au with the understanding it would stall at 50%? When another 1Au comes in, I can resume the project.
Thus, when I log in 4 hours later, I don’t get an immediate upgrade, but I can skip the first 2 hours (using 2TU from the object and the 2TU from the first gold).
With a queue system, it might be interesting to be able to re-prioritize tasks. Suppose I’ve got the aforementioned upgrade at 75% when suddenly I’m attacked. The object can build a defensive unit in 2 hours that requires 0.5Au… I can build this unit immediately using the the banked 2TU in the object and by stalling the upgrade and using it’s 0.5Au resource.
Heh…Implementation of JIT inventory in an RTS…I like it. Total annihilation did a pretty good job of this IMHO with its sustained construction model sometimes needing 20-30 min to finish a unit…
What is the basic functional unit of the game, I like the idea of single people. Train them, group them, equip them, etc. Will they have individual skill sets? Could they be individually trained as skilled tradesmen, warriors, bankers, scientists, etc. We could easily construct a list of hundreds of different specialties a society would need to function or skills they might develop.
One thing I have always wanted to see was a skill improvement system and a price on life. Pissing off neighbors = fighting = loss of skilled people. Skill improvement should be slow and minimal so as to make it take a long time to build up another high skilled blacksmith or general.
Battles should leave devastation which must be cleared before rebuilding can occur. Building should take a while. Large projects requiring thousands or even millions of time units should be available. Castles dont just pop up, even reinforcing the wooden walls of a walled town should be a major project, not even counting the needs for materials.
Recycling something for materials should take almost as long as building it and yeild no more than 30% or so of original materials.
I suspect that the TU’s as given would give a massive advantage to the offense – imagine what would happen if you could attack someone instantly! It would be a far better idea to make actions take some amount of time, just less than it takes to accumulate a TU. For example, it could take 1TU to move a unit three squares to the right, but the actual movement itself would take 30min. The alternative is to make TU’s banking limit really low relative to their value, but that would either make the game slow (an attack would take well over 24hrs) or would make it necessary to log in often.
Incidentally, I had an idea for limited logins. You could have quasi-turns, where a player is permitted to log in all the time, but can only command new movements within “turns”, three half-hour time slots that could be taken on demand up to, say, three times a day.
Let’s turn this into a example. If you’re 75% complete on your palace and you’re attacked, then you can’t really switch any of those 75% into city walls, or something other that might increase your defences. This is actually something I think Civ does right, or am I missing something?
This sounds like a perfect team game to me. You could have a teams of players managing a nation. This might solve the problem of players being “away” in that another memeber of the team can take over the away player’s management or their aspect of the nation. This will also solve the problem of new players joining, in that they become part of a team. This can also lead to betrayals as well, if part of the team decide to break away and form their
own nation.
Is there also going to be diplomacy as well? Some way for the players to contact each other in game? Nations can form alliances to pick on another
nation. Nations could also agree to merge.
Let’s say 10 people start the game, each with their own primitive nation. Nation a then conquers nation b becoming team A. Nations c and d merge to become team C. A new player joins Nation e to become team E. Players b and e they decide to break away ( taking the assests they were managing) and form a new nation. And so on.
One thing that you may want to build in then is an actual “real time” section. Teams/players agree a time when they can meet for a real time battle.
You could also look at Apolyton Civilization site, in particular the Alternative Civs. section. Try Civilization Online an MMORPG, see if you can get some ideas from there.
Say it takes 100 Stone to build a palace. In this example, you could stop construction on the palace at 75% and redirect the not-yet-used 25 Stone to build defensive walls.
It might be interesting to set up a way to cannibalize the committed 75 stone at some cost… tear down 25% of the palace and get another 15-20 stone.
That’s an interesting idea, we have nothing like that planned for the moment, but we could perhaps add something like it later.
For now though, something like that will still exist, since a lone player managing and enormous empire (despotism) will have a hard time micromanaging everything, with the corresponding loss of efficiency (the price for his absolute power), meanwhile an empire shared between lots of player will be more efficient but harder to rule.
That is something that the game client will manage, but there is no reason to do it that way.
The game server will offer all the info available to the player. The client will show it however it wants, and since the first client will be coded by us, rest assured that we will not do it that way.
those ideas seem interesting, but i’m starting to feel overwhelmed! :D.
Here’s how i see the unit/installation building working:
You can not build them until you have the necessary resources, but once you have them the unit/building is built instantaneously, not very realistic (since you may have been storing resources to build a Castle and suddenly decided to build a Temple), but i think it’s realistic enough and, more importantly, easier to implement (for non programers, Implement : take the necessary pains to program it, make sure it does not clash with the rest of the game rules, test it, etc).
Yes, the offense will get a big advantage, but, i think that if the maximum number of TUs is set just right, it would not be so big.
If your attacking units can only attack once or twice before running out of TUs, you’ll have to be very careful not to let them exposed to enemy counterattack, in that way the defense/offense equation is not so imbalanced.
Imagine what would happen if you attack a heavily fortified position, fail to take it and your unit runs out of TUs, they’ll be sitting ducks when the enemy player logs in and sees it.
Exactly, thats exactly what we have in mind, diplomacy can be done by in-game messages, and also using the forums that will inevitably appear :).
That sounds interesting, i think something like that was mentioned up thread, looks like something to implement in future versions/branches.
I tried to see how civ-online worked (how could i have not seen it?, i checked the apolyton forum several times when designing the game) but i can not find a tutorial/help, I’ll try to play it a bit to see how the game flows. (i hope they have not preempted my game idea! )
Age of Empires had something similar with the way workers could be moved around. I remember having a hundred workers banging away at a Wonder and then having to pull them off to repair walls or OPs because someone started attacking me.
“Realistic enough” doesn’t really mesh with the goal of “most detailed game imaginable”. I am not a fan of the “build instantaneously” thing as normal behaviour. If you have banked time units, sure, building instantly is okay, but that’s justified as a compensation for the fact that you can’t be logged on all the time.
A lot of games have resources go into a common pool. If a miner produces some gold, that gold goes into the user’s bank and can be used to make a unit on the other side of the map instantly. Some games require you to move the resource from the mine or forest to a town center, and then it can be instantly apportioned anywhere on the map.
I’d say that the resources should be treated like real things.
If you mine gold, the gold stays at the mine unless you move it. If someone captures/destroys your mine, they now control any gold that had been mined.
If you want to built a castle, you can designate a place for the castle, but you have to move resources to the area for work to proceed. You can assign a bucket brigade of individual workers to ferry individual resource units between the source (mine) and sink (castle) as a sort of just-in-time inventory, or you can load up a wagon an commit the whole allocation requirements right at the start of the project. If someone captures your castle mid-construction, they can make off with the unused resources. If you have a more pressing need for the resources, you can start taking them from the castle project and move them where you need them. If you forget to reassign your bucket-brigade they’ll just keep delivering resources to the castle for storage.
Now that i think of it, you are right, i would revise that then to say, once you have the necessary resources, you can start building, and building time can be banked (until a limit of n hours).
that’s still short of JIT building, but as you’ll understand we have our hands quite full with al the rest of the designing/development, i think that once the first version of the game is running, we will start to add even more detail (being the geeks we are… )
That it’s more or less how it will work, one of the biggest differences this game will have with al the others is just that, resources do not magically appear in a central repository, you have to mine them, transport them and store them, also units do not eat and get equipped magically neither, you have to transport food and equipment to them (this avoids a personal pet peeve of mine with Civilization, where you could send a single unit in a voyage around the world even if it lasted thousands of years)
This is slightly unrealistic in my opinion. A unit can always forage off the land (or sea) or buy food locally. It would be more realistic to have a unit have a “cost” to it. If it is in hostile territory then it might need to be supplied from a base, either at home or from a local resource that has been captured. Also, you could have ships having to put into a port after so many turns to restock on essentials if you want true realism.
All of those supply concepts will be integrated in the game, you can get some resources by foraging, you can buy food locally if the local players sell to you. or if they do not you can take it from them by force, a ship will have supplies on its own stores, once they are gone the ship has to go back to port for more or be resupplied from other ships.
I don’t understand what you mean by banking time in this context. I’d only allow banked time to accrue for idle units, possibly only while offline. Assuming you implement it where building a structure requires workers, you could have instant progress based on how much time the workers have banked.
If the building is capable of performing actions (researching a tech tree, spawning units), it could start banking time upon completion (unless the user had already populated it’s queue while it was being built), but while it’s being built… it’s not idle- it’s being built.
Just throwing ideas around, To built a castle requiring 100 stone, the player would have to have at least 100 stone in storage and, say, 30 stone actually on-site to begin building. If you don’t move in more stone, whatever workers you assign will work to 30% and then go idle (and start banking time).
It shouldn’t be very hard to get a very very ugly version of the game up for trying out different things related to the fundamental behaviour of the game engine.
I thought about supplying resources to units, and decided on basically the same thing as rayh. They aren’t dumb units, they can take care of themselves.
If you include the political capital idea, feeding and supplying the troops would result in higher morale/obedience than if the soldiers had to fend for themselves or live off the spoils of war… you could have random offensive units attacking farms and starting wars because they’re hungry or haven’t been paid. Might also include how the soldiers foraging affects the popular opinion of the normal folks in the area.
So you could still sent a scout unit on a thousand year mission (or do you implement natural death? Does the scout still have to report in for you to receive the information or does it magically appear?), it’s just sometimes when you check up on him he’d be hunting deer for food or mining iron to repair his sword or chopping wood to make arrows rather than scouting.
This brings up another thing, what about repairs to equipment? As time goes on vehicles/ships, etc wear out. Are they going to need to be repaired/replaced?
Yet another link for you to look at - C-evo. Another Civ based game but with improvements, might give you some more ideas.
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