Here’s another idea - have some dead-end technologies. Most games like this have a clear path of poor>fair>good>better>best for technological development. The only decisions that need to be made are how quickly you want to upgrade to the next higher level.
Again, this is unrealistic. Most technologies are not obvious when they’re first thought of. And the future development of a new technology is even less certain.
So offer the players a choice of a dozen different possible technologies to develop. Some will produce immediate gains and some will progress slowly (and maybe even backslide at certain points). Some technologies will dwindle down to nothing and others will change the entire world.
So players will have to make real choices about how they develop their society. Some will choose to be conservative and rely on time-tested technology with known proven abilities. Others might decide to try running as many different development projects as possible in the hopes of not missing anything (but at a very high cost). Some players may decide to risk everything on picking on technology and giving it full support in hopes that it will work out and let them move ahead of everyone else. Others will pace themselves, content to let others work on the cutting-edge and then imitating whatever seems to be working best (and hope the front-runners don’t get too far ahead).
banking time for buildings upon completion was what i meant.
that’s the idea more or less, for the very first cycle, the game will consist on a blank map, units you can move and use to build settlements and (generic) installations, and nothing more.
We’ll test how it works, change anything that needs to change and proceed with the second cycle, probably adding unit construction, supply and a couple things more.
The idea is gradually adding functionality, testing it, changing and adapting it, and then add more, until the game is working with all the detail we want.
Historically, the care and feeding of troops (logistics) is very important, units of more than a few soldiers require extensive efforts to keep supplied, the scout unit may work as you say, perhaps the rule could be “units of less than n persons do not need maintenance”
Units that have vehicles will need vehicle parts and fuel as part of their supply needs, combat efficiency,morale and loyalty will degrade in units that are not adequately supplied.
That’s interesting, but how do you decide what techs are good and what techs are dead ends?, if you go by historical cases the players will have only to look at the wikipedia to avoid dead end techs.
A very good point here. If you’re going for ultra-realism, each unit would have to have a set lifetime. Also, where do “units” come from? Would it be a interesting bit of realism to have a civilian population to recruit from? Keeping your civilians fed and safe would give you an ever-expanding population to draw on for workers and troops. But if your civilians dwindle because you can’t keep them safe, you’ll enter a tailspin.
Another good point. Who are “you” in the game. Still an omniscient, omnipresent god-figure who can look anywhere instantly and issue commands instantly? Or do you have to transport information as well as resources, etc. That would be a really crazy game to play, but you could imagine that you have an avatar that can move around to give orders, inspect things, etc. And have courier units that can send orders or bring back info. (upgradable into modern technology for faster response.) Not necessarily recommending this, but it’s an interesting idea for a “realistic” civ-game.
Units do not have a set lifetime, they are supposed to be getting replacement troops from their original settlement.
Units came from settlements, their loyalty and morale is strongly influenced by the loyalty and morale of their original settlement.
An undetermined question would be what happens when an unit’s original settlement is destroyed or captured by enemy troops.
We talked about realistic information transfer but decided to draw the line there, it would be, as you say, a really crazy game, 2 things influenced our decision.
it wouldnt “feel” like civilization/merchant prince if info transfer is delayed
info transfer would not be delayed anyway, since players would comunicate via email/chat to get around info transfer limitations.
Currently the “you” in the game would be both the omniscient (but only in things known by your units/cities/buildings) “god” and an avatar with some yet-to-be-defined abilities that would represent the current “leader of the dinasty”, if killed it would reappear again but losing some abilities, loyalty, etc.
Depending where the soldiers are stationed, you might be able to just supply them with gold (i.e. pay them) and they can buy what they need from the local community. But most communities are only capable of supporting themselves indefinitely. If you move in a bunch of soldiers, local resources will become strained after any stored surplus is used… this could be reflected in the locals charging more for food, making the soldiers less happy about what you’re paying them. Or the soldiers begin foraging, which pisses off the locals.
Which means that if someone attacks, your soldiers aren’t as effective in combat because morale is low. Or it means the map area is easier to capture because the people are pissed at you for quartering an army on them. Or both, depending. Maybe if you keep the barracks supplied with gold, it keeps the combat troops happy and well-trained, but the locals are tired of not being able to buy food because the solders are the only ones who can afford it. Someone attacks, and your troops are suddenly in hostile territory with no supply lines because the people in the map area change allegiance. Or if you don’t pay them well, the soldiers go mercenary and switch sides.
I should be able to see what the market prices are for a map area, or set prices if I choose to have a command economy. OTOH, I don’t want to micromanage every time a solider tries to buy food and a farmer tries to sell it to him. They should be able to conduct the transaction on their own.
This is starting to sound like SimCity with shared maps and fighting.
I’ve been thinking about how Frodo talks about giving portions of the map to other players to manage and keep thinking “but why would I want to do that?”
Information limits like this could be a good motivation, as I could communicate with other players using outside channels faster than the game might allow information to travel at a given technology level. Sure, sure, once you’ve discovered the telegraph, radio, and the internet you could probably manage the whole world yourself, but at that point you’ve already agreed to give other people a share based on historical reasons.
OTOH, I can see how this would be very frustrating if you’re used to playing god-mode games.
Probably come up with a bunch of different possible technologies and outline a variety of development paths for each one. Then randomly set up each game with an assortment of paths (which are unknown to the players). Otherwise players will just stick with the historically proven technologies. But in the game, things like gunpowder or electricity might be dead-ends that players will throw money away on without ever achieving any useful technology, while the player who invested his resources developing ether and psionics will rule the world.
It would probably be easier to implement to have the same tech tree prerequisites and dependencies, and vary the costs of individual technologies. You could still go from gunpowder to fireworks to rocketry to a space program, but it would be very expensive in time and treasure. You could still get there, it’s just the other path would get there first, all else being equal. The next game, the tree is weighted differently.
Or it could be weighted differently for different players in the same game… might make it more worthwhile to steal a technology than to research it yourself.
What might be slightly more realistic is having a tech that leads to a number of other techs. Instead of researching a specific tech, the next one you get is randomly generated. So if you have tech a which leads to to techs b, c and d sometimes you will get tech b, sometimes c, sometimes d. If you are after tech d and you get tech b, you will have to do the research again to get tech c or d.
You start out with only the option to throw money at your natural philosophers and they might invent anything on the tech tree (provided you meet the prerequisites). Rarely, they’ll discover, say “Economics” which isn’t an invention you can use to upgrade units/strutures, but gives you the option to research ONLY the economics-related inventions and prerequisites. It might take you forever to discover all the prerequsites for, say, “online banking” just hitting the generic “research” button, but it will be quicker with “research economics”.
Analogy, when you send them to the tech tree, they usually find leaves. Occasionally they’ll discover a branch, and in the future you can send them to that particular branch for more leaves of that particular type.
It would probably be more fun to make “research X” make it more likely their random discovery would be X-related rather than explicitly limit it to a particular part of the tree. That way people would never really know when they’ve found everything on any particular portion of the tech tree because there would always be the possibility it just returned something Y-related by chance. Could be that really-rare world-changing X-invention is still out there.
A player builds a university. It takes 1 gold to call research() which has a 1/X chance of returning an invention/discovery. The amount of gold the university has in storage effects how often it calls research(). If you keep it at 10 gold, it will call research() every 6 minutes resulting in a discovery on average once per hour. At 100gold it calls every 3 minutes. 1000Au, every 90 seconds. Set up a wagon train to cycle between a gold mine and the university and ignore it as it cranks out inventions. If they discover a new field of research, you can assign it a priority, meaning for every time it calls research() there’s a chance (based on priority) it will pass a given argument. Alternatively, build a College of X that will call research(X) depending on how much gold you send it.
I’m thinking of something like cold fusion. We’re spending money researching it and we don’t know when, if ever, we’re ever going to have a useful source of energy. Should we continue funding a technology that may never work or should we be switching those resources to improving more conventional existing energy sources? I’d like to see a game that modelled those kinds of decisions.
Look at WWII. The United States put huge amounts of money into developing an atomic bomb. Germany spent huge amounts of money developing missile technology. Both hoped they were developing a new technology that would produce useful and decisive weapons before the war ended.
During the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets both had programs to try to develop psychic powers. Sure it sounds silly but in a game setting it might have been a good idea that would have produced results. Maybe in the same universe the laws of physics are slightly different and heavier-than-air travel will never be viable. Only cranks keep trying to build an airplane that flys under its own power.
That could be accomplished under the “existing rules” by setting things up this way
First you arrange a repetitive task for a Cargo unit, to carry gold from a mine to a depot in the area.
Second you arrange Automatic Trade for the depot to buy food at a certain price in gold, thus players with farms in the area can get gold by selling food to your depot.
Then you have the units take their supply from the depot.
wich ends up being the same thing you said, more or less
The idea is to avoid managing complex things like economies, supply and demand intereactions and the like via game rules, the extra detail and the huge number of players should result in a realistic “simulation” of those things via player-to-player interaction (ie: if a huge number of troops are in an area, the players with farms in that area will start asking more gold for their crops (since demand has increased), the players that control the cities may not like it and complain to the player that controls the troops…)
There are several reasons why a player must want to share control of his empire with other players
[ul]
[li]To avoid micromanagement (moving, feeding, clothing and housing lots of units could easily take you more time than your actual job)[/li][li]To have a quicker response to events, for example 100 military units managed by one player only react to events when that player logs in, if you divide them between 10 players you have a far more flexible army[/li][li]To avoid parts of the game that bore you (as in the example up thread, you may like city administration and not military strategy, etc)[/li][/ul]
Also, have in mind that the Owner/Controller system will allow you to “lend” parts of your empire/business to other players and take them back when you want.
Other thing you have to keep in mind is that not all the players will control empires, some will only have, say, a fleet of cargo units and some depots, others will have lots of factories, etc.
Buildings belonging to a player can be built on or around cities controlled by other players, there will not be defined “territories” where one player has game-enforced authority. If some one builds an installation in territory you claim as your own, and refuses to go away, you have to actually send troops there (or get other players to do it) and evict him from there.
Taken together it sounds as if you get into the game a little late you pretty much can never control an empire. You either take a role traditionally covered by AI or NPCs (because nobody wants to play that part of the game) or are an abject vassal middle managing someone else’s property.
How do I stab an Owner in the back and take power over what I’ve been controlling, if the game keeps saying it is his and he can toggle a switch and take back my armies?
Maybe have it so if an Owner makes me Controller of a barracks, thereafter whatever troops I spawn view me as their Owner (and the Owner of the barracks as a Controller). Or I could destroy the Owner’s barracks and build my own and put the former Owner as a Controller, and then I’d own the troops spawned in the future. That might be kind of obvious. Maybe implement a periodic replacement (i.e. natural death and decay), so it wouldn’t be a red flag that a Controller has rebuilt a barracks and become Owner.
Or rather than having a strict Owner/Controller either/or you have some way to advance from Controller to a co-equal Owner of the objects you control (like the methods discussed in the prior paragraph). And then some way to challenge the object’s loyalty if two Owner’s are in conflict over how to use something, demoting the loser.
If you’re managing the entire army of an empire as a Co-Owner with the Emperor… you challenge the loyalty of the entire army, and then attempt a coup with whoever falls your way.
That’s when the Loyalty concept enters into play, if you keep your units well fed, and led them to victories, their loyalty to you will grow faster than their loyalty to their owner, eventually they’ll be more loyal to you than to him, and then you’ll have the option to Take Ownership of them.
If you are “middle management” in some commercial enterprise, the route to ultimate power runs through accumulation of wealth, you will not work for nothing, if the installations and business they give to you to manage bring great profits, the CEO players will fight for your services, offering bonuses and the like.
Eventually you’ll be able to start your own business or take over the business of some other players.
Remember that in real life we all start far from controlling empires (except for heirs and the like, but they are represented as a single player in the game).
A player skilled in politics could quickly rise to head of a nation of allied players, even if he started with nothing (See Obama, Barack H) :D.
Also, some players will eventually tire and wish to leave the game, late comers will pick up the pieces of their “decadent empires”.
