One of the things in Elemental we've been thinking hard on is how the economic system in the game should work. Elemental is, first and foremost, about building a civilization that happens to exist in a world filled with magic.
So when it comes to building things, we are trying to get away from the classic "N production units". There are, for instance, no factories in Elemental. We want players to really understand just how big of a deal it is for a civilization to be able to produce mounted warriors who have metal armor and metal weapons. It's not just knowing how to build such a unit, it's being able to put together the infrastructure to produce such a unit.
Players don't research types of units, they research technologies. Players then design their own units and those designs require certain resources. A basic soldier with a club is pretty easy. You take a guy, arm him with a big stick. A better soldier might involve same guy, armed with same stick but trained. Now he's much much better but it will obviously take longer to get that unit. It's not about production then, it's about time.
A still better soldier might be equipped a bronze sword instead of the stick. But that bronze sword didn't just come out of nowhere. The metal had to be mined and then forged and then delivered. Of course, the challenge from a game-design point of view is that you don't want players to be forced to micro-manage such things. It's supposed to be a strategy game, not an inventory management game. And so, you make that issue something for your civilization to deal with - not the player.
A given land tile may have a metal resource on it. The player builds a mine on it. That mine then produces N units of metal per turn. That metal then flows to the keep's inventory (in the city). When the keep's inventory gets filled, it then starts getting sent out to other cities (little caravans start appearing on the map delivering this stuff). All of this is automated but evidence of a growing civilization. Players can build warehouses to store more inventory of a resource. A player can also build an armory which produces weapons which flow again into the keep's inventory and then into warehouses if built and then out to the country side to other cities. Players can build roads to increase the speed in which these resources make it (and incidentally, these caravans only go out sporadically so the map isn't going to be full of these units running around and they're not true units, they'll be almost like decoration except when attacked).
So when I go to build a unit, the amount of time it takes to build that unit is going to be based on decisions I made -- what am I equipping him with. How much training am I giving him? And of course, since populations of "cities" range from 100 to 1 million or so, one of the resources units require are people. A village of 100 people obviously can't conjure up a legion no matter how much money and resources you have.
How will all this actually be implemented? That's where the open beta will come into play. Our development tools allow us to quickly implement many different concepts and UI's. that's where a lot of our work has gone into so that we can make changes like this. Players saw hints of this in Galactic Civilizations where we could make dramatic changes to the game based on player feedback but it's nothing compared to what we've built for Elemental.
So for instance, do players want to prioritize where these caravans go? How much control do players want of this kind of thing? Would it be more fun to actually have technology branches dedicated to having governors (not AI, just bonuses to supply) that "manage" this. These are some of the many things that players will be involved in.
The main thing I wanted to get across is that we are not going to have the traditional "N units of production". Players will be able to design their units, design how much training (a small squad of elite soldiers or a huge mob of untrained brutes or somewhere in between?), decide how well equipped you want them to be and so on. It's not about sending out a knight. There is no "knight" unit unless you choose to call a unit you designed that has a horse, a soldier who has been trained, plate mail, sword, helmet, etc. a knight when you save it. How long would this knight take to create? Possibly very little time at all if you have the plate mail, sword, helmet, and horse ready to go. Then it's just a matter of the training time. Otherwise, it could take quite a long time (the game will estimate the time based on arriving supplies).
Hopefully this gives you a glimpse at the strategic depth we want to provide players. The choices for players in how they want to play this game are endless.
What I'd like to see, that's missing from most every PC based game, is the hidden economy that's part of a lot of board games, which is "actions points" or "command/ruler points" or some such. Many board games give the players X actions per turn and it's those actions that are your most precious resource.
In PC games, you can pretty much give an order to every single unit and city every turn, which means the player can feel obligated to micro manage to squeeze out every inch of efficiency. I'd love to see a more limited command activation (some wargames have this). So, I might have 50 armies in the field, but as monarch I only have enough time and commanders to activate 15 of them. The rest would defend, but I just don't have the intelligence and logistics infrastructure to be ordering them all around every turn. I could choose, perhaps, to hire heroes or commanders that improve my actions per turn. HoMM has this, but in too extreme a form, where only heroes can activate.
For the pure underlying economy, I like the idea that what a town can build is restricted somewhat by size. I don't think I want to babysit caravans, but the idea of the time it takes to build a unit varies with the distance to resources. Or, if you have "logistics points" you could spend those to hurry it. Or perhaps towns could invest in people and/or improvements that would improve such transit times (dedicated quartermaster, or magic portals connecting 2 towns, etc).
In a nutshell, it boils down to opportunity cost with logistics as well as resources. You not only have to decide where to spend your gold/mana/iron/wood/etc, but also have to decide how much of your infrastructure it'd take to do that build. Producing yet more stuff has dimishing returns if you don't have the infrastructure available to use that stuff.
gah, reminds me of my experiment with kriegspiel. Very interesting game, but even a massive advantage was hard to exploit because of the limit to the units you could move. It's very frustrating when you can't take advantage of a superior strategy. I do like the economic ideas, though. Roads become highways become magical portal networks, sounds fun. From what I'm getting from this, that's what it'll be like, where you need to figure out how much to prioritize infrastructure.
Ii works well in wargames because it makes them more fluid. But each unit has its own agenda, and even if you don't give orders to them they should be able to do ather things than "stay here and defend".
But an action point system would be interesting because it would limit the maximum size of your empire. And why not spells/research that would raise the logistics? (and then have an upkeep. Oh wait .. it reminds me something ) then commands as "patrol" or "go raze that ennemy city" would be really important cause you wouldn't need to ask again each turn to the unit what they need to do.
Will it be as easy as "create the unit WXKFZ I just designed" and then the game calculates everything or do I have to manually send caravans to that town?
I think the full supply side system should be modeled in the game as well as the demand side and things should accounted for to the individual item with an option to have a simplified economy if the gamer so chooses. The real issue will be in how the AI would handle both systems. I don’t like hidden economy systems and all the bullshit that goes with them to be honest. I want the full system out in the open with detailed records and stats with an option to automate things at my leisure via governors or administrative assistances.
I would also like to be able to enhance or create custom items for my units. For example if a standard sword takes 2 metal resources if I want to give it a +1 physical effect I should be able to create an enhanced basic sword with a cost of say 3 metal resources.
I think one of the key things here is that sometimes there is no subsitution for time.
In GalCiv or most other traditional 4X's, if you build enough factories, you can crank out an amazing # of units per turn.
But that is a uni-dimensional design. There are other factors in place including time to train, delivery of resources from other places, etc.
The reason we have such a simplistic system today is that the 4X genre got started back when our PC's were a lot wimpier and we simply couldn't have the game go out and put together more complex algorithms for estimating time before the unit is complete. But that is no longer the case.
Another reason is the difficulty traditionally in creating UI for these games. Elemental's UI is built by DesktopX so we can really refine the system to prevent micro-management.
When I click on a city and want to see how long it will take for my squad of Paladins to be made it will still say "9 turns" but that 9 turns will be now based on:
Yet, in another town, it might only take 8 weeks even if the city is a totally undeveloped town:
Excellent. And will we just have to click one time on the "paladin" button we created before? Or will we have to first ask for horses, then plate mail, then long swords.
And what about the goods if I take an enemy town? Will there be some way to burn our resources if we see an invioncible army coming our way (that was the scroched land tactic used during WW2 in Russia)?
Sounds good. Does that mean there won't be any "Quick Buy" options for units? I never have liked that, even though it's been a staple of most 4X games. It's not like the US military could rush build a new aircraft carrier and have it ready in 1 week just by throwing more money at it! As you say, there is no substitute for time.
And even if they did rush a project, launching it before schedule, it would have loads of problems! So maybe allow rushed but give the unit penalties. Of course, that probably is something to suggest in GalCiv, not here where units are people, not machines.
Although rushing a unit of swordsmen leaves only 60% of your units actually equipped with swords! Or only 40% have all the designated armour! It might be worth having a slightly weakened unit when you're in a tight spot.
Does this means unit sizes are fixed? So you design Squads consisting of n Units armed with Weapon x and Armor y, Riding z ?
Really interesting looking economical system, making use of the infrastructure/roads for more then just troop transport. It sounds far beyond what I could hope for, but afterall; this is Stardock! I will pre-order for sure when my next pay check arrives!
Come on Stardock, show the world the great potential of turn based strategy!!!
Damn you, Stardock! How am I supposed to enjoy Empire: Total War now?
Would there be any way to speed up training time? eg. you build a barracks and now training time is 25% shorter
This way you won't have a small village with hardly any buildings produce a unit as fast as a huge metropolis.
When I click on a city and want to see how long it will take for my squad of Paladins to be made it will still say "9 turns" [...]
Yet, in another town, it might only take 8 weeks even if the city is a totally undeveloped town
I hope that you don't have to click through all your towns just to see which one can build a specific unit the fastest at a given time. That would lead into micromanaging hell.
Then why in the first town do they only train for 8 weeks instead of nine? They should be 9-week-trained knights. If you don't give that automatically, it would be an advantage to micro-manage and make sure city one has 9-week trained knights and city 2 has 8-week trained knights ( = more micro management = evil). And how do they train without the swords? Yes, you can use wooden swords. How do they train horseback riding before they have the horses? You need to either put training at the end, once everything else is available, or make it an order that's available all the time.
I'd like to see a system where your unit has three stats:
-Built-in (armor, weapon, natural strength). These don't change unless you outfit your unit differently or cast a mutation spell on it.
-Experience: Veterans are not veterans because they are well-trained but because they faced actual death. Nothing replaces experience, so give experience points that boost troops after combat. You might even envision some arenas where you pitch your soldiers against each other in evil death fights. You'll lose some, but the remaining ones will be experimented. Basically, fights grant experience points which grant levels. Fast for the first levels, very slow and probably capped for the higher levels.
-Training: Can be gained with time in a barracks. This requires your unit to be in a city with barracks for instance. Like experience, you gain points with time, but it's a different level from experience. And you need both experience and training to be really elite.
Another issue is whether you can disband units. If so, you can arm some units with sticks, move them around, and disband them somewhere, effectively controlling where your population will be.
In medieval times, it was very common that knights were aristocrats training for war most of their time, while commoners were raised and given sticks, spears and sickles to go fight with their lieges. Such a militia would have to be disbanded fast otherwise noone would be able to tend the crops. Do you think of any way to represent something like that or do you go the classical 4X way of doing a professional, standing, army?
Very promising concept. Though, as Wahngrok also points out, it also sets other requirements on the UI. I'd want to be able to know why my units are produced faster at my puny village V than at my splendid capital C. So essentially, I'd also want to be able to get the kind of information outlined above. And at the civilization-level, I'd want to quickly get a clear overview of the production capabilities of my cities; and, easily get some kind of overview of how I can improve a certain production capability somewhere.
I like of realism, but only up to the point where it doesn't hurt gameplay by making it hard for the player to grasp the game-logic. Recall MOO3, anyone?
BTW, having not posted in a long while, let me also note that I admire the continued willingness to engage in discussions on the gameplay design with us, the players!
@Frogboy - great. That is what I had in mind. Except I hope the enchanted long swords were created by the avatar while "hanging out" in the town. I'm firmly convinced that enchanted items should be linked to the avatar's magic pool. I can see if special creatures are added with such abilities on a very limited scale but in general all the magic should come from the avatar. It would be nice to have weapon, armor, steed and siege equipment enchantment as proficiencies for the avatar.
@LDi - I also want that kind of system. Except I want the option to micro everything. To me micro is part of the immersion effect for the game. Maybe I'm too much of an old P&P gamer.
No substitute for time? I think you mean,
'There's no substitute for POWER'. Ummm.....pOWer.
(work per unit time).
Sounds like a fantastic concept, although there are a couple of things I'm not so sure about. Well first of all this doesn't sounds particularly...uhm...magical. In my opinion there really should be ways to affect what role your troops play on the battle field besides quality of weapons, armour and training. You had mentioned griffins, that sounds great, some exotic mythological mounts would help a lot. I think it's a must, however, to have magical weapons and armour that you can give to your units. I'm not talking small bonuses either, how about swords that can be planted into the ground to cause earthquakes that damage all units on surrounding tiles and the like? Upgrades and spells would be nice too, because otherwise it may just end up being "historical" armies where we have realistic Medieval warriors in realistic gear, with minimal magic and mayhem, except when fighting the odd dragon or giant spider. This will be less of an issue if the player can realistically afford to have heroes with most of their armies, who will hopefully be able to equip items and perhaps use some magic. If not though, the above may be worth considering.
The second thing is variation, basically you can get footmen, archers and cavalry by the sounds of it, in light, medium and heavy varieties. Are all of the races going to work on this same model? What about factions? What will distinguish the armies of the different sides from each other? In other words will the Fallen and Humans be using different equipment and play differently on the battlefield?
The last thing is that all of this sounds pretty complex if indeed your armies are going to be composed of thousands of individuals, even more so if you allow units to have spells and magical weapons, which is an issue that may require some thinking in and of itself regarding how best to optimize the system so players can make epic-sized armies without a lot of difficulty.
Well, if there's any developer that can pull off such an ambitious mechanic it's Stardock, I'm sure you guys will do an awesome job no matter what you decide to do.
ZubaZ hopes Elder Brother Wu (the money lender) is around. Otherwise I'm in a world of hurt.
Interesting, Brad. I've been hoping somebody would find some way to tweak the 4x production model beyond just "If you have Iron, you can build Swordsmen instead of Militia" (which was a very nice tweak in its own right)!
I love the notion of limited resources and transportation abilities creating bottlenecks for what you can produce when and where. A few thoughts/suggestions:
@FarAway Galciv - Most excellent points to address directly to be honest. I assumed they would already be accounted for in the system outlined. This assumption is based on my experience with Entrepreneur. However that was some time ago and we should never really assume anything.
I'm not against allowing people to micro. I'm against forcing them to. If you have to devise one unit per city to make the most out of their training/construction time, then you're forcing micro through bad interface. If you abstract training a little, then you can get the same effect without forcing to micro.
You'll still have a lot of opportunity at micromanagement with Brad's system anyway, since some units will be trained, others not, and you'll want to keep track of that, group them how you like, etc.
I too am for a dual system as I have pointed out in several threads already. With the computing power available for this title having both either in a single or dual GUI should not be an issue methinks.
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