So how complicated (as internal critics put it) or sophisticated (as internal advocates put it) should the Elemental economic system be?
We have the code in for handling a pretty sophisticated/complicated economic engine. But the debate is, is the system sophisticated? Or just complicated.
Let me give you the arguments of each camp.
Camp #1: “Sophisticated”
1. Everything in Elemental is a resource. Food, metal, swords, armor, horses, you name it.
2. Resources can be processed into other resources. Iron Ore into a Sword.
3. Part of the fun of the game would be running a proper empire (or letting AI governors take care of it).
Example:
A mine is built on an iron resource. The mine produces 10 units of iron ore per turn. That iron ore is then directed to go to the city of Torgeto where a blacksmith is able to produce 5 swords per turn. The unused iron ore is stored in a warehouse that can store up to 100 units of iron ore.
Those swords can be directed to be shipped to various other places (with sliders or other UI means to determine what ratio goes where).
In some of those places, the swords are issued to soldiers. In other places, the swords are sent to an alchemist workshop who, taking potions that have been shippped in from Wellford which in turn had taken Aeoronic crystal mined in another town to turn into those potions. The resulting magical swords are then shipped out to various places with the player (or governor) able to control the ratio in which they are shipped.
Caravans appear on the map to show the items being shipped. If those caravans are attacked, the items are lost.
Camp #2: “Simple and Fun”
1. There are only natural resources (food, iron, crystal, horses, etc.).
2. When a natural resource is controlled, the player assigns that resource to a specific town.
3. Only that town can make use of it. Towns that don’t have a resource assigned it cannot build units that require those resources.
Unlike camp 1, there are no ratio sliders to mess with. A resource is assigned to a particular town. That makes certain towns more strategic than others and a lot less micro management. On the other hand, it means that there will be many towns that can only build weaker units. Players can research technologies that increase the base (weaker) unit that cities can build over time but some cities will simply be more important than others.
Caravans would still flow from the natural resource to the target town and if those caravans are attacked, the enemy player gains a bonus and the victim player would get a penalty to their production until the next caravan arrives.
The Argument
Camp 1 argues that a lot of fun can be had in putting together ever more sophisticated and specialized items. If natural resources can be processed into new resources that can in turn be processed again and again and again, you can reward players who might be able to equip elite crack soldiers with very rare but very powerful weapons and armor.
Camp 2 argues that while some people would enjoy that, it would result in a lot of people who would find that system burdensome and turn them off to the game entirely. It also says that those who do like the camp 1 system would still be satisfied with camp 2 where those who like camp 2 would probably be totally turned off if the camp 1 system were used. In addition, they argue that Elemental has so much other “stuff” to it (sophisticated diplomacy, tactical battles, quests, etc.) that many players might find they have to rely on AI governors which would put a heavy burden on having really “smart” AI.
Now personally, I could go either way. I do like the idea of players having to choose certain towns that are absolutely strategic. But I also like the idea of being able to have “processed” manufacturing that can keep specializing things until you get some rare but very valuable things.
On the other hand, I’m also worried that a complex system could turn out to fall apart in actual practice (the user interface for it would have to be incredibly good) and then we’d be stuck having to go to camp 2 late in development.
What do you think?
UPDATE: 5/21/2009
Camp #3: The Merchant
Today we looked at the feedback from here and Quarter to Three and came up with a way that may satisfy both camps and increases the fun overall.
1. Everything is a resource.
2. Resources can be processed into other resources (iron to swords, crops to food, crystal to potions).
3. Resources are sent automatically to other towns based on the resource needs of that town. No micromanagement, no AI.
4. The fun of this portion of the game would be in watching your empire grow organically.
There are no ratios to set. If I build a town with a blacksmith, then one presumes I did that because I want to produce stuff that requires a blacksmith. If I build (or upgrade) more blacksmiths, then one presumes this town is a place where I want to crank out a lot of stuff.
Similarly, if I build a town with multiples barracks it presumes I am trying to train soldiers which means that stuff should be shipped there, particularly if I’m in the process of building a particularly type of soldier.
Caravans (which aren’t player controlled) send out regular shipments of resources to the various towns. When these shipments arrive, they’re available for use on demand or, if the town has a warehouse, they are stored.
When players design a unit, they choose a category of weapon and that category of weapon (whether in the field or in a warehouse) will automatically upgrade as my tech gets better. A short sword doesn’t become a long sword or anything like that. But A short sword would automatically become a better short sword if I research tech that improves is in order to remove the complexity of having to “upgrade” units. However, the cost of keeping a soldier in the field will be fairly high and since soldiers come from population, there’s a real down side to keeping throngs of soldiers idle.
In addition, by building roads, my caravans will arrive a lot quicker (3X faster). Similarly, I have to keep my supply lines secure.
This also opens the door for a lot more trading. Rather than just having “food” you can have “crops”. Crops are processed into food and can be traded with other civilizations or used by special buildings (Inns, restaurants, etc.) to increase prestige (which adds to influence).
It also allows players to have the game be very simple (just keep everything local) or highly sophisticated (have weaponry go through multiple processes – a magic sword processed by a Aereon Forge doubles its damage. The town with the Aereon forge is the one that would get on the priority list of magic swords and the Aereon blades produced would be sent to the town with the barracks that is producing your “Night Guard” or whatever you call your designed unit.
But in this way, there’s no real UI other than providing players the ability to close down shops in a city or expedite their priority to get more stuff sent to them. The player remains the king/emperor and not a logistics manager but at the same time is the architect for success of their kingdom’s economy if they so choose.
UPDATE: 5/23/2009
Camp #4: Quarter To Three concept
Having read a lot of posts both here and QuarterToThree we’ve thought of another way to do it that might be interesting.
2. Resources can be processed into other resources.
3. Controlling a resource automatically makes it available throughout your empire at a basic level. The more resources you control, the more that basic level is provided.
4. If there is a road to a city that connects you to where the resource is provided, that city gets a bonus amount of that resource.
5. Cities can build improvements that have caravans deliver bonus amounts of that resource to that city from the source.
6. Cities can optionally build warehouses whose only affect is that they can store caravan deliveries for later use. I.e. if I’m not currently building death knights, I can store caravans of “stuff” so that when I do build them, I instantly get the bonus at that point.
I want my army to be filled with trained knights who have plate mail, steel swords, plate helmets, etc. Those things are expensive. If I control an iron deposit, I can build them though any town with a barracks. Let’s say it will take 30 turns to create that unit. 10 of those turns is the training of the soldier and the other 20 is the production of the equipment. If I control 2 iron deposits, that production is knocked down to 18. If I have a road that connects this town to the the iron resource (directly or indirectly) then I can knock it down another turn for each resource.
I can also build a blacksmith shop. By doing this, caravans will be sent from the iron resource production area to the town with the armory. When that caravan arrives, it will reduce the time even further.
Similarly, if I want to make a magic sword that requires Aegeon crystal to be turned into a magic potion then as soon as I build 1 Alchemist lab in any town, then any town can build magic swords at a base level. If I build 2 alchemist labs, I won’t get any further bonus unless I control more than 1 Aegeon crystal.
So basically, it’s a much simpler system that provides fairly straight forward bonuses for players who want to create a more sophisticated economy.
Camp #1 here for sure btw.
AS a side bar I guess but the impression I got from the OP was that as "resources" were upgraded (Basic to +1, then +2 items etc), the fielded troops could/would be thusly upgraded, for a cost.
Wouldn't having that system in place not alleviate the need to keep stores of the old +1's and +2 resources, thus production of those "resources" would cease and thus reduce the over-all # of resources required to be maintained?
Or do I have to give a soldier a Basic kit first before he is eligible for an upgraded kit?
Ellestar, pls stop the yelping about LOTR or Starcraft. It is not interesting & completely offtrack.
Empire wide industrial Specialization (a desirable feature)
All factories can be upgraded up to level 10. All Unit Producing Building (UPB, e.g. Barrack) can have level 7. Each upgrade further reduces the 10% input material needed to provide same output; in a series of 1.00, 0.90, 0.81, 0.73, 0.66, 0.59, 0.53, 0.48, 0.43, and 0.39.Higher level factories/UPB is progressively more costly to buildWhen any factory reaches the level 5+n (where n=1 to 5), all factories of the same type & of lesser level in the empire will be upgraded to at least level n without cost.When any factory reaches the level 5+n (where n=1 to 5), all other factories of lesser level in the same town will have a 25% discount when upgrading, up to level n.- This represents economy of scale achieved and a national/local industrial specialty when an industry matures.Permanent Caravan Route (a desirable feature) Gamer can setup caravan route for any future resource production output from NR mines or Factory or UPB. X% of its future output per turn is caravanned to a specific location, where X=1 to 200. When X > 100%, it means it’ll remove any stockpile in the local warehouse, whenever applicable. This route can lasts Y turn, where Y=1 to ∞.- It is not exactly a pure PE mechanism. It is also micro. But I realize that some amount of manual caravanning is needed anyway even for PE, why not make it nice & make it set it and forget? This feature alone can simulate some kind of push economy Camp#1 (& thereby the issues comes with it)
@climber - you read my reasons for going this route, correct? If you have 110 resources (presumably more in late game if you have multiple sources of any resource) the map is going to be AWASH in caravans. The only options then are to abstract caravans (not popular because people want to be able to raid them) or you forget about ever seeing the ground because your kingdom is going to be one frothing mass of caravans. They won't even have to move - they can just hand whatever they are shipping from one caravan to the other like an old time fireman brigade passing buckets of water.
I read & knew why u suggest it. But the 'caravan stuck' moment in your model is even more troubling to me, as MR get reprocessed repeatly all the time in many cities.
Maybe the devs should label MR caravan on why it is travelling anyway, to ease the too many caravan problem, regardless on which camp they try to use.
I agree, I think it would be a lot smoother to caravan NR and abstract MR distribution.
Gandalf is a homeless bump, he has no fixed abode on Middle Earth. His "role" in LOTR however is quite different.
I think a role of Gandalf is to be a relatively equal opponent to Saruman and so obviously he should have his own empire in Elemental.
That's what i said from the very start when i said it will be Saruman vs Gandalf in Elemental
Then he wouldn't be Gandalf, but simply a good version of Saruman which is what I said. You are trying to put a square peg into a round hole. I notice you also no longer refute the fact that the sovereigns would steal and trade resources if they really wanted them and they couldn't be found in their own empire.
Have I ever mentioned Hobbits?And board warrior tricks like a straw man argument you just used don't work against me.
my argument against your point has been based on (I'm sorry that you feel that I have been delibrately distorting your argument and sunk to doing the same to mine in revenge):
((Gandalf != Saruman) && (Gandalf != Gandalf with an Empire)) =>
(Sovereigns in Elemental will trade with each other (if not at war)) && (that Sovereigns will try to steal resources from each other (if they are at war or the other one is unwilling to trade)).
It doesn't matter if Saruman vs Gandalf is more logical; its still not exactly right and therfore does not work as you intended.
There is also the fact the in the normal situation, the sovereign is just one person and cannot personally guard every single caravan to stop rivals from snatching them.
Of course, at this point, our arguments have gone on a tangent to the topic on hand and therfore it is pointless to continue them on this thread. Also the fact that we both believe that we are right doesn't help.
I would like to suggest that all resources going to one city from another city should be bundled into the one caravan; up to the max load that one caravan can hold - as a way to marginally clean up the sprawl of caravans.
I'm still basically a Camp 1 person despite all the very interesting counterarguments in this thread. That's mainly because I believe complexity at the modeling level is almost always good for a TBS game, but also because I want to see the genre evolve to include a wider variety of 'action settings.' I consider the UI stuff a fairly separate argument, and am a big sympathizer with the low-click-overhead crowd in that area.
UI stuff aside, the whole solider-whacking-at-soldier thing is pretty well covered in the larger genre, but there's still not much in the way of enabling TBS games to have sub-plots like Stopping That Deuterium Shipment or Stealing Back the Ark of the Covenant. Maybe the quests can carve out similar enough spaces for Elemental. But I worry those will be too X-commy for me and I'd really like to be confronted with some painful clothmap-level choices after, for example, I finish forging a Seriously Scary Sword in my capitol and need to get in the hands of my Greatest Champion, who's deep in the field and definitely not a safe candidate for an attempt at teleportation.
I feel ya. Maybe abstract MOST MR, like mass quantities of swords, armor, food, etc. For something really special like this uber sword or QUEST ITEMS, I don't even think that should be abstracted OR caravan'd - that is a courier job, and you can either go with the unguarded swift version or the slow-with-one-thousand-elite-guards version.
I would not trust a Seriously Scary Sword to a caravan.
You just described a version of the caravan distribution system, with shipping routes and everything. The only differences are that in your version, you make the caravans invisible and to raid them you just attack the actual trade route, and caravan transportation is instantaneous. The caravans are still there, as code and calculations, and under the scenes everything is still there. The removal of the caravans achieves nothing in this case but abstraction for the sake of abstraction, loss of ambience and less strategy (location of caravans is no longer relevant and city specialization isn't as important with universal storage). You'd still need a really good UI to manage it all, so now you seem in conflict with yourself.
Leave your personal slights at the door, they aren't welcome here. I'm actually happy that you're arguing against what seems to be the favorite idea, because that is how they improve. However, snide remarks are as unhelpful as argument is helpful. I never said you need a complex economy for convoy raiding. I said you need convoys for convoy raiding. Starcraft doesn't have convoy raiding, and it doesn't have convoys. You can disrupt economies by destroying workers (like in most RTS games), but few if any TBS games have workers with that same function. In some you need to capture or build structures in order to take advantage of resources, but defending those is not nearly as strategic as defending a distribution network that transports those resources to where they're needed. It's one of the problems in 4X games - people invading your territory usually isn't such a tragedy unless they're heading towards a city, or a mine; but those things are points, and are thus very easy to defend. You don't really need to place your troops strategically, because if the enemy wants to hurt you they have to go towards one of those points. With convoys, or caravans, essentially the whole of your territory becomes important, and you have to consider how to best defend that much larger area. It is similar in Starcraft - if you had to transport resources from the source to a distant location, you'd have to secure the route and not just the endpoints.
If "caravan emulation model" means your description that I quoted at the top of this post, then I must disagree. I don't think it would work as well as a caravan distribution model, and I think there are more disadvantages to universal storage than advantages. The only advantage is simplicity, which in my mind isn't worth the huge reduction in strategy and depth.
Sorry, I've never played Settlers so I was just reiterating Psychoak's point. It'd have been more productive if you had mentioned that there is no automation in your response to his original post (in which it appeared you just ignored everything he said) instead of mocking me for it.
I don't know. Hence the "as far as a know" bit. What makes you so sure that people have tried and failed? It has never been a popular game probably for a number of reasons, one of which being is that it is undoubtedly a challenge and most people have avoided it. But why impossible? Are you a professional game designer? A programmer? A user-interface designer? Do you know anything about AI? If you aren't extremely proficient in most of the above, then you are totally unqualified to say that it's impossible. Even people who are all of the above aren't qualified to say it's impossible - they can only say it's really damned hard and maybe not even worth the effort of trying, but not impossible.
That would be even worse than me saying that magnetic monopoles cannot possibly exist. People have searched and searched and searched for them but none has ever been observed. And even worse because at least I can point to research that explains why magnetic monopoles shouldn't exist (but I can also point to research saying why they should).
The ratio of border:area actually depends heavily on the shape, and if your empire becomes irregularly shaped then it is very possible for the opposite to happen. And if you split a larger empire in two halves, each half might be stronger than you for a little bit, but it'll slowly crumble unless each half is also fully self-sufficient. And again, none of us are saying that a caravan distribution model would allow tiny kingdoms to regularly topple huge ones (that would be a problem, not a good thing), but it provides another means to fighting and another area to out-strategize the opponent.
Why can you only show shipping lanes for one or two resources? Even with 110, Legerdermain outlined one very efficient method of displaying said shipping lanes. Again, don't be so fixated on manually managing all 110 resources at a time. I can't really imagine a scenario when you'd care enough to manually manage more than a small handful caravans at a time. You want your Bear Cavalry to be ready sooner in Bear City? Go in and prioritize distribution of bears to Bear City. Your empire is short on food and you want to sacrifice one city to save a more important one? Go send food from the one to the other. Tell me, what perverse desire has you wanting to control every single resource going in every single direction at every single time (or even at any single time)? The AI should be very capable at handling all, or at least the vast majority, of the boring management, leaving you to step in when things get interesting.
Seriously, no matter how great Starcraft may be, whether or not it requires strategy, it doesn't matter. Starcraft is a Real-Time Strategy game, and the differences btween RTS and TBS/4X are too innumerable to enumerate. If you can come up with a TBS example, go for it. Otherwise, please drop Starcraft - no meaningful comparison can really be made with it.
The best ideas are the unexpected ones. If every game functioned as, "this is what we want, let's do it and ignore any potentially interesting features that might come up along the way," we'd have lots of boring games. The real process here was, "this type of economy sounds great! Hey look, we could also do this!" We aren't expecting caravan raiding, or other features, to spring magically out of the ground without any work from the developers. Nonetheless, to consider the full worth of a possible feature you have to take into account everything you might do with it. If the devs implement a caravan system and do nothing to make caravan raiding function decently, that would be a tremendous oversight and mistake. That is all we are saying, so don't try to put any contrary words in our mouths/hands.
Hardcoding unit limits vs. hardcoding convoy raiding are two very, very different animals. In fact, I don't think it's really possible to 'hard-code' convoy raiding, as it can't just be represented as a fixed parameter. There is a huge difference between 'hardcoding' and abstraction.
I'm starting to agree with you. Making caravans cost you, or doing things like Denryu and I were talking about, would largely be adding work without adding fun/strategy, and thus would be a big no no. That said, I wouldn't mind if caravans are only sent out from resource nodes on less than a one-turn basis, so long as it's not extreme (once every few turns would be fine, and no expediting). I do think that resource clutter could become a little crazy otherwise.
[...]
At first I didn't much like your Empire-wide industrial Specialization idea, but in the time it's taken me to compose this post it has really grown on me. The numbers might need tweaking but the idea is not bad at all. It may even be better to make it based on research (all your blacksmiths would be at least Level N - X, were N = research lvl, X is some number).
The permanent caravan route just seems to me like one example of things we should be able to do manually. I'd like to be able to make one-time and temporary changes, but I'd also like to make permanent rules.
I like your attempt to refine your idea, yet this part of the idea is not preferred. Why my caravan doesn’t just send everything ASAP when the gamer order something? Why the gamer has to wait (or need micro to expedite) when I am stuck at 99 resources? And if my order requires going through multiple does, each town will have a chance that it get stuck & the gamer will want to track it down for the many process that 110 MR will have. Is it fun to manage caravan by optimizing its operating cost? Also no. I say assigning cost to caravan is not a interesting part of the game.
I agree largely with this section.
Incidently this topic has kinda moved a bit beyond the original 2/3/4 camps, Its getting hard to see what model with modifications the actual majority approve of or are arguing for anymore. It could use some major clean up and possibly a repost with an update to the camps or something along those lines
Or they could list all the different features, from all camps, and see who likes what. I really like a lot from camp 3, but I do not like autoupgrade of units in the field and I don't like owning a resource makes it instantly available Civ wide.
If they determined which features are loved/hated/indifferent then they could shoot for a camp 5 option that would incorporate as much as possible of the popular. Or maybe they ahve already taken the voluminous inout and made their decision.
I don't think it matters. This isn't a vote, Stardock isn't going to do whatever we vote on just because we voted on it. Our opinions count, but we don't dictate game development.
(Listening to your fans is good, but doing whatever they tell you leads to insular games that don't appeal beyond what the loudest of the forumgoers wanted. One of Vanguard's biggest issues was that kind of mentality. They listened to the most hardcore players out there, and made a game that appealed to nobody else.)
Of course that's true. But the problem with the "camp" approach is some camps get a lot of qualified support. So to find out what everyone really likes, maybe breaking things down into features and doing a poll (can they do polls here? surveymonkey?) while not being us dictating to SD, it might give them a better feel for what is really liked about each approach. And then they can have more accurate info to make their decision from.
Ok, Ellestar, when I say actual resources being transported from point to point give you actual resources to raid, that is irrespective of the complexity level of the resources. Retorting with a response that a simple game with a simple economy where actual resources are carried and can be raided wasn't particularly effective.
"You suck, Starcraft has college courses" is not an argument against complexity either. That a college offers remedial gaming courses to go with the rest is humorous though, thanks for the information. If you're going to argue against complexity, you need to stick to actual arguments against complexity. You need to specifically say why transporting resources everywhere they go instead of just from the origin to a central depot is better.
That raiding can be done without a supply line doesn't negate that a supply line has to exist to raid a supply line. Abstracting the supply line so that there aren't any actual supplies but still letting it be raided just makes supply line raiding confusing. You're worried about not being able to manage it, but you haven't explained why it would be confusing to have them there. You say having to manage all of the different resource screens would be confusing as well, why? Perfect clarity isn't required for utilization, explain why it would matter if you're not exactly sure of your total while setting up production at a specific site with clear information on what and how long it's going to take.
If the management systems they have described are going to exist, your concerns are at best nitpicking. I'm thinking of the possibilities from interrupting an actual supply chain has and it's making the game look a hell of a lot more interesting. You're saying it's confusing, because for some reason the user is going to count his resource total every turn? This is about what I've gotten out of your posts, aside from a Starcraft fetish.
You quoted it, did you read it as well? You have bears and horses. They both serve the same basic purpose. They are a mount/chariot component. Bears are fucking badasses that eat horses for breakfast, relatively speaking. You balance the expenditure required to obtain bears, with the expenditure required to obtain horses. You assign them both values based on the worth of a unit of that good. Lets say it's five to one, probably a reasonable system for a realistic bear. Slower than horses, but vastly more dangerous an animal. The resources would then be balanced against each other when it took five times as much investment to gain an equal number of bears as horses. So, your hunting camp that gathers bear cubs gets you one a week, your pasture raising horses gets you five. Balanced.
You then balance all the other resources, all the refinement processes, and it no longer matters what the specific unit is. The thousands upon thousands of combinations are impossible to balance, the inputs of a modular component system aren't.
You're calling a real time strategy game slow, as opposed to a turn based strategy game. Yeah... If you measure fun in terms of APM required to play a game, you're in the wrong genre. The automation in The Settlers is the only thing keeping the player from going insane trying to do everything. It would make the Starcraft interface look kind, and that's already a detestable interface requiring hundreds of actions per minute to be anything resembling a decent player. Keep this in mind while mentioning how much work it would be to look at all those caravans. You could have one minute turn timers and still have time left over if you can play Starcraft even halfway decently.
I've got another town closer to the spear production center that has gotten some shipped already, and is closer to the supply anyway. If I build the units there, it'll only take them 5 turns to run up to the border town after I build them (light cavalry is pretty fast compared to a caravan).
What I really want out of this situation is units at my border town ASAP. To find out what ASAP is, I have to look at different towns to figure out which one is closest to my border town that already has a supply of +2 spears.
I consider this a plus. Not that you have to look at two towns, but that you have to have the resources there to build something there. It adds depth to what is normally a pathetic half measure, towns that magically produce things regardless of their location in respect to the resources they're supposedly using. I'd gladly sacrifice a little time for such depth that makes territorial control and logistics important in how you deploy your forces.
I hope not. If they are, you can't chase them down with a light harrying force. I do doubt that your light cavalry would travel three times as fast though. The spears would probably be able to make the trip in time to finish the unit first even if it had a 20% speed advantage. 15 turns to move hopefully means you're trying to send resources halfway across the map, which would be crazy anyway. I'd guess a nearby town shouldn't be taking more than a turn or two to ship the goods.
He's forgetting the context of the argument. When you want to move resources from one storehouse to another, you have to manually create a caravan. There is zero automation for trading resources between settlements, but there being 28 of them still doesn't make it difficult. The production itself is automated, relying on your making sure they're happy and healthy by giving them the right things to keep producing. It's a different scale, but since he said there's nothing to do, he should understand immediately why it's relevant.
Industrial specialization. No.
39% resource usage. This would be a compounding effect at every level, making multi-tier productions actually be more cost effective than the base refinement by more than doubling the products at every level. Nice thought, but that smithy of doom making enchanted blades and armor in two steps is taking a unit of ore and turning it into six plus, while just a smithy would turn it into two and a half. The enchanter is taking swords and turning them into two and a half enchanted swords.
Some level of waste elimination could work nicely at the basic level, but it's much more reasonable to increase the original inputs and productivity. That wont defy physics, or invalidate a multi-step refinement process by making the harder to get perversely more cost effective and plentiful.
Caravan clutter really isn't a big deal. Caravans are by nature, a group. It would only be logical for all resources being shipped, no matter how numerous or high in volume, to travel as one caravan. The unit display could then be changed in regards to the content by increasing the number of wagons/carts/whatever. You'd know how relatively important it was at a glance, your opponent would know the same way, and a popup on mouse over would be all it took if you really wanted to know what was in a particular convoy you were looking at. With a once ever few turns orchestrated transport, they would be regular, uniform, and very easily distinguished.
Please, System 1. That would be simply too amazing.
I recognized another camp was added since my last posting.
I still vote for Camp_3... with Camp_1 as a secondary.
I see several ongoing discussions which should probably be moved into their own topics since it would make it easier for Stardock to count the actual votes of the community.
Fixed
Also, by my count there are at least 7 different camps now including the ones suggested in the last 4 pages.
FYI - not that it will help StarDock, but I created a survey on surveymonkey just to see what kind of response it would get. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=EjNvMWbHExYaTOyb6vfbWg_3d_3d">Click Iexpect this will be buried, so I created a new post in the General forum also.
Well, not exactly. That way you get rid of a per-city resource storage. So, that reduces a number of information screens almost N-fold, where N is a number of cities. Also, you don't need to micro caravans at all as they're not used for actual resource transfer. Ambience will be fine either way, you may show caravans on screen in both cases. City specialization is less important, but i think it's a small loss for a huge reductions in stupid micro. After all, you're still managing your resources on a strategic scale (making buildings that convert resources, checking supplies and production rates etc. - that's a lot to think about in a big empire), i think it's good enough.
Well, psychoak said it and you continued that discussion defending his point of view so i assumed you think the same. Anyway, my point is that you can have convoys without using Camp #1 or Camp #3 way.
Starcraft doesn't have convoy raiding, and it doesn't have convoys. You can disrupt economies by destroying workers (like in most RTS games), but few if any TBS games have workers with that same function. In some you need to capture or build structures in order to take advantage of resources, but defending those is not nearly as strategic as defending a distribution network that transports those resources to where they're needed. It's one of the problems in 4X games - people invading your territory usually isn't such a tragedy unless they're heading towards a city, or a mine; but those things are points, and are thus very easy to defend. You don't really need to place your troops strategically, because if the enemy wants to hurt you they have to go towards one of those points. With convoys, or caravans, essentially the whole of your territory becomes important, and you have to consider how to best defend that much larger area. It is similar in Starcraft - if you had to transport resources from the source to a distant location, you'd have to secure the route and not just the endpoints.
Ok, now i get your point. I think noone really protects routes. Generally, you have some fast units in your cities that can intercept enemies, and you have some extra roads on the front so your border cities can't be easily cut off from the empire.
Am i right in my assumption that you want to make Stacks of Doom weaker and make a war more tactical? I think the biggest problem of a 4X TBS in that case is the lack of the scouting mechanics. In most RTS you can sneak in and attack vulnerable targets while in TBS you can't because enemy sees all his territory. However, scouting in the enemy territory is also lacking in TBS so that killer Stack of Doom becomes too effective - at the moment you know about it, you have no way to react to it unless you have your own Stack of Doom nearby. Also, in TBS there is a lack of RTS engagement/disengagement mechanics - your cavalry can't just outrun enemy infantry even if you want to raid enemy economy instead of fighting. So, the same units are good for city defence and for anti-raider duty. Since it's very easy to spot and kill raiders and it's hard to attack fortified targets like cities with raiders, generally raiders deal less economic damage than their production cost. Another problem is that production cost should be paid now and economic damage happens in the future, so even if you deal damage equal to the cost of the raider you're actually at a disadvantage.
So, i think it's more important either to increase effectiveness of raiding or to make it easier to survive for raiding units, or both. Adding a bigger number of targets for raiding will not really help if raiding as a whole is inefficient anyway.
Yes, it's that model. The biggest advantage is reduced micro requirment. I think there will be too much micro and this is a way to reduce it. I'm not really sure how it adds strategy, micro is not a strategy after all, it's not even tactics.
There is a huge difference between one warehouse with 28 resources and 20-50 cities with 110 resources each. If he says one thing is ok because something 100 times smaller is ok, then he has problems with a logical thinking (which i pointed out) and so he'll not understand any other logical arguments anyway.
I'm a professional programmer. Once i was offered to work as a professional game designer, but i declined. I do know how Civ 4 AI works, but i never wrote an AI myself.
And, well, it's your fault i used that word. I tried to convice you it's impractical. But you didn't listen. Ok, make it impossible, now it's too harsh for you. You say i should have said it's not worth the effort. But i already said it and you ignored it.
As i expected, you just want to add a stupid micro. If you want a bear cavalry sooner, you just need to click somewhere to prioritize it. With one warehouse, there will be no need to prioritize it. Less time spend on stupid clicking means there is more time for actual strategy. Like, how to get resources and how to make a production line for a bear cavalry.
Ok, blockade in Master of Orion II. It reduces production and stops food transfer.
Fine, i also want a caravan raiding. I agree that it's worth discussing various ideas and features, but it's not worth implementing unnesesary things in the game, like Camp #1 or Camp #3 or even a full-fledged caravan system.
I dont have the time to read all 19 pages of this thread, but here's my piece.
Camp 1 sounds like it could end up being a nightmare unless a good deal of time is spent on it to implement it well. Camp 2 sounds a little too dumbed down and, personally, if Elemental ships with Camp 2, I would be disappointed knowing that the game could have had Camp 1.
I like the sound of Camp 3, it rings a beel with the way heroes worked in Majesty, but I can see the same problems happening with it as I had with Majesty's heroes "All my crystal keeps moving towards the town where I have one alchemist, I need it way over here now though, so I have to build two alchemists to make my crystal go there."
Camp 4 sounds like it could work, but now that I know there could have been a non-abstracted economy system with Elemental, I still would get a similar, but not as bad feeling as I would with Camp 2.
My solution, implement Camp 3 and 1, Camp 3 sounds a lot like Camp 1 except that the entire system is automated, to me at lesat, if you can streamline all the features of both together so that they are bascially the same besides automation and maybe a few other differences, it shouldn't be that hard to have a "checkbox" at game setup to change it. Also, Camp 3 I think solves some of the problems that Camp 1 would have, automating the caravan process would help to get rid of a lot of the micromanaging that might come along with Camp 1 in the late game.
I do not like the new option 4. It's way to simple. Everybody as access to the iron. No way. The mine could be months away but hey no problem lets beam it it the baracks and lets get it done.
No thank you.
I pstill prefer option 3. It's more like a fantasy world and less like a sci-fi world.
With even all the non-topical verbose banter to try and persuade me.
Still Camp #3.
I know that and I hope that while they listen to our feedback, they do take in to account mostly everyone here is of the hardcore sector and make sure it does have wider appeal - because I want this game to do well 'cause it looks cool.
like denryu (spelling soz) says it would be nice to see what everyone on the forums wants, even just for our benefit becuase of the introduction of two additional camps after this topic started, has kinda made the whole subject hazy on our end.
I'd love a hybrid between camps 1 and 3, basically allowing camp 3 as a governor control for camp 1 system. I like the idea of having caravans that can be raided for goods, but there's little need to set them all up individually unless you want to make it slightly cheaper or otherwise beneficial to manually move things around. Also, seeing an oncoming threat you might shut down or divert certain routes so that they are not intercepted by enemies.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
