Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game.
So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game.
Here’s how it works:
Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person.
The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage in an attack they can potentially do), defense (how much of an attack they can potentially deflect), their health (how much HP they have), and their speed (how many attacks they get in a round).
These traits come from giving the unit weapons, armor and equipment.
It’s in what you equip your unit with that things get..interesting.
Let’s look at a late game unit that a player might potentially design (and none of this is set in stone as beta testers will have a lot of say on this):
I have created a unit called “Dread Knight”.
Equipment:
Weapon:
Armor:
Now this may even be a simplified unit design depending on where the beta takes us. The point being, the creation of this unit may hinge on several different resources being under the player’s control.
Now, in say Civilization IV, if the player didn’t have oil, they couldn’t build tanks. A unit would have a single resource requirement total.
But here, because players are designing their units, there may be several resource requirements. Which begs the question, what happens if you lose control of one of them? How should the game handle it?
I can think of a few different options:
I’m a little biased for option C because I’d like to see the resources treated as bonuses rather than as pre-requisites. We keep the armor and weapons as straight forward as possible and have the “power” be in a large number of optional equipment the player can add on.
A variant on Option C - what if there is an automatic back up option that's always available? So for example, if Mithril is unavailable, then the player starts getting units with normal Long Swords and helmets, rather than the nicer, shinier ones. In the case of the Twililight Honey Pack, perhaps they just lose the bonus.
edit - This way, a player loses a valuable bonus without being forced to redesign their units.
When this happens, the player can be informed of the lowered quality, and the reason, but they're not forced to redesign anything immediately (unless they want to, of course).
This way, a more casual player knows what's happened, and can just get on with the game. Alternately a more hard core gamer knows to jump in and tweak the unit designs.
A possible tie in to this would be to have a 'grace period' after losing a resource that represents stock piles being used up. So for example, I lose my Mithril mines, at which stage I'm notified that supplies are running out, and I have (say) 10 turns to recapture the mines before my troop production will be affected. This adds a number of interesting choices to a game - do I continue as planned, or retake the hives I just lost? Do I target the enemy's army, or reduce his production ability so that his Dread Knights are less fearsome?
Yeah I see now why you are wanting to make resources give bonuses instead of prerequisites.
For reasons I put in the other thread I still think that making it a requirement is desirable.
How about making certain materials give a bonus to an item? This allows an option C type of resolution.
For instance, what if a mithril sword was an iron sword with a mithril overlay (which gives the sword a bonus)? Then if you lose mithril, your unit gets just an iron sword (notifying you that this was happening when you lost the mithril resource of course)
For a few things this does not work as well, i.e. horse mounted units vs bear mounted units. On those you would need specific defined units for each mount type. But for metal, wood or crystal I could see the advanced/rare material just being an overlay that provided an additional bonus to the item.
I think going this route (making a mithril sword be an iron sword with mithril added) gives you the ability to treat almost everything like "equipment" in the 'c' option above. And I think it is the best of the three options by far.
One problem that I see with substitution is that you will then have some dread knights running around with mithril weapons and some running around with iron weapons. This would be a bad, bad thing imho. So maybe a is the better option after all.
I don't remember which economic model was going to be used for starters...
I'd favor A mixed with C. I mean, if you don't have mithril, forget about those nice mithril armour pieces and swords. (no more Dread Knights for you) You should get a warning about substituting pieces if je still wants to build them but... well, that would be like a new unit. If instead of the lack of mithril we talk about the lack of twilight bee apiary (why do I get the feeling that some bees at Stardock are going to be in the credits of the game?), then you can still build those Dread Knights without it (ok, you could build the Dread KNights without the mithril but they would go without weapon or armour...) because it's just an extra.
Out of curiosity: the Attack, Defense and HP... is there possibility of changes/evolution? Like adding other stats (no need to get hyper realistic but yes more varied) and/or skills. Not that I don't like the simplicity of the current system.
Edit: damn me. Forgot about that if you lose a resource (mithril in this case) but it's not just a bonus but you actually get to store quantities of it... well, you have your buffer there until you reclaim the resource again.
This is a slightly unrelated thought, but...
Will units have experience in some sense? I like the thought that my battle hardened troops will be more effective than the raw recruits fresh off the factory floor, as it were. The thought of units have battle honours or flags to go along with their experience would be kinda cool as well.
I would just like to chime in with Winter that, as nice as simple attack and defense is, we really need more stats. If nothing else we need resistance for each element. (I think of it as in GalCiv2 defense vs lasers/missiles/projectiles.) I think that if this is not present, then the diversity of the elements themselves is lessened, it makes all the units too vanilla.
Hm to be honest, I have no problems with Option A at all [Civ4 style -> Resources have hardcore strategical value that way]...but Option C looks ok too.
Adding another step into the economic model would help this senario out. For instance:
Mithril ore is used to make mithril armor that can be stored in a warehouse.
These armor pieces are then used to make troops.
If you lose the mithril you can still make the troops for some time but will have to get back that mining node for future production (or start trading for some armor).
Your notification feedback would come from a blacksmith that says "I have run out of ore".
Variant C hands down. Just add a dash to the units name or something so we know they are substandard.
I think you can merge options B and C.
When you lose a key resource you should be given proper notice of what that means. If you're building multiples of the unit in may need to pop up a screen saying that you only have enough of the resource to produce the object in one town... slowly. Would you like to substitute a different item instead? How much of the material is in storage across the kingdom/empire for the building of a last few units with it?
Personally I also find it painfully difficult in 4x games when a resource is lost and suddenly all production on a unit is lost because you don't have the resource to complete it and must start over. So whatever you do please don't go with Option A.
Option C sounds like a good idea to mitigate the micro-management of option A. Always a good thing. Option A I'm used to from most other games, and I would be fine with it. Not a fan of Option B.
As Tourresh mentioned, make sure it's obvious from unit selection which units are lacking items from the original "blueprint".
Why not go a simple route? After the resource is lost the player is given ten (or whatever) turns during which thier "stockpile" allows them to to continue building the units. After the time is up, give them the option to modify the units to make them legal or make an entirely new one.
That or the unit just takes longer/costs more. Thats super simple, and may be the best option.
Option C, but keep the "bonus equipment" as part of the unit, just greyed out on the units profile. If/when your empire re-aquires the resource, you can move your unit back to a city, and hit "re-supply" or something to bring that unit up to standard.
Maybe expand the idea of equipment a bit - add one-time-use equipment to unit designs like healing salves, magic scrolls, or grenades or whatnot. Once they are used they are greyed out until you re-supply in a city. This way the player gets used to the idea that you may need to re-supply your units to get them to 100%, and would provide a natural bonus to a defending empire (easy to re-supply one-time-use powerups).
And like Tourresh said above - a simple indicator on the unit icon so the player knows which units aren't up to snuff.
But, if the player is missing a resource for the core equipment I'd rather see option A or B, because I don't want a thousand variants of Dread Knights running around.
I like C, though I'd like to see some of B mixed in. For nonessential items - like your honey that adds 10% hp, etc - C is fine, if access to the item is lost, just build the unit without that bonus (although it'd be good to inform the player that the 10 dread knights he just queued up will lack that bonus).
For items that you don't want to simply leave out, like armor and weapon, I'd prefer B; to see the unit still get built without the resource, just slower. If your unit uses an iron sword, and losing access to iron means you either have to redesign a new unit with a bronze sword (A) or choose a replacement sword when you try to build the unit (C), either way it's painful micromanagement. And not just micromanagement when you're training the unit, but it creates more micromanagement later - units with iron swords may perform noticeably better in combat than otherwise identical units with bronze swords, so you now have to keep track of which units in your army use iron and which got the bronze, perhaps relegating the bronze sword units to city garrison or acting as a rear guard over your supply lines, while the iron sword units are the front line, first to attack. This may sound fun and tactical, but multiply it over potentially hundreds of units, and it'll just be a pain - for simplicity's sake I'd much rather know that every unit of a given type has an iron sword, even if it takes longer to build them without access to iron.
A good number, I think, is 2x build time without the resource; i.e. if my soldier with an iron weapon and iron mail normally takes 15 turns to train, he should take something like 30 turns to train without access to iron. Of couse it's more complicated than that, what if he uses an iron sword but leather armor and you lose access to iron? However the details work out, though, I think it should wind up taking about twice as long at the most without a resource. This is a big difference, it makes you want to get access to iron, but not such a massive difference that it's no longer worth building the unit if you lose access to the resource. Keep in mind that, if you temporarily lose access to iron and you need units asap, you always have the option to build an older bronze design - but unless I'm desperate, personally I'll stick with building the iron design half as fast and focus on getting that resource back.
This is a great idea too, it lets you get all your units back up to standard later if you temporarily lost access to a resource, so you don't have to worry about some units of the same type having different stats (which I'd really like to avoid having to micromanage).
I like C as well, especially if you can design units via equipping them with things that break the rules. I think making sure we have the ability to create rulebreaking units is important to unit diversity. If we're only deciding attack/defense and hitpoints then the idea is just to make the best we can. For example creating a unit with a "first strike" like ability that allows them to attack first whether they are defenders or attackers.
EDIT:
I just thought of a pretty neat way to do this.
Give them a couple extra equipment slots that you can call "Special training"..
Here you can equip them with special training in things like "first strike" or what have you
This is how I'd like to see the resources handled, as it was something that always struck me as missing from Civilization - my mighty nation was completely shut down in the later stages if I lost my oil fields. Now, this made them a great strategic Target, however it didn't make any sense that I wasn't able to somehow prepare for this.Perhaps adding a Warehouse Building that enables a small percentage of a resource or produced items to be stockpiled when not being used in Unit production would be the best method? This ensures that your not able to stockpile thousands of items and keeps resources' strategic value, while also ensuring that losing your only available Iron Mine, for example, doesn't completely remove your ability to muster some kind of defense.
I think my concern with option C is the required interface behind it, essentially all Option C does is create a temporary unit design so that the player doesn't have to.What I want to know is how temporary, if I lose a resource needed to build a unit it will ask me if I want to continue building it, but what if I click yes and close the build window then reopen it, and build a second of the unit, will it ask me again? what if I change to a different city will it have to ask again? or will it assume that I want to do the same thing in each instance (of particular importance if resource levels differ between towns). What if I take back the resource later in the turn, will it continue to build the worse unit or detect that the resource is back and upgrade them again?Additionally, part of me suspects that the drawbacks of Option A are being overstated, if we take the Dread Knight\Twilight Honey example then the likely hood is that throughout the game, as I acquired new resources and technology that I have already created about a dozen precursor units to the Dread Knight, so rather than framing it as a Dread Knight minus Twilight Honey, it would simply end up being a unit I had probably already designed.Given that as a thought, I suggest allowing players to create "timelines" of units, so to speak, so that if a resource is lost you can simply revert it back to the unit it was upgraded from, so that you don't have to worry about whether it is a "Dread Knight" or a "Dread Knight -1" it is simply a "Black Knight" or whatever you happened to name the previous unit.As an aside, Please allow the creation of separate unit lists for custom races, by which I mean If I create a "Knight of Good" for my Good faction I don't want them turning up each time I play as my Evil faction, especially if it involves having to delete each and every variation of them that existed as technology improved.
I think it kind of depends on how resources are handled in the game. Do you harvest the resource and stockpile it (or the products made from it), or do you simply have it available and use it on demand? Does each city need their own resource for making gear for units from it, or is it empire-wide or regional?
The next question is how easy/hard is it to lose that resource? Are resources generally located far from the cities that use them? How likely are you to lose a resource in the first place; does an enemy need to invade deep into your territory to capture the resource or is it located so far from cities that guards/reinforcements will take a long time to get there in the event that the resource is lost? If it's deep in your territory odds are that either it's a raiding party you can somewhat easily deal with,or it's a part of a larger invasion and capturing the resource is merely a part of hampering your ability to reinforce your lands.
What I'm trying to say is, the amount of "hassle" that comes with losing a resource should be somewhat related to how easily it can change hands to begin with. If an important resource is likely to change hands quickly and often, the impact on unit design should preferably require as little micro-management as possible, and preferably it should automatically change to a backup-design or something. This is doubly important if losing one resource impacts multiple cities, since a resource changing hands often resulting in you manually changing building orders for multiple cities every other turn is a recipe for tedium. Mulitply that with the number of different resources a unit can depend on.
If losing a unit resource is a major thing that is unlikely to happen very often, then some micromanagement is less of an issue since there's likely several actions the play will need to take anyway in order to deal with the issue.
Hmmm, that was very general and uninformative. Sorry, I'm better at playing games than designing them
Honestly, why not make it that that if you have mithril which should be rarer than Iron you can research the ability to use it, and each round you stockpile an amount of the resource and as long as you have it stockpiled and researched you can use it, and by research, one to mine it, another for armor etc.
That way if you find it early you can start mining it, even if your economy is not up to building such units yet. That way geographic luck play in, as well as your decisions on when to start collecting a resource through research, I mean its a vital decision research the ability to collect said resource or to research that gives you a more immediate bonus, but one that is not near as useful later on. It all depends on 2 things Brad, how detailed you want to go into an economic model, and how much housekeeping on the programming side there is.
Personally I think lots of resources and requiring a stockpile or active collection of said resources is a good thing. It forces the player to create defensive positions around important resource collection areas and not just go well I will use it while I got it, or in you .1 collection idea of just waiting forever to buidl a few powerful units. One nice thing about stockpiling like that is say you lose a city, you have two options on how stockpiles are handled, either it is distributed throughout the empire so each city has a % or the cities that actively collect it stockpile it and losing that city means the enemy collects that stockpile
It makes exploring in the early game useful, and exploring in the early game could be extremely dangerous depending on the number of monsters in the world +AI etc.
Anyway just my two cents, and I would like to say that other than issues that other people have reported, I am having a wonderfully stable experience on Windows 7
Luke
Option C is more work for Stardock but other then that I can't see a downside.
+1 vote for Option C
Sammual
I'd want to see something like Option C. The way I'd want the units to be kept to a minimum is have a system that holds what is a direct upgrade of something elser (you might have to send some time early on, or just use a few pre-made sets) If you have mithril helms on all your guys once you gain access to mithrel, (because all I'd want is the cheapest armor, leather oc icot, and the best armor, mithril, adamantine, oricalcum, ect. I'd only use bronze or steel when thats my best option most likely) So it wouldn't bother to show all my middle ground guys if I have access to better upgraded forms of them.
I kinda thought this question was tied up in the resources part of the game. My understanding was that since caravans were moving resources from mines/bee apiaries all the time, there was at least some of a given resource heading to a town at any time. Those resources would start into motion when you made a build, that would (invisibly to us) start to move iron/bees/etc toward the town in which the unit was being built. The upshot of this was, to deny a player building the Honeyed Warrior O' Doom you think he's building, you need to control the mine, the apiary, AND hunt down and kill his caravans before they get to the city. You can't build any more once the resources are depleted, of course, but there's a time lag between when you take control of an opponent's mine and when they truly can't build a unit requiring resources from that entity, because some of the resource is alread enroute to his cities.
Am I just woefully behind the times on the thinking now? I know we chose (at least initially) a simplified economic model in the other thread on economics (Stardock Dainty Underthings Made Public, or some such thread), but I thought that caravans still were part of the game, moving resources around between towns. Heck, I've even seen the little wagon wheels in the build we have.
Option C seems the better option imo. I could live with option A but it might be a pain when you loose a ressource to have to reorganize everything.
Imo the dream option would be the unit gets created with everything available if it reaches 150% of its regular build time without getting the ressource. You then have a resuply option as suggested by elkoba.
This resuply option could be managed by a list and avoid micromanagement for example the available resuplies: 10 troops waiting for mithril swords with the options replace all and resuply all (eventually greyed out). and some popup window prompting you to resuply if there is available equipement for troops . Eventually the same two buttons on individual troops for micromanagment addicts.
I agree with Draginol that option C is the best, but the above point should be addressed: IMO the incomplete Dread Knights should "run around" with a marking that makes the player realize their weakness, but should also be auto-upgraded as long as the resource is recovered by the player and kept for a certain number of turns. (having them go back to a city to upgrade would be more realistic but quite tedious IMO, I hated having to do that in MOOII with starships).
Option C works for me, keen to playtest it and see how it flies.
Are we doing different training types in unit design? Examples: Anti-cavalry, phalanx formation, long range accuracy etc? Pre-reqs can be research & specific barracks add-ons etc
What about traits bestowed by buildings? Morale bonus for church, big one for cathedral etc?
P.S. Go dreadknights
So from my understanding of how resources will work, you can build warehouses in cities, and use them to stockpile resources (that is how it's going to work, right? That's what I remember, anyway)
Assuming that's how it will work, then I think you should be able to build the unit so long as you are producing/mining the necissary resources, or you have them stored in warehouses. If you have been stockpiling mithril since the beginning of the game, but then you loose your mithril mines, you can still build units using mithril, at least until you run out of stockpile. If/when you run out, I'd go with B or C.
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