Internally we are constantly playing, testing, and trying out new ideas.
Here are some examples of discussions we have had:
To: Team From: Brad Date: Feb 2010 Re: Tile density
One of the things I’m a bit concerned about is how barren the world is. We want to make sure that Elemental’s world is filled with interesting things that make each game different.
Here’s a picture with an example of what someone might find early on:
Here’s another:
To: Team From: Brad Date: Feb 2010 Re: Making turns count
One of the absolute goals in Elemental is to make sure we balance it so that every single move means something.
I want us to avoid what we had in GalCiv where there were a lot of “pass” turns, we want to enrich the world such that game flow proceeds with a disciplined design.
So as we’re balancing things, we should be cognizant of how different elements fit together.
For instance:
Turn # / What happens
1. Player builds city.
2. Player clicks on city, queues up a command post and a study to be built, sovereign explores.
3. Command post gets completed (hence, we need the command post to only take 1 turn to build), player trains a pioneer, moves sovereign again.
4. (a quest tile comes into view this turn), player moves sovereign (getting a goodie hut)
5. Player sees quest objective in LOS and moves towards it, a low level champion shows up on LOS (this champion is simply a free pioneer). Player can recruit this champion easily.
6. Study gets built (which means study should only take 3 turns to build). Champion pioneer is near a rock quarry which provides 2 material per turn when built. Player moves Champion pioneer towards quarry. Player moves sovereign again towards quest, player queues up a hut in their city. Civilization level 1 technology achievement is made. I choose farming. Add farm to my queue. First tech should take 5 turns to get. I switch tech to adventuring.
7. Player reaches quest objective (killing local bandit terrorizing people). Reward: 10 people go to your outpost plus you receive boots of speed which, when equipped, gives your sovereign +1.
8. Pioneer in city gets built, player moves it from city, queues up a peasant defender. Sovereign sees a sider and moves towards it.
9. Sovereign attacks spider, wins, gains 50 gold. Champion pioneer reaches stone quarry, builds quarry and is consumed.
10. Pioneer continues north. Sovereign moves west. Hut gets built. Adventuring level 1 gets completed. I choose Ruin Delving. In my LOS 1 ruin is displayed along with a stone golem. I choose Warfare level 1 next.
11. Sovereign moves west. Encounters champion builder known as “Boboth the Builder”. He has an a magic hammer that causes things in cities to be built 1 turn faster. I send him to my city. In my city, a peasant defender is built in my city. Gold is too tight to build another one at this time.
12. My pioneer is heading towards stone golem in his LOS and heads towards it. My sovereign moves north. Boboth the builder heads words my city.
13. My pioneer closes in on the stone golem. My sovereign sees an ancient ruin (goodie hut) in his LOS and heads towards it. Boboth the builder heads towards my city.
14. My pioneer reaches the stone golem. An event pops up with a piece of artwork (like a quest dialog) telling me how the Titans built golems as soldiers and they obeyed whomever activates them and asks me if I want to activate. I choose yes. I now have a golem with my pioneer. In my LOS I see an ancient spring, I send my pioneer towards it. I send the golem back towards my city. My sovereign reaches the ancient ruin which contains jewels worth 100 gold. My farm is complete and the hut is now queued up. Warfare level 1 is reached. I choose “equipment”. Some crummy armor is added. I go to the design screen and design a unit that has crummy armor. The crummy armor adds 5 gold to the cost of creating the unit (hence, we now know that designing units involves gold, metal and/or crystal). The pop up card design randomly chooses “Imperion” out of its lengthy random unit name. I am okay with it and am also okay with the randomly generated quote “I fight for my people”. My unit has a club so it has 3 attack and now 1 defense thanks to the crummy armor and costs 6 gold total (5 for the crummy armor and 1 for the club).
15. My sovereign encounters Lord Capitar and we agree to be friends. Boboth the builder reaches my city. My pioneer reaches the spring and builds a majestic spring on the spot which increases the prestige of my city by 1 and consumes the pioneer. I queue up another hut in my city. In my sovereign’s LOS I see an orchard and head near it so that I can build my second city when I reach there.
And another:
To: Team From: Brad Date: Feb 2010 Re: City / Unit construction
One TBS crutch I’d like us to try to get rid of is the reliance on things taking N turns to build where N is dependent on resources.
The reason is that this forces us to abstract out the economy in such a way that trivializes the kind of economics that I think a lot of players would like to see. In GalCiv and Civ, players produced “shields” or what have you and that determined the number of turns it took to do something.
In Elemental, I’d like us to move towards a system broadly describes as “Materials & Labor”. Labor is what determines the time to produce a thing and materials is the up front cost.
This way, I could have a given thing require a lot of different types of materials (depending on how powerful and sophisticated it is) without the user having to sit there calculating out the time it takes.
For example, with this system we could have all kinds of rare and interesting things that can effectively only be built once. I find the plans to build a Dread Golem and it requires a midnight stone to build. As a player, I now know that if I want to build this, I must find a midnight stone (that maybe I can find on a quest or something). In essence, I can have units and buildings that are very precious, rare and interesting by having a richer economic system without making the game a spreadsheet.
Thoughts?
A lot of these discussions make it into the game. A lot of them end up being rejected or not working out because it turns out not to be fun or turns out to increase scope too much or what have you.
In Elemental beta 1Z, we have started going towards the direction of making the game a lot richer and more interesting – more density.
A lot of this becomes possible by alterations in the economic system – simplifying construction thus enabling greater sophistication.
For example:
One of the big changes we’ve made that resources are now global instead of per city.
I’d like to take credit for that one but the beta group collaborated on this:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/378334
And it turns out to make the game much much more fun. I can’t even begin to describe the potential for fun by having this system.
When a player acquires a resource, it shows up on screen in their resource list. At the start of the game, all they have is food and population. Build a workshop and now you get 1 “materials” (our catch-all for building materials) per turn.
Build a garden and now you have 2 food available (food is handled as your net food production). A hut provides population but consumes food. But now you don’t have to worry about where your food comes from.
Roads and such increase your production through trade.
Moreover, now quests, goodie huts, and such can provide as many different types of resources as we (or modders) want to provide and have weapons, equipment, buildings, etc. consume these resources.
From a “fun” perspective you end up with a much more sophisticated economy but one that is remarkably straight forward to understand and play.
Beta 1Z also introduces the pioneer.
Pioneers are the answer to an often requested feature by the beta group that also solves the “density” issue I was complaining about previously.
Originally, only cities could build improvements because resources were local to the city. Now that they’re global (again thanks https://forums.elementalgame.com/378334) we can let players build pioneer units who go out and can build on resources that aren’t part of a city. The pioneer is “consumed” (since they’re settling on that resource) but now you get that resource. Of course, the downside is that someone else can capture those resources pretty easily unless you send out units to protect your territory.
Pioneers also give players a logical rationale to control their territory rather than just their cities. Historically, control of the countryside has mattered and now it matters in Elemental as well. Hence, the player that creates a massive single army may indeed be formidable but could quickly find themselves starved out by a more nimble (but smaller) opponent that controls their countryside.
I won’t even get into how cool all this stuff looks in the full mode (graphics engine turned on). But this way, every game feels and plays very different because we can have lots and lots of different resources. You might play 200 games and suddenly get a quest that gives you the plans to build a diamond golem – provided that you find the star diamond located on some distant island (you get the idea).
I love the pioneers idea, but I can't help but feel the economy is getting increasingly unimportant and devalued. I'm concerned with what is going to be the end result. I had such high hopes for the economy back in the Internal Debates Made External. Camp 1 amazed me unbelievably. I've been playing Dwarf Fortress recently and it's sad to think that a game like that (one without financial backing) has a more advanced economy than Elemental is going to have. I haven't given up hope, and I hope as development continues people will realize that this game needs a more advanced economic system.
Yes, I understood that to begin with. I guess my point is that I always thought in Civ 4 they were incredibly lame and one of the most frequent complaints I heard about Civ 4 when I was active in the community there was how annoying they were as a civilization on/off switch.
I mean a long time ago there was a big discussion on the forums about the economic model for Elemental. It had a lot more participation than the recent little thread I only saw till recently and the overwhelming consensus seemed to be for a mixed model rather than going super simple or super complicated.
Sadly, we're a minority. Most people don't find managing an economy like that 'fun'. I'm still holding out hope that with modding a camp 1 economy will be possible though.
Well, personally I only intended for Food to become a global resource ... but meh. I felt that global Net Food was a good way to personalize Food and make it its own unique mechanic.
Does this mean that we won't be able to starve a city out any more by laying siege to it, since the magic food faries will teleport shipments past our lines?
Is the system where any resource lacking is replaced by a "labor" resource ? (so a 15 lumber/5 labor would take 20 turns if you don't have any lumber) is still in place ? It really is a brilliant and simple system.
I'm going to miss the complexity of supply lines, but I'm sure it can be done right either way (and probably will, with the player/developer dialogue as it is).
I think it would be nice, if you can send several pioneers to one resource to build the better "mine". Something like constructors in GC2. One pioneer - basic mine, second - improved mine..... Perhaps some upgrades can have logical but difference effect. For instance a lookout option - your vision range increases, a fortification could increase the defense of defending units, a store allows you to get some money from the mine etc.
Whee! Great!
Some questions and comments, if I may:
- Resources being Global: Does that mean they are available everywhere even if no roads / caravans travel between them? Even if their source is in some of "your territory" on the other side of "someone else's" territory with whom you are not friendly? Do resources get magically teleported between locations of "your territory"? I would find that puzzling; I like Global Resources, but these have to be linked via unhindered Trade Routes.
- Labor & Materials: No Hammers / Shields. Won't units take longer to train whose training is more diversified / complicated / advanced? (It should take longer to train an elite "knight"-type unit than an idiot with a pointy stick.) So why doesn't it take time (in the form of labor) to produce armor, even if it is only crummy armor giving 1 point of defense?
- Sovereign Attacks Spider at gets 50 gold: In Dragon Age: Origins, my RPG immersion was ruined by ridiculous loot (not just the crappy shields et al. hidden in all those hard to pick chests.) By that I mean items which a unit could not use or even want (e.g. lyrium potions on wolves). Why should the sovereign get gold for killing a spider?
Thanks much!
Perhaps someone who has gold want the remains of the spider for some potions
Pretty simple. First, it may be that the spider lives in an ancient ruin of some foregone empire that still has loot in it, maybe even so that they summoned and bound the spider there to protect their glory and pride.
Or perhaps the spider has captured travellers with nets, dragged them in it's lair and eaten them. But since it can't eat gold, it has spit them in a pile nearby, much like a human would pile rubbish.
You should take Dungeoneering 101 if you're interested. Explanations are abound.
Hey
Just to change topic here a bit but I'm also a little concerned about the barrenness of the world. I understand that it is supposed to be after the Cataclysm but exploring a wasteland environment just doesn't quite seem as enticing as exploring a world like that in the Avatar movie. Some deserts are ok but they will get boring pretty quickly if that's all there is too look at so I think it would be nice to have coral reefs, cloud forests and other pretty lush landscapes to explore.
Perhaps you could green the world a bit more but set the date for Elemental a few decades (maybe even centuries) after the cataclysm event so the world has had time to recover to some extent. Remember that if most of the worlds population was wiped out presumably it would take many generations before each race and their sovreign/dynasty begin to recover, regroup and repopulate their former territories. In those 'dark age' conditions most of the technology and knowledge would be lost and presumably it would still take many years before civilisations could begin to recover their lost secrets. Remember that once the majority of a population dies, the few survivors will obviously be focused entirely on scavenging for the little substinence they can find and will not have time to research metallurgy or advance their knowldege.
From what I've read about the lore of Elemental it sounds like the game is picking up during this 'dark age' time which would be expected to last for many generations after the cataclysm event. Therefore I don't see any particular requirement that the game needs to start too soon after this event. In my opinion give the land a few years to recover.
"a game like that"??? DF is the most complex game what I've ever seen. That is why we love it. ASCII "gfx" but extreme complexity.
Either way, I am with you, since I prefer complex/diverse/well detailed games, but I think that the devs don't want to implement very complex subsystems. [Another example: We won't have physical dmg/resistance types at all, because they felt that it's not necessary/too complex. Thankfully we can mod in stuff like these at least. ]
Global ressources are very good. It makes management much easier since you do not have to view each city all the time to know what you could do here.
Variety is good, but do not make it a collect stuff on the map game like in "heroes of might and magic" where you spend most of your time looting the map.
If you want to make everymove meaningfull, it could be done by making all move take 1 or 2 turns (maybe 3). This way, players get feed back really fast and they can easily try to set themselves priorities and determine which move is best for them. Ex: does it worth it to spend 2 turn on that building, or should I use these 2 turns to do 2 moves that takes 1 turn each. Also the game evolves faster.
Quest: Somebody said that some video games are machines that creates stories. Civ like game are actually those kind of games where you will get a memorable story that you could tell to others after playing a game. If some game elements can force the players to create their own quest, objectives or stories, that is very good.
Good post. One thing I've noticed is that when you start in a dead world, the map is initially very uninteresting. I'm glad you guys are addressing that.
Though I think it's important for the map to have some initial interest, I would also like to see the players be able to change how the land tiles look and function. I want my lands to take on the characteristics of my chosen magic path, not just good or evil, but in various combinations. I want to be able to create various types of kingdoms that have their own look and feel.
I would like to see plain land tiles, not just resource tiles, have some economic or magic function, and I would like to be able to shape that in a way that suits my persona for that game.
If you have a chance to look at Heroes of Might and Magic 2, check out the map editor that came with that game. You could paint scary, charred land with belching lava, or parched deserts, or magical forests and it was great fun just to make maps. It would be great as a player of Elemental to have that kind of control in shaping your kingdoms atmosphere, and also to function in a way that suits your game objectives.
Some quick Q&A:
Re: Workers.
Pioneers aren't workers. They're similar to Settlers except that they only build a single "improvement".
Re: Unit construction.
Metal being a global resource, players decide how much metal they want their units to use when they design them. When they go to train one, it consumes the metal when it's built. Metal is infinitely stored globally.
I don't know how many other history buffs there are here but those that are know what I mean when I say that metal is a big deal. When you see an enemy unit with plate armor showing up, it should be the same as when you played Civ 1 years ago and saw a Battleship or a Tank while you were still cranking out musketeers.
Re: The world looking barren
The cloth map looks barren because it's made to look like cloth.
The movie analogy for Elemental would be Excalibur where King Arthur drinks from the holy grail and the world is coming back to life.
Re: Sieges
You don't need some intertwining/intercity economic system to make sieges worthwhile. There are plenty of alternatives we could put in place such as cutting a city off from global food simply by parking an enemy unit in an adjacent tile.
Re: Economics
The new system makes economics matter a lot more than the previous one where things just "magically" got built - albeit with a time penalty. This was one of the big things that showed up as NOT fun in playing -- having the time it takes to build units be very inconsistent based on the availability of resources.
Instead, what we'll likely implement in the future is a trade system where you can buy and sell resources with neutrals and other civilizations. Then it's a matter of how integrated we want to implement that into the train UI.
Yeah, one undesireable consequence of starting with a dead world is that it threatens to kill the exploration game. Many and varied resources help in a functional way, but aesthetically it's still just a dead (boring actually) world.
While we are at it....
What about adding a new -specialized- building: the marketplace? NPC traders should visit the cities [it should be totally random, even more merchants should visit the city in the same time...] occasionally to sell/buy stuff. IE. the players could sell/buy specific resources and even finished goods, such as weapons and armors.
Side note: Trading weapons and armors should be also possible with other civilizations.
I hope that the global resources paired with increased density doesn't mean that we have to maneuver a gazillion pioneers all across the board just to tap in to all the scattered resources within our growing kingdom. In other games (Civ, GalCiv) this becomes a really annoying problem in the endgame, when you just can't be bothered to mess with the outposts and such even though you full well know that you would be slightly more efficient if you did.
I'm loving the sound of 1Z though. If it is considerably more stable than 1G, I might take back my 'not ready for multiplayer' statement in the other journal entry.
This looks close to a theorical concept in geography where the geography of a location is not only it's landscape but it also include how man change this landscape.
When starting up a "random map" game is it going to be possible to choose how "dead" the world of Elemental is. In the cataclysm the world was destroyed. In your first example something came into site almost everyturn. While I would certainly want to play a game that way, sometimes it is also fun to obliterate the world and make finding something extra special. It could be a Cataclysm selector: mild, average, extreme, and total. Just a thought.
As far as I see from what the OP said, YES to all this answers, very unfortunately. I feel sad and sorry about this implementation. Global resources means instant teleportation of all resources, free of charge.
In the same post OP mentioned https://forums.elementalgame.com/378334 , I've suggested a" multiple locale global resource" system as I saw the direction Brad was going, but there seem to be not interest from anyone. I'll stay positive and believe Brad is still open to suggestion (still beta! ), I hope my modification suggestion to the Global Resource economy will be heard (or at least they tell me the why it is no good). Anyway, this is their game and I appreciate very much on what they are doing with this forum.
For the sake of brevity, I try to summarize this "multiple locale global resource" idea in a few sentences below, for anyone who interested in detail, pls refer to the aforementioned thread.
"Resource is considered "global" and can be utilized by all cities connected by the same Road network. Caravan (trade route) only travel within 1 road network. Cities connected to a different Road network will have a different set of resources."
This way when Christopher Columbus arrived NA, his crew would not have 1 million tons of Iron available building their first outpost.
Roads and caravans matter because as a practical matter, you won't be able to compete economically if you don't build a trade network.
"This way, I could have a given thing require a lot of different types of materials (depending on how powerful and sophisticated it is) without the user having to sit there calculating out the time it takes. For example, with this system we could have all kinds of rare and interesting things that can effectively only be built once. I find the plans to build a Dread Golem and it requires a midnight stone to build. As a player, I now know that if I want to build this, I must find a midnight stone (that maybe I can find on a quest or something). In essence, I can have units and buildings that are very precious, rare and interesting by having a richer economic system without making the game a spreadsheet."
For example, with this system we could have all kinds of rare and interesting things that can effectively only be built once. I find the plans to build a Dread Golem and it requires a midnight stone to build. As a player, I now know that if I want to build this, I must find a midnight stone (that maybe I can find on a quest or something). In essence, I can have units and buildings that are very precious, rare and interesting by having a richer economic system without making the game a spreadsheet."
This has possibilities, or the option, to allow more than one player/AI to combine items to create something unique just for them. That could be very cool indeed.
Using the example above. If I find the "midnight stone" in my lands, and my neighbor found the plans for the "Dread Golem", we could combine\sell\trade the 2 items, in this case, to create the Golem, along with decide who gets actual ownership, who gets to activate\control the dreaded "Dread Golem", but the deal stipulates that the Golem cannot be used against the other player, for any reason and cannot be renigged on.
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