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).
So does that mean we're back to not being able to build swords if we don't have metal of some kind?
So long as it's not super rare, I'm glad to see that. Super rare resources are a great idea that will add variety to the game, but the more basic "you're screwed without it" ones shouldn't be terribly rare.
Since roads are important, will they have an effect on global resources? IE: It is global to all of your cities if they are all connected by roads, if you have one city not yet connected to the raod it has less access to the resource?
Any other special units in the making? Assasins? spys? diplomats? Thief?
Examples:
Assasin: able to challenge a single unit in an army to a 1 V 1 battle (or a chance to)
Spy: hidden unit that gives you info, mobile watch tower, or gives you more detail on a faction if placed in a city
Diplomat: they carry the messages and diplomatic bribes, (make it so they can be intercepted) Example: I send a diplomat with a 1000 Koku payment to my neighbor for military access, so I can stomp all over another NPC on the other side of the map. His assasin intercepts my diplomat, taking the letter and the Koku.. then sends his own diplomat to counter me.
Thief: I am thinking Settelers of Catan, Put a thief at an enemy resource to stop him from getting resources out of it until he investigates with a military unit or assasin.
Just ideas, like everyone else, can't wait for the next version to come out.
AJ
"infintly stored globaly". What does it really means ? Are the resources stockpiling as before ? So if I have 10 iron, then i build a unit which need 2 iron then I have 8 and.. I need a new mine to get iron, or will the iron replenish over time (up to the max - 10 in my example) ?
The simplicity of "1 missing resource = 1 labor" was in fact a brilliant idea The game was telling you how much time you would need.
Now are we screwed like in civ 4 : "Need horses ? Too bad ! You can just build warriors and archers" ?
I don't know that what system we gonna end up having in the game, but isn't it realistic like that? I mean....how could you create a horse archer, if you don't have horses? However...this can be "negated" by adding new building types...example: stable/horse breeder. Either way, if we can create units like horse archers, "beast" riders etc. out of nowhere...I will be pissed.
Realism isn't a prime consideration in a turn based fantasy strategy game. I'd prefer game balance to realism any day of the week. Besides, believability is the consideration anyway, not realism.
The Civ4 mod, Fall from heaven had it better. Anyone could do axemen, but if you had copper or iron, they were better. That means, that even if you don't have a super important resource, you can still defend yourself, albeit not as efficiently as if you had it. I prefer this, because it doesn't lead to such huge differences in power, which make the gameplay pretty boring.
For the horses, this might mean that everyone can make horse riders, but you can find special Unicorns, Nightmares, well-bred horses for war, or whatever you might come up with, in the nature, that makes horse riders better compared to those the opponents get.
More realistic yes. Unfun, too. You got the resource for 50 turns, lose it and then you can't build a unit you've cranking for 50 turns ? Noone got the idea to make some breeders or else ? That is unfun, truly unfun. And even more unrealistic.
Iron mine should give a huge value, and there should always be some ways to get at least a minimum in the wilderness.
Define "fun". Loosing strategical resources should have consequences in a serious strategy game.
Anyways...like I've said -if strategical resources won't be that important- we need to have a specific building in order to build units like those. More buildings [like stables] in a city = more units can be produced / turn. It's realistic and not so hardcore.
I tend to agree. In lands where iron wasn't too well known, or where it was hard to get from mines or such(or where mining culture didn't exist), they got the iron out of bogs and other strange places(by modern standards). The yield was of course much worse than in an iron-ore-rich quarry, but at least they got some of it.
An on/off switch in "unfun" because you get ripped of from options. And I always hate when I have less options to get with. If I need some cavalry for my units, even a few I want to be able to get some. And if a "horse resource" is the only way, then that's too bad. What I mean is that we need options to get things done. A horse resource shouldn't be the only way to get cavalry. And even some bear cavalry isn't acceptable, because the problem is still the same.
Like tiavals said, in FFH there implementation is interesting : you "can" do things, but units will be less effective.
HArd things like on/off switch should be for really powerfull creatures, like dragons. But not for "mundane" things like horses.
Mongols weren't so hard to fight because they were the only to get horses, but because they had some "doctrine" that let them use more effectively. So instead of a "no horse ? no cavalry" a "you have horses ? You know better how to use them, you know them, you know how to get the best of them".
Completely agree. 100%.
I'm getting sick of hearing this. This is the most stupid thing I have heard in these forums and I hear it all the time. A game could be balanced out the wazoo to the point that everyone could build everything and you're saying that would be fun? Maybe we just have a huge variance in opinion but I don't think your thinking it through to be honest. We're not talking about realism as in "Oh no, you can't have magic it's not real!" We're talking about it in the sense that provides a living breathing world to unfold. You can't have a living breathing world (aka realistic), as the devs have mentioned they want a million times, if everything is just handed over to you from the beginning.
MoM is far from balanced. X-com- far from balanced. These classic games, still talked about in 2010, almost 20 years after they were made mind you, did not have balance. Instead they made you a part of the world, made you attached to your characters, made you say to yourself, "Wow I'm glad I have that hero or soldier". And when they died, you were seriously saddened. That's not going to happen in a game you can create whatever you want, sorry but that's fact.
I don't know which way this game is going to go, because I see a rift forming amongst this community. The hardcore, (who want to see this game follow along the lines of great classics like MoM, X-com, even Dwarf Fortress for its "living breathing world") and the gamer who wants the game to become the next thing they can kick someone's @ss at, hence the calling for "Balance, balance, balance!" Which if you think about it, destroys a game's playability in the long run. I want this game to be what people are talking about 20 years from now. What do you want?
Personally i like the idea of not having horses meaning i cant build horses. I like how it works in civ 4, encourages you to work with what youve got, forcing you to do somthing different to the last game.
Its very easy in these kind of games to develop a certain way of playing that quickly makes replaying boring.
So long as you dont end up with no special resources at all then youre never screwed. Hopefully the maps will be generated in such a way that if you dont have horses, youll have somthing else, Metal, Cyrstals, Mythral, Warpigs etc.
Ok, so I'm not understanding something...what is the point of having caravans amongst your cities? I know its vital between other players because you want a trade network.
@Rising Legend.
And what about clever implementation like in FFH ? It's not a war of "realism/gameplay". It's about what a player can do. Some options should always be available, even in a less efficient way to player. What I'd liek is that every resource could have a rarity level, and that with a low level of rarity can be find everywhere with some "work".No iron mine ? You can stil get some in your city if you build some unit that will find some for you.
Or maybe the ability to create resources on the map if you have anough : you have 1 horse resource ? Then you can build them where you want (think of it as some breeder) with a"pionner" unit. So if you never saw a horse you sure can't use it. But when you get at least one then you can be sure you won't be in shortage (it would need a bit of tweaking but the idea would give you more options.
Or a system where when you capture a resource it begins to "spring". After some turns then the resource is mature and you can build a new one on map, and the resource spring is reset to 0. etc. Each resource built that way would need a good place to create it.
Not quite. In Civ IV, they had the concept of strategic resources that you either had or you didn't.
What we are discussing here are resources that go into a pool. You don't control your own horses? Then you'll need to buy some.
The key difference being that there isn't that much abstraction here. If you need A horse, you will use up A horse. Building stables on a herd of wild horses will produce N horses for your kingdom per turn.
The character races were far from balancedin MoM, which was part of the fun. Trying to win with Gnolls, Klackons, or Lizardmen was very challenging. They were just awful. However, that was part of the fun at times, taking a far weaker race and defeating the High Men. I also want some investment in the characters and champions. MoM was great with that. Getting a hero, building items, and having the character grow with experience was great.
Balance is tricky, I certainly don't want a game where every unit has the samething on the other side. But having balance so far out of wack as MoM is not a good thing either. Playing with the Gnolls on impossible was practically impossible because the Gnolls were so worthless and limited. You could get their best unit very quickly but it really didn't matter. As long as the races (units) each have benefits and weaknesses than it will be fun to play.
Obviously you have had some bad experiences with this kind of conversation, but I must state that you misunderstood what I meant, and the whole concept of realism hasn't been defined too well, I suppose.
What I meant was, I truly do not want to have a game that slavishly tries to make everything like the real-world and statistic(hence, realistic) where analytical fun-haters can grin and say "See, it's like in the real world!".
I want a game that is fun to play! One where I don't feel like it'll be a chore. One where I don't see something in the game, and immediately notice it as super-unbalanced, that obviously breaks the whole point of 50% of the mechanics in the game.
Neither MOM or X-Com had such unbalanced things. Sure, MOM had some races which were obviously better than others, but they were very different as well, and what is the most important thing, they had a soul. Each race had it's own theme and feeling when you played it. Same with spells. Some were better than others, but none were of such a caliber that they make the rest meaningless. X-Com had it's Egg-launcher, which was far superior to all weapons. But you could only get it in late game, not straight ahead, which makes it fun and balanced. You had to work to get it. They had nothing to do with realism, which is precisely what made them so great.
In short, our views on what "realism" means are incredibly different. In my mind, what you are describing is believable(in that the world works within it's own logic). Magic exists in such a world, but what it means to that world, how and why, that is what makes it believable or not. Not realistic. I surely want Elemental to be a classic, like X-com, MOM and DF. Games which have a soul, that are fun to play, that I will reminisce about many years later. And balance is a great part of that. If a game is unbalanced, it goes to the trash can, because it's not fun to play. But balance is just one part of the game. If the game has no spirit, it is perhaps even worse than being unbalanced. And precisely because of this, we think about how the game mechanics should work. If they are balanced, and hence fun, it'l be a game to be remembered. The spirit of the game is a thing only Stardock can make or break, not us community dwellers. But we may be able to supply ideas regarding balance and other mechanistic things.
So we can stockpile now ? Maybe that's not a bad idea when resources are global.
anyway can't wait to test the beta 1Z. I'll see then if I like the new implementation.
I have to say that sounds a lot better than "horse" as a completely ubiquitous and readily availible resource once you have one stable and a road. Depleting them also sounds good. This should give a wide variability in terms of just how much you can crank out. One horse unit versus 1000s of calvary riding down masses of unsuspecting slobs....ahhhh.
However, my concerns are twofold:
1) falling into the Civ 1 - Civ 4 trap of lacking availible resources and falling far, far behind. Its only fun when you're the guy with the Battleship and in Civ 1-Civ 4, you could only ever build a "battleship", there was no way to counter with some other powerful unit using other reources. Battleship was it.
This could be solved by a) having a very diverse set of units that you can build and ( free-flowing marketplace where the commodities could be bought-sold with prices dependant on their overall rarity, etc etc. Option A gets you into the the problem of "why have the resources at all" if you are going to have so many options. Option B sounds better, allows for diplomacy etc etc. Problem I have with Option B is that, well, I hate the AI. I wanna kill said AI, so why bother to trade with them. And "neutrals" like those lil planets in Gal Civ are really only ever good for taking over. Additionally, if you make an AI as good as GalCiv, then they aren't going to want to trade with you anyhow b/c they also want to crush you. It's the perpetual trap as recently describe by Sid Meier "in video games, everyone has to win - in real life someone looses, someone wins" he then went on to talk about the "decisions" and some crap like that. But what it comes down to is, if you're not going to give me the Battleship, you then need to give me a method to somehow counter that battleship. Personally I'm split 50-50 (love being the battleship and having the battleship option) but I believe you're going to get yourself into where you don't want to be: having the end game about simply mopping up the other players versus epic battles.
2) If units are going to consume resources as built, then are you going to require additional resource consumption over time or healing after battles?
docbates7, Here's one option that popped into my mind about the Civ problem: have the super units last only a finite time.
The Genie you managed to summon from the magic lamp that you spent all your arabian pottery supplies on will go back to its own dimension after you foolishly use up your last wish (X amount of turns or battles or some such). The diamond golem runs out of power unless you're able to find another star diamond vein to keep it powered for longer. The dragon you captured to fight for you with that magical ring that required you to use up all the unicorn horns and mithril is able to eventually break free, shatter the ring, kill its commander and fly off. You get the picture. Makes it fun to get the super units, but balances them out even if there is no real counter (other than a Genie vs Dragon battle, and how cool would that be?).
Also, if you know you'll lose them eventually you wouldn't have to play so defensively to avoid getting them killed, rather you can wreak as much havoc with them as you can. This in turn translates into fun fun fun.
Besides Dragons, and perhaps some really high level spell stuff, there are no conventional 'super units' since all units are designed by the player using whatever research they have. There won't be a 'battleship' unit with no equal because there will be many possible variations of the 'battleship' unit you can create and you opponent can create as well.
Also, Dragons are supposed to be extremely powerful and extremely rare, so I will be pissed if there is no way to permanently bring them to my side.
That's what trading is for. With enough resources in the game, you're going to have something that other people don't, and they'll have something that you don't. Want to build Knights but don't have horses? Find someone with Horses who is lacking enchanting crystals and work out a deal for 50 horses. Then make 50 Knights.
Civ didn't really have that, because you couldn't trade strategic resources unless you had two of them, and you couldn't trade in limited quantities. You either give his entire empire unlimited horses unti you cancel the deal, or you don't. This is a lot more fine grained.
Looks like it should work pretty well to emphasize trading.
I don't understand how having a unit for a finite time isn't just as cool as having it permanently. Actually, having a unit for a finite time only often makes it seem much cooler, mysterious and rare to me.
In my opinion there shouldn't be permanent super units that trump everything, but I do like the feeling of having awesome magical super units possible to get (such as the dragons you mention), and when I actually manage to get my hands on a dragon I damn well want the dragons to feel as powerful as dragons should, so having a time limit on them would seem like one of the few options available to make them in any way balanced and still obtainable & very fun.
And I wouldn't want to have such units only available through spells from the Sovereign. There's no reason why you couldn't train / build a super unit that will eventually break down in a city just as well as from a spellbook or an ancient ruin. It's actually pretty strange that TBS games that incorporate temporary units almost exclusively have those temporary units come from spells that are a marginal part of the game (summon elemental, summon dragon etc).
I love the clarity with the new resource system brings. Having a finite number of resources and figuring out what to buy or trade for will be fun in its own. This should also bring diversity to the kingdoms depending on which resources they are rich.
One thing Stardock should be careful about is resource seeding. All resources arn't created equal so there should be some careful thought put into how they are randomly assigned. I would hate to get into a game and have all sucky resources. while others have the best food and weapon resources. Now if I have a sweet magic resource and someone else has the great weapon resource, trading becomes possible
Thinking about the resource trading in the game, it would be nice if there was a Merchants Guild that could be used to trade resources. The market could then becoume a mini-game like MULE but would also provide an easy way to sell and purchase outside of direct trades with other players (be they pc or human). If the market prices fluctuated based on supply and demand, then market speculation and manipulation become possible. I'm not sure the dev's want this, but it could be interesting.
I also love the idea of outposts. The more valuable locations there are on the map and the more pain players feel from losing them, the more value of good tactics and planning. Setting up good defenses becomes more important, having moble forces becomes important for raiding, etc..
Can you elaborate this a bit? With my logic it's the other way around. If there are a lot of valuable locations on the map, the less impact there is for losing one. Inflation and all that.
If you have an unlimited storage capacity it might be good idea to have npc merchants or somthing you can sell excess stuff to.
For example in a really long game where you have a resource you dont use, you could end up with a massive useless stockpile.
Also this could go into more depth, for example if you kept selling him horses, it could drive the price of horses down, and if other people buy horses from him the price may rise etc. Creating a market independent of direct player to player trades.
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