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).
It's extremely ignoring to think that a few people on the forum represent more then a microscopic fraction of the market for this game, or that a poll will reveal anything other then what we already know (the forum favors complexity).
I do. More importantly, my wife has expressed interest in playing the game with me, and she most definitely will. Tedious micro, at that. Is this a game about being a wizard emperor and trying to revive a dead world, or a game about being a logistics officer trying to figure out where to send the swords next turn?
One of these things is not interesting gameplay. My wife is going to give Farmer Bob a sword in the designer, then try to train him. She'll discover she can't train him in the city she's at because she needs to ship swords out from the capital first.
The next thing that happens is she goes to play something more interesting.
Even if you automate it, it still doesn't add any interesting mechanics. It takes 4 turns to train Farmer Bob at City 1, and 12 at City 2 despite City 2 having a Forge and a Barracks, because City 1 has the swords and while the game shipped them out, it'll take 10 turns for them to get there? To the other 99% of potential customers not reading this forum, this is NOT fun.
Once you automate it enough that it's no longer annoying (swords get sent everywhere automatically beofre they're needed), it also no longer serves any purpose as a mechanic and can be removed outright without affecting the game.
I do uderstand how these games work you know, I do like them. I don't like that in my strategy games however.
There would have to be a very large advantage to having a resoruce in a certain place I mean if you need all of that to simply build a unit it seems overcomplicated - especially to actually facilitate early game exploration and fun rather than the classic "SKIP SKIP SKIP SKIP SKIP SKIP" effect. Once you have your automation lines setup (and btw that system has to be freaking perfect or it becomes a source of irie) what do you do? You have decided to put dragon eggs in city J because the dragon trainer is there, you put the meteore in city B because thats your production base, you have wood being shipped to the whore house in city M, the feathers from the ducks in city G are bing shipped to city U where they are combined with the linen from city D to form pillows and douves which go to city K where bedding is put together which goes to city L which is where the nobel men have thier orgys (and thus giving you a 25% incrase in tax).
What do you do now? Where are the interesting choices?
Now if you want a system where you have a small number of important artifacts, lets say holy/evil/powerful/whatever relics of the past which give large benfits to defense, produciton, sight etc etc etc which you have to transport around manually - that gives you an interesting choice and the logistics to go with it (it takes time to get it somewhere and can be intercepted and stolen on the map).
That would be cool, but it seems you simply want to manually redistroubute your resoruces because the peasants can't do it themselves.
Personally I want a war of magic.
Elemental: Serf Simulator? Peasant Patrol? Patrician's Paths? Do not want.
What would that system actualy do that is useful to gameplay, bareing in mind you can cut off resoruces with other systems?
I think it's clear, that you haven't played with a game which had a local resource system. Even if you automate it [it's a must have feature of course, if a system like that goes live], the gameplay [strategical] itself is very different compared to a game which has a global resource system.
Perhaps a local res. system is not for the "masses" [like your wife], that is true. More serious strategy gamers would prefer to play with a local res. system, that is for sure. Either way, perhaps this could work perfectly, and everyone would be happy: Some resources like food should be global [it will be global], while some other resources, like rare ores should be local.
PS. I am pretty sure that modders can turn food into a local resource type if needed even, so I am not worried.
So if food resources are Global, how does food get from one city to another if there are no roads between? Magic??
Maybe there could be a system like in Moo2 where you had to build freighters if you wanted to transport food or people between start systems.
There could be a "food cart" network that you pay into (say 10% of your base gold reserves)
At the full 10%, your kindgom is happy cause they're getting their 3 squares fresh and on time (+ to kindgom prestige)
If times are tight and you need some more $$, and you want to put it down to 1%, people are still getting their food, but it's now slower, so there's unrest in the kingdom, and prestige lowers.
1Z! 1Z! 1Z! 1Z! delayed
Completely agree, you see there has to be a way for us all to be happy. I don't want micromanagement either but I want to feel I can do something if I want to. Like I said before, you want those swords there right now? Teleport them, it's not too hard. I'm not trying to say anyone is wrong, we're all just blowing hot air here because in the end it's the devs decision.
I just think that if we don't have per city stockpiling and instead go for global stockpiling for everything, then caravans, which almost everyone has said is a great idea (in fact, I haven't heard anyone say they want them abolished) won't have any purpose anymore other than random boosts to income or some other abstraction. That's what I want to get away from, random % boosts that are nothing more than "gamey" solutions when an alternative is not at all difficult to incorporate from a game perspective.
When I accost a caravan, I want it to hurt my opponent, I don't want him to shrug and say, "oh well, I'll just send another one and protect it better so that I can keep my magical +3 gold/turn"
If we had per city stockpiling, that caravan I took might have swords that I could use against my enemy. You're telling me you don't think that would be awesome? If global stockpiling is in effect, that sort of thing can't happen, and the immersion takes a hit, and that living breathing world we all seem to want dies just a little bit.
The strategy behind this sort of thing would be immense. You'd have to ask yourself, "Do i send that many horses in order to protect Outlying City A and risk them being taken by those goblins I ran into the last time? Or do I teleport them there? Should I send a few, wait, and see what happens?"
Think of all the times in Civ, when you fought so hard to get that iron resource from your enemy.. (I know you know what I'm talking about.) Now wouldn't it be neat to have that feeling every time you destroyed a caravan and got some iron ore? and maybe some gold or horses to boot? with that comes immersion. The world is alive at that point.
Global stockpiling sounds too Civ-like to me, sure civ was fun but I sure as heck don't play it anymore. I play the games that made me feel a part of the world, games I'll mention over and over and over again in these forums.
When a horse is a horse and not just some abstract resource on the map that can be used anywhere it actually means something, there is an importance to it. You actually care for that 1 horse, because that 1 horse might be the turning point in a war and that's what brings immersion to a game. That's why we like MoM, for the customizable heroes and items. That's why we like X-com, for the unique soldiers with unique traits.
I still play Master of Magic and X-com because these games made me attached to the characters, and whose to say we can't be attached to our resources in the same way ?
When you destroy a caravan, the city it was heading to should lose access to every resource it can't produce itself until the next caravan gets there. Course, that'd also mean a city needs a road to be hooked up to the global resource network, but I'm okay with that too.
One of the things caravans originally envisioned doing was moving stuff around (under camp 1 it was both resources and produced goods that were then used as inputs elsewhere). With a solution like this, you get the feel of that back and caravans are really important if you intend on producing anything, but you don't have to deal with the local storage micro. If you want to make something, the stuff you need gets there... as long as you keep your trade routes secured.
(edit - That also provides a straightforward blockade mechanic. block the caravans and you just blockaded the city until the city owner finds a way to get caravans through again.)
The way I was looking at it: If you only have a few important locations then they are easier to defend and unlikely to be taken without a major campaign. You will have a very centralized government and for someone to defeat you, they will have to out muscle you.
A decentralized approach with lots of pioneer outposts will be much more vulnerable to raiding. Hypothetically, you could chip away at a stronger opponent and make their investements in outposts wasted.
Since pioneers are optional, you can decide to use them rarely and stay centralized. If you choose this path, you will take an income hit, but you may not lose as much either (I imagine pioneers and other outposts costs won't be trivial) when invaders attack.
Do you know that generally in the real world trading between two entities simply does increase total production for both parties? It's not that unrealistic or gamey to make a trade route just give a +% to total production.
My intuition says that it'll probably be nice not to have to work out production transportation between cities every time you want to construct / train something special in a city. I don't see how it's fun, really.
Aha. Because if you have 1 adamantite mine connected to 1 city, and you have 40 cities total, all cities should be able to make adamantite weapons + armors out of nowhere. Right? Caravans should transport it between your cities. The enemy destroys the caravan, which was heading to city X? No adamantite weapons or armors can be made in city X. This is the way to go. It's fun, and actually you GOTTA protect your caravans, because they will have a very important role. If a caravan only increases the production in a city...well...caravans won't have any real strategic purposes.
Only the most common resources should be global, like food + iron. I say it again...rare ores -for example- must be a local resource...else the economy system will be dumbed down into oblivion.
So your one iron mine can produce global iron, but your one unobtanium mine can only produce local unobtanium?
Now you're just adding confusion. Rare stuff is rare because you don't have much of it and may never get more, not because you need to hire FedEx to overnight it to the city you want to build stuff in. That's especially true when common stuff can get there on its own, why do my logistics staff know how to transport metal but suddenly forget when it comes time to transport that other metal?
Totally agree about the caravans (since I wrote the same thing earlier this page ), though. Caravans are the explanation for why a city gets access to the global resource pool. It's less abstract without adding micro, but it makes caravans vitally important and makes blockades and raids effective.
You are right, iron shouldn't be different at all..I would love it, if it would be a local res. as well...BUT you know how it goes...if a basic metal -like iron- won't be a global res., many players will get pissed on the forum...or not?
Plus..if iron wouldn't be a global & basic resource, the players wouldn't be able to create metal armors and weapons at all, if they wouldn't have access to an iron mine. You can "live" without having access to an adamantite mine, but if you cannot create basic weapons and armors, because you don't have an iron mine...That would be a bit too hardcore. Agreed?
The system before was supposed to allow for a 'rummage' system where even without a exploitable resource your cities still produced a small amount just to avoid that situation.
However, I feel people are getting too hung up on global vs local. IMO, it will be like civ 4, if your city is connected to your infrastrucutre, than it has acess to all the resources of your empire. If its not, or the city is under siege, than it loses access to global resoucres and only has access to local resouces. I'm just happy that resources produce actual resoucres and not like Civ where 1 iron resouces lets you build as many swordsmen in one turn as you want.
Your unobtainium or Adamantium or Iron (as the case may be) is "currently" stored globally.
If you only have ONE mine of Iron, then youll only have enough Iron to make one unit at a time, or store enough to make a party or a company, ect.
Either way your production will be severely limited and the limiting reagent is NOT going to be some slow ass caravan, but its going to be how quickly your mine can stockpile the resource.
Now ... sure, for some people, it would be nice to have to go out of their way to set the Iron to send only to the big Industry city with Labor Camps and Training Yards ... but in that case there really is only one option, to send the iron to the city best capable of building units, so that it will build them fast enough/best what-have-you.
When your building the unit it assumes (hey, I must have already sent the material before-hand,ect, so Im using it now) .... instead of needing to assign it prior, and wait half a decade for the caravan to arrive. In the Total War games, you get "caravan flow" every turn ... and the caravan you see on the map is only an abstraction telling you how lively the trade is along a path. If I had to wait for each caravan to arrive before getting the gold I would likely run short on money a lot longer.
I would, quite frankly, rather focus on the Questing, the Magic, and the Battles/Army movement, rather than worry if I set Horse Herd 3 or Iron mine 5 to send their resources to my troop building city or not.
Hm...so what is stored locally in that case? Weapons and armors only? Caravans won't be very important strategically in this case. Once the game is released, we will need to work on a mod, which turns specific resources -like rare ores- into local resources...too bad that I cannot code.
Are those stored at all? It looks like they're just made on demand, when you say "make 50 archers with secondary daggers" the game will go out and make 50 bows and 50 daggers while the 50 archers are trained.
Unless there's still stockpiled weapons and we just haven't seen it, but I think that was ditched along with camp 1.
Hm...correct, those are not stored at all...even tho they should be stored. When X city needs Y number of weapons and armors, a caravan could just transport it from one city to another. If an enemy attacks and destroys the caravan, they should be able to loot these.
Will the required Infrastructure still be needed in any town that requests a unit to be built? Except horses of course...
Example,
I own 2 Towns seperated by 50 miles (abstract). Town 1 owns resource Iron, a Forge and a Smithy. It has also coralled somes Horses for use.
Town 2 is quite new and does not yet have anything but "Global" food to this point. But I just discovered a Bandit Camp on the Outskirts of my fledgling Town and I need someone to defend the peasants, now, so Town 2 orders 1 mounted peasant with a sword.
How do I justify, in any logical manner, other than total suspension of disbelief, that I get a my Mounted Peasant Guy with a sword, riding out of Town 2 after X # of turns just because Town 1 has aquired the required GLOBAL resources?
Does the whole "how did that stuff get there" get added into the X # of turns required to produce that guy in a Town that has no business, as of yet, doing so?
There seems a very fine line between "abstraction" for simplicity and simply total dumb-downed "I don't like to actually think" game mechanic's.
I could see the need in a Real Time game. Last word was this was a 4X/TB game so immediate responses can be put on hold.
But I don't want it to be like Civ 4. i mean, I think this game can do so much more, and Civ 4 didn't do such a bang up job imo.
Oh someone will, don't worry I just hope we don't have to wait too long, cuz it looks like the "Let's make this Civ 4 with magic!" crowd is gonna win this battle
Unfortunately, I don't think this is true anymore either. Sadly, I think Tridus is right. Unless Frogboy can varify, that was taken out when camp 1 was thrown in the "garbage pile of amazing ideas we decided not to use"
It's already better than civ4 since resources are finite.
I was originally in favor of camp 1, and still am to an extent. However, I am begining to be convinced by the other side that all that stuff doesn't add much the game that can't be accomplished nearly the same without all the micromanagment. Making a distribution network is cool, but once it's setup it's not fun anymore to add another iron resource to my trade infractructure. And simulating caravan harassment and blockades in very doable without actual local resource movement. In the end, I'm starting to think camp 1 really just add to micromanagment when the stuff can be done nearly as well in a bit more abstract form.
Civ 4s rescource system in general was horrible.
I don't want that. I want a system where resources THEMSELVES matter, not how to get them to where they need to go. Thats why I play diffrent types of games where the logistics are more important - smaller scale games like X-com (so good!), settlers or Anno. In the large scale stratergy game logistics becomes where are my units, where are my resources and where are my citys. All of which can stretch into the hundreds and each -can- matter in a good system (unlike the city spam and unit stacks of civ 4 combined with the '1 iron fits all' resource sillyness).
Good question.
If the produced ore will be a "global resource"....I doubt it, but I am not sure. I am kinda confused about this upcoming resource system right now.
I absolutely agree...
At the same time, there's also a very fine line between complexity that adds depth, and complexity for the sake of complexity. Figuring out which side of the line its on is the fun.
The way it's described, it works like this:
1. You either build an improvement with a town, or use a pioneer, to capture a resource. Let's say Iron Ore. So you get an Iron Ore mine.
2. Your mine produces X Iron Ore per turn (I'll guess 10). So, every turn 10 Iron Ore gets put into your global resource warehouse.
3. If you go to a town and build a guy with a sword, and the sword costs 5 ore to make, then 5 ore is taken out of the global resource warehouse. Effectively it's like spending money (which is a global resource in almost every game and nobody seems to mind ).
4. For rare resources (like unobtanium), it could be handled a few ways. There could be a single node on the map that when mined produces 0.2 ore per turn. Or it could be an event that a star falls and you find some in the crater, or in a crypt, or some such. In that case how much exists on the map is finite and once you use it, thats it. It's entirely possible a given map won't have any of some of the rare resources.
5. For trading, instead of trading access to your iron mine, you trade the result. So you could trade 500 ore in exchange for 25 horses, or some such. You can now make 25 cavalary, and the other guy can make 100 swords (or whatever he wants to use the iron for).
I think that covers it pretty well, provided my hand waving doesn't turn out to be wrong.
You nailed it, Tritus.
And, because it works as you just described, it opens up a LOT more diplomatic options and makes resources a lot more valuable since they now matter to the player as a whole and not just to a particular city in a player's empire.
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