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 basically the whole economy will be based on global resources in the vanilla game. I have some serious issues with this [..and I am not alone I guess], but ah well.
I want to explain why this sort of thing isn't a big problem for me. I've read in other posts and experienced in the game itself that one in game turn is actually a fairly long period of game time. I forget what the exact breakdown is but a turn represents something like two months of time I think. To me, if a resource is being produced a city or two away, and a troop takes a turn or two to train anyway, I think 2+ months is plenty of time for the required stuff to have found its way from the producing city to the city spending the resource.
I do however, think that for cities far off the beaten path there should be some sort of time penalty to training a unit or building something that requires resources the city is not geographically close to. But even in the most extreem of circumstances this penalty shouldn't be more than a turn to two. This penalty could even eventually be negated with the research of some road enhancing technologies, or installation of magical teleportation post offices.
The idea of manually requesting resources to be moved from city to city does seem tedious to me. When I train a troop I don't beleive that it comes out of thin air. I am happy imagining that someone in my city is actually training these peasents to hold a sword. And I am happy imagining that same person filling out some little order forms and sending away for the swords necessary to train them. After all, thats what I imagine I am paying him to do when I say, 'hey, train me up some swordsmen'.
On a different train of thought, I think it would be spiffy if your population was a resource as well. It seems a little silly to me that you can have a city with 100 population but have a handfull of farms and mines. Who is working in those farms and mines? I love that population is taken away from the city for units to be trained, but why not have population be required for buildings in the city to function?
If you had a city of 100, and assumed maybe 20% of them were to old or young or otherwise unable to work, you'd have a workforce of 80. Now you build two farms that take 20 people each to run at a minimum capacity, a research producing building which employs 10 people, then maybe an Inn with an innkeeper and a few others running it, a few more to work at the smithy thats churning out your weapons, you're down to 20 or so people you can create an army with, and that'd be with your farms barely functioning. So long as your prestige is high enough to replace people faster than you send them out as troops you'd never have an issue, but, if you build more resource producing buildings than you have housing for, you'd have efficiency issues. Or, maybe someone casts cloud of gloom and depression over your city and no one wants to move in anymore.
Also, wouldn't it be neat if prestige had less of an effect as a higher percentage of the map came under the influence of one soverign or another? If prestige is supposed to be attracting folks from the wastes and eventually there are almost no wastes left, maybe there aren't any people left out there to attract. This would make prestige buildings more important instead of being disposable once you reach the max population your city can handle anyway. And maybe if your opponent has more prestige than you they get people faster.
On an abstract level, it is. As the settlement population grows, more tiles open up for improvements, thus giving you more buildings. The numbers aren't very realistic, but the idea is there.
I believe this is the right direction for Elemental to take. There are still plenty of possible options that would allow for strategic depth without creating needless micromanagement. I would rather the developement time be spent in other areas. In the end the mod community will make all sorts of 'adjustments' to the finished game.
And now the stupid question: why ressources should be handled differently from gold? Gold is a global ressource that can be spend immediatly on any of your cities on the map or on the upkeep of any of your unit anywhere on the map.
And each city produces gold that is added immediatly to your treasury (no tax officers doing the trip from city to your capitol to bring gold).
I suppose this makes me feel a little better... But...
Your def not alone here tormy
I don't know, maybe I'm just asking too much, but I can't help but feel that caravans really arent going to play much of a factor anymore.
It wouldn't be handled any differently. Like I said before, if a turn is a few months, the basic production time for something is plenty of time to get any gold to pay the workers with too. Besides, soldiers don't get paid daily, so there is no need to imagine gold being immediately handed over to units or workers the second a building or unit is queued up.
One could also imagine there is some sort of banking system with checks or notes of credit involved. If gold is taken to represent things of value, like gemstones or artifacts found in a lair, then it must be accepted that the soverign has the ability to represent that value with other things as well. So long as the people have faith that a thing is worth what it is said to be worth then money is a global resource.
My greatest fear regarding the resources is that they are too plentiful in a sense, leading to a lack of specialization for the different nations. If you have an iron mine, but you aren't at war, you'll just stockpile the iron, trading it to other lands for horses as well. Then, when war approaches, you'll just field a large number of knights. Indeed, that every nation in the game would do the same. There wouldn't be a nation that has a huge amount of horses, but no iron, leading them to make horse-rabble. Practically I guess what it means is the following:
How much of a single resource is a lot? Suppose you have a single horse-resource. Does it produce enough horses that you'll likely be able to mount your entire army with them? If a single horse-resource isn't too much, maybe giving you the ability to make around 10% of your army into horsemen, then it'd be rather nice. But the problem is in part due to the stockpiling as well. After a long period of peace, you'd have so many horses that you could give every soldier a horse, and that'd be pretty dumb in my opinion. The higher the unit upkeep costs(if any), the less units you would field at a time, giving them better equipment, thus favouring the "trade until you have everything, then make a few super-knights" way of approach, instead of the "a few knights, then plenty of peasants" approach. But I guess further testing will show what manner of handling it will be the best.
But I guess this all depends on how exactly the trading works. Is only nation-to-nation trade allowed, meaning that you must trade your resources to another nation, instead of trading with a global bank that has infinite resources? I guess it may be up to Frogboy to make such a good AI that sometimes it chooses to blockade you in trade, meaning it won't trade you iron if you don't have it, unless you offer ridiculous amounts of stuff for it.
Youve got a great point here. My guess is that there will be stock houses, or places to be built that allow you to store a certain amount of that resource.
So let's say you have a city. That city has a horse resource. You build a "pasture" and then that city would produce X horse per turn. If you build a "stable" in that city, you can store up to 20 horses.
This would be easier done as a per city storage model, where shipment would automatically go to a city that had the lowest total, unless designated elswhere.
However it could easily switched over to work with global as well. 10 cities each with a stable means 200 horses able to be stored in your global pool. Thats not going to be enough to supply your entire army. But if you want more than that youll just have to use up more space in some of your cities to build more stables. Thus taking away space to build other improvements. Mines, etc would work the same way.
So let's take these resources for examples.
Horses
Iron
* "Other" gives benefits like "population, prestige, weath, etc" with houses, estates, and mansions, and "produce iron goods" with the forge while also providing a smaller scale storage.
Something like this could be used so that you have a cap on how many resources you can accumulate, especially if your not at war. You might try to support (build) a standing army in order to use up some of your resources and allow for more stroage, but you better hope you have enough money cuz itll most likely be expensive.
In reference to this, wealth should be produced per city and transported to the capital pool (once it gets here tho, its global) by way of tax caravans every X number of turns. Thus making you decide whether or not to build that city out in the middle of nowhere. Its not profitable to you if every tax caravan gets lost due to brigands, enemy troops, creatures, etc... Also this would allow for wealth distribution between cities so that we don't see mansions popping up in every city on the map by the end game... At least that would bring some meaning back to the caravans usefullness....
Aside from that, I'd just like to see a world where if I tax my citizens out the wazoo I can see my cities fall into slums, or if I am generous see them flourish and have mansions and estates throughout the coutryside. But no matter what I want to see variation in the world. Not everyone should be rich. poverty is rampant in a fantasy world, and wealth needs to be taken into account for this.
The game I've played wherein every turn mattered the most was Twilight Imperium, by far. It's a board game, and a rather long one at that. It's somewhat rare to play any more than eight turns, but everyone is composed of several rounds where every player gets a chance to activate a system (it's a sci-fi game) and perform a variety of actions in it. What makes every round in that game as important as it is is two things; first of all, at the end of every turn, victory points are calculated (the first one to reach ten wins), but the other one is that during every turn you get one, two at most, chances at using your factories to produce, one chance to move this and that army around and after that, they were pretty much locked. This made every move important as you inevitably locked out some opportunities you previously had, making a mistake meant you had to wait several rounds before you could rectify it, and so on.
My point is the following: If you want every turn to be important, try making more of them with more opportunities in each. it must be possible to have a TBS that does not emcompass the hundreds of hundreds of turns that Civ 4 and GalCiv could be plagued by (this might also do something about the Late Game Tedium I've seen discussed here).
That's an awesome idea, better than my own personal meanderings I was about to post a half page on
The problem with caravans is that if they become so dramatically important, then we need ways to defend them. And choosing WHERE they are built would be an absolute must-have feature.
EDIT: Pigeons *sigh*
Something must be done, because as we know, all resources will be global in the vanilla game => What is the purpose of caravans now? Some economy boost? That would be pointless, because that way, the caravans won't have any real strategical "value". I've suggested that only food and iron should be global resources [so that the player will be able to build basic units], everything else should be local. => Caravans would move the rare stuff around => Strategically the caravans would be important. This could work like a charm, but this is my subjective opinion of course. [I plan to make a total conversion mod for the game, and the economy will work like this in it. Food/Iron/Stone = global resources ; Rare ores etc. = local. I will need some coding help of course, because I can't code. .. Maybe it's not a big problem, since we gonna have guides sooner or later anyways. How to implement a new local or global resource etc.]
I plan to make a mod as well but everything (food, iron, wood, swords, spears, magical rings, armor, the whole shebang) is going to local storage
Why would that be a must have feature? If there's only one road to your border town, it's pretty obvious where the caravan has to go in order to get there.
Defending the caravans is kind of the point. If you don't have to bother defending them, then obviously they aren't that important.
Well yeah, perhaps that is the best choice.
I think we should all step back and think about what we really want from this game. Because I'm sure different people will want different things, we will never all agree on some of these issues like global resources. However, if we all understand our goals, we should be able to better contribute to the conversation.
Having seen posts about dwarf fortress, I played the game some this week. Even though I can see where you can dervie enjoyment from it, it has so much micromanagement that I decided that I didn't have time to get further involved into the game. This and a glass of wine made me start getting philosophicaly. Here are some of my thoughts...
Games should have a target play time. Should a game last minutes, hours, days, weeks, months..... Depending on your answer, the mechanics of the games will change dramatically. You migh want an online game of elemental to last hours, but a single player game to last days for example. This factor directly impacts the amount of micromanagement in the game. The more micromanagement, the more time it will take to move the game forward.
I truly love elegant games. Ra is an elegant board game that you can only do 3 things on your turn: start an auction, draw a tile or play a god tile. With these 3 actions, the game designer has created a very fun and rich... and I might even say deep game. It is a game of decisions and timing, not of millions of decisons. Better players ussually win and the game is fun and competative. Elemental is a game about empire building and will have a lot more than 3 options, but we should still seek elegance. We should seek the fewest mechanics to give us the right game feel and the right level of control. Here are the things I seek from elemental:
- I want player choices to matter. If we all make different decisions, I don't want us to end up at the same place. This is a case of a game being on autopilot. Choices, are not choices if they don't produce different results. I bring this up because we have watch the research system and city building systems for failing in this area.
- I want lots of ways to outplay my opponents. This is another category I see a lot of games fail. I see many games that are this complex creating few viable paths to victory. Killer stack, or advanced research, city sprawl, early rushes, etc... If a game has a lot of paths like these it is fine, but if there are really only one or two ways then the games becomes boring.
- I really don't want the game to only be about momentum. If you get some bad luck or lose an early battle, you should not be out of the game. There has to be some way for a player to come back. This means there probably has to be some way to make a killing stroke even if your opponent has more stuff. Capturing a capitol or killing a leader would be ways to give underdogs a chance at coming back and stealing victory
- I want simplicity, yet depth. As I ramble, this is what I really want. This is what dwarf fortress lacks. It has complexity and depth. If we get to a place where things are simple, yet there is great depth then this game will be great.
Ok, I'm done rambling. I will only say that from now on when I see discussions, my new filter will be... is there simplicity and depth. If the answer is yes, then it gets my thumbs up. So for the global resource debate, I say that it is simple and provides an adequate foundation for depth. I say foundation, because the other systems using the global resources will really dictate whether the implementation is good.
Its extremely hard for simplicity and depth to coexist. What we can agree on is that we want depth in this game. As soon as you focus on making the game "simple enough" you are going to lose depth and you are going to lose immersion. almost guaranteed.
Actually, by adding complexity you can add "non decisions" and lose depth.
Depth is all about the scope of the game, and it really more streamlining the mechanics to meet a certain need (the style and feel of the game) and less about reaching certain "realism" or "complexity" quotas.
Well the game "go" is fairly simple, yet is one of the most complex game.
What we should remember is that simple system that interact in interesting ways is the way to go.
Not necessarily. As Vieux said, look at the board game Go (I play board games). You have a board of lines criss-crossing and a box of white stones, and one of black stones, similar to chess. You take turns to placing these stones where the lines intersect. If a stone or a group of stones is surrounded on all four sides by the opponent, it is captured. It is illegal to place stones in a manner that permits infinite reruns of the same placements.
Those are the rules, and that game can be very, very tense and require a lot of strategic thinking. You can use the same method of thinking regarding chess. A child could (and frequently do) learn the rules, yet it takes absolute masterminds and computers to master it.
In my opinion, simplicity and depth is more difficult to create than complexity and depth, but the result can be so much better. The resource system is a good example of something simple, but with some depth. Acquiring materials is as simple as that, but the possible variation in what materials are available (Stones of Peril, Vorpal Pendants, etc.) gives the system depth. Creating separate systems for collecting crystals, stones, wood, grain, bread, meat, diamonds and so on would create a complex system.Naturally, the resource system is not as deep as it could be, and it shouldn't be, given that it's a stepping stone to manipulating other systems (city building, unit creation).
All that being said, I realise that Elemental is not going for the stripped-down board game mechanics that Go and Chess has. The game is also about the fluff and such. If I were to suggest a simple, but potentially deep system, I would go for a series of numbers dependent on each other, such as Armor/Speed, Attack/Defense and so on, as well as allow a number of extra effects. For example, Ranged Attack, Charge, Defensive Stance/Retreat, Mounted and so on. This would create a system where horse archers could be used for quick attacks and had to be chased by equally light cavalry or infantry with Charge, while the centerblock of toughies could hold the lines and so on. A way of easily adjusting the army to suit ones needs.
Magic.
Magic spell: Illusion Horses or Spirit Horses.
Improved Magic Resource: Spirit Horse Stable.
So, you want horses (or bears or giant iguanas), and don't have them? Research the spell. Then you can one-off a horse type unit. You want to supply horses to ALL your cities/barracks/unit makers? Then you build a magic structure which will produce X amount of "horse" material a turn.
Personally, I think the game should go with roads as the basic network conduit--- and allow you to build warp gates which would effectively connect any two cities/gate equipped structures (and their trade networks) together.
This would also mean you could have other trade transmission points, mundane or magical. Mundane: Ports (allow connection between any two port equipped centers on the same body of water). Magical: Zepplin Fields.
This means to siege a city, just cut it off from its trade network. No food = starvation. But any city that has a hard/special to intercept trade connector (ie, warp gate, astral stairs, etc), will require special seigers. Or that you attack their resource providers directly in the field.
Honestly, can someone tell me what was so broken about the economic system before?
I thought it showed a lot of promise and was heading in a good direction with some new content and less filler. City placement was tactical and meaningful. Road caravans gave a reasonable bonus and were worth defending, though not totally crippling to lose.
I didn't think it was broken and I don't understand why they through it out for a blah system that has been tried by many other games before and never excited anyone. Seriously, stockpiling of global resources is different from Warcraft 2 economy how?
See the only reason I said that was because silicor said that Dwarf fortress was complex. When in fact, what we are seeing in that game is immense depth with a slightly larger learning curve. I think people mistake "complexity" with a game's "learning curve". Because in reality, one afternoon on the DF wiki will make you understand the game ten times easier, but you can't expect to just dive in and get it. In the end however there is still depth in it. Other games lose depth once you figure them out *cough* civ *cough* I'm afraid if stardock attempts to make this game "simple" we are going to end up with a game that is a shadow of what it could be.
Agreed. I would rather see this game push boundaries and experiment rather than fall back on dull systems used in every other game in the genre. Elemental does not need to be Civ IV with magic. I don't know why so many people seem to want that
I think Stardock should let us play each of the original camp ideas in the beta builds (when they get more stable so people can't use bugs as an excuse ) and I guarantee you that people would find camp 1 (or something similar to it) a whole lot more refreshing in the end. Yea, it may look complex on paper, but once you get the hang of it, it turns into depth. Just like with Dwarf Fortress, use the wiki while you play and you can sort through the "complexity" and find the magic in it.
Other games get old because the simplicity makes them repetitive. Dwarf Fortress can never get old, and will live on indefinitely because its different all the time, and the immersion allows for different stories to be crafted every time. The depth is so much greater than a game like Civ could ever create. Because take the economies in both games for example, DF would be considered "complex" but is different every time you play. Products have different values, and rarity. When you find a supply of something special you know it could be gone, you have a limited supply. Civ has a simple system. You find it once and you have it forever unless someone takes it. No values, no certain amount and it all turns out to be boring as hell to play by the end game. Both games have depth, but the complex system stays interesting throughout a play through.
Tell me how many times you've quit Civ cuz after a while it just got boring..? I know I do. Every time I finish a play through of DF I am left feeling a sense of awe and my mind is still racing with imagination of the world I was playing in. That's what Elemental needs to create, and That's what a sophisticated, well engineered (NOT simple) economy can supply.
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