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[Gaslamp-Daniel]

Absolutely.  We've been throwing around some less comprehensive ways of dealing with the problem, and we have some ideas, I just can't really comment on them because I don't know how they'll feel 'til we have time to try them out.

[Viken]

Gaslamp-Daniel, how comprehenisve is the terrain generation system going to be? I forget if it was already going to be fully proceedurely generated or not.  If so, a simple way to figure out water levels and whatnot is a simple basis of humidity, rainful, and depth.   An area of high rainful may have an effective water level of thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, creating water basis and pools; while standing water on the surface can accumulate within feet.

Once you have the terrain math figured out; its fairly easy to decide if you want water to be spawned within a given area at a certain depth as a terrain generation feature; that changes as the environment itself is changed, instead of through a full fluid dynamic system.

P.S. - I'm just tossing out ideas from my sleep deprived mind.  But it would seem easier as an addition to the existing terrain generation system than a whole new complex set that overlaps it.

[Descan]

It's not generation that's the issue, I think. But the movement for like, lake-draining and river damming.

[Aklyon]

It's not generation that's the issue, I think. But the movement for like, lake-draining and river damming.

What of the movement for Artifact-infusing the water?

[Shakerag]

New blogpost up, and it is fantastic.

[ScriptWolf]

new update the UI sounds fucking awesome

[Viken]

The UI info does sound pretty cool, as well.

[Criptfeind]

New blarg post up yesterday about deaths and such. Game looks done to me! Shipping time.

Although, on the topic of the last post, only one bit of equipment per squad sounds. Uh. Bad. One cannon per squad or something would be fine, but where do they draw the line I am wondering. Steam armor is shown to be a one per squad thing as well, which seems exceedingly odd to me. Does this mean that soldiers are going to be using basically the same equipment for the whole game? That you can never achieve well equip squads? No clockwork knight brigades?

It's a interesting choice if they are actually making it how they seem to be, and I think it is the wrong one perhaps.

[Techhead]

I noticed that the trees are only ~8 feet tall. I understand that huge trees might have problems with occlusion, but they look like large shrubs. How are you supposed to get lost in the woods when a man on horse-back can see past the tree-tops? How are bears going to hide from the player in between mauling your woodsmen?

Also, it will always be too soon for Roanoke jokes.

[Jopax]

New blarg post up yesterday about deaths and such. Game looks done to me! Shipping time.

Although, on the topic of the last post, only one bit of equipment per squad sounds. Uh. Bad. One cannon per squad or something would be fine, but where do they draw the line I am wondering. Steam armor is shown to be a one per squad thing as well, which seems exceedingly odd to me. Does this mean that soldiers are going to be using basically the same equipment for the whole game? That you can never achieve well equip squads? No clockwork knight brigades?

It's a interesting choice if they are actually making it how they seem to be, and I think it is the wrong one perhaps.

Well the stuff they listed is considered special equipment, so I'm thinking you'll have multiple kinds of squads which are very specialized like arty squads or powered armor sphess mahreens while the bog standard riflemen will be able to take something to help them specialize atleast a bit.

[ScriptWolf]

Yeah the sizing seems to be a little off it does look a bit weird te people being much taller than the trees.

From what I have seen so far of the map I am a bit worried the maps are going to be a bit to small.

[Hyndis]

Very interesting blog update. I love reading and watching how something is developed from the very start. Its all kinds of interesting.

I do have a simple question about trees though. Will they grow back? If the entire map can be chopped down and then there no more trees forever, that would kind of suck. Over harvesting of lumber should of course always be a concern, but trees should be able to replenish themselves over time.


And also, some of my thoughts on military organization for CE, and I apologize in advance for length. CE guys, if anything here is remotely interesting or useful, feel free to use it;

While DF's military interface may get some flak, I think its a well designed system once you get used to it due to how powerful it is. Though I think some level of abstraction would work, so say you order up a military squad, and then tell it what kind of squad it is. Do they have rifles or steam armor? Or maybe just pointy sticks. This equipment has be produced by some factory or imported.

The Sierra city-building games handled it in this manner. You could build a barracks, and then click on the barracks to tell it what kind of military unit you wanted. If you wanted legionnaires you needed 1 weapon and 1 suit of armor per soldier. The barracks would send out a guy with a cart to raid warehouses of weapons and armor, and then cart them back to the barracks. Only when a soldier had both his weapon and armor would the soldier be able to do anything. If the soldier lacked equipment, he simply didn't exist yet as far as the game was concerned.

Military units would vary by type, and also as far as what equipment you needed to outfit a soldier. So this could be a powerful system in allowing flexibility and customization.

Lets say for a soldier, you have an armor slot, a ranged weapon slot, a melee weapon slot, and maybe 2 accessory slots. First off you need to build some sort of barracks building. Each military unit/squad/formation requires its own barracks. By clicking on the barracks you can then decide how many soldiers it will conscript and what the equipment loadout for that squad is. Every soldier gets the same equipment in the squad simply for ease of management. Also its Victorian England, so the poor underclass doesn't get a choice if they're in the military or not. Possibly some "recruiters" could press some underclass people into military service, which will put your idle and poor into useful work.

The barracks options would then let you outfit your squad. I don't know if a soldier should require all equipment to be present before he'll do anything, or allow more granular outfitting, so a soldier will be available to fight even if he doesn't have all of his gear. Of course this means if you're sending your soldiers out to fight but you only have enough guns for half of them, its unwise. But at least this would let you form a semi-armed militia which could be vital early on.

Some suggestions for equipment slots:

Ranged weapon:
musket, blunderbuss (shotgun thing), rifle, crossbow, sling, pile of rocks, steam powered gatling gun fired from the hip

Melee weapon:
bayonet (requires firearm), sword, pike, club, axe

Armor:
civilian clothing, military uniform, breastplate, full plate armor, clockwork steam powered armor

Headgear:
nothing, metal helmet, pith helmet, gas mask (provides defense against vapors?), mining helmet (light in dark places?)

Accessories (1-2 items?):
field rations (eat/drinking breaks taken less often), medical kit (can heal self and other friendlies), grenade (occasionally can chuck an explosive grenade), religious adornments (protection from eldritch horrors?), scope (increased range or accuracy on weapon)


As far as military assignments go, maybe a waypoint system would work to organize. The player could create a waypoint either purely through the UI, or by constructing some sort of object, such as a flagpole. This flagpole could be given a name, say "main gate" or "swamp detail". A military squad could be assigned to one or more waypoints. If they're only assigned to a single waypoint, they'll spend all of their time there. If they're assigned to multiple waypoints they will patrol through them in a loop. The squad's uptime could be set at the barracks. Always on duty could cause some unhappy thoughts, but it would be useful to get all soldiers to move ASAP in an emergency. Or low levels of alert would be lots of idle time and down time for soldiers in the barracks with few troops on active patrol, but that should have some kind of happiness bonus for the soldier.

Also will the game have fortifications in it? If so, building flagpoles on the walls to assign military units to guard walls or patrol the battlements would be invaluable.

Star forts existed about that time historically, so there were fortifications and walls back then. Presumably a small outpost would start out with a wooden palisade at first, but even this could be manned so long as there is a platform built next to the palisade.

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

All of our internal design notes at this point are considering a waypoint system for groups of units that are not tied to specific buildings, perhaps with timed locks to minimize the capacity for micro-management (though this is still in discussion).  I find it really interesting just how much interest the concept of "minimalism" when applied to military units is getting.  I suspect this is one of those things that we think is a great idea and we have a well-defined plan for, but until you get to play with it a bit, the idea of trusting a flawed (by-design) commander with the immediate tasks of a squad isn't something people are used to.  As ever, the game is about people and their interactions with each other and the world, and not a military strategy game.  Maybe for the next game

There will be defensive structures, and I guarantee you I have seen at least half of all the pictures of starforts that exist on the internet in doing research for the military structures in the game   That said, the benefits of star forts to repel cannon fire may or may not be pertinent, and they have some very difficult configurations from a simple logistics perspective.  If we can make them "feel right", we'll have them.  The Victorian era really straddles a strange time in terms of military tactics and composition, and of course given the setting we will be taking some creative license to it.

As mentioned I believe in the comments on the post of last week, units *will* have inventories, we're just trying to mitigate the amount of management that players require.  The old sierra games have been discussed, and we like the simulation aspects of having to create all the items, but again, ease of use comes into play here. 

We're heavily prioritizing a pull vs push -based economic system where a high level order will initiate a bunch of lower level functions, so you don't have to designate each of the 37 steps required to create a unit, while still having some smithy make the guns and some miner harvest the ore.  It's in accomplishing (or not) these minute tasks that really make the characters interesting.  There will be some capacity for a player to facilitate the ancillary tasks on their own, but that won't be the focus. 

This may also be a good time to let you guys know that the UI will be moddable.  It's all in XML files, and there will be an API for pulling data from the game.  I want the game to be easy to play for beginners.  You guys are not beginners.  If you actually want to rebuild a DF style interface over the game, barring some obvious fundamental differences in the mechanisms involved, you could probably get close.  If, on the other hand, as I suspect, you have a specific desire for some other organizational method involving a gigantic data dump on the screen, you can do that too. 

And finally, about trees: they will grow back.  In fact, our initial design involving deteriorating soil fertility given enough harvesting is still on the books, it's just a lower priority than some of the more immediate requirements. 


I've skipped over a few questions about the terrain because as soon as we got some semblance of "biome objects" into the game, we started drilling in other bits of the framework, intending to get a fully playable, emaciated, bare-bones game together before we start fleshing it out.  I could spend years simulating natural terrain, and given the chance... maybe I would.  Alas, we also need to feed our pets, they rely on us.  We are doing our best to prioritize parts of this game that further the goal of making the game about the stories the characters tell.  For now you might just have to wait and see what happens

[Urist McScoopbeard]

we're just trying to mitigate the amount of management that players require.

but I want to manage EVERYTHING!!! I want to choose the color of their shoelaces damnit, im the insane governor of the godforsaken colony after all!!!

[Hyndis]

I apologize for my earlier wall of text, but I apparently had failed to notice this thread. Then when I saw it in its 38 page glory I went on a frenzy reading every blog entry and screenshot and got overly excited. 


Will there be some sort of standing orders, ala Towns, or the option to produce things individually if the player wants, such as in DF?

When the player orders things produced at the higher level, will then your citizens/subjects/serfs will then automatically produce the items that make up the big thing you ordered? I'm thinking, say, a steampowered suit of armor. It would probably need lots of brass and iron, maybe some cogs, leather, glass for the headwear so the soldier can see out, etc.

Will the player need to queue up X number units of brass plating, Y boxes of cogs, and Z crates of leather? Or you just order a soldier to put on a suit of steampowered armor, and then the military unit's commander gives an order to the craftsman. So the blacksmith, tanner, and glass blowers all get to work automatically, making the components, which are then assembled at some arms depot and delivered to the barracks all without further input from the player?

If so, and thats automatic, then thats awesome. Micromanagement is one thing, but if its just tedious micromanagement without any gain, and its just busywork, then that is no good.


As far as fortifications go, adding in, well, building destroyers might make things extremely complex. There's the DF model where most things are not building destroyers. Sure, eldritch horrors could rampage through your city, slaughtering and eating everyone until its a ghost town full of skeletons, but they leave the buildings intact. There needs to be some sort of mechanism for them to break down doors so they can get into town through the walls. Or some requirement to keep a constant path to the outside world.

Evil Genius had an interesting take on this. You had to have a path to the outside world at all times. Even if it was through locked and guarded doors, you still had to have a path. If there was no way for a minion to path from his current position to the helipad (entrance/exit for the map) then the minion would begin to panic and slowly lose HP over time, eventually ending in their death. So you could in theory forever wall off your evil island lair, but your minions would all go insane from being buried alive and soon perish. As doors could be destroyed or have the locks picked by agents, this meant that agents always were able to path into your evil island lair. Doors would slow them down, but nothing could outright stop them, barring traps or minions to "dispose" of the pesky secret agents.

Cannons might imply some sort of building destruction. Would that also go the other way, so your city could be under siege by things that could destroy walls? If so, I'd suggest some sort of mechanism to have wall damage repaired automatically, as designating a new wall to be built after every siege would get tedious. The Stronghold games had a mechanism where an idle engineer would automatically attempt to repair damaged walls so long as you had stone to repair them with.

And another fun thing with cannons...what about gigantic monsters? A monster so big that muskets would be like a bee sting? You can't stop C'thulhu with muskets, the muskets are just too small. But bringing up the artillery might be more effective for very large creatures.

Artillery as a defensive thing would also be invaluable. Maybe give them a few options. Solid shot for long range, and grapeshot for close. Or even more exotic ammunition, depending on what the scientists and researchers can invent. Cannons shooting ball lightning? Cannons mounted on walls or towers could certainly help thin out the numbers of the attacking hordes.

As you mentioned there will be fortifications, that implies attacks or even sieges. Will the strength and timing of sieges be something that can be manipulated, so a player can start off peaceful, build up a fortress, and then declare war on everyone and have an onslaught? Maybe civilizations at the edge of the map which could be traded with, or if relations are bad, they might send armies instead.


Again, apologies for the wall of text. I'm just overly excited. Victorian dorfs with steampunk technology and Nikolai Tesla fighting C'thulhu? Ohgodyes.