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[Mephansteras]

   Huh, still alive here. Anyway yes, something playable is a must if you want to be able to continue. Even if it sucks once the game is playable you will probably work it along enough to make it decent. Its like with letters, you can write one and not send it but once you put a stamp on the envelope very few people don't end up sending it off.
   As for your goal of getting them to build units. if you can get them all to make a single type of unit then you can get them to make any unit so don't fall into the trap of trying to design a few units for them. Make a basic soldier unit and get them to produce them then that's enough. Once you get them to fight you will naturally end up making more unit types because you won't be able to help yourself. Sorry if you already where planning this or don't want the advice but I think this could be interesting so I figured I would invest my 2 cents worth of advice.

Yeah, I've got some basic units already planned out. Simple stuff - Swordsmen, Archers, Militia. Planned all that out before I even started coding. So my current work is just coding in the Unit and Army classes. Once those are ready I'll be able to hook them into Factions and Towns, and then I can see about getting them built.

Thinking about that...might be smarter to start with to get them hooked in and just spawn some at the start of the game. Not worry about any of the economic issues just yet. Not until I get the armies wandering around and fighting, at least.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Hey Oh, hold your horses there. Who said anything about economy or anything like that. I just meant something like the places should spawn a unit, maybe on a timer so they spawn more. Having units placed at the start is different from having them spawned during gameplay. Basically put the hooks in to let a place spawn a unit whenever they want to and you can put the limits on it later.

[Anvilfolk]

Glad to see this going again

[lemmily]

I am also glad to see this going again!

I always find I get overwhelmed by projects after the motivation fades.... I personally find giving myself a "small" goal. aka an achievable goal(like "make it so cities spawn by water"), I tend to get the ball rolling again!

I'm here rooting for this project anyways

[Mephansteras]

Ok, planning time.

I'm working on implementing armies and units and combat and...I realize that I have to design this out properly ahead of time. Not in an abstract sense, but in an actual 'how will the code work' sense.


So to start, we have Armies. Armies have a few core things we need. First, it needs to have a list of Units, and at least 1 unit in that list. So it'll need to have a starting unit. Next it'll need a Faction to belong to, so that will also have to be a starting attribute. Armies can also have a commander, although that I'll add in later and it should be determined based on the units assigned to that army. So I don't need to worry about that right now. We do need a position on the World Map, though, and we'll need a way to show units moving around on the world map.

Which means I need a World Map layer for Armies.

One thought I have is that there could be two types of Armies, Garrisons and Mobile armies. If I go that route, Garrisons would be automatic. Every single city would have a Garrison Army at the start of the game with whatever default units it needs to do so. All units produced in a city would automatically be assigned to the Garrison. Mobile armies, then, would need to be created OFF of other armies. This in itself is fine, since you'd want to be able to Split or Join armies as needed. I'm not sure if this is really necessary, though. It's not all that different from having a new army created if there isn't one in the city. It would answer the question of which army gets any new units produced, though, which could be useful. Otherwise it might not be too obvious to the player how units get added to armies if there is more than one army in a city.

Hmm. Ok, now you'd have an army with 1 or more units, it would have a faction and it would be somewhere in the world. All good stuff. Now what?

Well, we need to move it around. So we'd need some way to measure how fast the army can move as well as any terrain modifiers it gets from the units inside it. Obviously, it can only go as fast as its slowest units and would need all units to have a terrain modifier in order to apply that to the army as whole.

Might want to give the player the ability to nickname armies as well. Maybe use that with the Garrisons so that they get a default of [City] Garrison for those and Army # for the others? Probably reasonable as a start.

That's probably enough for the moment. I'm sure I'll think of more as I get that implemented.


Now for Units. Those are kind of complicated when we look at the list at the start. But we can get away with just having the basics, for now.

Let's take the Swordsman as our example:

  Type: Swordsmen
  Attack: 50
  Defense: 20
  Damage: 10
  Figures: 100
  Hit Points per figure: 10
  Attacks per phase: 1
  Phase: Melee
  Morale: 100
  Rank:  Captain
  Cost: 600
  Upkeep: 720/13.85 (year/turn)
  Build Time: 4
  Pop Type: Male
  Special: Shield

We're going to want most of that. Maybe leave out the Specials for now, just so we can get things rolling. They're complicated, and we don't need them yet. Nor do we need officers for the base unit aspects to work. So...strike a few of those out and we get our core. Now, we need to add in a link to the Army that the unit is part of, which is pretty easy. We can also give them the nickname capability. Not sure if we'll use it off the bat, but that's easy to code in so we can give them that to start with.

Once those are all done, I think I'll be able to have the game pop some armies and give them some units. Should be fairly straightforward, I think.

Next will be the interface options to let you select armies that belong to you (just 1 at the start) and move them around. And after that we get combat. AI to move around armies can come even later.

But one thing at a time. Let's get the armies and units out there first, then I can worry about making them do something.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Don't know if the following will be useful but I though of something so here it is
   The garrison idea is a good one though I agree having new recruits thrown into it for basically no reason besides it is easier that way seems artificial. What you could do is have a unit which is a [basic unit type] recruit. When you recruit a unit to be trained you don't wait a few months and suddenly the swordsmen magically appears from nowhere. Instead if say you want a unit of 10 light cavalry when you recruit them 10 mounted recruits get added to the garrison and after the training period they upgrade into regular light cavalry. This would not only have it make sense that the units go to the garrison first but it would also allow strategies involving raiding the enemies land to try to kill the fresh recruits before they can become something. Also it would make it so if you have mercenaries you can have them priced higher and yet still have players want them because they are pre-trained units and so the enemy can't spy out that suddenly they have a bunch of recruits floating around on their borders. That in and of itself is another benefit in which spying would be in and of itself useful even if all it let you see is what units the enemy has lying around.

[Mephansteras]

Don't know if the following will be useful but I though of something so here it is
   The garrison idea is a good one though I agree having new recruits thrown into it for basically no reason besides it is easier that way seems artificial. What you could do is have a unit which is a [basic unit type] recruit. When you recruit a unit to be trained you don't wait a few months and suddenly the swordsmen magically appears from nowhere. Instead if say you want a unit of 10 light cavalry when you recruit them 10 mounted recruits get added to the garrison and after the training period they upgrade into regular light cavalry. This would not only have it make sense that the units go to the garrison first but it would also allow strategies involving raiding the enemies land to try to kill the fresh recruits before they can become something. Also it would make it so if you have mercenaries you can have them priced higher and yet still have players want them because they are pre-trained units and so the enemy can't spy out that suddenly they have a bunch of recruits floating around on their borders. That in and of itself is another benefit in which spying would be in and of itself useful even if all it let you see is what units the enemy has lying around.

Huh. That's an interesting idea. Certainly makes sense that the training troops should be useful in some way if you get attacked, even if they aren't really ready for it yet.

I might include that in the future, but I think I'll hold off for now. It adds another layer of complexity and I'd want to figure out some way of automatically progressing the units during the training phase so that troops that are half-trained are a good bit better than fresh recruits.

Fortunately, I don't think it'll be that hard to add in later.