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[Mephansteras]

I had thought you meant th turns would be a year each, from the way it was put. Now it makes a bit more sense.

Ah. Yeah, I think a Turn is going to be week. That's a good middle-ground from a civilization level standpoint in terms of time it takes to do things and move around while still being low-grain enough to not get the Civ style (1 turn = 50 years!) sort of silliness. I guess it's also a lot finer grain than the Total War series, but I'm cool with that.

[Rolepgeek]

It should certainly take multiple turns to do things, then. The fastest castle built(by Oda Nobunaga) was built in a year, I believe. And he had premade buildings and walls and shit.

[Mephansteras]

It should certainly take multiple turns to do things, then. The fastest castle built(by Oda Nobunaga) was built in a year, I believe. And he had premade buildings and walls and shit.

Indeed. Even a simple fort (with basic log walls) will probably take months to build. Making it anything more than that will take a long time. Same with stone walls and the like.

Hmm...eventually I might need to give an option to start a fort at stone walls. It'd take longer to get anything useful, but ultimately be less expensive/faster than building it with wood first and then stone.

[Rolepgeek]

True. Most of the reason they did wood, and mostly the Normans, is that it was fast, and forests were abundant in England. But a properly constructed concentric ally designed stone castle? There's a reason people sieges stuff. Taking those things was really really hard.

[Mephansteras]

Woo! Cities!



I think 20 seems to be a good initial number. Now I need to get them to populate villages next to them.

Still need to decide if I'm happy with the way they're showing up, but for now I guess it's ok. They take their background color from the Tile they're on and use that. In that screenshot they're all on Plains, which is pretty common, although occasionally you'll see one in some hills. I might switch that over to being the foreground color and just leave the background always black. We'll have to see, though, because I'd like cities to show what faction they're from. So...more work to do there, if not really high priority.

Once villages are done I can move on to assigning cites/villages to Factions, and I can see about adding in a Faction Territory map overlay to see how that looks.

After that, I think it's time to move on to the UI and getting a bunch of that sorted out before I move on to actually doing something with these cities.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Nice, it has a decent format and I can understand what most of the squares represent. Also I want to ask something about the units cost figures. Basically are you going to included modifiers to the cost such as if a town has a rich iron mine so instead of buying iron from somewhere they can produce it themselves (though of course it still costs something). While something like this could give the place an advantage it would probably be needed to help protect the mine.

[Mephansteras]

   Nice, it has a decent format and I can understand what most of the squares represent. Also I want to ask something about the units cost figures. Basically are you going to included modifiers to the cost such as if a town has a rich iron mine so instead of buying iron from somewhere they can produce it themselves (though of course it still costs something). While something like this could give the place an advantage it would probably be needed to help protect the mine.

Not with the current design. Each square does have a Wealth rating, though, so some cities and villages will be richer than other.

Gold, at this point, simply represents the overall Wealth of a Faction. It doesn't concern itself with the source of the wealth, or attempt to do any differentiation of resources beyond that.

I might add in resources later, but for now that's a complication that I'm just going to gloss over.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Fair enough. I probably just ended up thinking deeper then needed.

[GreatWyrmGold]

About the display thing: Maybe have the city's symbol thingy be the same color as the biome it's on, and have the background of each tile show its ownership.

[3_14159]

I'd have two suggestion/comments, mainly on the unit training and building system.

I) Unit training:
At the moment, your recruitment cost are representing both training and equipment costs. How about lowering the costs depending on:
a) Training level: Both by using men from the last year and forcing them to train during the whole year (i), a bigger cadre of trained men would be available, decreasing training costs and necessary training time. And, of course, increasing experience.
b) Equipment cost: Possibly by increasing the available weaponry, or by using weapons already existing (for example, Militias, or emergency Militias and of course equipment from former years.)

Combining these two would make it possible to, for example, stockpile swords and, in emergencies, recruit the veterans of last year in only a week or so, culminating in an experienced and well armed force. Of course, this would (maybe) make it necessary to track veterans a bit, so that an enemy army would target the now-civilians.

II) Away from the civ building system.
I for one am deeply, deeply annoyed by the civilization (or total war) building build system, mostly because you have to build things like a tavern yourself, which requires two or three years to build. Instead, I'd have two ideas:
a) Civilians build civilian buildings: Smaller buildings like inns, houses, shops and so on are built automatically (assuming of course that they even have an influence)
b) You can build as many buildings at once as you like - assuming you'd have enough resources, enough builders (both untrained and trained) and enough money to pay for those. And, you can vary those amounts.
Combining these two would result in, for example, a naturally growing city which, after some time, would've attracted enough builders that you could build a cathedral or so, or alternatively several guard stations or such simultaneously.

And, while typing, another idea crossed my mind: How about making a city not contain 'n people', but 'n people with profession x', depending on resources, buildings, and so on, combined with a immigration and emigration? For example, building a cathedral in a city would result in many builders immigrating to that city; a war in most people trying to emigrate, but several professions (blacksmiths, for example) immigrating. Depending on your chosen 'openness' for your cities.

Of course, only you can know how it fits in your concept and the time you're willing to invest.


(i) Edward III declared in 1363: "[...]  that every man in the same country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make use, in his games, of bows and arrows... and so learn and practise archery.", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow, under training.

Edit: Forum didn't like my citation style.

[Mephansteras]

Good ideas, and I've pondered the idea of tracking veterans among the population. That might go in, since I expect there will be a fair amount of 'Recruit Swordsmen - Fight - Disband Swordsmen' going on.

The building stuff is a good idea, but maybe too in-depth for the scope of this game. As far as buildings go, the only things I have planned right now are defenses and military buildings. So you'd need to build stables yourself, but things like taverns or the like are just assumed to be part of a decent sized city.

[Korbac]

This looks interesting, keeping an eye out! A few questions :

Does the current system generate towns / cities and then assign them to factions?
How detailed is recruitment and training going to be? For example, will there be an option to train a unit at the cost of gold / time so it can improve even while not in combat?
As for the building stuff, I agree that it's safe to assume taverns, shops etc. are part of any normal city, but would there be a way to 'invest' money into a city to boost it's income / happiness / growth in the long term (this could easily be abstracted)?

Cool beans!!!

[Rolepgeek]

Is there going to be any sort of complex resource system? Like,when you recruit swordsman, you need weapons and armor for them, and when you disband them, you get, say, 80 to 50% of those weapons and armor sets back?

[Mephansteras]

On Towns: Well, right now I don't have factions in at all yet. But they're up next, once the initial villages are in. Once I get some UI stuff in place I'll probably let the player choose their start location, and eventually I want to have some different starting scenarios and the like. But for now, it'll just be random faction assignments so I can see how things look.

Yes, you'll be able to invest money back into a town or village to improve the Wealth rating of the site.

On Recruitment: It is going to be pretty simple for now. You pay the cost and once the training time is up you get the unit (drawn from the adult male population of the surrounding area). Haven't thought of any advanced training options, but that's always a possible addition for later. I don't keep track of weapons or armor, that's abstracted into the cost. Right now if you disband it all goes away, but if I track veterans later on that might reduce the initial costs and training times if you're just calling them back into service.

[Mephansteras]

Got a first pass of villages in. I need to do a bit more work on the algorithm, I think, and I have some more tests to do. But it's looking pretty good.