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[GalenEvil]

Do you want the villages to only be around the towns or sorta spread out along routes between towns also at points where roads might cross?

[Mephansteras]

Initially, they cluster near the towns. Eventually, they should spread out to the surrounding area and along roads and trade routes.

[Mephansteras]

Updated the OP. I decided to make a nice Features list for the game, along with notations as far as what is done, what needs to be done for a future release, and what stuff is a 'later' or 'maybe'.

I want to keep my focus on getting the core game functional first, with everything getting fleshed out later as needed. I figure that getting something done and working is more important than having any single aspect be perfect from the get-go. Especially since this approach will help keep me motivated to keep working.

I probably missed some stuff, so I'll be adding to that list/revising it as I go along.

[Mephansteras]

Should be finishing up the basic Faction info tonight and getting those on the map. After that, I'm moving on to UI. That'll probably take a while, but I'll post screenshots as stuff gets functional.

[Mephansteras]

Quick picture dump of Factions, as well as two new map types. The Coastal and Big Island map styles to go along with the Great Lakes style we already had. Still needs some work to make sure that everything looks good, especially for the Neutral factions. But it's a start!

[Korbac]

Will each faction have unique units?

[Mephansteras]

Will each faction have unique units?

Not initially, but that's an eventual goal.

Well...more precisely I think there will be different Cultures that have unique unit lists. Factions would then belong to those cultures. That way you can do different scenarios, like competing empires or civil war within a single culture or whatever.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious there are 5 Main Factions up there (Red, Blue, Purple, White, and Orange) while the Neutral cities are Grey. I'll have to figure out what the acceptable Faction colors are and make that a bit more variable. And, you know, declare factions as Player or AI and all that jazz.

There is also a problem with some villages not showing up well. Mountain villages are completely grey right now, which is problematic, and swamp villages are almost impossible to see. So I need to tweak stuff some more. But it's almost in a 'good enough to move on' state. After this comes UI, which will be a huge amount of work.

[Rolepgeek]

Maybe an option to have a variable number of factions?

[Mephansteras]

Maybe an option to have a variable number of factions?

Yeah, that too. Eventually I want you to have a lot of control over the state of the world when you start a game. Map size, # of factions, # of starting cities, world-gen length of time. Ideally even starting scenarios.

Right now, though, it's just hard coded stuff designed to give me a decent idea of how things are working.

What do you guys think about the various map types? That was a bit of a tangent last night, but I'm reasonably happy with how they turned out. Too many little islands, but generally good otherwise.

[GalenEvil]

What do you think the maximum and minimum sized worlds should be? I will need to look at the OP, or earlier in the thread if it's not there, but I think you said each map square would be 32x32? Would that be getting subdivided further into individual plots like DF?

If it is all a single level, without having the sub-terrain z's in there to bugger up the gen times to astounding levels for individual tile loads, then each plot could be pretty much as large as you want it to be, but would probably then play hell on any long distance pathfinding you do Above ground z's wouldn't really be too much of a problem I think. I haven't gotten more than single level going in my simulation yet hehe.

On pathfinding, since I mentioned it: Are you going to stick with grid-A* or go for one of the less known variants. An HPA might work well as a granular path map, with A*/D* between HPA nodes.

Sorry if this was all addressed in the OP, gotta go read it since I haven't for the last several updates of notes you have put in there >.>

[Mephansteras]

It's all one area, so there aren't sub-regions or anything like that. It's more of a large-scale conquest game like Civ than a site-centric game like Dwarf Fortress. The example maps I've been showing are 50x50. Depending on how many cities and enemy factions you want, you could probably go as little as 20x20. Max size...I'm not sure. We'll have to see how things go, but 50x50 is pretty big when you consider how long it'd take to get from one end of the map to another if you can only move a few tiles each turn.

Haven't really looked at pathfinding yet, but I'll keep your suggestions in mind. I'd been thinking of doing A*, but I'm fine with whatever works well.

[GalenEvil]

Ah okay, I had this mixed up with another game that is being developed here D: A* should work fine, at 50x50 the limiting factor then becomes the number of entities that need to request paths. The number of entities supportable should be very large though

[Mephansteras]

Yeah. Pathfinding isn't something I'm too worried about with this game. There shouldn't be too many units pathing around at any given point. Especially considering that most things doing pathing will be armies, and I doubt most factions will have more then a handful of Armies actually going anywhere on a given turn.

Thinking about it, the AI trying to decide what to do will probably be the most intensive thing as far as pathfinding goes (and pretty much everything else). I may want to cache things like pathing between cities to help speed that up, since questions like 'Which city will be the fastest to reach from this one' will be pretty common. It'd need to be updated when a new road gets finished, but that won't be all that often.

[GalenEvil]

I fully support the caching of paths between cities/towns/other important areas! I suggest updating when new intelligence is obtained instead of just when roads are built, though, so that the towns do not have perfect knowledge of the world. Sorta like a fog of war in RTS/TBS games from the human player view.

For each city that is usable as an origin point you could generate paths to anywhere that it knows about (nearby cities/towns, enemy civ frontline cities or more depending on intel reports, etc) and create semi-permanent paths that are altered depending on changes to terrain such as forests being cleared to make travel easier or new road systems being built which make the current path less desirable. Updating those semi-permanent paths could be done using a variant on Dijkstra's algorithm confined to work within known information instead of perfect world state information. The paths would be stored within the origin's knowledge container using the destination as the key to search.

Example time of a possible implementation using cached paths and a limited tactical AI:
Towns A, B, and C exist. A is friendly with B, but mutual distrust exists between A and C.
A decides it is time for war and so wants to send some troops over to C. Town A could just send their troops directly to C, but recently got intel saying that C has started to build up defensive structures along the route A<->C but not B<->C since C is perfectly happy with B at the moment.
A decides instead it will send the army on a roundabout journey to bring it to C from the side without defensive structures, using the route from B->C. A sends army to B via a static route that is already known, but the army doesn't have a map (semi-permanent route) to follow to get to C. Army has two choices, ask B for a route to C (may or may not succeed depending on how much B likes C) or make a new path from B to C using a best-guess about the terrain situation. Let's say that town B decides to give the Army the route, and so A's army now goes and rampages C from the side in a surprise attack, survives, and wants to return home. The Army would have been given a map for the original A<->C path since they may have needed to head back to A if their intel was wrong about the B<->C route being open and more heavily defended than A<->C. Army then heads along the A<->C route (backwards since their origin is C and destination A) and gets home safely.

A lot of ways to go about the tactical AI portion, the above being a poorly formatted and simplified version. Hope reading it doesn't make your head hurt (from parsing it, not understanding it)

[Mephansteras]

Heh. Yeah, I've thought about stuff like that. Lots to think about for eventual goals. Initially, of course, it'll just be perfect information for everyone since that's easier to code.

More complicated issues like territory control and the the like will have to come later.