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[mastahcheese]

Everything Tiru said

Also while we're talking about a subject during that time period, while reading on other things around the Art of War, I read about how the military forces of the period before that mostly consisted of peasant infantry, while the nobility-equivilent rode chariots into battle.

In the game, is there any kind of caste divisions in some societies? Or is it more like DF right now in that everyones pretty much equal, with the exception of important figures?

[Clownmite]

In the game, is there any kind of caste divisions in some societies? Or is it more like DF right now in that everyones pretty much equal, with the exception of important figures?

Currently, there's not really anything dividing people. Most generated people get associated with a profession, and the profession is tagged as either "noble" or "commoner", but I don't think I use those tags for anything yet. However, I think the majority of the "interesting" characters in the world are going to be noble or similar, just because they'll be the ones with the money and the means to do interesting things.

I should point out that the game can't track everyone in the world individually, so it's abstracting a lot of it, but still creating the important historical figures and simulating them all of the time (although, they don't yet do anything too interesting).

[Ambidextrous]

PTW

[Clownmite]

I recently spent a little more time messing with the economy. I started examining some of the city economies in more depth, and it's making some interesting trends. You can see some graphs of price, supply, and demand taken from a few sample cities at this link: http://imgur.com/a/kqx3k#0 . Each of these graphs shows the natural flow of a city's economy for the first few years after it is set up. A lot of times, conditions in other cities will affect a city's economy, since merchants must purchase and transport goods in order for them to be available.

There's still a lot of weirdness with tools not being consistently available - in most graphs, the line for tools in the price history plot only shows up sporadically. This is at least partially due to the time delay when merchants transport the goods.

Cities also need a much better idea of figuring out what commodities they need, and a way to setup imports and exports more dynamically. Economies also need better ways to sustain themselves in general. However, it's pretty cool to see some of this stuff coming together.

[mastahcheese]

*Is excited*

[Lt_Alfred]

*Is excited as well*

[Skyrunner]

I can never figure out how supply and demand influence price in reality, not in the ideal world where the supply/demand curve already exists. How is price negotiated??

[Clownmite]

I can never figure out how supply and demand influence price in reality, not in the ideal world where the supply/demand curve already exists. How is price negotiated??

I think there's some discussion on this earlier in the thread. But in short, there's no set price for any commodity. Each city has a number of "agents" who have varying beliefs for the price of an item. Each round that they need an item, they'll make a bid. If their bid is accepted, they get more confident that their belief about the price is correct, but less confident if their bid has not been accepted.

Each of these agents performs a certain job; either gathering resources or transforming resources into goods. In order to do their job, they require certain items. In the current version, almost all agents require "tools" for example. There is a certain chance that an item will break each round, depending on the material it's made out of. Once the item breaks, the agent will start bidding for it.

So what ends up happening is that if there's a scarcity of an item, there will be more agents competing to bid on it. The ones who don't purchase it will adjust their price belief upwards, so that next round they have a better chance of acquiring it, leading to a rise in price. The opposite happens when there's an abundance of an item - sellers will adjust their belief downwards so that they are more likely to sell the item.


Finally, if an agent runs out of money, it's removed. Another agent of the most profitable type is added to the economy. You see this in the supply plot in some of the graphs I think, where for example the Potters level off towards the end, and more farmers or clay gatherers get added in the cities which are exporting clay.


Of course, this whole thing is really difficult to debug, so it's very useful to be able to look at charts like these to figure out what is going on. In order to be playable though, much more work needs to be done ensuring that this is stable.

[Tardigrade]

You sir, are a genius. PTW.

[Magnumcannon]

This looks promissing! Seriously, this deserves far more views! Anyway, PTW!

[Clownmite]

Thanks for the kind words!

Most of my effort on this project lately has been thinking about combat. I'm exploring the idea of simultaneous turns for combat. The idea is that there would be a few different kinds of strikes one could make with their weapon (maybe high horizontal swing, low horizontal swing, vertical swing, and thrust). The move you choose would be compared to the move that the other combatant chose. There would be some sort of default values that would come from comparing the two moves (like maybe a thrust gets a value of 80 and a vertical swing gets a value of 20 when compared to each other, giving the thrust an 80% chance of "winning" that round by default). However, a few other attributes would add to these values - the type of weapon (maybe spears get a +20 bonus to thrusts) and the combatants' skill levels. Each combatants' point values are added up and a "winner" for the round is chosen based on their weighted score.

In this system, I'm picturing opponents' swords clashing for a bit before they actually strike and damage the other combatant. Once a solid strike is made, I'd expect it to be reasonably deadly. However, I'd want to lose a lot of the randomness that one would find in DF combat by making sure the player knows when a fight isn't going his way and giving him reasonable chance to escape.

I really like this as the base mechanic, but there are a few ideas brewing as to how I can proceed from here. Perhaps the winner of the "round" then applies damage to the other combatant. Or perhaps each turn consists of 2 or 3 "rounds" of which the moves are specified beforehand by the combatants. Perhaps combatants must build up an "advantage" before they can strike and damage the other combatant directly.

The biggest hurdle, though, is to figure out how more than 2 combatants in the same combat would work out (in, say, a 2v1 scenario).


If anyone has any thoughts on this I'd love to hear them. Overall, I'd like to keep the system fairly mechanically simple but still allow for a lot of depth. I don't want this to get super tactical, but I definitely want to make it more fun than simply an "attack" move. I'm not married to the simultaneous combat idea either - but I think if pulled off right, it could be a refreshing difference from most roguelikes.

[mastahcheese]

I do like the idea of pre-choosing multiple attack moves, and comparing them to an opponent's moves.
I also think that the idea of build "advantage" over an opponent before going for the killing blow would be a nice change over other games.

Although, again, the issue of multiple combatants causes issues again. One solution would be to have a character for "advantage" for each opponent they face, and each advantage increases or decreases independently, but at slower rates than against individual opponents.
So one technique would be to focus with defensive moves (With more focus on slowing the rate of an opponent's advantage on you, rather than building advantage against them) on one enemy to keep them at bay long enough to slay a different enemy with offensive strikes.
Unless you're such a high-level hero as to wipe out multiple enemies at once, but it should be rather absurdly difficult.

It might seem nonsensical if you coded it like that, and set up a 7 vs 7 fight or something like that, but perhaps it's an idea.

[Clownmite]

Thanks for your thoughts. I think the problem with multiple combatants goes deeper than that. Do both enemy combatants compare their move to yours? If so, does yours only count half-strength? Or do you choose one enemy to attack and the other one gets a free strike at you? Just some things I've been thinking about.

[Asgarus]

Some thoughts regarding the combat...

Let's say you have a fighter X.
In the first scenario he is facing a single enemy Y.

....
.XY.
....

They are facing each other, have their weapons in one and shields in the other hand.

X has luck or is more agile or whatever and can lead the first turn.

First turn planning:
X decides to do a low low horizontal swing from left to right with his sword, followed by a diagonal swing upwards from right to left.
Y has now a chance, depending on his experience and knowledge about fighting with swords, to see from X's movements what he plans to do.
That can be more or less successful, and Y can, to a degree, consider X's actions when planning his own actions this turn.

Let's say, Y knows that X is gonna attack low, not that it's going to be swing, just that it's low.
He now could decide to lower his shield, preparing to defend a low attack, and let follow a high slash towards X.

First turn action:
X makes a low swing with his sword, aiming for Y's legs, but the attack is blocked by Y's shield.
Y reacts with a high slash, but X manages to parry the attack with a vertical swing upwards.

There would be calculations about the power of the attacks and who leads the next turn.

That could also include the mentioned advantage.
X advantage would slightly increase if he can make Y stumble from the power of his second attack.

Y advantage would slightly sink, thus he has a lower chance to successfully foresee and counter X's actions,
while X would have a slight bonus on foreseeing Y's actions and countering them because of a slightly increased advantage.

Falling to the ground would be a much higher change in the advantages and probably mean ones definite dead in the next turn.
--- ---

A fight with more participants would be no problem, either.

.A..
.XB.
.C..

X is surrounded by A, B and C.

This time, X isn't so lucky and A leads the first round.

First turn planning:
A decides to make a high horizontal swing and nothing else, which could increase the power of this single action.
Since X is better than B and C, it's now his turn to plan.
He foresees that A is doing "something", but has no idea what exactly.
He decides to lower the shield in his left hand, to duck and to make a low swing from the left to the right with his sword.
Since he chooes 3 actions, each action is slightly less effective.

Now B plans. He doesn't manage foresee what X is gonna do and decides to try a high slash towards X's head.
C can't foresee what X is going to do, either, and plans to make a diagonal downward swing from right to left.

First turn action:
A attacks with a high horizontal swing, but it is blocked by X's raised shield.
X cringes and makes a low swing, which hits B's legs,
making him stumble and almost fall (medium advantage loss for B and he is too distracted to do his action).

C attacks, hitting X's shoulder, but the hit is weakened by X's iron shoulder plate.
--- ---


I'm sure there are flaws and gaps in this, but I think it could work and make some interesting fight scenes possible.

A fighter has the chance to foresee all actions planned before it's his turn to plan,
So if A, B and C would all have their turns before X, he could plan even better, like raising his shield, then taking an escape jump backwards,
avoiding the attacks he didn't block with a bit of luck.
He would have a disadvantage though, because he has to share his focus to the three of them, making it possible for him to not foresee anything or maybe even make wrong assumptions.

I think fights with more than 2 factions would work with this, too.

I hope I could inspire you a bit.

It looks really great what you have done so far, keep up the good work!

[Clownmite]

That's an interesting concept for combat, but it's hard to see how all the algorithms would work out. What determines the actual outcome of the attack? For example, in the 1v3 example, what gets compared to what in order to see who gets hit?