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[My Name is Immaterial]

I was thinking something like medieval European sword fighting versus Japanese sword fighting, on a large scale. On a small scale, German versus French fencing styles. Cultures develop techniques over time that focus on different areas of battle. For instance, one culture could have something that emphasizes quick, fluid attacks from behind a heavy shield, while another could focus on lightly armored spear attacks and using a dagger to parry blows. These styles could be influenced by who the culture normally fights: if they are constantly raided by melee cavelry, they focus on spears, large shields and defensive formations.

[Clownmite]

I was thinking something like medieval European sword fighting versus Japanese sword fighting, on a large scale. On a small scale, German versus French fencing styles. Cultures develop techniques over time that focus on different areas of battle. For instance, one culture could have something that emphasizes quick, fluid attacks from behind a heavy shield, while another could focus on lightly armored spear attacks and using a dagger to parry blows. These styles could be influenced by who the culture normally fights: if they are constantly raided by melee cavelry, they focus on spears, large shields and defensive formations.

Can you think of quantifiable parameters that each of the stances could change, in a one-on-one combat situation? Would I be correct in thinking it would affect things like - chance of parrying, chance of dodging, chance of counterattacking, chance of dropping weapon, chance of disarming opponent? Any ideas how these stats can come together into a coherent combat system? I won't do a HP-based thing if I can avoid it, but I won't be able to go in-depth as dwarf fortress.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Your assumptions about the stats are spot on. I feel that it would make every culture and world feel unique.
To add to your list: [bodypart] defense, against stabbing, slashing and bludgeoning, attack speed, bonuses to weapons, and combinations of weapons, movement speed during battle, chance to let down guard and provoke an opportunity attack.

I am not sure it can stand alone as a full combat system, but I'm at a loss for a fix.

[Clownmite]

Awesome. Can you point me towards some basic forms and what general effects they would have on stats?

[My Name is Immaterial]

Wikipedia dive complete!

General information:
Historical European Martial Arts.
Swordsmanship.

European styles:
Viking weapons and armor, sans horned helmets. They were lightly armored, and fought with a variety of weapons, from swords to spears to bows and arrows. They fought with a berserker/shock and awe style, emphasizing speed over suitability. They tried to escape before backup came. 8-11th century. Source on that.
De Re Militari, a roman book about warfare. It stayed relevant even after gunpowder. "Concerning Military Matters". Mostly dealing with running military campaigns. 5th century.
German school of swordsmanship. Focus on the two-handed longsword, but also discusses other martial arts.

Spoiler: Some principles (click to show/hide)

Taking the shortest and most direct line of attack disregarding flourishes or flashy parrying techniques. (Less chance to parry, less chance to disarm, bonus to heavier weapons.)
Footwork and stance and of correct distance and speed of motion. (Better dodge chance.)
Taking the offensive, with a fixed plan of attack. (Bonus to initiative.)
Hiding the intended action from the opponent. (Bonus to surprise opponents.)
Speed and courage paired with wariness, deceit and cleverness. (Bonus to relevant stats.)
Correct distance, concealing one's intentions, reason, anticipation and dexterity. (Mostly repetition.)
Training and confidence, speed, agility and good footwork. (More repetition.)

Italian school of the same. An advanced system of grappling, daggers, poleaxes, short-swords, long-swords, and spears. There were many weapon combinations:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sword alone
Sword and Dagger
Sword and Small Buckler
Sword and Broad Buckler
Sword and Targa
Sword and Rotella
Sword and Cape
Sword and Gauntlet
Two Swords
Sword for Two Hands (also referred to as the Spadone by some masters)
Dagger
Dagger and Cape
Halberd
Spetum
Ronca (weapon)
Partisan (weapon)
Partisan and Shield
Lance
Pike
Unarmed against Dagger

Ancient era:
Ancient Greek warfare. Mostly information about general strategies. 800-480 B.C.E.
Peltast, a type of light infantry. Focused on javelins. Originated in Thrace.
Hoplites, Greek spearmen. Fought with long spears and large shields. Armored. (Could receive bonus to fighting in groups, as they often used the phalanx.)
War in Mesopotamia. Little information, but I didn't look very hard.

I didn't look into Rome, as I thought that would be too advanced for your needs.
Also, almost every culture that used shields had a type of shield wall, going back to Mesopotamia.

[Clownmite]

Thanks for the links. I will have to check them out and do some brainstorming.



I've continued work on the language stuff and finally put it ingame. It's a little more of a side-track than I was planning on but I enjoy working on it. It has some framework in place (not implemented yet) where two cultures could share the same language, but have different ways of writing it down; or alternatively two different languages could share the same orthography. With some more work I can model a single language mutating into two different ones, following some of the same rules as happened historically. I don't really need that much depth to languages at the moment, but it could be pretty cool if it ever happens.

Anyway. the language generator is starting to come up with languages that were more distinct than before:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I even came across a few languages which only had 3 consonants:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, honest opinions on these? Do they look distinct enough? Do they look "believable" enough?

[mastahcheese]

But can it emulate an African clicking language?

This looks awesome by the way.

[Clownmite]

But can it emulate an African clicking language?

This looks awesome by the way.

Thanks. It should be able to emulate any language - you just need to feed it the phonotactic rules (which can be a pain to find). Right now it uses most of the phonotactic rules of English, but most languages don't use *all* of the English rules. At some point I will probably add some more non-english rules for it to choose from.

Anyway, some languages in my generator actually do get "clicks" at "empty" syllable onsets or codas. A quick look at one such run I just did is:

Spoiler: Clicking language? (click to show/hide)

boulder - 'é'skroe'
stone - 'aa'
chariot - dré'skrï'
dagger - 'ae'
shield - sfé'
spear - vé'sfé'
fire - 'ae'vé'
cave - sfae'
cloak - sné'dae'
axe - 'é'skré'
flint - 'aa'
iron - 'ae'
sword - sné'sfé'
rock - 'é'vae'

Just replace every apostrophe with a click. Of course, I could use any ascii character to represent a "click" phoneme. If I wanted I could use a !k to represent the phoneme, as in the !Kung language transcription. Here's an excerpt of another language I generated with that parameter:

Spoiler: Clicking Language 2? (click to show/hide)

copper - !kú!kyî!k
pot - lî!k
crate - yâ!k
site - yú!k
rat - skú!k
village - skú!kchúrng
earth - thâ!kthî!k
continent - prî!kchúlƒ
market - skú!k
city - pî!k
horse - lú!kthi!k
death - chî!k
lake - !kä!k
hall - stri!k
bronze - lí!knî!k
plains - thî!k
wood - pi!klä!k
forest - Ĕ!k
temple - ƒrî!k
hill - li!kmâ!k
life - φî!k
wheat - nú!klî!k
mountain - zî!kmî!k
path - lî!kφâ!k
desert - fîlmä!k
inn - thrò!k
room - tú!k
tavern - yúpú!k
pillar - lî!kpî!k
dog - jîrt
ocean - strí!k
planet - smî!knî!k
place - kòmzî!k
barrel - sri!k
river - φâmî!k

Using the "!k" to represent the click looks a little silly, but I could use any character in the ASCII set, it's just a matter of finding one that looks good (suggestions?). Anyway, the "clicks" that I'm generating here aren't really following the phonotactic rules they should be - they're just being used in places where it could have generated another consonant but didn't.

I also plan on having some languages hyphenate between syllables, like you see some ancient languages transcribed.

[USEC_OFFICER]

I'm not entirely sure whether I like the language where two thirds of the consonants use the same symbol more than the language which has three consonants but only uses one. Decisions, decisions...

Also, keep up the work. The languages look fantastic.

[Clownmite]

I'm not entirely sure whether I like the language where two thirds of the consonants use the same symbol more than the language which has three consonants but only uses one. Decisions, decisions...

Also, keep up the work. The languages look fantastic.

Haha, thanks. The "p" language is a weird case. I don't have any phonotactic rules for the "zh" phoneme input currently, so even though it's "valid" in that language, there were no valid rules for it to be used. That will hopefully be addressed soon. I'm not sure why the "ng" didn't get used though, I'll have to look into it.

These are pretty fringe cases though. I thought they were amusing, but I will probably make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen too often.

[My Name is Immaterial]

The languages look good. How are you planning on using them in game?

[Clownmite]

The languages look good. How are you planning on using them in game?

Right now they're used for names of people, cities, and cultures. I've done a little work to try to make the male names distinguishable from the female names.

You probably won't be able to have any advanced interaction with a speaker of a language you don't know.

Some other possibilities I've thought of:
Being able to find letters, messages, etc on people. These could reveal plans or important locations, but you'd need to get them translated if you don't know the language.

"Ancient" scripts which look nothing like the Latin alphabet. You could find these in ancient ruins. Some may tell history, but others may lead to secrets/goodies, if you or someone else can decipher them. There could be "Rosetta stone"-like artifacts which could help you translate.

[mastahcheese]

You made a language generator that can make a clicking language...








No words can express my shear joy at this.

[Clownmite]

Well, I've continued work on various things. I played around with the economy a bit, and actually got things to start looking reasonable. Now it takes about 10-20 years for the global economy to collapse instead of 1 or 2; but on the whole it seems like it is doing a much better job than before. I think a big issue is that since merchants for a particular good are not always in the city, it leads to a chain reaction of people needing those goods to produce their thing, and then people who need that start to fail, etc.

I also cleaned up the city info screens to make it easier to see how economies are doing. I'm not sure how much of this will actually be displayed to players once everything's stable, but it's an immense help for testing.



Since there are now more important figures running around, I updated the screen showing which of these are in a city. Again, I'm not sure how much of this players will see farther down the line, but it's helpful for now. One cool part is that each figure has a city where they live and a house in that city. If they are traveling to another city, they pick an inn to stay at. (edit: Just noticed the 3-year-old tax collector haha - I just fixed that)





I've also been trying to come up with a combat system that makes sense, but this has been the hardest part so far for me to design.

The picture in my head is that you and the opponent trade blows until one can find an opening. Besides setting your stance, you won't have much control here. Once one of you finds an opening, you can then choose where to strike and how. It is here that interesting things would happen, like disarming or being knocked over.

Figuring out how everything actually works together is the tough part. I have a few basic skills and stances set in the game, but once I have a more solid idea of how things work, I'll post the system here for thoughts and ideas, since it's almost guaranteed to be terrible at first pass.

[Mephansteras]

Well, I've continued work on various things. I played around with the economy a bit, and actually got things to start looking reasonable. Now it takes about 10-20 years for the global economy to collapse instead of 1 or 2; but on the whole it seems like it is doing a much better job than before. I think a big issue is that since merchants for a particular good are not always in the city, it leads to a chain reaction of people needing those goods to produce their thing, and then people who need that start to fail, etc.

I think a fix for your chain reaction would be to get producers to work on a stockpile-and-sell mentality. Start with the assumption that any given producer will be visited by a merchant once a year, and they prepare for that visit. This goes for both inputs and outputs.

With that framework in place, you let the period of visits be adjustable depending on job and demand.

For example, a wool industry would work fine like this. Sheep are sheared once per year. Wool merchants then come and collect that wool. They sell it to weavers/dyers who then sell it to other (possibly the same) merchant who then takes it to markets and sells them. The final merchant probably has a rotating schedule of markets he visits, selling a portion of his goods in each city. Ideally, from his perspective, he'll run out of goods to sell at about the time he gets back around to the source which should then have a fresh set of goods available.

Since you can change the period, you can adjust the frequency at which things occur. So if a Butcher needs to get fresh stock every week then he can buy from various farmers who stop by periodically to sell him animals to butcher. Or perhaps he travels to the farms to buy the animals, that might be easier to model.