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[Vactor]

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Current State of the Project:



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Latest Release 0.01.04:

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=28169.225

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So I've been toying with the idea of developing a persistent world multiplayer RTS for some time, which I've been calling Airlands.  I am testing the waters to see if anyone is interested in working with me if I go ahead with it, or if anyone has any suggestions/advice.

One of the problems with creating a persistent world using traditional RTS styles is that the fact that you will share your borders with the same player until one of you is completely removed from the map.  Also if a player spends a great deal of time working towards something, it is very demotivating to loose everything that you have worked on.  There is also an issue of what to do when someone is offline.

With Airlands I hope to be able to avoid all of these issues.  The player takes the role of a sorcerer who resides in a tower floating in the air.  The map is hex tiled, and attached to the tower are several tiles of land.

here is a quick mock up i made:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In order to increase your wealth, fame, and power you will need much more land to build your empire.


I have a somewhat brief summary of key game mechanics that I would consider core here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-Airlands-

-Gameplay takes place in the atmosphere, floating islands dominate the sky.

-Players take control of an Airland, land is created in hextiles, the player starts with a central tower with a few tiles in which thier population, encomony, military exists.

-The larger the Airland, the lower it must fly, creating a pecking order of safety, the smallest of Airlands can escape predation by increasing altitude.  In this way the largest Airlands are vulnerable to attack from the largest number of enemies, while the smallest are not vulnerable to larger airlands.


-Habituation-
The environment that a player spends their time in will affect the player's Airland, i.e. a player that spends large amounts of time in lightning storm clouds will have existing tiles pick up lightning effect generating attributes, populations will be affected by their surroundings as well.


-Populations-
Player's Airlands will have dynamic populations of various races, certain races will have easier times co-existing with other races, some races will be very difficult to maintain co-currently leading to civil wars and unrest without proper Airland structure management and design.

Players must feed, equip, pay their militaries with goods generated on their airland, or traded for from other players.


-Central Tower-
The Central Tower is the foundation of the player's persistance in the gameworld.  The player can never lose their central tower, and any upgrades applied to their tower will persist even if they lose the entirety of their tiles.

Improvements to the Central Tower makes it possible for the player to quickly achieve their previous levels of airland development if they lose a large part of their airland.

Central Towers can grow to cover multiple tiles.

-Airland Layout-
The arrangement of tiles can be altered by the player, tiles can be swapped with eachother one at a time, and it takes time for the swap to complete.  A more militarily defensible design could have effects on the economy of the island, or the amount of tiles required to sever a portion of the island

-Trade, Raiding, and Conquesting-
It is possible for an Airland to dock with another, at which point trade can take place, or combat.  Combat has 2 parts, military and engineering.  The military is used to secure land from enemy units so as to provide safe passage for engineering units which are able to cut the bonds holding tiles together.  Engineering units must be protected from enemy military units for a time for them to successfully cut a piece loose from another players airland.  Bonds between particular tiles are able to be strengthened via infrastructure upgrades, there are different types of bonds that are more/less easily broken by different types of engineering units.  Military units are also able to capture food, equipment, or money from the storage areas of their opponent.

-The Barbarian World-
The world surface is undeveloped and primitive, this is the main source of generic undeveloped tiles.  Special tiles are to be found scattered throughout the environment, volcanos, metals,

And while I haven't written it up in those notes yet, the combat would be automated based upon standing orders and strategies.  Magic would be ritual based, positioning would be a large part for more powerful spells(i.e. getting your spellcasters to take position forming a triangle and channel a spell would create a powerful attack at the triangle's center. Individual units can be given assignments relating to other units or the landscape, protect, assist, avoid etc.  Each hex tile would likely be broken into some form of smaller tiles, be it smaller hexes forming thirds, each hex being split into each facing direction and the center.

The games I would consider inspirations for this would be DF, Globule, Civil War General, Settlers, Stronghold, and the Total War series.  Tactical battles over base rushes.  Central fortified citadel with most fighting over outlying outposts.  It would be impractical to defend everything with heavy fortifications, so choices must be made on tile values, and non static defenses

I would be programming using C# and XNA, and have a basic understanding of both.  I have done a bit of work with getting game environments up and running with basic controls:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Aqizzar]

It's great to see someone who actually knows how to program talking about making something.  Pity I can't help you in any meaningful way, but it sounds fantastic.  The Altitude safety mechanic is especially good.

I get that you're going for actual complexity and strategy with the mid-level-heavy command model.  In addition to the games you listed, there's a few old abandonwares you should check out.
NetStorm was an early multiplayer game somewhat similar to your concept.  Never played it, so take from it what you will.
Dominus is a pretty good fantasy RTS with a hands-off, standing-orders-and-traps system like you described, along with some cool alchemy mechanics.
The Populous games are also a good model for indirect town management.

[Vactor]

Thanks for the links aqizzar, i'll definitely be checking those out.

[Cthulhu]

It does sound pretty cool, I'd play it.

[Fualkner]

First of all, extremely brilliant and creative idea. I love it already, and I'm jealous you had the idea before me. A few suggestions:

1. The people must be kept happy. After all, they could be susceptible to propaganda, or even civil war. However, overtly happy people rarely do alot of work...

2. AFKer's have to have some sort of extra protection, and present players have to have some extra power. The extra protection should prevent from getting buttraped 20 times while being offline and losing everything. The extra power is to reward players that attack other players. This "extra power" would be in the form of active command of units, more definite control over magic and the like. But, while playing you can be completely robbed, and possibly have nothing left except a lonely floating tower. This is a reward for players that encounter other active players, as they can get more.

3. "Atmospheres." When you gain a certain amount of land, you float into a new sphere of the planet. This is because the rock actually floats you higher. This allows people of nearby levels to attack each other, and prevents noob exploitation.

[Servant Corps]

Make sure you don't fall into the trap of TOO MANY BLODDY WRITERS SYNDMORE. I seen too many MMORPGs suffer through that.

[Vactor]

First of all, extremely brilliant and creative idea. I love it already, and I'm jealous you had the idea before me. A few suggestions:

1. The people must be kept happy. After all, they could be susceptible to propaganda, or even civil war. However, overtly happy people rarely do alot of work...

2. AFKer's have to have some sort of extra protection, and present players have to have some extra power. The extra protection should prevent from getting buttraped 20 times while being offline and losing everything. The extra power is to reward players that attack other players. This "extra power" would be in the form of active command of units, more definite control over magic and the like. But, while playing you can be completely robbed, and possibly have nothing left except a lonely floating tower. This is a reward for players that encounter other active players, as they can get more.

3. "Atmospheres." When you gain a certain amount of land, you float into a new sphere of the planet. This is because the rock actually floats you higher. This allows people of nearby levels to attack each other, and prevents noob exploitation.

in response to each point:

1.  This is something i've been considering.  One of the ideas behind the different races was this, say you had a village of demons on your airland, and then picked up a village of angels in one of your conquests.  You have access to more units, but your two villages will likely send raids to attack each other, perhaps even your military units will attack each other if they meet.  The unit diversity may help you win battles, but makes it much more complicated to keep your island running without your population destroying themselves.  There would be of course some races that complement one another well socially, but are more redundant in their military unit capabilities than polar opposites.

2. One of my ideas for gangbang protection is that while you offline, defending from an attack your character (the sorcerer) is working on channeling a spell from your tower, the longer you are under attack, the more powerful this spell becomes.  This spell would lash out from your tower damaging enemy units that are in your territories, as it gets more powerful its range and damage increases.  If a second enemy attacks after the first leaves the spell picks up where it left off, and continues to increase in power such that it becomes very difficult to mount an attack.  When you log on you break the channel as you can't focus on it and govern your settlement at the same time.

When you are online I am thinking you can send yourself out onto the battlefield, both in attacking and defending.

3.  I already have a mechanic like this, with elevations, the larger your airland, the harder it is for your tower to keep it afloat, and the more you are restricted in regards to altitude.  Noobs start out high up in the air out of reach, while the heavy hitters duke it out amongst themselves nearer to the ground.   One of my goals here is to encourage a type of food chain that feeds upwards through the altitude heights.  There would also likely be more dangerous areas where more powerful players will congregate to search out and fight over powerful artifacts and unique tiles

[beorn080]

One thing you can do to prevent players from being wiped out easily is integrate team's deep into the game. I played one MMORTS called Mankind for about a year and teamwork was extremely helpful from the very beginning till the end when massive fleets of warships are moving in half a dozen directions at once. Early on you built on the same planet and shared resources, with the more developed players assisting the new players with money, resources, and ships. Combat was often handled by teams of players moving fleets between systems and sending in reinforcements when needed, with the less skilled players shepherding the fleets to their destinations. You could set up buildings that sent messages to your allies if you came under attack so they could jump in and control your defenses to hold off the attack. One player may focus on city building to get more population while another harvests rare ores to fuel the big ships that a third was building with the population and the ores from the first and second.

Try and make sure that it is foreign language friendly if you go the team route. Otherwise the player who can play at 4AM has the advantage of being pretty much alone in the world. With a large number of international players, that advantage disappears.

[Aqizzar]

AFK Gangbang Protection - This might be too simplistic, but maybe you can cast lasting spells to defend your tower.  But in addition, when you log off, your mage-like avatar goes into some sort of "empowering trance" that boosts your defensive spells, so people who are offline are harder to attack than people who are online.

Likewise, if defenses are powerful enough, it would require a really concerted effort to break into another land, since you have to send all your forces there, and fight all of the forces present on the island.  That means it's easier to attack people who are online and off fighting somewhere else, because they've taken a big chunk of their "defenses" with them.

I had another idea for newb empowerment, but I've gotta run to work.  Good luck again.

[Davion]

Sounds interesting.

I was under the impression that XNA had limited networking capabilities though, doesn't it only support 32 players or something like that? Unless of course that's around the amount you expect to be playing at a given time.

[Servant Corps]

Vactor, the idea of having your own angels and demons butcher each other doesn't really sound...er...fun. Now, if there was a spell that can activate racial feuds, causing angels and demons to start butchering each other, then it suddenly becomes far more fun, for the other side. :p

[Vactor]

Sounds interesting.

I was under the impression that XNA had limited networking capabilities though, doesn't it only support 32 players or something like that? Unless of course that's around the amount you expect to be playing at a given time.

From what i understand the XNA networking limitations only come into play if you use XNA for your networking, which is required for the XBox, in the case of PCs you can just use system.net.  I will admit however the networking is something i'll have to study up on quite a bit to make this work.

Vactor, the idea of having your own angels and demons butcher each other doesn't really sound...er...fun. Now, if there was a spell that can activate racial feuds, causing angels and demons to start butchering each other, then it suddenly becomes far more fun, for the other side. :p

You may be right, however ironing out mechanics like those will be challenges i'll joyously take on once i get a playable game environment running.   One of the things I want to ensure is that you can't have everything, but the player can always make choices. Angels and Demons were simply examples of the two things that in my mind would have the hardest time coexisting.  My hope is that it will be possible to create an airland that can sustain polar opposites, but would require some innovative infrastructure/tile design that can keep them isolated from each other, but in all likelihood hamper the economic activities by restricting travel and village interactions.

or perhaps a more neutral race could be used as a buffer between the other villages, or the loyalty levels of military units would need to be raised to appropriate levels before a wise sorcerer would trust opposing races to fight alongside each other against a common enemy.  Holy units may be unwilling to assault a wall of human peasants being used as living shields, but Demonic units are able to possess the peasants, or harvest them for plunder.  These types of situational complexities are what I am looking for.  Rather than a player choosing to be a demonic ice magus from a class screen, I want a player to be a demonic ice magus based on what tiles they are able to collect, and what type of units they like to deploy, and what game mechanics they are clever enough to get to function with each other.

[Neonivek]

Ill make a suggestion that comes from my dream game (Basically an imaginary game I made up where people hold these handheld devices and stuff)

How about the player can chose, dirrectly or indirrectly, the flavor of his Airland.

So characters can pick down to earth worlds or even some so fantastical that their populations are entirely of pink bunnies and cotton candy unicorns. They can also mix and match but require buffer zones as fantasy creatures have different likes and dislikes as well as problems.

For example in my imaginary game the Necromancers, who were used by the player so they could deal with the extensive evil vampire population in the dark forest that has been able to stop raids to control it, had a flaw of causing zombies and skeletons to come to life which caused problems not just for the citizens but for the Light users, who were required to keep the giant monster tame, who had to waste their valuable time taking them down and away from their secluded life.

Of course the Evil vampires also had a possitive, because they were so rampant a few citizen adventurers eventually became specialised in killing them and became "Vampire Slayers" who later started a group that attracted magic users to the city. (which came in handy as the Necromancers became corrupt and eliminated a TON of the progress the player made)

Currently the player has borrowed a ton of Bezerk fighters from his real life friend to boost his military power, but looks down on them due to their overfocus on power, so he is trying to use his powered up hunters to find some monsters to train but the problem is that he ran out of fantastical locations and now his hunters have to go long distances to get anything.

He also upgraded the Vampire hunters to official status within the city, but their numbers won't really go up because there are no more Vampires and thus they use the Guild as their training site.

His sister in the other grade has a Pink Bunny land but is actually one of the more powerful players in the game... Seeing as even her clouds shoot deadly rainbows and Unicorns not being pushovers. She tends to have a sparse population of powerful creatures.

His Friend has a more down to earth Barbarian city but is rather early into the game and doesn't recognise the need to make his citizens happy or how to get Heros (which most of come from the citizen population). Despite being Barbarian they do use Axes and Metal Armor. His friend is very good at dishing out tons of attackers and usually only loses because he falls for every trick in the book... which I say lightly compared that he never actually has lost and always seems to have more military up his sleeve.

The Player has been shifting strategies and hasn't got a strong feel for what he really wants to do, he has a otherwise mundane population but has bartered and attracted many of the game's other kinds of characters including a few samurai (two who became hero characters... which he retrained to become his hunters) sometimes causing problems because of it. He treats his population well, which they love him for, but hasn't been able to make them excell much beyond dishing out high hero numbers. He has managed to capture a giant monster who is the staple of his military to the point where his own military, even after he gets the mages, is actually rather feable and almost always falls back on "Plan monster". His avatar is actually pretty powerful, to the surprise of other players, and his obsessive use of it to run his kingdom gave him some benefits but overall it cripples his advancement.

In general in the imaginary game the only way to get heros under your control was to
1) Find them from the general population and hire them thus right
2) Attract them (which was the easiest way also to get different themed characters, but it wasn't magic and required constructed buildings they would like such as personal housing)
3) Trade
4) Guilds and Training halls could sometimes generate them by finding latent talent in citizens (they actually came from citizens)
5) Magic, special training, and objects could sometimes awaken them as heros or greater

I should stop... this is very derailing.. I hope I gave you a few ideas XD

[Vactor]

Neonivek:
I think that your post captured a lot of what i'm hoping to get to someday.  I am planning on a spectrums of fantastical/mundane, good/evil and while I can't help but hesitate a bit at pink bunnies shooting rainbows, the complex interplay between various things is very much what i'm hoping for, if not exactly how the events you described unfold.  I especially liked a handful of citizens/soldiers becoming specialized in fighting a type of unit they encounter in large numbers, and the capturing of unique monsters controllable by other units and levied into military/peaceful service.

Beorn080:
teamplay would be very much a part of the game, i'm not entirely sure how integrated it would be, some form of specialization and trade would be a must, and i'm considering a mechanic that would allow a group of players to set up a platform, either multiple airlands linked together like a flotilla, or a static chunk of land that the guilds can manage, improve, expand, and tow about to serve as a common area and stockpile.

I think i've worked out how i'll have the tiles work.  Each hex will be split into its center hex and each facing direction.  walls can be built on the facing directions, and take up half the area of the sub tile.

This pic is of one tile with sub tiles drawn, and walls on each side bordering a tile in each direction.  Towers are on corners to make the jointing of walls in various directions easier.  This creates a second grid of hexes that will be used in unit movement.

The light lines show where the walls would go if built on the edge of that tile.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

it sounds great idee, i would be glad if i could beta test it when that phase comes ... for helping ... i don't know i have an idee of mine to but no time to make it so i think i won't activly help you in programming but if i have an idee i share