We've been talking with Lap a bit about some game mechanics, right now focusing on provinces.
There's a lot of text to read, and I'm honestly hardly able to make it more concise, but I'll try. If you guys want to read this and perhaps give some feedback, then be welcome.
Spoilered for walls of text
1.Province name - that'd require either some random generator/random choice, or simply a number.
2.Terrain - due to large scale, each province shouldn't be defined by a single type of terrain. It seems more reasonable to assign certain percentages, like e.g.: 30% plains, 30% forest, 30% mountains, 10% urban etc.
Exact terrain types and production values are to be determined later.
Terrain could also influence outcome of battles by giving some modifiers to accuracy/morale etc., maybe also the units' vulnerability to orbital bombardment?
3.Population
There would be no population stat as such, instead we'd go for abstraction and use a provincial stat called "Urbanisation"
The game assumes that each planet that is of any concern to the players is already populated to some degree.
All, or all non-faraway habitable planets had been already colonized during the many centuries before current time. Some of these might be barbaric now, but we would assume that at some point in the past all of them were a part of large empire(which has since crumbled etc. - similarly to EoFS lore, or Assimov's "Foundation", or Le Guin's "forgot the name of her universe, but they were using ansibles in it").
Uninhabitable planets would be of no interest to the sort of feudal lords that the players would represent. If only because maintaining mining colonies on truly hostile worlds would be prohibitively expensive as compared to conquering one of the inhabited planets.
Alternatively, lifeless worlds could be a made into a very special type of planets, with special rules an buiding types(a lot of work, though, and not really needed in my opinion).
Whenever urbanisation raises in any given province, it is assumed that people automatically and independently migrate to that province from countryside/neighbouring provinces/other planets - drawn by hopes of increasing their own wellbeing in economically thriving sectors.
It is pretty obvious from the logical standpoint, that some planets would be more attractive and more hospitable places to live on, which in population terms would translate to higher numbers of inhabitants.
To reflect this, while keeping population stat out of the game, the game would impose a set of modifiers on various aspects of provincial development - based on the planet type.
The modifiers in question could e.g.be:
-less food produced by farms/arboriums=hard to keep crops alive
-less income per point of urbanisation=a higher part of local economic activities is soaked up by the necessity of providing basic living conditions. Think water on desert worlds, heating on icy ones, air purification, heightened need for medical care etc.
-As you've proposed, adding land types resisting urbanisation and restricted to hostile planet types=no cities on glaciers
-higher cost of raising structures=sometimes you need to invest in schemes actively attracting workers to where you need them. Think state-supported transportation, off-world advertising etc.
Introduce "battlefield" percentage for each province. Each bombardment, land combat, other war-like factors, would increase this percentage by some value. This percentage would represent killed populace, refuges leaving battle zone in search of safety, damaged private property and fear based reluctance to live there.
A year(turn), or two, after there are no "battlefield" increasing events in the province, the percentage begins to fall, representing people coming back and rebuilding the cities.
Could be made more significant by stating that a battlezone on any province on the same planet reduces the rate at which all planetary provinces recover.
This percentage would sharply reduce provincial income, so that at e.g.33% or 50% there would be no income at all(it's hard to do business when there's explosions all around),
while reducing production as per percentage stated(state factories build tanks till the end).
This mechanic could work alongside regular damage to buildings, so heavy fighting would effectively cripple a province for the years to come.
1c-A. Let's look at various depop. factors and how'd they relate to each other:
(B=building damage; Pop=Battlefield increase)
Orbital bombardment - High B, Low Pop. Think the bombing of Dresden
Land battle - Medium B, Low Pop. Think battle of Berlin, Warsaw uprising.
Symbiot(if included) attack - Min B, High Pop. That is, if repelled. If victorious, then, total slaughter and whatever else(this for much later, I guess)
Chemical/biological attack - Low B, High Pop. Maybe with some additional effects, like spread or persistence.
All scalable due to force used, of course.
Also: starvation - Med-to-high Pop, no B(or min)
Each building would represent a large complex of industry and infrastructure, together with workers' lodging in the form of hotels and private houses. It's also encompass all the private enterprises of the services sector that arise to satisfy the needs of workers etc.
Each building, apart from the effect it provides depending on it's type(so RPs for a lab, unit production for a factory), would also increase an urbanisation stat by a certain amount. The exact amount could vary depending on construction type, or be flat for simplification.
Urbanisation would show on the province alongside the terrain percentages, and would in fact override those percentages as it grows, eventually reaching 100%, meaning full coverage of habitable area, Leagueheim, or Byzantium style.
There could exist types of terrain resistant to urbanisation coverage, such as mountains(maybe also other kinds? marshes? glaciers?). This would mean that some provinces would be prefferable to being urbanised, as there could be more facilities crammed on plains-only land than on a mixed one.
We'd assume that outside-cities taxation and production is neligible. Only cities provide noticeable tax income. Fully built-up(100%urban) province would give always the same income, before other modifiers apply(planet type, battle damage etc.).
Full urbanisation should take time, and not be very easy to achieve.
I'm thinking of making the cities' growth exponential/geometric, rather than linear. The more buildings the player constructs, the more each one of them increases the percentage of urban terrain. This is to represent that larger cities tend to attract even more people, growing services sector, foreign immigration etc.
This would give the player an incentive to create large industrial sectors, as it'd be easier to push that one province to 100% urbanisation(meaning lots of income) than improve two provinces to 50% each(for the same income).
This would in turn give rise to specialised provinces, and industrial centers on planets. Personally I find such a variety desirable.
First of all, no "housing" type constructions. Cities can not represent some herding of the population, rather a natural growth around industrial investments(i.e.buidings).
Arboriums/farms: building a farm type would create a new terrain type "farmlands", which would be unavailable for urbanisation. This new terrain would overwrite the natural terrain type, just like the urbanisation does.
The building itself would still raise urbanisation as per the above rules. A basic farm would be able to create farmlands from plains/forest areas only. Arborium-style building could do so with more unaccessible terrain like glaciers and deserts. Will provide incentive for province specialization.
Mines would produce resources based on existing terrain percentages. More mountainous regions would yeld more minerals than the rest per mine constructed. Urban terrain would yeld no minerals at all, so building up a province to 100%(which assumes no mountains and other inaccessibles) would make the existing mines redundant. As the above, creates specialization.
5.Special resources - Most likely, a simple addition of resource tokens to each/some provinces would do. A province with a given resource would be able to build a corresponding harvesting building type. That's pretty much it for now.
Alternatively, special resources may be tied to exotic terrain types on non-standard planets.
Each percentage point of urban terrain consumes a set amout of food. Food produced in one province is available throughout the planet, providing there exists an unbroken chain of friendly provinces connecting the source with the target(might want to include "(rail)road network" improvement for each province acting as a link in the supply chain).
Sea province would act as a friendly province, unless enemy ships engaged in convoy raiding are present. Spaceport buildings provide a link between any two provinces containing them, uless enemy space fleet engages in a blockade.
The above rule requires provincial storage capabilities.
All resources are stored locally, with either infinite amout of storage capacity, or a finite one, with an ability to build a "silo" type building to expand it.(I preffer infinite, for simplicity)
Each "production faciliy" checks what resources are available to it whenever it tries to "produce" it's output product. A check for an unbroken chain of supply as described in point 7. would be necessary. If the resource can be reached, it is assumed being automatically transported to the point of destination and used. Otherwise, everything stays where it's produced.
Capturing a province means also capturing all the locally stored resources.
Note on size: All of the above rules assume that every province is made in such a fashion as to represent the more or less same area. No other factor is used for defining provincial borders - no income, political dependencies etc. Only size matters(oh the pun, dear me).
Lap is presently against the following idea. I'm going to post it anyway so you can give us some feedback, if you care.
Due to space and time scale considerations, there should be a single one per planet, varying in some abstract "size" depending on the planet type. The size could simply mean that it borders more or less of land provinces.
Player could place units like naval transports and/or combat ships on the water province, and thus be able to move troops to neighbouring provinces over sea just as if the two land provinces were next to each other. Enemy combat ships could target the convoys/enemy ships if present.
Making this any more detailed would mean too much of micromanaging and unproportional in scale.
Amphibious landing would still take a turn to execute, meaning that, depending on the map, moving by sea would simply be two-four, maybe five times faster than by land. Which is ok and in line with what reality seems to teach us.
Now, amphibious assaults could be easily prevented by investing in a navy, which would either prevent completely, or have a chance of intercepting a transport.
Conquering a province from space and then building a navy to counter the enemy sea-borne forces would be hard, but it's only fair.
It could be done, though, as no one forces the player to move his freshly launched warships out of the port one by one(this would mean that there can be navy units residing in land provinces, providing there's a port/shipyard).
With regard to graphics representation of provinces, I just wanted to add that(providing these rules do make it into the game), a mechanism for slowly turning the original terrain art into massively built-up one, to reflect growing urbanisation, would be pretty awesome. I can't imagine how could it be done programming-wise, but I'm just a layman.
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Topic: Echoes of Imperium (4X Strategy Game)[Not Dead] (Read 35380 times)