Please write more things about space.
You said that these cyclopes are unlikely to give up when aroused. I may have missed pages of discussion addressing this but are you working surrendering into the game? Either humanoids surrendering to belligerent armies or surrendering to the player? would your character be able to surrender?
Or will you be forced to brutally murder in cold blood every enemy who feigns surrender like Skyrim?
Thanks
- I will try. There should be another academic entry up some time later this month. I'm currently firing out a ton of thesis and don't have time for much else, but I'll be much freer in about a week.
Surrendering... wild creatures, which will be the only kind in the very first alpha, won't surrender, though they might turn and flee and try to escape if too badly injured. Later, however, I fully intend to add surrendering, and you won't be forced to kill everyone who 'surrenders'. Similarly, I think it would be neat if you could surrender in order to survive, be taken prisoner, and try to escape later...
This also raises the question of prisoners, slaves and ransoms.
It does, it does. Again, I have a few pages of ideas in that area...
Going back to the magic thing for a second. I would really like it if the concept of mana went away. It's a useful abstraction like Hit points, but if URR is getting rid of hit points (like DF does), then why stick keep mana around? The only vaguely historical analog to what we call mana is the concept of "vital essence" which shows up in alchemy and is more or less controlled by how often you have sex. Not something that should really drive the magic system in a strategy roguelike.
Other ways of moderating spellcasting could be used such as fatigue, insanity, the threat of attracting the notice of some beast from another dimension, bodily harm, aging or drastically increased nutritional requirements. Fatigue is probably the easiest to code, since all that happens is that after a spell the mage needs to go have a good lie down. The problem is this is very boring for the player when they utilize magic. Given the social networks needed to control a mercenary band, have mages go insane could have some interesting complications. Especially if they start being delusional or paranoid. Also fun if you stop being able to trust your assessments of NPCs. Extraplanar entities (such as demons) seem to be alreadt incuded in the cosmos, and the possibility of an annoyed demon showing up in the the middle of the command squad during a battle is probably scary enough that you would need to be careful. Bodily harm could either be deliberate (i.e. you need to injure yourself or a proxy to cast) or it could be the result of mishandling magic. The possibility of feedback could manifest as burns, kinetic force, blinding light or in extreme cases explosions. Premature ageing would put a hard cap on how much magic a caster could ever use, although not so much how much magic could be used at any time.
I think a significant part of magic is going to involve dealing with various supernatural creatures, either by you, or a mage under your command. Either way, there's no 'Mana' meter, and resting probably won't be the way to recharge; you'll be able to do a volume of magic proportional to what you've managed beforehand in terms of agreements with creatures, rituals performed, etc. Magic needs preparation, but once prepared, you can cast - when you run out, you won't be fatigued our 'out' of magic, but you just won't be able to cast any more until you rebuild your supply. I do like the idea of potentially negative feedback from 'overcasting' - one of my very, very earliest builds had something similar for a magic system I was just trying, actually! If you tried to cast when your magic was too low, you might get the desired effect, but nasty things could happen too...
Most of this is what i would consider either spell/casting failures or things suitable to a world where magic isn't that powerful.
Mana can in many cases be considered mental fatigue but whatever system used, It just comes down to balance.
But what kind of balance? Rock, paper & scissor type? Or maybe the ever present "magic is just another type of archery"?
I would like it if the balance lies in the effort needed rather than a mechanical wall.
I guess a new character has some standard start level so that you're not forced to start as a wide-eyed farmboy/girl every new game.
But at this level, a melee character might head straight out into the world and bash shit and make a living, where as a mage would have to start with some caution and try to increase his power that compared to the warrior would take more player effort.
Honestly, I'm not sure yet. I think you currently start off as a generally competent person who has maybe helped fight the odd bandit raid or two, and knows of the existence of magic. Getting into the thick of combat will require other issues that magic doesn't, since berserker characters will have more wounds, more potential negative effects from other creatures, etc. Magic balance won't be from the AMOUNT of effort, I don't think, but rather where you extend alliances too, what you spend your time doing, etc. Assuming you want to do magic yourself, as you should be able to find those you can recruit for it. Again, first alpha is combat only, but we'll have to see how balancing the magic works out in the end
I would hate to see a situation in which the character with vastly more potential (mage) is "balanced" simply by making that character type more difficult to play as. This system would just set up a "early game favors warriors, late game favors mages" situation.
No, I definitely want to avoid this. For a late-game player who chooses to focus on combat (in the triangle of Combat, Command, and Magic) there are going to be a lot of options for becoming hugely powerful yourself!
But this won't be about one on one combat, so an all powerful mage would struggle in other ways.
Distrust, fear, rivalry, betrayal - all facets of any general's relationship with the world and his army, and perfectly valid tools to provide different balancing options for an arcane wizard versus an honorable warrior.
Yes - many randoms you recruit might have a distrust of mages, especially if that mage entreats with gods or creatures they consider particularly negative. On the flip side, if you recruit soldiers who worship the god your mage happens to deal with, then that'll obviously help general army cohesion.
Taking ideas from Dominions 3...
If you're a mage general who only commands mindless magical creatures, then there would be no distrust! That could be another balancing tool actually. Have a fighter oriented commander better able to command human soldiers, and not able to command many magical creatures (or any?).
Currently, I don't *think* non-intelligent creatures will be recruitable into armies. You may be able to chain and use some (think of the guy in 300 with the immortals...), but for the most part, creatures in your army will be intelligent. As for whether magic characters will be able to summon familiars, or other creatures into battle... I'm not sure. I have one nice idea in that area, but it's in its early stages so far
Hey, Ultima, can I ask what font you're using? I can't seem to find one that's all smoothed and antialiased and also includes extended ascii chars.
Just arial, 12x12. Though, actually, I've just shifted to 10x10 to accommodate for people with silly screen-sizes!
It's a single player game, so no need to balance it so that every type is equally strong.
No matter how skilled you are with the sword, a large wave of fire will still burn you to a crisp. What to do about it? Sneak up on the mage or recruit people by playing on their fears about that spell tossing lunatic.
I just see it as a different playstyle and a different set of challenges.
Yeah - as I mentioned somewhere above, I'm now thinking of there being three paths of Combat, Command and Magic, and each will require different. You would be burnt to a crisp, but I'm actually working on at the moment mechanics for things like fire resistance and the like. It's not going to be a clear dichotomy between invincible/susceptible a la nethack, but probably more like a sliding scale. For fire, specifically, creatures with high or total fire resistance can walk around in lava either unhurt, or mostly unhurt. Either way, these effects will be hard, but not impossible, for your humanoid character to get
You don't bring a ninja to a field battle, pretty much?
Unless your entire battle-plan revolves around taking out the enemy leader, perhaps...
Edit: Though that rambling did lead me to a question: Will your army composition effect itself? If you've got a bunch of magi, will the bog-standard soldiers start picking up cantrips and minorly enchanted kit? If magi and normal soldiers don't get along, what about if you've got some kind of inbetween, say the above mentioned spellswords (fighter/mage types)? Will a sizable number of clerics/paladin types start converting the rest of your army? More maliciously, will an army with a heavy dose of necro/biomancers have the rank and file start occasionally getting an odd mutation and a morale penalty (/intelligence loss and increase in loyalty, for a smaller penalty to a larger number of fellow soldiers 
)?
Interesting rambling
. I do want to make sure everybody doesn't just want magic, and that needs both balancing, and making beheading creatures up-close and personal as desirable as possible. Which shouldn't be too hard...
Hmmmm. Good questions. I hope to give armies internal dynamics - not just some factions might like others, but some factions might fight amongst themselves, or dislike others, or try to convert Faction X to belief in God Y, and as I think I touched on above re: BishopX's ideas, there might be some feedback. For mages, awful eldritch things might happen; for a combat-heavy army, there might be tensions that need to be relieved by fighting each other when there's nobody else around to fight, or they might get bored from a lack of combat or desert. I'm also planning to implement streamlined but important systems about keeping your army paid, fed, etc, and the lack of these will produce potential for unrest.
I like this idea... that your soldiers will teach each other skills/help each other out. Maybe it should depend on how much your various soldiers like each other. But if I had an army of 50 swordsmen and 4 potion makers , I might expect that even the potionmakers would learn a bit of how to handle a sword.
One system I'm rather happy with, and still working on, is that AI creatures will share information about you (and other AI foes) with each other. If one Orc starts fighting you and notices after a few turns that your left arm is nearly broken, and then a second Orc comes up, the first will shout to the second that your arm is nearly broken, and stuff like that. I expect I will extend a similar thing into armies, but I'd want to make sure that if you didn't just leave an army around they wouldn't all just train each other up to perfection...
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 596246 times)