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[BishopX]

Looks great! Very excited to get to (eventually) play this, hehe.

Haha, thanks - I'm still pretty confident about the schedule I posted on the blog last week

Crop cycles etc - I am going to put in seasons, so I suppose that will effect crops etc! Hmm. I'll have to think a bit more about exactly how to program that one...

I guess you'll abstract the farming so that no specific type of crop is selected which means that the harvest time should be averaged over a time.
Say that crops is harvested and delivered during all of autumn. Although i've forgotten how to to the math for it and the name in English, Take the total crops yield, spread it out over all of autumn starting and finishing with a low yield while it peaks during mid-autumn.
Well, This is just for a temperate climate area, which means that if you're going to implement tropical or warm climates you're going to have to increase the harvest time and yield due to multiple harvests.

thanks for all the great ideas, anyway .

I'm full of ideas and inspiration, I just dont have an outlet.

Yes, I guess something like that. I'd like to get cities storing grain, eventually, so that you can send forces to destroy it, etc, as another method of weakening a city pre-siege. Well, do keep them coming, I'm eager to incorporate peoples' ideas into URR wherever possible!

Assuming all races have more or less baseline human nutritional needs, I think abstracting all food into three catagories is probably your best bet. Basic Food is wheat or the eqivalent (rice, maize, beans, cassava, potatoes etc.). It will keep people fed, although in the long term a diet of just Basic Food is going to lead to malnutrion. Basic food stores well and lasts for quite a while on its own if stored correctly. Good food is more or less everyting else. Meats, cheese, fish, fruits and vegetables are Good Food. Good Food will keep your troops happy, prevent malnutrion and allow people to function optimaly. The problem with Good Food is that on it's own it doesn't keep nearly as long as Basic Food. Unless it's processed or stored properly Good Food will spoil within a month at most. The third type of food is Booze (I supose this should also include other types of recreational drugs). Booze is required to keep any population happy. Soldiers tend to require a lot of booze.

Basic food gets rpoduced in several big chunks each year, depending on the climate (so you could have 0, 1,2,3 or 4 harvest areas) and requires that land be devoted to agriculture. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic grous would have very little basic food. Good food would be produced in much smaller quantities continously, possibly with periodic spikes representing a mass slaughter or a fish run or a fruit harvest. Booze would be produced.

In order to preserve good food you need salt. In order to manufacture booze you need food.  Historically salt was a major trade good because it allowed you to preserve food, and it could also be used to make food taste better. Aside from armies, almost all food was consumed near where it was produced. Shipping grains or flour more than 100 miles was very rare. Animals could be driven to slaughter, but once slaughtered the meat didn't travel very far. Salt, of the other hand moved thousands of miles in giant caravans and had towns and road networks explicitly contructed for the production and transport of salt.

A band of twenty people should be able to survive off the land four seasons year round. A band of 100 people should be able to keep themselves alive three seaons out of the year, assuming they keep moving. Anything more than 100 and less than 10,000 should be able to live off the land, provided they are willing to strip it bare and send out foraging parties. Anything over 10,000 troops will require a supply chain or order to keep from starving. Keep in mind that surviving isn't the same as thriving. A well supplied force will always preforms better than equivalent force that's been living off the land, so while twenty people could make it through the woods with some skill with a bow and knowledge of local plants, twenty troops with a commisary wagon will move faster and fight harder.

[Leatra]

Good point. These are very good ideas.

[Nighthawk]

Raising up an army of 10,000 strong would take quite a bit of time, money, and as you just mentioned, food.
This would make it more worthwhile (to you AND the environment) to raise up an elite squad of skilled fighters.

It would be interesting to see, once the game is capable of handling this sort of thing, a battle between a giant, unskilled army, and a smaller, well-trained force.

I'm getting really excited for this game's release.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Assuming all races have more or less baseline human nutritional needs, I think abstracting all food into three catagories is probably your best bet. Basic Food is wheat or the eqivalent (rice, maize, beans, cassava, potatoes etc.). It will keep people fed, although in the long term a diet of just Basic Food is going to lead to malnutrion. Basic food stores well and lasts for quite a while on its own if stored correctly. Good food is more or less everyting else. Meats, cheese, fish, fruits and vegetables are Good Food. Good Food will keep your troops happy, prevent malnutrion and allow people to function optimaly. The problem with Good Food is that on it's own it doesn't keep nearly as long as Basic Food. Unless it's processed or stored properly Good Food will spoil within a month at most. The third type of food is Booze (I supose this should also include other types of recreational drugs). Booze is required to keep any population happy. Soldiers tend to require a lot of booze.

Basic food gets rpoduced in several big chunks each year, depending on the climate (so you could have 0, 1,2,3 or 4 harvest areas) and requires that land be devoted to agriculture. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic grous would have very little basic food. Good food would be produced in much smaller quantities continously, possibly with periodic spikes representing a mass slaughter or a fish run or a fruit harvest. Booze would be produced.

In order to preserve good food you need salt. In order to manufacture booze you need food.  Historically salt was a major trade good because it allowed you to preserve food, and it could also be used to make food taste better. Aside from armies, almost all food was consumed near where it was produced. Shipping grains or flour more than 100 miles was very rare. Animals could be driven to slaughter, but once slaughtered the meat didn't travel very far. Salt, of the other hand moved thousands of miles in giant caravans and had towns and road networks explicitly contructed for the production and transport of salt.

A band of twenty people should be able to survive off the land four seasons year round. A band of 100 people should be able to keep themselves alive three seaons out of the year, assuming they keep moving. Anything more than 100 and less than 10,000 should be able to live off the land, provided they are willing to strip it bare and send out foraging parties. Anything over 10,000 troops will require a supply chain or order to keep from starving. Keep in mind that surviving isn't the same as thriving. A well supplied force will always preforms better than equivalent force that's been living off the land, so while twenty people could make it through the woods with some skill with a bow and knowledge of local plants, twenty troops with a commisary wagon will move faster and fight harder.

I must say, that is all fascinating. I really like the food ideas - the thing is, I don't want the logistical side to turn into a DF clone; players don't need that, and that's then time and effort on my part moving away from what I want URR to be. On the other hand, I think the logistical side is important for realism, and I do want to keep a major part of it in. I think a lot of it is going to be abstracted away from the player; rulers choose what foods to harvest, etc, and you only become involved if a) you are destroying the source of enemy food, or b) you come to command army/rule civ, but even in b), you will only make 'high level' decisions about food sources and the like, not specific decisions about places, workers, etc.

I have just thrown in salt as another resource that generates on the world map, though. I'll shortly add in various herds of wild animals, and get their AI to 'tether' them to particular areas, I think. Nevertheless, I really like the Basic/Good distinction; also gives some potential for managing your army's food, rewarding/punishing, morale, and things like that. Basically:

If on your own/small group, you need to find food. People in civs will be making food, and there will be wild animals too.
If in an army, whoever leads that army will  handle the supply chain under the hood. If something goes wrong, you will hear about it (say, enemy army razing farms), but otherwise, food will be passed down to you.
If in charge of any reasonable force, you determine where your army gets food from, but only in terms of "Kill all deer in square x," "Raid farm on square y for wheat", "Order soldiers 1-10 to transport Basic Food from City Z to us once a month", etc, and then your minions go about it. However, I think your suggestions are pretty much the level of detail I want the under-the-hood food creation to have

Good point. These are very good ideas.

I concur!

Raising up an army of 10,000 strong would take quite a bit of time, money, and as you just mentioned, food.
This would make it more worthwhile (to you AND the environment) to raise up an elite squad of skilled fighters.

It would be interesting to see, once the game is capable of handling this sort of thing, a battle between a giant, unskilled army, and a smaller, well-trained force.

I'm getting really excited for this game's release.

Yes, definitely - a la 300 (or similar), small elite forces should be more than able to survive against many times their number of poorly equipped/trained/led foes. Thanks! I've just made a brief breakthrough tonight, actually, which'll probably get a blog mention before too long...

[Ivefan]

rulers choose what foods to harvest, etc, and you only become involved if a) you are destroying the source of enemy food, or b) you come to command army/rule civ, but even in b), you will only make 'high level' decisions about food sources and the like, not specific decisions about places, workers, etc.

I have just thrown in salt...

simply let the player rule by decrees and so only decide upon the percentage of the arable land thats available for farming and if its for basic or good foods.
keep in mind that while basic foods usually only takes a season to harvest, cattle takes time to get a large enough heard and fruit trees takes time to grow.

let salt increase storage time and trade distance of meats.

Yes, definitely - a la 300 (or similar), small elite forces should be more than able to survive against many times their number of poorly equipped/trained/led foes.

Depends, if there's enough people it can become a stampede instead. And in that case it does not matter if the foes in front does not want to die, the mass just can't stop.
The roman soldier would be the best to sustain an assault like that, and while pikemen might keep them at bay for longer, as soon as they're past the pikes its bad.
Basically, the situation 10 vs 100 is worse than 1 vs 10.

[ThtblovesDF]

I would love to see it played a little like Dominions 3...

So a set of high-average-armor/skill & range warriors with a hint of luck (or magic support) will always get the first-strike in on the naked-club-wielding people charging them, but due to a fair amount of luck, a single half-naked-guy could slip though 2-3 spear attacks and start a hope-spot for the rest of them. 

In game terms, it would be nice to have the challenge of actually forcing your low-lvl-crap-troops forward hard enough so they overwhelm the elite enemy without breaking.

[Ivefan]

In game terms, it would be nice to have the challenge of actually forcing your low-lvl-crap-troops forward hard enough so they overwhelm the elite enemy without breaking.

No problem! Just make it more attractive to run through the enemy than away from them like... Having a horde of hungry ghouls behind them.
True, a sword in the gut kills you just as surely as being eaten alive, but i think theres something more attractive with the sword.

[ThtblovesDF]

Well I would adore a game where you could use (poorly equipped to unarmed) prisoners and beasts of war in this manner, even if only to tire the enemy or make them lose moral because they have to kill those of there own kind/race.

[Ivefan]

Well I would adore a game where you could use (poorly equipped to unarmed) prisoners and beasts of war in this manner, even if only to tire the enemy or make them lose moral because they have to kill those of there own kind/race.

Excellent in siege warfare, use prisoners from the adjacent land as meatshields.

[ThtblovesDF]

If you desire a task that can never be finished, add another layer of "fantasy-reality"

As you fight and carry on, you start to get famous... and maybe, if your goals work with whatever goals the local population has (or at least they THINK that you share the goals), they might help you out... a handful of rangers might join you in your battle versus the beasts of old, a mob of peasants joins you in the siege on the capital, a wandering monk seeks to support your claim to godhood and soon many join his cult...)

And in the same vein your constant slaughter of innocents causes enemies to fight more firmly or dark forces to take notice of you.

Then add another complexity layer, where information travels semi-realistically and you can potentially kill all natural witnesses, but have to work extra to take out supernatural observers...

Then add another layer of learning beings (human or smarter) learning from all your fights, learning what you use and adjusting to a degree "What do you mean, the humans started to line there weapons with silver to fight the werwolf spys i have spread among there villages to cause chaos at the 3rd moon of the year? Very well... good thing I invested heavily into buying up all the silver I could find beforehand... now we can buy those same peasants to fight for US - and plenty of them will become quite useful at night." -#Xenos gambit time.jpg

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

simply let the player rule by decrees and so only decide upon the percentage of the arable land thats available for farming and if its for basic or good foods.
keep in mind that while basic foods usually only takes a season to harvest, cattle takes time to get a large enough heard and fruit trees takes time to grow.

let salt increase storage time and trade distance of meats.

Depends, if there's enough people it can become a stampede instead. And in that case it does not matter if the foes in front does not want to die, the mass just can't stop.
The roman soldier would be the best to sustain an assault like that, and while pikemen might keep them at bay for longer, as soon as they're past the pikes its bad.
Basically, the situation 10 vs 100 is worse than 1 vs 10.

That's about the level I'm thinking, but as you say, with some understanding of the times it takes different foods to become available. Also, crushes is an interesting idea. Hmm. I hadn't considered that. Currently fleeing, although they are fleeing, is very orderly, and nobody fleeing takes damage. That'll clearly have to change!

I would love to see it played a little like Dominions 3...

So a set of high-average-armor/skill & range warriors with a hint of luck (or magic support) will always get the first-strike in on the naked-club-wielding people charging them, but due to a fair amount of luck, a single half-naked-guy could slip though 2-3 spear attacks and start a hope-spot for the rest of them. 

In game terms, it would be nice to have the challenge of actually forcing your low-lvl-crap-troops forward hard enough so they overwhelm the elite enemy without breaking.

Interesting - I obviously want elite troops to have major advantages, but I don't want the only tactic for crappy troops to be a) get a huge number and b) throw them at the enemy. I think some kind of leverage over those troops could be interesting to play with.

Well I would adore a game where you could use (poorly equipped to unarmed) prisoners and beasts of war in this manner, even if only to tire the enemy or make them lose moral because they have to kill those of there own kind/race.

Excellent in siege warfare, use prisoners from the adjacent land as meatshields.

I have a whole page of thoughts of this sort! Especially for how slaves/prisoners are going to work; you will definitely be able to send them up ahead, or kill them in sight of the enemy forces, or do all kinds of similar, horrible, morale-weakening things.

If you desire a task that can never be finished, add another layer of "fantasy-reality"

As you fight and carry on, you start to get famous... and maybe, if your goals work with whatever goals the local population has (or at least they THINK that you share the goals), they might help you out... a handful of rangers might join you in your battle versus the beasts of old, a mob of peasants joins you in the siege on the capital, a wandering monk seeks to support your claim to godhood and soon many join his cult...)

And in the same vein your constant slaughter of innocents causes enemies to fight more firmly or dark forces to take notice of you.

Then add another complexity layer, where information travels semi-realistically and you can potentially kill all natural witnesses, but have to work extra to take out supernatural observers...

Then add another layer of learning beings (human or smarter) learning from all your fights, learning what you use and adjusting to a degree "What do you mean, the humans started to line there weapons with silver to fight the werwolf spys i have spread among there villages to cause chaos at the 3rd moon of the year? Very well... good thing I invested heavily into buying up all the silver I could find beforehand... now we can buy those same peasants to fight for US - and plenty of them will become quite useful at night." -#Xenos gambit time.jpg

Haha - I strongly suspect I may have already taken on an infinite task , but I get exactly what you mean. I already planned to have information travel depending on who witnesses things, but these other ideas are particularly interesting. Not only can your fame grow, but the fame of items, mounts, and various other things can grow. Of course, one thing I want is for all intelligent creatures to potentially be 'adventurers'; they will also be making alliances, finding items, raising armies, and doing the rest of it. Just as others hear tell of your deeds, YOU should hear tell of the heroic deeds of others being performed elsewhere! I currently also have a very rudimentary system whereby enemies spread knowledge of your force, though this only currently works in battle. However, if some escape your onslaught in a lost battle, they will try and get back to their homelands to tell of your tactics, army composition, etc etc. And you mention spies... spies are an interesting one. More on this at some later date

Lastly, I've just uploaded this week's devblog entry - all about how 'realistic' I want URR to be, and how realism in fantasy settings ends up working out (for better or for worse) - largely an extension of the part few pages of discussion here! http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2012/01/02/the-strange-marriage-of-fantasy-and-realism/

[Ahra]

about the cheap troups, The battle or agincourt, nuff´ said about "Cheap" troops.
that and for the love of... flank them, sneak at them, burn their camp and fight dirty and night raids.
 "oh sorry sir did i push you on the ground and your fancy armour keeps you down/maybe underwater? dont mind me, this hammer will end those problems..."

[Frumple]

"oh sorry sir did i push you on the ground and your fancy armour keeps you down/maybe underwater? dont mind me, this hammer will end those problems..."

Magic, baby.

"Oh, no, no problem, good fellow!" *does a kipup thirty feet into the air, spewing returning throwing weapons around, killing ten to fifteen of your friends, then decapitates you and six other people with a length expanding broadsword.* Fantasy land sez, "Enchanted mythril gives me wings! and still blocks cannonfire from three feet off."

So, my random thought of the day re: URR: Specialists and god-blooded. Will there be characters within a race with unique talents or strange mutations? Any comments on how that'd play out?

I could see a kind of multi-layer mutation system resembling other RLs, except with multiple sets (Kinda' like how Crawl does demonspawn/normal mutations/Jiyva mutations) depending on the source. With a pantheon of gods, you could have each of them having a unique set of mutations (possibly procedurally generated, if the gods themselves are) that divine descendants can manifest, ferex, while the magic node-type stuff mentioned earlier could have their own mutation set based on the node; stuff born or living for too long in the area would start to manifest strange abilities. Then you'd have possibly a few sets of just weird stuff that comes out occasionally.

What about crossbreeding? How much of or is crossbreeding going to be a thing, and could we have strange descendant type-things happening starting from people that, say, contract with elemental spirits or what-have-you? Are we going to be able to crossbreed a hydra with something with wings, and then mix the offspring with a fire elemental to have a giant, flying, regenerating, flaming megabeast of many heads and doom? What about lower key stuff, like introducing trolls or whathaveyou into your preferred recruiting base, causing a rise of half-trolls (that, incidentally, have regeneration and higher than normal strength and toughness, perfect for cannonfodder that's harder to kill than humans but smarter than trolls.)?

... the other question coming from that being timeframe. Is your character going to be subjected to the ravages of time? If so, will there be ways around that (magic!) or means of passing control to another character (de dynasty!), and will different playable races have different lifespans?

... tangential to that, how expansive a choice of race for the main character? If we want to play a hydra, will it go forth into the world and pick out a hydra that just happens to have a strong enough intelligence boosting mutation to justify leading an army?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

"oh sorry sir did i push you on the ground and your fancy armour keeps you down/maybe underwater? dont mind me, this hammer will end those problems..."

Magic, baby.

"Oh, no, no problem, good fellow!" *does a kipup thirty feet into the air, spewing returning throwing weapons around, killing ten to fifteen of your friends, then decapitates you and six other people with a length expanding broadsword.* Fantasy land sez, "Enchanted mythril gives me wings! and still blocks cannonfire from three feet off."

So, my random thought of the day re: URR: Specialists and god-blooded. Will there be characters within a race with unique talents or strange mutations? Any comments on how that'd play out?

I could see a kind of multi-layer mutation system resembling other RLs, except with multiple sets (Kinda' like how Crawl does demonspawn/normal mutations/Jiyva mutations) depending on the source. With a pantheon of gods, you could have each of them having a unique set of mutations (possibly procedurally generated, if the gods themselves are) that divine descendants can manifest, ferex, while the magic node-type stuff mentioned earlier could have their own mutation set based on the node; stuff born or living for too long in the area would start to manifest strange abilities. Then you'd have possibly a few sets of just weird stuff that comes out occasionally.

What about crossbreeding? How much of or is crossbreeding going to be a thing, and could we have strange descendant type-things happening starting from people that, say, contract with elemental spirits or what-have-you? Are we going to be able to crossbreed a hydra with something with wings, and then mix the offspring with a fire elemental to have a giant, flying, regenerating, flaming megabeast of many heads and doom? What about lower key stuff, like introducing trolls or whathaveyou into your preferred recruiting base, causing a rise of half-trolls (that, incidentally, have regeneration and higher than normal strength and toughness, perfect for cannonfodder that's harder to kill than humans but smarter than trolls.)?

... the other question coming from that being timeframe. Is your character going to be subjected to the ravages of time? If so, will there be ways around that (magic!) or means of passing control to another character (de dynasty!), and will different playable races have different lifespans?

... tangential to that, how expansive a choice of race for the main character? If we want to play a hydra, will it go forth into the world and pick out a hydra that just happens to have a strong enough intelligence boosting mutation to justify leading an army?

You both make a fine point - training is only so useful when you have an axe to the face. I'm thinking, in that area, of having the time of day you attack matter, or the time of day you send in an early attack force, or similar things, to catch the enemy asleep, unaware, etc. Anyway:

There will be some who have particular connections to particular deities, but probably nothing beyond that. I want to keep the biology of individuals pretty uniform, I think. It matters much more what equipment you have and what training you have than the specifics of a creature's biology (I mean, within a certain class; obviously a hydra and a dwarf aren't comparable).

Crossbreeding is currently a no. There will be something involving bloodlines for things like vampirism, lycanthropy, assorted unusual conditions, ability to talk to certain deities, basic stats and similar, but crossbreeding is out, at least for the time being. That would be a feature for the far future.

Now THAT is a good question, re: timelines, aging, etc. The honest answer is: I haven't decided yet. I think you will age, but I'm not sure how this will play out. I think the dynasty idea is a tremendous one; when you eventually die, you control your son/daughter, and then there might be a power struggle for the army, etc. It would tie into the history books idea very nicely, that the world is long, and lived-in, and you are having a noticeable effect upon it. Again, that's one for the future, but you will have an age when you start your character, and you will age. As will everybody else, of course - natural deaths can happen!

Currently, human/dwarf/elf. I might add in some of the intelligent creature races as options later, depending on how they play out as 'mercenaries' and components of larger armies. I'm not quite sure yet...

[Leatra]

Now THAT is a good question, re: timelines, aging, etc. The honest answer is: I haven't decided yet. I think you will age, but I'm not sure how this will play out. I think the dynasty idea is a tremendous one; when you eventually die, you control your son/daughter, and then there might be a power struggle for the army, etc. It would tie into the history books idea very nicely, that the world is long, and lived-in, and you are having a noticeable effect upon it. Again, that's one for the future, but you will have an age when you start your character, and you will age. As will everybody else, of course - natural deaths can happen!

I like that. You also should be able to train your son/daughter so you can start off with some skills when you control your son/daughter.

What happens if you got more than one child? I guess you should be able to choose whoever you want. Also, a cooperation/rivalry between your brothers and sisters could be fun. Maybe your power-hungry brother decides to get a huge army together and you have to fight him or your enemy kidnaps your sister or something. You can actually create a movie with that kind of dynasty mechanism.

Currently, human/dwarf/elf.

You might want to add orcs and maybe halflings to that list in the future