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AndreliusCaesarKhan

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  1. I'll try to summarize what has thus been stated. The current training plan involves having untrained citizens spawn automatically at a cap based on the number of housing and specialized citizens, and the rate of spawning would be dependent upon the stockpile of food (food is used exclusively to train livestock and citizen, although at a higher cost). As food stockpile increases, so does the rate of spawning, and since citizens cost food, the food stockpile would lower to a quantity where it is more stable. When the civ center has used the last food available to begin spawning, progress would be slow. However, as more food is collected while the civ center is spawning a citizen, the faster it will produce it. Having a system which you propose is similar to what edwardlongshank had proposed. Having the citizens not be controllable and instead be more of a representation of how many units can be trained. Although I've said before, I've been thinking about a compromise to reduce micro, thanks to both of your comments (not sarcastic). I want the untrained citizens to still be controlled so that in the event that you want stone or wood, you can use the untrained citizens to work on gathering resources (not as efficient as specialist citizens), or defend from early rushes (ineffectively, of course). If the untrained citizens are automatically-controlled completely, there may be path-finding issues that may require manual control if the location is too "confusing" for the untrained citizen to reach. That being said, the player should be able to click on the barracks or economic production buildings, and order the training of a certain number of units based on the number of idle untrained citizens that have been recently been spawned at the town center, and have the controllable untrained citizens move towards the buildings that require training automatically, while still having the possibility of being controlled manually, or rally pointed from the town center to the training building of choice. In this way, if you are currently using the untrained citizen as militia or for gathering resources, and have moved them to a new location, there will preference to use the idle untrained citizens for training. If the player wishes to train more units than there are idle, the player chooses to pull untrained citizens from gathering resources, or guarding its borders, and have them enter the specific training building the player desires. I hope this idea is more appealing, as it could possibly reduce the micro involved, but allow the player to still remain in control.
  2. Alright, thanks for your advice. I will prepare a formal proposition of my idea in greater detail before I submit it to the developers, even though the chances are low of implementation. Good idea to name the average citizen the name of their nationality. It is a simple, effective way of getting around the social status dilema. That's brilliant to have the way-points work in conjunction with the town center. That will simplify micro a lot for the player. That can be very usefull when players are on far off campaigns micro-ing their own troops, while reinforcements can be left macro-ing in their base. As far as soldiers go, I agree that soldiers should still have the ability to perform economic tasks, but as I mentioned in earlier posts, be nerfed in their ability to do so. This would make specialized commoners that much more appealing to train. I referred to the dilemma of units having multiple training histories back in the first post, and looking back, I think the last 2-3 trainings should be remembered- different training in other tasks and the unit will "forget" its training in the oldest session it had. I think this should be justified mainly due to the sheer computer power required to have the computer remember every single unit's history, when there could be hundreds of units in the player's faction. Regarding the possibility to have commoners be trained in economic and military tasks I think should be possible. I'm sure historically, some soldiers came from very humble beginnings as farmers or miners, joined their state's war effort, and returned back to their former occupations when the war ended. Addressing your last question about the military capacity of generic commoner, I think they should have a weak capacity to engage in conflict in the same manner a militia would be able to. As a single unit they would be relatively powerless, but as a group they should still pose a mediocre threat, but not a threat that can't be handled by the training of professional soldiers. Generic commoners should be a little better at economic tasks than fighting, which would incline the player void conflict with them, if at all possible. To illustrate, the unit system would work like a dichotomy between economic and warfare specialization, from left to right respectively: Specialized commoner ---- generic commoner ---- low-tier barracks units ---- higher-tier fortress units In short, specialized commoners would probably be the worst in combat, while higher-tier, experienced units would be very inefficient at economic tasks. I'll take a look at those games, thanks. I also appreciate the bringing up of these questions, they help me get my mind thinking about this idea in more depth
  3. I don't mean to be aggressive saying this, but if this game mechanic has no chance of implementation, why would you ask me about what should be sacrificed to implement it? You clearly have a huge say in the future of the game's development, so if this idea, as you say, strays too far from being close to your formula, you need not explain yourself- the game's future answers to you. Now on to the hypothetical. For the record, could you please sight some games that you have heard have "similar" game mechanics as this proposed idea. I would like to take a look at them to investigate how they implemented these systems, and what can be improved upon to make this idea a reality, in perhaps a mod for this game. With regards to micromanagement, a reoccurring issue, I reaffirm the position I've taken in my second post in this topic, that the micro may not be that bad. The untrained citizens would enter an economic building, begin training, and come out automatically looking for work in their area of expertise. So its not my intention to completely change the game into an intensive-training fighting game, as you said, or to sacrifice the economic design. I hope to integrate the two in a way that both are not sacrificed, and merely add another layer of strategy to the current system. The economic micro would be to assign the untrained citizens to a certain "path" in the game, either as a soldier, or a citizen building a stronger economy ultimately. In fact, by specializing the citizens, I hope the tasks that people enjoy- like farming, mining and such- are improved upon as they would be even more productive. If you don't feel that I've answered your question good enough, I suggest you read my earlier posts to get a greater sense of my design and direction, as it is a lot of information that I've posted already.
  4. Thanks for the constructive criticism (not sarcastic). The use of the term "slaves" was arbitrary, or at least that's what I meant by its use- it does have an oppressive connotation so I'm sorry for using that term . History shows that not every member of society had the equality to attain any position it desired, as this would have collapsed the society's economy. For this reason, a citizen could not be a farmer for instance, and have the same social status as a miner- where miners were often criminals sentenced to hard labour. So although I agree that the name of the citizen should be changed, I don't think it merits turning the disposable population into children, who even then don't have the same social status between them, and is a little arbitrary. Probably, a more common class should be used to identify the worker classes, such as plebeians if the civilization was Roman. This would also make sense as "commoners" (my new arbitrary name for slaves) had a greater chance of being able to join the national military against slaves, as you mentioned. With regard to the hoplite comment you made, I think game developers could get away with having a "commoner" become a hoplite warrior much easier than a slave- at least for simplicity's sake- so thanks for bringing that up. I recognize your idea to have the untrained/children not be controllable, and to have them represent the population of disposable men for training. At this I respectfully disagree, since the untrained/children become a little useless, since it effectively puts a cap on the production of millitary and economic growth, and we may be probably better off disbanding the idea altogether. The intention of my idea is to make each "commoner" more useful to the player than just "the worker", but also critical for production of any unit in the game by their involvement in literal training, able to act as "militia" should they be required to, and remain interesting as workers in the economy as task specialists. This is why I suggest them to be player-controlled -think of the ottomans in the game, AOE 3, and how they can automatically spawn units. With my small comparison to the ottomans in AOE 3, I think that your suggestion to have housing affect the cap of "commoners" is very clever, and similar to AOE 3's mosque for the ottomans. Such a very simple idea that effectively leads to the relationship: the more housing you have the more housing you will need to keep expanding, as housing will raise both the total population capacity, and the "commoner" cap- great idea. Having specialized citizens also affect the cap on "commoners" is an inventive solution to increasing the cap of "commoners", since as you mentioned, the citizens would be simulating the effects of having a house, and stable income/food. To address the point you bring up about the surplus in food, let me clarify what I mean by "surplus". If you produce a lot of food, then you will temporarily have a huge surplus of food in the short term. As Wijimaker proposed, food could be specifically used only for spawning more "commoners", and as I mentioned in the last post, the stockpile of food affects the spawn rate of "commoners", which means that eventually that huge surplus of food in the short term, would very quickly be drained by a faster spawn rate of "commoners" which require food to produce- until the food stockpile drops to a lower amounts, and the rate of "commoner" spawning accordingly drops. This makes food simulate real economic supply and demand, and most of the time when your at war, you won't even be paying attention to your food stockpile, as it would likely be at an equilibrium quantity assuming its production wasn't sabotaged. Again, thanks for the constructive criticisms to this idea. @ Thorfinn the Shallow Minded: I was hoping it could make it to be part of the real game to set it apart from others, but its ok if its a game option too I guess. @ Wijimaker: I will start making planning this out more closely, thanks for your advice.
  5. I'm glad you like the idea I think that the micromanagement problem is very valid, and wouldn't be too much to deal with. The current system requires the manual production of a female citizen, whereas this new system automatically spawns slaves. The slaves that are ordered to enter training in an economic building, such as a wood cutter hut, would come out as lumberjacks seeking out the nearest trees to its wood cutter hut to cut down. The barracks would be relatively unchanged as there would be a rally point waiting for them as soon as they finish training. Your idea about having food influence the spawning of slaves is brilliant, and I think it is a much better alternative. Since there would be a surplus of food since it would not cost food to train anymore- just metals and stone- then for every 100 food increment gathered for example, automatic spawning of a slave would commence until, like you said, a cap is reached for the sake of system requirements. As the amount of food in the players stockpile increases, the faster the rate of spawning should be to spawn slaves, which would make the game even more realistic as the population numbers would be dynamic- changing based on the food available, and lowering when there is less food, while exploding when there is an abundance. Cavalry should probably have their own "micro town center" system acting similar to the production of slaves, where they spawn automatically in pasture buildings that require a number of slaves to maintain, that have their own rate of growth based on food production and capacity, except on a greater scale as horses and camels would require more food than a human, of course. Horses in the ancient days were very much a luxury, and this system would reflect it. To reduce the micro work, when cavalry training in the barracks begins, a slave should pop out of the pasture leading the horse to the barracks which could get killed or the horse captured for further strategy. By the way, what are the chances of a radical system like this being implemented, and what could I do to help accomplish it (i'm not really a modder of games).
  6. Going back to the topic of the post, I think the ability to have trees grow is a very great idea, and has been done before in other games successfully (like stronghold) at a very slow and steady pace- which doesn't really disturb civilization growth, since trees are easy to cut down if you simply get a huge army of soldiers to cut them down. I am interested though about what can be done to aquire more stone and metals in the late game when resources get really scarce, as having rocks and metals "grow" doesn't make much sense. lol
  7. If anyone has played any of the stronghold series by firefly studios, and the zerg in starcraft, you'll see where I would have gotten my inspiration from. This idea effectively replaces the female citizen with a "slave". The idea is simple: all units are produced automatically, at a steady pace, with a capped limit per town center, as slaves (peasants in stronghold) in the town center. These slaves are able to be freely controlled just like any other unit currently, with the ability to have a weak attack. I'm thinking the slaves could be diversified in their weapons, apperance, damage, speed, et cetera based on the characteristics of that faction. From these slaves, all units can be trained in various buildings (acting like the larva of the zerg, except "cocooning" in buildings), by right clicking on them to train in the barracks. Then clicking on the barracks, there would be a pool of available slaves that can be trained for specific soldiers, which you can choose in the barracks as you normally would, except there would be a slave limit that would cap training. This would make sense of the current system where soldiers magically spawn from the barracks. This system would obviously favour players who expand by building many town centers, producing higher populations and consequently have a stronger economy- in short, highly realistic. Based on the previous suggestion for barracks production, this could allow new buildings to be produced, such as a specific wood cutting, metal & stone gathering building, allowing slaves to enter these individual buildings and come out as SPECIALIST workers for tasks on mining, wood gathering and farming. This has the potential to produce a boom for economies based on occupational specialization. Further to this, I think all units should be able to train into other units, except back to slaves, and so one unit can be recycled to be a skilled stone miner, then a skilled archer, then trained back to being a farmer. This would add much greater value to each individual, and you would cease to view them as just another unit in your army. I think if a slave that has been trained in one task, changed to another, and then back into its original should not require training again, but I recognize this as highly controversial as this could mean a major drain in computer power to remember all the tasks every unit has ever done. I think the low tier soldier ability to build buildings and act as workers is unbelievably innovative, and realistic (historically, many soldiers were levied from farms by their governments), and should be kept- although perhaps nerfed in their ability to perform worker tasks to make specialized workers be useful, and since they are still soldiers and are trained to kill, not to strike a rock with a pickaxe all day. So I would like to hear opinions are critiques about this new concept, as it is fairly different. I'll start - I think resources would take such a drain in the game that either the capacity if each resource needs to be increased, or should be able to sustainably replenish on its own, as I have read in this forum from gudo(i.e. trees should grow) - If all your slaves are killed and the enemy is camping at the towncenters, or destroys them all, your pretty much done, since you would not be able to train units any longer- but i rebutle myself by inquiring: "isn't that realistic in a war"
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