General Suggestions

[Aquila]

I see that someone already pointed out a problem with resources. In my opinion people gather resources too fast. In my last game villagers cut all trees near village in less than an hour. That makes gameplay (without replenishing resources) rather short-centered. I myself fing playing a desert map (when all trees have been cut, all stone and metal mined etc) totally boring and, as someone said before, it's not about resource availability through market. It about playing a game with no trees at all - a catastrophe.

So, if replenishing resources cannot be implemented, maybe you should increase "resource" amount in trees/stones? If, for example, tree "has" 200 wood in it, maybe we should increase this number to 2000? Or even 5000? So, during gameplay, only few trees would be cut in an hour? 

And will there be any "Wonder" buildings - like in AoE II?

[oshron]

i think 500 would be a good amount. that was about as many as in Empire Earth and Age of Mythology, and those trees could last for a good long while.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Gathered the trees in an hour? How long do you want games to last? and it doesn't make any realistic sense that 1 tree would have enough wood for 10 houses.

[Aquila]

Well, maybe there's better way to satisfy all. Can you make a file (preferably a txt or xml file that could be edited with notepad) that would contain number responsible for all resources in the game? So if someone would like to have 500 "wood" in a tree - he would only change the value to 500. If 2000 - change to 2000. Is it possible to do?

[fcxSanya]

Well, maybe there's better way to satisfy all. Can you make a file (preferably a txt or xml file that could be edited with notepad) that would contain number responsible for all resources in the game? So if someone would like to have 500 "wood" in a tree - he would only change the value to 500. If 2000 - change to 2000. Is it possible to do?

This is already implemented, you can find these values in the simulation templates. Look for example to template_gaia_flora_tree.xml:

13 	  <ResourceSupply>
14 	    <KillBeforeGather>false</KillBeforeGather>
15 	    <Amount>150</Amount>
16 	    <Type>wood.tree</Type>
17 	  </ResourceSupply>

[Aquila]

Gathered the trees in an hour? How long do you want games to last?

I sometimes like to play a game for few hours. Slowly developing my village/city, defending only, and after fun from having a huge and wealthy city disappear - finish off the enemy.

This is already implemented

Great! Thanks!

[Sebovzeoueb]

I think renewable resources would be great. Trees should grow near other trees, I reckon. And animals should spawn in the appropriate type of terrain (deer in the forest for example). I'm sure I have played a game like this before. This system encourages you to leave some forest, so that it will grow back and the appropriate wildlife will spawn there.

I really like the idea that you could play forever, rather than harvesting everything on the entire map and then having nothing. But only if you make an effort to avoid deforesting everything.

Maybe eventually implement a high level tech where you can dig out quarries to get more stone and mines for metal. I don't remember which game it was, but I remember one where you would mine a resource, and it would run out, but then you could mine deeper and get more of the resource. I may be thinking of Anno 1602.

I also like the idea of being able to generate metal through trade.

Right this instant I have just had a thought, what if you could kill certain animals and sell their pelt for metal? I find the thing with the way this game (and AoE style games) works is that you initially kill a few animals and gather some berries, then you build some farms and for the rest of the game they serve no purpose. It could be interesting to bring some sort of greater use for animals into the game.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I doubt we'll have replanting trees and such (for one thing this would complicate pathfinding; maybe Philip will contradict me). I could imagine us having spawning animals though. Seems easy enough: Respawn rate x number of existing animals. If all the animals are poached, then no more spawning. Could even make the number of predators as a ratio to the number of passive or skittish (prey) animals.

[gudo]

Hmmm.... You would also want your animal spawning rate equation to take into account the carrying capacity of the map (the max number of animals the map can support) otherwise, you may end up with a map choked to death with animals. (medium sized map can totally support 2^256 deer.) Not only is it unrealistic, it would also cause our game performance to degrade over time. If I can find some old notebooks of mine, I can write up some nifty equations for rate of population growth with the following properties.

If the population is ever above the carrying capacity, the population starves till it falls below capacity. (eg, what happens to the lions when people kill half the deer population.)

The population grows fastest when it is far below capacity (more resources per member of the population) and slowest when it nears capacity (fewer resources per population)

*optional* When the population falls below some critical value, there are no longer enough members to restore the population, it will eventually go extinct.

Determining the carrying capacity at any give time would be easy enough I think. For herbivores, we just take the grazing area and multiply it by some constant (1 acre can support 10 deer. If we have 30 acres, our carrying capacity is 300 deer.) Thus when a player builds buildings, he decreases space and lowers carry capacity. Carrying capacity for predators would be easy too, just relate it to the number of prey items avaliable. So when the prey population decreases, the predator population will fall till there are enough prey to support it.

With four equation\s, I think we could make a very lifelike predator/prey model emerge in the game.

Edited June 2, 2011 by gudo

[Ykkrosh]

Hmm, is managing wildlife population levels a fun activity for players to engage in? I'd expect any equations would devolve into some trivial guidelines ("always hunt everything except for 5 deer then wait 30 minutes and repeat") that players would look up in a guide, and then the gameplay would consist of panning over the map and counting animals, which sounds pretty tedious to me and would distract the player from the main focus of the game (managing their economy and military). It could be a good component of an ecology simulation game, but we're making an RTS game, and I don't see how a mixture of the two could really work.

(Incidentally I happened to see some documentary recently which rubbished the idea of modelling ecosystems as mathematically stable systems, since they're actually not stable at all - they're constantly changing, and after a sudden disruption they don't return to their original state. I think the programme may have made some potentially dubious claims, but it sounded convincing that stable systems were an inaccurate oversimplification of real life, so it probably wouldn't be "very lifelike" )

I doubt we'll have replanting trees and such (for one thing this would complicate pathfinding; maybe Philip will contradict me)

I will - the game already has to handle newly-created obstructions (e.g. buildings), and dynamic changes to forests (e.g. cutting down trees), so dynamically creating forests probably shouldn't introduce any problems that we don't already have to solve. I guess the trickiest parts of spawning new trees or animals is picking precisely where to put them, and not making it look stupid and confusing by having them suddenly pop into existence for no observable reason.

[gudo]

Hmm, is managing wildlife population levels a fun activity for players to engage in? I'd expect any equations would devolve into some trivial guidelines ("always hunt everything except for 5 deer then wait 30 minutes and repeat") that players would look up in a guide, and then the gameplay would consist of panning over the map and counting animals, which sounds pretty tedious to me and would distract the player from the main focus of the game (managing their economy and military). It could be a good component of an ecology simulation game, but we're making an RTS game, and I don't see how a mixture of the two could really work.

(Incidentally I happened to see some documentary recently which rubbished the idea of modelling ecosystems as mathematically stable systems, since they're actually not stable at all - they're constantly changing, and after a sudden disruption they don't return to their original state. I think the programme may have made some potentially dubious claims, but it sounded convincing that stable systems were an inaccurate oversimplification of real life, so it probably wouldn't be "very lifelike" )

Heh, don't tell my old bosses about that documentary I used to do a bit of population modeling for USA Dept. of Natural Resources relating to sustainable harvests and a tiny bit for some pharma corp. (populations of bacterium vs human cells. Actually very complex because there's hundreds of types of bacteria all competing for a slice of the pie, plus other factors.) In both cases, I was looking at the effects of big disturbances (for DNR, it was clear cutting, for pharma, it was the introduction of antibiotics.) But I digress.

I really doubt that players would take a keen interest in managing population levels. There's simply too much other stuff to do, you can't track all the animals, you can't control what the other players will do with the animals and it just plain old sounds boring. I think they'd all adopt a animal management policy like "Just leave a few deer, and they'll come back." IMO, the actual game is too engaging to devolve into a park sim.

Anyways, I got home and I looked at my notebooks and I realized that I was thinking far, far, far too complex. (population thresholds, competing species, varied resource utilization, etc.) Like you said, it's an RTS, not an ecology sim ;P The most basic of population models would work great in this game.

Rate of growth = k(Pop)(1-Pop/Cap)

Pop is the current population. Cap is the carrying capacity of the map, and k is an arbitrary constant used to fine tune the rate of growth.

As you can see, when the population ever exceeds the carrying capacity, that second term becomes negative, so we naturally lose some population. Unlike a a more basic equation (say, "population grows by 25%") this means we effectively put a bound on the population. We'll never wind up with 2^256 deer even if we don't hunt for days. Also, the further we are capacity, the faster our population grows.

How do we determine our carrying capacity? I was originally thinking we could have it be some function relating to the amount of grazing space, but that's just overkill now that I think about it. It would be better to just flat out define it. ("For large maps, the max deer population is 50. The max elephant population is 10.") For predators though, I think it would be cool if we defined carrying capacity as a function relating to the amount of prey items. ("The carrying capacity of lions is one fourth the current deer population.") Assuming lions ever get AI enough to naturally attack deer, then that right there is all we would need to establish a very realistic predator-prey relationship model.

As for where you'd spawn animals, why not have them spawn exactly on top of existing members of their own race, then walk away?

Edited June 3, 2011 by gudo

[chaosislife]

Renewable resources for trees and critters sounds about right, i remember expecting AoM to do that when i first started playing it. I'd just leave a few deer in a nice wooded area, wall them off and hope they'd breed. What you could do is just set the gaia ai that controls all the animals and trees to build new animals and trees from the ones on the map, give them a longish build rate and only build one at a time. Next thing you know the areas you aren't currently gathering from get loaded with wildlife. I like this idea better than watching the enemy run out of resources and sit there waiting for me to kill them. I play to play not to win. As for the other resources such as stone and metal, metal could be generated thru some sort of factory, workhouse, or trade function. Stone and wood and even metal you could get more of by recycling buildings. Set it up so that when a building is destroyed either manually or thru war rubble takes it's place like in aom. But make the rubble a gatherable resource representing like 75-90% of the buildings required materials. This also means that if you get done with a building and want to build something else in it's place you can do so without it being totally wasted.

[Alpha of the Eagles]

I think the keyword for replenishment of trees and animals should be slowly.

[chaosislife]

yes, slowly is good, but if we went a tad more complicated we could also set it up so new trees and critters can't spawn in any players LOS. Then we wouldn't be able to actually see the new resources appear, we'd have to discover them.

[Rasunadon]

we could also set it up so new trees and critters can't spawn in any players LOS

And what about situation where you have your outposts around the whole world so you see whole map? No spawning?

[chaosislife]

If you have that much coverage you're playing by yourself having already shot down every single enemy unit that spawns. But yes, no spawning in fully revealed maps. Tho another way might be to use some sort of growth animation like the gaia forest trees in AOM, or to spawn a sapling model which then transforms into a more grown up model over time. The transform function should be able to handle that.

[Rasunadon]

You don't have to be alone - there could be four players still at war, each one fully seeing his quarter of map.

[Sebovzeoueb]

Tho another way might be to use some sort of growth animation like the gaia forest trees in AOM, or to spawn a sapling model which then transforms into a more grown up model over time.

+1