Radical troop training idea

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

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"

Edited October 3, 2011 by AndreliusCaesarKhan

[Wijitmaker]

That is a really neat idea! Very interesting and fits well with the citizen soldier concept. You could arm the basic citizen solder with a pitchfork and rocks or something if ever attacked (making them primarily a econ unit. Rather than battle experience to make the jump from basic to advanced, you could do just as you suggest. Make them pay for training at a barracks by "garrisoning" the unit there. Advancement from advanced to elite would be through experience still.

Off the top of my head, the main gripe I could think of is that it would be a little tedious to micromanage. A game designer needs to consider what they want players to spend their time/clicks doing. Do you want players to spend their time tasking their slaves/citizens to a barracks to "train" or would you want them to spend more time engaging in other activities like battle tactics?

I like the idea of specialist citizens. It offers the players choices on how to manage their economy and adds strategy and depth.

I'm not sure it would be a good idea to have citizens/slaves to always appear automatically at a constant rate. Perhaps have a system similar to civilization. The rate at which food is collected would be linked to the rate your population would increase. Food would perhaps have to then be generated from resources that provide a constant regenerative source of food (farms, corrals, fishing). Though bumps in the rate might occur with hunting. Or, maybe food could solely be used to "generate" citizens/slaves. Perhaps every increment of 100 units of food collected, you automatically get a new citizen/slave (until you hit a cap - necessary for system requirements). Although... how would you "buy" a horse, camel, elephant. Maybe you could queue it and instead of 100 food automatically going to a human, it would instead use the next 200 food (for example) to purchase a horse that would be available for someone to train with at your barracks?

Neat idea, just doing some brainstorming

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

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).

Edited October 2, 2011 by AndreliusCaesarKhan

[edwardlongshank]

My biggest problem is that a city did not start of with slaves and then turn them into fighting men. I can go into this in more depth if need be but its rather obvious to me at least that you cant turn a population of slaves into the main fighting force of your army, you wip a guy for years then suddenly give him a spear and teach him how to use it... i think you will end up with a spear in your throat. My other biggest problem is that in a lot of ancient city's like in and Greece not all men were created equal in terms of having equal choices. A poor farmer would be unlikely to become a hoplite warier, he would be more likely to become a stone thrower, spear thrower or bowmen so i don't think its a good idea to have to select each individual citizen to be trained in a certain area. I think it would be simpler to just have a population of children/untrained men which can not be controlled (moved around) but it determines how many men there are available for training (more children = more units available for training). I think the increase of this population should be based on the number of houses, the amount of food and the amount of trained citizens. Trained citizens have a house and income/food so therefore they are the ones who would be producing the most offspring. However i do not think that the more food you have stockpiled should should = the more children/untrained men. In most rts games the aim is to spend your resources so that you do not have a very large stockpile as having stockpiled resources is not an effective idea when your in the middle of a war unless you have a massive food surplus. I think that instead of the population of children/untrained mens rate of increase being determined partly by how much food you have stockpiled i think it should be determined by how much food and gold (currency) you pay your men. By this i mean if you feed and pay your working citizens more, then they have the necessary means to produce and support more children. Having food stockpiled provides more security to a city but it does not increase the population as its not actually being used. You must give it out if you want it to be used.

Even if you take nothing else of what i suggest on board at least stop using the word slaves! Slaves are very expensive to have and only a mad man would willingly arm a slave as he would fear the slave would take revenge for being enslaved! Maybe *subjects* would be a little closer to the word your looking for but still not a the right work to use imo.

Edited October 2, 2011 by edwardlongshank

[Wijitmaker]

Even if you take nothing else of what i suggest on board at least stop using the word slaves!

I agree, not all civilizations represented in the game had such larger percentage of their population as slaves, such as the Romans and Persians. That was one reason why we chose to use the word citizen instead of slaves. So, I'll call them citizens.

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).

It could almost be implemented entirely with modifying lots of xml files. One might need some help setting up the auto generation of citizens. Also there is some logic needed to 'transform' entities when 'trained' in structures. Perhaps some GUI elements as well. It wouldn't be simple, but it wouldn't to laborious I think.

I think the biggest hurdle one will have is convincing the team that it is a good idea, when in doubt the team tends to do things like the Age of Empires because that is mainly the audience that will be playing this game. It can be done though. I would suggest making a clear and objective list of pros and cons. Also create a little mini document that details all the effects this would have on the game inside and out. How would food effect technologies? How is food collected? What would the interface of the UI look like to train the citizens? What structures would it require and what actions would each structure take? How does it (or does it at all) fit in with game design elements like auras, citizen soldiers, trading, building structures, promotions, heroes... etc (see here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Design_Document & http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/XML.Entity - Note not all documents are up to date with the changes the team has made in the last several years - I'm sure they will correct you as you go).

The output of this effort would give the team a good picture of what the risk/rewards of doing a system like this is and give them the ability to estimate workload for such a task.

Good luck

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Perhaps this could be a game option.

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

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.

Edited October 2, 2011 by AndreliusCaesarKhan

[Mythos_Ruler]

Hmm, I'm not sure when it's appropriate for an active team member to comment on this and chime in with his opinion, because I don't want to throw cold water on anyone's ideas (I've done so in the past and felt like a @#$% doing it). But to be honest, this really has no chance of making it into the official game. It strays completely from the formula we've established. And while we've made changes to the game design over time, the core gameplay concepts have remained the same since 2003.

My specific criticism is that of micromanagement. There have been other games that have used a similar training system, and all I've heard about those games were how frustrating they were to the player. When you add a new feature with intensive micro as this has, you have to make a trade-off and remove micro elsewhere from the game design. I could see an intensive training system like this if we refocused the game into a training and fighting game and dropped much of our economy. I think people enjoy things like farming, hunting, mining, lumbering, trading, bartering, etc., so it would be a tough call on what to remove and how to streamline what remained so we could add micro by moving peasants around to different buildings and training them for specific roles.

So, my question would be: What in the current game design/direction would you sacrifice in order to add this?

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

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.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I guess it just feels too Settlers-esque for my taste. Anyway, I'm not the final arbiter of these things, so you can continue to discuss it and others can chime in. I only say there is zero chance of this going into the game because it would entail changing something that is already implemented and integrated into the game. This is why my alternate combat idea will not be going into the game--a perfectly good combat method is already implemented. We generally only change large gameplay things before or at the point of implementation. But again, others can have a different POV.

[Wijitmaker]

The untrained citizens would enter an economic building, begin training, and come out automatically looking for work in their area of expertise.

To further automate you could also waypoint the citizens to automatically rally at a specific building. If you want to focus in the early part of the game on food, move them to the farm center. If you need more lumber, move it to the mill. If you are ready to create some military, move it to the barracks. If you aren't sure yet what you want, just move it to a patch of ground near the town center.

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.

A commoner is good, I like that. In the game you wouldn't have to identify them as a commoner, citizen or a slave, you could just call them a roman, carthaginian, etc.

Few more things to consider. Would advanced (in your model - units that were trained), elite (units that gain greater stats through experience) soldiers still have an economic purpose? Right now they do, just not as efficient as a basic citizen soldier (freshly created unit). I believe they should, as a fall back option. Or could a unit have multiple training - both military and economic? Would a generic commoner have any economic or military capability without any training?

For the record, could you please sight some games that you have heard have "similar" game mechanics as this proposed idea

If the training wasn't done at a structure, and instead done by clicking on a single unit then doing the "training/upgrade" specialization from there - it would be a similar idea to Westwood Command and Conquer RTS games and later the same studio that EA bought and made Battle for Middle Earth. Basically your applying a tech through means of garrisoning a unit in a structure for a period of time.

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

I guess it just feels too Settlers-esque for my taste. Anyway, I'm not the final arbiter of these things, so you can continue to discuss it and others can chime in. I only say there is zero chance of this going into the game because it would entail changing something that is already implemented and integrated into the game. This is why my alternate combat idea will not be going into the game--a perfectly good combat method is already implemented. We generally only change large gameplay things before or at the point of implementation. But again, others can have a different POV.

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.

To further automate you could also waypoint the citizens to automatically rally at a specific building. If you want to focus in the early part of the game on food, move them to the farm center. If you need more lumber, move it to the mill. If you are ready to create some military, move it to the barracks. If you aren't sure yet what you want, just move it to a patch of ground near the town center.

A commoner is good, I like that. In the game you wouldn't have to identify them as a commoner, citizen or a slave, you could just call them a roman, carthaginian, etc.

Few more things to consider. Would advanced (in your model - units that were trained), elite (units that gain greater stats through experience) soldiers still have an economic purpose? Right now they do, just not as efficient as a basic citizen soldier (freshly created unit). I believe they should, as a fall back option. Or could a unit have multiple training - both military and economic? Would a generic commoner have any economic or military capability without any training?

If the training wasn't done at a structure, and instead done by clicking on a single unit then doing the "training/upgrade" specialization from there - it would be a similar idea to Westwood Command and Conquer RTS games and later the same studio that EA bought and made Battle for Middle Earth. Basically your applying a tech through means of garrisoning a unit in a structure for a period of time.

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

Edited October 3, 2011 by AndreliusCaesarKhan

[hhyloc]

Please forgive me if I miss something in the previous posts, but maybe we can simplify the training process by have the untrained citizen (different from "labourer" that the player must train manually) spawned automatically at the civ center, but you don't have to garrison them inside a specific building to train and you cannot control them. The training should be done similar to current training system, you click the building (barrack, mill) then select type of unit you want to train, a specialized woodcutter or a spearman for example then the untrained citizen will enter the building and come out as a specialized unit.

Edited October 3, 2011 by hhyloc

[Ykkrosh]

I only say there is zero chance of this going into the game because it would entail changing something that is already implemented and integrated into the game. This is why my alternate combat idea will not be going into the game--a perfectly good combat method is already implemented. We generally only change large gameplay things before or at the point of implementation. But again, others can have a different POV.

I don't think we should be particularly wedded to our current design by thinking the gameplay will be perfect, but I do think at our current stage we should focus on getting a complete implementation of some (any) design, and redesigning already-implemented features won't get us any closer to that, so probably best to avoid much redesign now if we ever want to finish . But once we do have a complete implementation (maybe during beta releases or something), it could be fun to do prototypes of radical new designs as mods - I think the idea in this topic (and the alternative combat system too) should be fairly easy to do, at least if we ignore AI and don't worry about pretty UI, and then people could play with it and see what ideas are fun in reality, and after the first final version of 0 A.D. we could maybe spend more time developing the successful ideas into a new variant of the game.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I don't think we should be particularly wedded to our current design by thinking the gameplay will be perfect, but I do think at our current stage we should focus on getting a complete implementation of some (any) design, and redesigning already-implemented features won't get us any closer to that, so probably best to avoid much redesign now if we ever want to finish . But once we do have a complete implementation (maybe during beta releases or something), it could be fun to do prototypes of radical new designs as mods - I think the idea in this topic (and the alternative combat system too) should be fairly easy to do, at least if we ignore AI and don't worry about pretty UI, and then people could play with it and see what ideas are fun in reality, and after the first final version of 0 A.D. we could maybe spend more time developing the successful ideas into a new variant of the game.

Right. You said it more eloquently than I did. I think we all feel that radical departures at this stage would be counterproductive to actually creating a "finished" product, but once we hit 1.0 we can try all number of things to experiment.

[AndreliusCaesarKhan]

Please forgive me if I miss something in the previous posts, but maybe we can simplify the training process by have the untrained citizen (different from "labourer" that the player must train manually) spawned automatically at the civ center, but you don't have to garrison them inside a specific building to train and you cannot control them. The training should be done similar to current training system, you click the building (barrack, mill) then select type of unit you want to train, a specialized woodcutter or a spearman for example then the untrained citizen will enter the building and come out as a specialized unit.

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.

[hhyloc]

After putting more thoughts into this, I agree with you that it's a better to actually control the untrained citizen and since these citizens will replace the old labourer, I think it won't require (much) more micro efforts from the player.

That said, the game development is going with the current citizen system, also it's would be unwise and counterproductive to redesign a large part of gameplay before the game is finished so look like this idea wont get implemented in the game. But I'm pretty sure once the game is finished, this could become a fun mod to play.

Edited October 4, 2011 by hhyloc