Moats, Canals, Gatehouses and some other ideas.

[DonSkallon]

Hey folks. I'm new here so please be gente

I had some ideas for structures to be built ingame by soldiers to make gameplay more strategic and interresting.

I'll just sum them up and briefly explain them.

Moats:
Give soldiers the ability to dig defensive moats around stone and wooden defense/city walls. In wet, grassy soils

groundwater would fill up these moats. When dug in more arid soil moats should draw water from ingame bodies of water.
These moats could slow down attacking infanterists and completely hinder cavalery and siege weapons from crossing.

You could force the enemy to nozzle down their attackforce into a killzone surrounded by outposts and guardtowers,

which leads me to the next idea;

Drawbridge Gates:

Gates can have a large wooden door hinged at the bottomside, so the doors can pivot forward and be lowered to span across

a Defensive Moat. Opened it serves as a bridge, closed it hinders attackers by presenting it with both a Moat and a closed gate.

Canals:
Give soldiers the ability to dig Canals, similair to moats but deeper and wider so ships can cross them. They would take longer

to build and cost more resources than moats, but they could also hinder Infantery from crossing and allow you to add a naval

fleet to the defence of your cities. Could also allow access to sea for Fishing when your civilisation center is far from water.
Would also allow more complex docks to be built. Could allow for nice Star-Fortress islands to be built.

Gatehouse:

A Gatehouse to become available in later ages would make besieging more challenging. A gatehouse could have a series of 3 gates.

You can select a Gatehouse, select the "lock gate" option and all 3 gates would lock at once. It would have 4 defense towers built into it

and be bigger than a regulair gate, but a bit smaller than a fortress. Like a mini-fortress and a gate in 1.
Example:

A nice upgrade to this Gatehouse could be to upgrade

it's doors from wood to solid metal, which would off course cost alot of metal.

Integrating structures into Stone City Walls:
It would be nice if stone Guard Towers could be built into city walls, replacing the short towers common in the current stone walls.
It would also be nice if you could incorporate Fortresses into stone walls. Fortresses have a tower on each corner; You could use

those as attatchment points from which to allow soldiers to build stone walls.

Wooden Poles:

Allow soldiers to beat wooden poles into the ground. Perhaps soldiers could "build" them like walls; in rows. It would only cost

a little bit of wood. If significant parts of land are covered with poles, this would hinder Cavalery and Siegenweapons

passing through that land. Infantery could pass these poles but would be significantly slowed down.

This was a method frequently used to hinder Cavalery in old times. Would allow for a cheap way to hinder enemy attacks,

when you dont have enough resources to build enough stone walls and defense towers yet.




I have plenty more ideas but I'll save those for later.

[LordGood]

As much as I love fortification, I don't think these ideas would fall in with the current direction of gameplay, and feel a little disjointed. It would make for a fantastic mod though, a lot of work for the artists though

[auron2401]

Would love to see a pseudo stronghold style game/mod.
Really.

...which is what you are basically suggesting. *looks at list*
Definately.

Love the idea of Canals, though. I do think the water system would need to be changed to implement them.

Ships can only sail at the water height, which is always at a set height. (I dislike this greatly)

However, if we had something akin to how AoM did it, canals would be possible.

Edited October 25, 2014 by auron2401

[thamlett]

This would be appropriate for Millenium AD....

[historic_bruno]

In-game terrain modification is all but ruled out for Part 1, due to design choices in pathfinding and complications in other things, e.g. terrain-based features like territories and water rendering. A lot of optimizations and caching can be used if the terrain doesn't change. Personally, I wouldn't mind having it with limited applications, but 0 A.D. isn't really about civil engineering/city building/etc. So part of me would like building roads, digging canals, building bridges, but it's not a focus Instead, RTSes tend to abstract such processes with technologies and stat changes.

[auron2401]

As i mentioned, changing the water system would effectively enable this.

[gracian]

Do not like it. This way of fortifications is characteristic for Middle Ages, it does not have anything in common with this period of history.