Different structure appearance between phases, make buildings appear upgraded when reaching a new phase

[MirceaKitsune]

One of the things I love in this style of game is the feeling of starting from scratch and progressing as time goes on. 0ad definitely has this, and one of the parts I love in that regard is the transition between three different phases (village phase, town phase, city phase). I feel these transitions would be even better if visual modifications were made to units based on the different stages to further emphasize the changes, making them appear more solid and upgraded when a new phase is reached.

I'm mainly looking at buildings here. Civic center at the very least, maybe houses, possibly all building types that can be built at a certain phase and will carry through to the next phase. The general theming I had in mind is something among the lines of:

• Village phase: Buildings look dirtier and pretty rough, little detail in the structure, gives the feeling of small establishment. Reliance on plain wood.
• Town phase: Buildings look more solid and clean, some additional detail is added, gives the feeling of a growing establishment. Reliance on plaster.
• City phase: Buildings look clean and fancy, pretty and detailed, gives the feeling of a massive establishment. Reliance on sculpture and painted walls.

This would require some artistic effort by the development team of course, considering how many unit related assets we'd have to modify. One way to make the process easier would be creating simplified versions of buildings for the early phases based on the existing ones: Take each model, remove some of the detailed parts of the mesh, save as town phase version... now take that version, delete more unneeded components, save as village phase. Afterward do the same with the texture, adding a bit of cracks and plaster then saving that as the town version, then adding more structural instability with some wooden planks and saving that as the village phase version. As a bonus we may do some minor resizing especially vertically, so town phase models look a bit more crumpled and short whereas village phase look even shorter and more crooked (mind the UV stretching).

Is this a detail we can hope to have at some point? What are your thoughts on it? How do you think this should be done and look like?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Probably most likely for Civic Center. Probably not for all buildings in the set.

[MirceaKitsune]

11 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Probably most likely for Civic Center. Probably not for all buildings in the set.

 

Cheers for that suggestion. Based on it I was thinking of an even better plus easier idea for this: Why not make the civic center a building you can upgrade, having the village / town / city phase in that area represented by which version of the civic center you have?

 

For one thing this makes more logical sense if you think about it: A faction can and will build multiple civic centers across the map, each meant to represent its own establishment. It's rather illogical that the phase is an universal property of the faction worldwide, instead of a property of each individual establishment. Normally one territory could be in village phase, another in town phase, another in city phase!

 

Going this route would also require less work and new assets being included: We'd only create different versions of the civic center for each faction, that's magnitudes of times simpler. This could be later accompanied by other changes to emphasize the advancement, such as a different HUD border or switching to different music.

 

Perhaps I should make a separate thread for discussing this in detail? Making the phase per establishment / civic center rather than faction universal is a change with different implications. But I can say the idea feels a lot more correct in many ways, including more correct functionality gameplay wise. What are your thoughts on this?

[Gurken Khan]

20 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:

It's rather illogical that the phase is an universal property of the faction worldwide, instead of a property of each individual establishment. Normally one territory could be in village phase, another in town phase, another in city phase!

Well, hm. On one hand I could imagine different regions of a civ differing in their advancement. On the other hand I think it would be difficult where to draw the line, like are techs and units of later phases are universally available or only in certain regions? And how would you balance that? I don't know if it would add enough to go through all that.

[MirceaKitsune]

1 hour ago, Gurken Khan said:

Well, hm. On one hand I could imagine different regions of a civ differing in their advancement. On the other hand I think it would be difficult where to draw the line, like are techs and units of later phases are universally available or only in certain regions? And how would you balance that? I don't know if it would add enough to go through all that.

I was thinking about that. When it comes to unlocked units / buildings / upgrades easiest way seems to leave those universal: If you have at least one civic center of a certain phase, you benefit from what it unlocks everywhere. One can make the claim that the technology is transferred between establishments, same way blacksmith upgrades apply to all troops anywhere on the map automatically.

Wasn't sure about buildings; Technically we could have it so a phase reliant building can't be built in territory maintained by a civic center below that phase. But this might get too complicated and confusing, probably not worth it. So in the end unlocked buildings should be possible to place anywhere once they become available.

Not sure if downgrading should be a possibility instead. So if you lose the last civic center of a given phase, you can no longer build / produce / research things from that phase until you upgrade a new civic center to reach it again. You don't lose existing stuff, just can't do new ones till you get back to that phase somewhere. This one seems more reasonable and I'd be in favor of it, what does everyone think?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Lol this is exactly what we've discussed before, every few years or so.  My idea was that each CC has its own territory and you can build structures only in CC territories based on their settlement phase. New CCs would start at Village. Your initial CC would be the Capitol, but you'd have the option to designate any City phase CC as your capitol. CCs would also come with names ("Rome", "Capua", "Ostia" etc.).

[Auron24015]

We could also make this a feature to gameplay, like upgrading buildings to better/stronger etc versions of themselves by the age.
This could help 0ad be unique to all other games of the type, and also add new forms of tactics and gameplay.

EX: You could choose between making multiple mud houses if you need more population but are having resource trouble, or if you are rich in resources and lacking for space, you could build a few stone houses which only cost a bit more and build time is slightly longer.
Rushing/blobbing against building tall as such.