What areas would you like expanded on the most in the game?

Darin · 2020-08-04 19:23:42

From a broader perspective: what areas of the game would you like to see expanded the most?

I ask this more as a question of helping me order my todo list for the next release (which I hope to cleanup and post on the website at some point), not because I'm thinking I won't (eventually) focus on the other topics.

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There's a few directions I can see for focusing the next release. This is roughly the order I'd prioritize them without feedback:

1. City dynamics - more depth to planning and building the cities (additional thoughts below*).

2. Military - improved UI (moving and automation), and other things like naval battle (you might eventually notice the AI is absent from the seas).**

3. AI - both its attacking and defense could use a lot of improvement. (It's all hard-coded AI at this point, the only neural networks used in the game are for the quote generations. Probably the next part of the game to see neural nets would be diplomacy -- declaring war, peace treaties, trade deals, alliances (last two of which are not in the game yet). Trying to jump all-in with deep learning will fail, so I have to reduce the scope of the problem and take it a step at a time)

4. Bug and performance fixes. Definitely a trade off between adding more and trying to better perfect what already exists.

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* Additional city dynamics thoughts:
I was actually planning to call the next edition `Cults of Rebellion`. Which I hope to add two major systems to the game: resident happiness, and religion. Crime also as a lesser system affecting happiness.

Your empire's religion would be decided indirectly by you, by the types of buildings you build and how you dedicate to them to various spiritual beliefs. Your empire's religion would then affect your citizens' preferences for things like war, technological progress, or spiritual pursuits, along with giving you direct bonuses (ex. combat bonuses).

I was thinking to have something of a religion tree which you'd progress through by, again, choosing to build many religious buildings for a particular belief system. You'd unlock a more advanced religion with more bonuses if you reached the threshold / pre-requisites of the religion tree. You'd become committed down a path after some point because of how many buildings you'd need to create to switch branches later in the game.

Doing things consistent with your citizens' preferences would make them happy and vice versa. In good times, they won't ask much of you and you can have more freedom to focus on what you want to focus on.

In harder times, they might start demanding you do concrete tasks. If you ignore them, you might make them even unhappier.

At some level of unhappiness, your citizens will be come more extreme in their dispositions. Perhaps you'll need to declare war, or peace to avoid a civil war of your own. Or perhaps you'll need to abolish the universities if you've built a heavily religious society. Or maybe they'll demand you remove any religious buildings and affiliations if you've created a more secular culture.

(Things always shape up differently than I think, and everything takes longer to code than I expect even when considering this recursive truism. So see the above as early ideas rather than concrete promises just yet -- none of it is coded yet and it all may look and play very differently than what I'm imagining!)

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** See the youtube comment by `Jeux 1d100` for more good suggestions on military feature ideas, and what prompted me to make this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkJf4fC8weM

Tchey · 2020-08-04 20:52:15

Thanks for pointing to the comments from YouTube (i’m Jeux1d100).

- It’s uneasy to manage warfare, selecting and commanding units to move, attack... There should be a way to set patrol route, auto attack, keep distance, follow, stay at range, create group of units to give global orders etc.
- I built a wall and could not find how to build a door. Would be good to have worker building gates, remove a wall section, patrol a zone and autorepair eveything in need with priority system wall, building, military, civil...).

First i think, i’d like a better City Building part. Now it’s a bit unclear why on a zone there is a Forge but not in the same one a few meters away.
More buildings, sure, but more info about everything. Walls with gate, towers, patroling the walls etc

Why my zones have a fix size, what’s a good ratio to start between residential, business, agricultural and industrial, do i need larger road later for bigger units, what why how...

How do deal with resources on map ? Should i build next to them, over them, completely covering the white shape ? Is it good to build several "blocks" of zones next to a resources ?

Explorers should have different orders too. Auto explorer to go far, but also auto-search the surroundings, going like @ shape around the city, to find the closest unexplored tile, instead of going super far and living the immediate map black.

Also, the workers are a bit crazy when automated. I was trying to build a "nice rectangle city", and workers went artistic with crazy shapes often sense-less to me.

I didn’t notice Group Move was to draw a rectangle to select several troops.
I’d like to save group like in classic RTS game and assign a key to call it back, and semi-automated functions like Patrol

About the religious stuff, i’d like to be able to build a god-less civilisation, even from early age, so i don’t like too much your idea around... UNLESS !?
You go toward the God-Like road as well, with power given from the faithful, landmarking, fireballing, mountaining the land with your might.

Last edited by Tchey (2020-08-04 20:57:10)

Darin · 2020-08-04 22:30:33

Thanks again for your comments. A lot of great ideas!

Tchey wrote:

Now it’s a bit unclear why on a zone there is a Forge but not in the same one a few meters away.

I don't understand what you mean here?

Why my zones have a fix size, what’s a good ratio to start between residential, business, agricultural and industrial, do i need larger road later for bigger units, what why how...

I don't quite know myself about the best zone sizes -- it's what ever the demands come out to be. From my plays though, it seems like more residential and agricultural. Industrial you need the least of. The zone demand indicators on the right of the screen might help, but they're not a direct indicator, and can become off over time (an issue that I'll work on...)

You don't need bigger roads for bigger units (they all only take up one tile, but multi-tile units would be interesting, for things like ships, and tanks I think)

How do deal with resources on map ? Should i build next to them, over them, completely covering the white shape ? Is it good to build several "blocks" of zones next to a resources ?

Over them and maybe 2-3x as large as the business zone here (http://www.arcanefortune.com/imgs/how_t … _hall2.png). As long as there are any tax paying buildings in the correct zone type (which is dependent on the resource type) within a relatively close distance to the resource (i.e., ones built by your residents, not you), you are given access to it. Probably much more than 2-3x larger than that example you might run into problems about lack of connectivity to other zones, which can reduce demand. With new cities that I create specifically to try to get a resource, I normally have to 'jump start' them with multiple government funded buildings to get the zone demand high enough for people to move in. Like theaters, houses of worship, monuments.

About the religious stuff, i’d like to be able to build a god-less civilisation, even from early age, so i don’t like too much your idea around... UNLESS !?
You go toward the God-Like road as well, with power given from the faithful, landmarking, fireballing, mountaining the land with your might.

Yeah, I think we might be thinking of this in a similar way. I'm not suggesting you'd have to go down the religious route. I more want it to come out as a series of trade-offs. Namely, a trade-off between some of the easier bonuses religion/spirituality might provide to make people happy, or the trade-off of having your residents fully supporting you in your efforts to become a technological super-power.

I was thinking of having it as each resident residing somewhere in this type of conceptual space:

War-loving
|
Scientific ---------- Spiritual/Religious
|
Peace

Based on what you've built around them. If your larger term empire is not in accord with their beliefs, you make them unhappy. (Ex. being at war, or not being at war. or the global allocation of your funding of science or religion).

I'm not claiming this is a great representation of reality or anything, I just think this could lead to some interesting outcomes in the game, and might parallel things you could imagine happening in real life. People's affinities won't matter too much if they're happy enough.

Pill_Peevis · 2021-11-23 00:03:31

A mode where you could watch the AI go against itself would be pretty cool. I love DF Legends and other passive god games so a mode where you can just sit back and watch civilizations rise and fall while messing around with different variables for tech growth and such would be super cool.

Arcane Fortune Forums

#1 2020-08-04 19:23:42

What areas would you like expanded on the most in the game?

#2 2020-08-04 20:52:15

Re: What areas would you like expanded on the most in the game?

#3 2020-08-04 22:30:33

Re: What areas would you like expanded on the most in the game?

#4 2021-11-23 00:03:31

Re: What areas would you like expanded on the most in the game?

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