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Quote:There shouldn't be limits on how many soldiers the player can recruit…. unless they really go overboard in recruiting the population en masse, which is a problem in rotk2 too!
The book has plenty of instances where so and so was only able to raise a small number of troops.
Do general stats now affect how successful recruitment is ? Seems like a good idea to me actually.
early games had hard limits that you couldn't recruit more soldiers than you had population…
Lets say that ruler trust is low, population loyalty is low ? What if the people really don't want to join the army ? Do you institute a draft (causing other things to drop again) ?
Or lets say you're Shamoke … you try to get more army.. but since you're kind of a bandit, you only get bandit like peasants to join you while the 'loyal to han' resist ? etc…
Quote:In battle, officers you control normally should have no problems with disobeying; the only problems would be if a headstrong officer gets challenged to a duel or confused/mislead/etc… and that's true in EVERY rotk game with those options.But earlier discussions had block level stuff and other outright disobedience ? Are we back peddling on that stance a bit ? See also: Sum Dumgai reference you noted. And wouldn't this also apply to a drunk Zhang Fei ?
Also, what dictates who the player has direct control over ? Are we going to get into a situation where an entire battle takes place that the player has no control over ?
Re: special limitations such as the ma teng ally / liu bei taxation / etc
You…. seem to be bouncing back and forth a lot on what can and can't be done etc :(. Some times its people do as you say, others it's mind of their own or can outright disobey… or have a mind of their own.
The ruler limitations were a tad bit of an extreme case/example, but do kind of serve a rhetorical point.
Don't get me wrong, I'm *loving* the brain storming sessions, but having a hard time seeing how a lot of this can be brought together coherently…. particularly with this moving target 'block' / 'personality' / 'ai-vs-direct-control'.
Personality stuff:
Quote:(3) War
(4) Politics
(5) Intelligence
(6) Charm
(7) Ferociousness
(8) Calmness
(9) Ambition
(10) Justice
(12) Compatibility
adding:
ruler loyalty
block loyalty (or is this compatibility, we haven't really decided)
block strength relative to ruler (??)
We'll quietly ignore for the moment the addition of 'politics' as well as possibly the other stats (so/so)…
So…. somehow we need to figure out:
1) does the player have direct control or not
2) if direct control, the likelihood they'll ignore an order and do something else
3) if not direct control, how likely they are to follow suggested orders (defend castle!, increase farm production!)
4) how they will choose to implement such actions
5) how they interact with other generals (?)
6) other dubious / questionable actions we've discussed etc
7) can they decide to attack another province all on their own ?
There are things that are somewhat easy for a person to look at and try to come to a conclusion over, but how does a line by line program do it ? If you come up with a list of equations for different probabilities, that can be easy to work with… but if ya need a bunch of branching (if/for/while/etc) logic and such… you're now into the realm of full on scripting (thus, LUA or something would be easier).
Just to kinda throw this out there: using "assign" on governors (to do stuff on their own) in the earlier games usually didn't work out that well heh.
The general-hunting battlescape stuff with risk/reward/etc … we'll have to fiddle with it once things get interactive (or run just pure number crunching simulations) to tweak formulas etc. It seems like a good idea but seems like it can be easily abused.
in other news:
made a bunch of simple buttons last night (with more of the dreaded 'bonzai' font hehehehe)… and started the province screen gui a bit. tonight the actual gui screen will fly together…. and i'll start looking into making it accomplish things.
gui stuff is still mostly hard coded, haven't moved it to reading from a txt/ini file yet. as it is, i could prolly move to txt/ini just to treat it as a 'skin', but actually making it modable would require a little bit more (ie: which function call the button makes etc). in due time.
ini/txt for skinable will be next on list once dummy rpn and 'it affects things!' gets done (ie: it'll be real soon). this makes it easier for anyone wanting to fiddle with appearances. it should also be easy to implement the skinable bits.
after that will prolly be 'viewable battlescape maps' simple style… no interaction… just viewing them (especially since our brain storming currently has battles totally in flux lol).
from there…. i don't think there's a reason to not hand out a private test build for people to fiddle.
the mini-map visible on province screen will have to wait for a little bit, dunno how i wanna implement that yet. province 'shading' in the map-of-china screen is also a bit in flux right now because of deciding how to handle it (right now it's just a solid color flood fill, all done dynamically). decisions decisions decisions…
i've been avoiding nearly all "pretty graphical effects" stuff for now… that's too easy to get wrapped up in and should only be considered after most of the core is done.
eventually – graphically it'll move from a pure 2d thing into the realm of 3d. not necessarily with models and 3d shapes and crap, but just stuff to get free effects out of (zooming in and out / fog-of-war-ish / lighting / rotation / etc). Again, that's presentation and not terribly critical at the moment.
Morale is sensible; they introduced it in virtually all of the later rotk games.
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I thought I explained war well, so here, have a map. Ten points to everyone who recognizes the map! (tragically, the points are worth less than a zimbabwe dollar)
Province ownership is claimed by entering the castle; if you're sensible, you'll leave someone to sit on the castle so the enemy doesn't regrab it! However, if side A has province X's castle but only side B has troops there, side B gets province X.
Attacking units should be allowed to show up any square in the defending province adjacent to where they started OR in their starting province.
Defensuive starting units will have standard starting spots, just like rotk 2. if we want a formula for what's allowed:
* The castle
* Any fort
* Any water adjacent to the castle (except province edges)
* Any forest within four tiles of the castle (except province edges)
* Anywhere else within two tiles of the castle (except edges)
Reinforcements (for both sides) will show up on the edge of the provunce they moved to, adjacent to where they came from. The battle will only expand to include a reinforcement province if it's adjacent to the original target — it will not expand the way a minor squabble [originally, anyway] in 1914 did!
Attackers can send units that have not done anything; defenders can send every unit in the proper province(s), no matter what.
Retreat means moving to a province not involved in the battle. If 12 and 13 are both involved in the battle, wei forces would have to retreat to either 14, 11, or 20.
In addition, the "retreat" command should mean "drop everything and get the heck out of dodge". If they're deep in enemy territory when they do so, they may lose a significant number of troops and supplies, especially if morale is low. Instead, manually withdrawing back to your territory may be better, but if you risk the enemy coutner-invading your province you may have to make a tough choice! XD
Deciding that the battle is over can mean no forces being left in a province the other side owns. , but if Zhuge Liang throws everything at 13 and it falls (along with all wei forces there), the battle ends before he can take 12. Of coruse, it's his fault he didn't send any forces to attack 12… XD
When the battle is over, both sides should have a dialogue to decide who goes where… assuming they finished with at least one of the contested provinces!
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Keep in mind that armies were mostly conscripted peasants. Nice rulers trained them into real officers, while not-so-nice rulers often kept them up front so as not to lose any elite troops! :thumbsdown: That said, rulers had ways of ….convincing… peasants to become soldiers, but each province has only a finite number of people. Yuan Shao sometimes ends up with enough troops — both in the later RoTKs and even in #3 (hi, LYS!) — that he can't afford to pay and feed them, and over-recruiting here may be the prelude to a downward spiral. That said, it may be best to limit the number of troops recruited in one go (based on the officer's stats), but not to limit it to zero unless the province is in a truly horrid state.
Recruiting troops with low population loyalty may indeed cause a riot — and it's your own fault for going LBJ on them! XD
As for Shamoke, he was never a bandit, but a king of tribal people. But even for actual bandits (such as Zhang Yan), I'm sure they can find people willing to join them.
Officers likely won't be drunk here; they may be headstrong, but that won't depend on whether they're a blockie or not.
Unless the player selects only block members to fight, they should have at least some control.
I apoologize if I seem inconsistent on the officer block system; it isn't set in stone or even set in clouds. XD That said, an officer block is like a mini-force; you probably should have full control over them in peace, but only general controls ("Attack Zhang He!", "Defend Hanzhong!", "Campaign for Obama!") in battle — and you have just as much control over them as anyone else under AI control.
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The player has direct control, EXCEPT for battles involving blockies and/or large numbers of officers… and provinces delegated to the AI. XD
Blockies will never ignore an order unless the leader has low loyalty (at which point he may defect)
Non-defecting Blockies and AI officers will always follow the order to the best of their capabilities, but you know how AI can be….. imperfect.
Blockies will only attack another province on their own if they think they can win AND the leader has middle-to-low loyalty.
Non-blockies will only attack a province on their own if you put the province under AI control AND gave them the permission (or outright order!) to do so.
General-to-general interaction hasn't been decided yet, and may be limited just to event.
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For shading the china map, consider having a standard map (a la google maps or somethign), with 50% transparency in the province's shape and force's color. A bit more work is probably needed (such as province borders XD), but…
Keep in mind that RoTK didn't get into 3D until RoTK 11. Yes, four of their five PS2 games were 2D! XD
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Finally, if this confuses anyone — whether Unfy or anyone else — ask away and I'll do what I can to explain better.
I'll have to chew that over a bit in order to form proper responses. Still at work, sadly :(.
Thank you for noting that you're still trying to bring it into focus within your own head, too… I don't feel so retarded heh.
3D — well… it'll still be a wholly 2D game… it'll just take place within a 3d space. Kinda like uhmmm I think 'bionic commando rearmed' on xbox live was that way. there are several rpg's that are also 2d-rendered-by-3d-hardware stuffs.
china map shading: i can do an alpha blend no problem sure — just don't ask it to be animated or anything — alpha blending real time is typically insanely expensive (cpu wise, dunno about gpu/3d wise). but, then you also get into something such as needing to create cutouts of graphics for each province of each ruler (so if you have 16 possible ruler graphics for the map, you need 43 * 16 separate graphics… oy). or building province masks at run time or something….
anyhoo, i was hoping to somewhat avoid ultra-realistic map. given that the art of the game is ultra-realistic, a map that *is* would be quite out of place. Oh, and google maps would be useless, current cities and layout bear no resemblance to 1800 years ago :).
http://www.chaz.org/Arch/China/City/City.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Chinese_urban_planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_An#Han_period
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_city_wall#Extant_city_walls
Have fun!
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If you can alpha blend, masks shouldn't be a problem. As for borders, that can be built into the map.
The map doesn't have to be ultra-realistic, but yes, it should have SOME effort put into it — or pictures of kittens! XD
You know, MidKnight was silly enough to skip my idea of including officer skills. Therefore, we should use them here! XD
But we need to decide whether skills are one (or two) per officer (rotk 9,11) or if they're mix-and-match (rotk 4,8,10).
And if we go with mix-and-match, we'd need to decide whether they're yes/no (rotk8 strategies) or individual levels (rotk8 tactics).
For the record, one (or two) skills per officer would mean more skills (and more coding) than mix-and-match, but less deciding who has what. Multiple mix-and-match levels means more deciding than yes-or-no, but it also feels like it'll make a better game, and multiple levels for a mix-and-match Dueling skill would probably let us combine war and lead into a single stat. Atma's recommendation is to go with multiple levels mix-and-match. [Advisor DragonAtma has 93 Int]
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On a side note, advisor advice should depend both on the advisor's intelligence and how close the decision is. Even the dumbest advisors in the land won't think "It's 235 AD? Hell yeah, now my good friend Gongsun Yuan can totally conquer Wei!" ;)
Quote:You know, MidKnight was silly enough to skip my idea of including officer skills. Therefore, we should use them here! XDI may do it at some future point. I'm just a little burnt out on assembly coding at the moment.
Hurt my back a little again on Friday evening… slept most of the weekend away.
Tried to fiddle with GUI a little but just wasn't up to it.
Didn't do much thinking (block/ai/etc)…
Officer skills: I kinda like the idea of people having skills that would make them better at a given task (rather than generalized to stats) but i'm quite nervous about adding more general stats into the mix. Part of my original reasoning for wanting to do something similar to rotk2 was how simple and clean it was. We've been wandering away from that to a large degree … but haven't really fiddled with 'working stats' much.
As far as the discussion goes… I'd prefer something more mix and match rather than unique. Uniqueness lends itself to abuse or 'gone forever', and given the nature of the game… anyone can be anything (Jin Xuan, conqueror of worlds!). So my vote would be pulling from a pool of possible "perks". If these are yes/no or levels… I dunno. If it's variable levels… then does something below a 'mean' make them catastrophically bad at it ? Liu Shan shoots himself in the foot while attempting to give rice to the people!
And speaking of pool of skills or anyone can be anything and possibly 'levels'…
Would it be possible to expand rewarding a general with just money, books, horses to also being able to reward them with something that increases their skills ? Something that has a smaller loyalty bump than 'books' (the age old thing to raise int)… but does a bit of loyalty and a bit of chosen skill ? Similar limitations as 'gotta have someone better at it in the province' (akin to book giving) ?
And then… for some of the skills… if you start introducing weapon proficiency, you're gonna want different unit types (calvary, infantry, multiple types of bowmen, etc)? Definitely against the grain for rotk2, btw.
PS: i like 'perk', but it is very 'yes/no' rather than a proficiency.
Back to the basic working stats…. rotk2 has intelligence / war / charisma…. that's it. Adding some more dynamics such as 'strategy' vs 'politics' vs 'whatever-is-needed-for-flood-control' and ya start getting into a huge mess of stats for people. And I honestly dunno if it benefits the game any.
You might be able to create more of a dynamic for giving generals more "personality" (not as in the stat, but uniqueness?), but does it really help game play any ? You're still going to have smarty pants do the development… you'll just be effectively penalizing certain generals over others (peasants, beware of Cheng Yu offering grain!).
Sadly, a lot of these extra stats and skills would need to be completely arbitrary without any basis in history or story… the book nor history only records notable mentions, thus you'll have a few generals with skills and the rest are kinda at a loss. What was Zhuge Dan good at other than betrayal ? Meng Huo ? Yuan Yin ? Hua Xoing ?
Quote:In addition, the "retreat" command should mean "drop everything and get the heck out of dodge". If they're deep in enemy territory when they do so, they may lose a significant number of troops and supplies, especially if morale is low. Instead, manually withdrawing back to your territory may be better, but if you risk the enemy coutner-invading your province you may have to make a tough choice! XDLoss of troops, yup, okay… was wanting to do that anyway (never added it to the list in the first post… wonder if i should update that thing lol).
Loss of supplies — how do you figure on working that out ? As is, there's no "supply lines" in the game… and we've only just started mentioning the return of the 'rice pot' for attackers to have to defend. The only really applicable thing I can think of is the 'arms' stat drops (ie: trade->buy weapons in the original).
Quote:The battle will only expand to include a reinforcement province if it's adjacent to the original target — it will not expand the way a minor squabble [originally, anyway] in 1914 did!So no recursion. Once the battlescape is set (for what's involved), it's do or die for those 2-6 provinces (or more depending on map layout and who's involved).
Just to extend the question a bit further….
The month comes to a conclusion and there's no victor, thus the battle rages on. Reinforcements to the area affect the battlescape how ?
Battle starts out as 30 invades 13. 12 immediately decides to help defend 13 (same ruler for simplicity sake). Thus we have a battle scape of 30, 13, 12… right ?
The month of battle finishes out with, say, a complete stalemate. Can 20, 11, 33, or 32 join the battle ? Technically, the provinces near them are in a state of combat…
A slightly off question…. with, say, just the 30 invades 13 battle… if the battle lasts more than a month … does 30 lose it's monthly civil / planning "turn" because it's embroiled in a battle (much like how 13 would traditionally) ?
Quote:Deciding that the battle is over can mean no forces being left in a province the other side owns. , but if Zhuge Liang throws everything at 13 and it falls (along with all wei forces there), the battle ends before he can take 12. Of coruse, it's his fault he didn't send any forces to attack 12… XDThis seems abusable. Note, the whole prospect of expanding the battlescape to beyond the sole province under immediate contention is rife with abuse possibilities that we're still exploring heh.
First example: leaving a unit just inside of 12's boundaries just to keep the combat going at the end of the month.
Second example: 13 falls while 30 continues to march in 12. 12 starts to overcome attackers, but 12's forces are a day behind of 30's. 30 manages to cross the 13/12 border (back into 13) with 12 in very hot pursuit. Well, 13 now has only 30's forces in it despite 12 being right on the border ?
Third: 30 launches attack on 13, but the real goal is 12. Defenders happen to decide to send reinforcements from 12. Battlescape is now 30/13/12, just as 30 had hoped. 30 sends its troops, virtually ignoring 13 and pound on 12. During this process… all of 30's troops end up being not-within-13 while they are marching on 12. 13 is no longer being immediately contested ? What happens now ? Perhaps 12 falls, 13 and 30 have no enemy troops within, is the battle over ? Did 12 fall because the ruler clicked a checkbox (or whatever) ? Is there a special rule that states you have to take the original targeted province ? Does 30's ruler get to keep 12 ?
A simple solution to many of these questions would be:
1) battlescape only includes the initiating province of the attack and the contested province
2) victory is via either castle falling or a particular side completely withdrawing.
This does still have some abuse spots.
Keeping with 30/13 combat, but adding a situation for credibility… Ma Teng is in 14, expands with just himself and one other general into 13. Liu Yan Decides to attack 30->13. Ma Teng gets reinforcements from 14. Battlescape in this situation is 30/13. Ma Teng happens to send the spare general he had with him across provincial borders into 30, just to keep things "going"…. while stoutly defending 13 castle all by his bad-ass-self. Reinforcements arrive, but Liu Yan's forces can't really retreat / withdraw because of that place-keeper-spare-general within 30's territory… thus buying time for the reinforcements to march down and take 30's castle. 14 just took 30 ????
Another thought on the matter. If a big powerhouse province attacks a little one that has some stout defenders… and the defenders happen to park a general inside the attacking province's boundaries… they could theoretically keep the attacking province tied up in the battlescape stuff… forcing the big power house to abandon their province if they're unable to bring combat to a close (or to just suffer the loss of civil/planning turns).
One last thought on the matter (for the moment) – could always limit units in such a way that they can't advanced 2 provinces.
In the 30/13 war. If 12 comes to the defense of 13 — 12's units can't push into 30's provincial map.. only 13's units can ? This defies some logic given that at high levels of training, a unit can typically walk the height or width of the battlescape many times during the course of a month (providing that general is bored).
re: no one will be drunk
Just an example of extremely headstrong Fei :). Seemed like the ultimate way of expressing a hard to control general.
re: peasants are indeed peasants (able to be drafted without question)
well, rather, a draft option would be interesting (to push beyond a limit put in place that normal army->hire couldn't get beyond… such as being poor heh).
anyhoo, i suppose this is just going to mean that we'll not worry about making some stats affect the army gathering abilities ? maybe instead have it affect population loyalty, or the quality of troops received ?
ie, comparing say Sun Qian vs Zhang Fei
a) Sun Qian has godly charisma, thus population loyalty drop isn't nearly as bad as a drunk Fei beating people into line. (say, 3 points vs 15 points ?)
b) Zhang Fei has godly war stat – he happens to pick higher quality soldiers (or more hearty 'survive' the hiring process j/k), thus the soldiers he gets starts with a training of 15 vs the 3 of Sun Qian's pick ?
just an idea.
Quote:The player has direct control, EXCEPT for battles involving blockies and/or large numbers of officers'large numbers of officers' is quite dubious… complete dislike for the phrase or it's implications. maybe it'd require more explaining, i dunno.
blockies / ai / etc …. still in a massive state of flux lol. with trying to focus attention on other things haven't given it too much thought in trying to bring block-stuff into clarity. i really really really need to march forward with the gui stuff… sigh.
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