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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! XD
Loss 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).
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 ?
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!
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 :).
Bikke's response to "two times two ?" : "Cantaloupe."
Bikke: Be this 600 or pineapple ?
Fighter: Pineapple's a fruit, Bikke.
Bikke: Don't ye be bringing' fruit into this.
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.
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.
lastly….
30 attacks 13, 14 and 12 come to reinforce.
the attack fails, and the reinforcements march on to 30.
Well… surely 30 could call for reinforcements from 33.
Does the battlescape now dynamically enlarge to include 33 ? Can we get generals from province 14 ending up in province 33 within 1 month's time ?
This just seems like it could be a recursive nightmare.
Expanding on WAR(*!@%&(!*@&#(
Sticking to the 2 province war…
Lets say that 13 is victorious in defending AND counter attacks back into 30… and takes 30's castle. What generals get transfered from 13 to 30 ? do we pop up another screen to make a selection ?
Then, to expand on this….
13 decides to counter attack. Well, the guy that controls 30 wants other provinces to send reinforcements. How does this work ?
30 invades 13. 14 and 12 come to the defense (for simplicity, all the same ruler).
We now have a battlescape map that comprises 4 provinces (thus also 4 castles)… right ?
Lets say the attack fails and the counter attack is strong. Did we just have generals from 14 and 12, which have *NO* connection to 30 somehow magically be able to transport to it ?
30 attacks 13, 14 and 12 come as reinforcements.
The attack succeeds, castle 13 falls. But the reinforcements are still present… does the battle continue while 14/12 attempt to retake 13 ? There are still 2 defender's castles on the map and 1 attacking castle (and the contested one).
Lets say that the reinforcements decide to NOT contest the fallen castle. Is it now up to the invasionary force to decide if they wanna press on and attempt to take 14 or 12's castle ? As well as if the reinforcements decide if to attempt to take province 30 ? (thus 30/13 swap control) ?
Did we just end up with forces from 30 teleporting far beyond their neighbor provinces ?
This fur ball gets nasty quickly :)
Off topic thoughts: return of a 'morale' stat for soldiers. The idea being, not being forced to field the gov'ner or ruler during a battle (but suffering some kind of penalty for being a coward). Primary example: liu bei gets invaded, but has zhao yun handling castle defenses.
First up a note – i've not played rotk beyond 3, and only played a bit of 4. The series seemed to go in a direction i had less interest in.
I'm gonna break this up into multiple posts.
First up WAR)!(@%&)(!@*#
This might get far more complicated than you think it might :)
Simple situation:
Province 30 invades 13. No one joins the battle from other provinces.
Traditionally: "map of province 13, units from 30 get placed on the south, units from 13 get placed around the castle, fight!" … and only the fate of province 13 hangs in the balance. This would just be early ROTK games in their entirety.
Instead:
Do we have a meshed together map of 30 and 13, with both castles present on the field. Where does attackers units get positioned ? where do defenders units get positioned ? If the attacker wants to send more units half way through the battle, do they spawn around the source castle (province 13 in this case) ?
If the attacking side can continue to deploy units beyond their initial 'want to send' stuff (which would make sense if they have to also possibly defend a counter attack or do reinforcements) … how does that "jive" with if i had everyone else do other things for that turn before attacking ? IE, sticking with rotk2 things-happen-immediately: i had all 10 generals "train" the troops, and then sent 5 out to fight. Defenders can field as many people as they want (in traditional rotk2) … but… when the attackers want to reinforce for whatever reason (to press the attack more or to defend themselves)… they already had 10 of the generals marked as 'used' already ??? those generals therefore can't perform a second 'action' for this month ??
Lets say the attackers are going to fail in taking the province, 13 stands strong! In early rotk's you just simply retreat and the battle is over. Well… we now have a mesh of two maps with opposite objectives.
Attackers are wanting to retreat, but how do we know when the battle is over ? They can't simply "retreat -> province 30" … province 30 is being contested currently! Or do they 'retreat -> province 30", go in the reserve, and are unable to be recalled, and if province 30 falls, they get captured ?
And those that were in the initial attack suredly better not be able to retreat->33, cause then they just teleported backwards. evil hackery cheaty bastids heh.
But back to the point – when the attacker gives up, how is 'battle over' decided ? They pull their units back into reserve, or flee, or simply march them back towards province 30's castle. The defender then has say on if the battle is over or not ? Cause, what if he wants to pursue the counter attack ? Ya can't just use "all attackers are in their original province, all defenders are in their original province" … cause… what if the defenders are just 1 day's worth of movement behind chasing the attackers.
I don't think you can also just offer the defender "attacking force has disbanded, do you wish to pursue" kind of thing… cause… what if the defender chooses to pursue, but doesn't move / advance ? You then keep both provinces tied up in battle even though no battle is taking place. Abusable :(. Easy example: Dong Zhou / Lou Yang attacks Hain Fu. Hain Fu is victorious but decides to keep the battle going. Lou Yang is now locked up battle and can't issue normal commands because it's in a non-battle with a tiny no-one-cares province.
Oh, thought.
battlescape situation. two opposing units side by side. can one general somehow attempt to challenge / capture the other one ? ie: you have lu bu with only 10 soldiers, cao chun is next to you… is there something lu bu can do to attempt to capture / kill cao chun ?
risk / reward would have to be high… and have to avoid being abusable.
Quote:So in rotk2, Zhuge Liang's northern invasions would be limited to 12, 13, 14, 29, and 30… which would still be enough to count as a full campaign!I don't understand the point of this statement ?
Sounds like we're going to have at least two different game modes… or an amalgamation of block loyalty and other stuff etc.
I prefer the omnipotent dictatorship style of play myself :). I can understand the draw of the more limited style… which would be a LOT more ai stuff to be done for it… almost down to personality algorithms etc.
PS: my goal for the game isn't really realism. Hints of it are fine, but… *its a game*. Player will undoubtedly create hundreds of impossible situations, and limit removal will make plenty of it impossible as well. The more you enforce realism, the more you remove hyperbole. Lastly, the more you take away from the player, the 'worse' it is (for lack of a better word).
More hyper extreme realism would also lead to situations where the player wants to recruit more people for their army… but for some reason, whatever conditions prevents them from gaining many people. IE: they try to recruit 100 soldiers, but only get 5. Very possible historically, but there are ALOT of factors that could affect that.
Or, say you're liu bei, you're in battle. You try to control zhang fei, but he's either drunk or just being willful and rampages about without your control despite insanely high block & ruler loyalty ? Liu Bei tends to be in a lot of really tight spots in the earlier scenarios (particularly scenario 3 rotk1)… losing control of a 99ish war general can be quite detrimental.
If generals have their own dozen set of biorhythms to choose from, then shouldn't the ruler itself also have limitations in what they'll let the player do (ie: nothing drastically or repeatedly out of character) ? Surely Cao Cao wouldn't let the player just vacate lou yang for no reason. Liu Bei wouldn't supposedly stand for heavily taxing the people. Ma Teng wouldn't let the player ally with Dong Zhou. Jin Xuan would never accept retreat in battle!!!
A possible example of a 'realism' idea that could be added that'd receive less resistance from me: food stores should tick down every month (rather than being eternal).
The complicated personality and loss of control stuff may really insist on say a LUA interperter or something. I dunno if it'd be possible to get a parser and such as complicated as the system would require or if it'd need to be hard coded into the game source etc.
i just dunno.
aye, i had similar quandaries for 3 way battles, or even head to head battles.
there's *NOTHING* stopping the battlescape map to actually be *ALL* of china … with… say… using tiled to have a layer partition off where each province is… thus … i dunno.
re: standard method / attacker has to defend something
aye, back in post #1 — "return of the attackers rice pot?" or something :)
