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New strategic design

A topic by Astronautz created Apr 29, 2021 Views: 256 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 5
Developer

This is the first draft of the new strategic design. This is only a rough draft and will tweaked a lot as it's implemented.

The strategic game will change to focus on occupying territory. The player will start off with one village and try to expand from there.

Each village that the player owns contributes certain amount of weekly tax to the players earnings and has a small labor pool.

Each person in the labour pool has the following skills:

Life points, Accuracy, APs, auto skill, interrupt skill, repair skill, medical skill

The player can hire anyone from the labour pool for a specific assignment according to his/her skills. 

The player must pay a weekly fee up front, plus an initial hiring cost, which is 20% of the weekly fee.

The size of this fee depends on the skills of the employee.

Assignments are as follows:

Soldier in players squad, militia man (used to garrison villages),  gunsmith / armourer,  medic

Possible labour pool for players home village would look like this:

Soldiers in player's squad are directly controlled by the player in a battle and militia men are controlled by the AI. Soldier's in players squad are paid 4 times their normal salary.

The player must supply militia men with weapons, gunsmiths / armourers with tools and medics with med kits to do their jobs.

Each worker can be given any assignment at anytime, which include guarding village, repairing, etc., or traveling to another location.

Each employee can be equipped with any equipment from the village storehouse.

Each village will send out raiding parties to surrounding villages (as in current game). Raiding parties can only be seen from one hex space away. The player can send militia men to any hex space to act as scouts (i.e. to give advanced warning of incoming raiding parties).

When a battle starts all workers in that location will be put in to the battle and can get injured (even if not employed as militia men). Medics and gunsmiths will fight if armed, otherwise they will try to avoid contact with the enemy.

At the start of each week all employees have to be paid in advance, or let go. They can also be reassigned to a different task. The player has an initial amount of capital, so initially salaries can be higher than tax income, but when capital runs out he will have to let employees go.

At the start of each week, new people may enter the village and can be hired.

Some characters will work for free (such as Watski in the current game)


The map will be hexagonal. Each hexagonal space on the map will contain, either empty country side, a village, or mountains / rivers (impassible)

Each village is normally occupied by a hostile militia clan. Each militia will be constantly trying to take over adjacent villages, by sending out attack parties.

Some clans will be too strong for the player to defeat and so the player can ask for a non-aggression agreement, but this means that the player will have to pay a weekly tribute.

Initially, travel is by foot. Traveling through a hex space with a road takes 6 hours and 12 hours if there is no road. If a location is occupied by the player's militia they can see approaching enemy attacks from adjacent spaces. 

These rules can get infinitely complicated if you get carried away,  so I want to keep things as simple as possible for the time being. Any comments , or ideas are welcome.

Sounds very promising : )

I like the idea of being able to add more soldiers to your squad. In the current version I can't afford to lose any of my soldiers and I keep restarting the battle until I  manage to win it with all of my  soldiers surviving. Your draft could bring back some of the the good old x-com strategy: train a core of good soldiers and hire normal soldiers to provide back up - and who can be reemplaced if they are killed in a battle.

Personally I don't see any need for equipping gunsmiths and armourers. This could turn the game into another "gain resources and start to produce goods and weapons" strategy game. I suggest to keep the strategic part simple. Collecting taxes and hiring people etc. sounds good. But I think it would be sufficient to be able to buy (or repair) weapons in bigger cities, without having to take care of employing and equipping a gunsmith. Until now I actually never have bought (and very rarely repaired) a weapon. The weapons dropped by dead soldiers are more than enough to equip the own squad.

Non-aggression agreements with stronger clans seems an interesting strategic element. Have you thought about other types of agreements too? Maybe instead of non-aggression agreements players could also try to ally to another clan and not have to pay tributes. The player than has to join this clan in battles (maybe against an enemy both have in common) to gain reputation. If the player's reputation with the clan is good, the clan won't attack, but if the reputation is too low, the clan will abandon the agreement and start to attack.

Developer

> I like the idea of being able to add more soldiers to your squad. In the current version I can't afford to lose any of my soldiers and I keep restarting the battle until I  manage to win it with all of my  soldiers surviving. Your draft could bring back some of the the good old x-com strategy: train a core of good soldiers and hire normal soldiers to provide back up - and who can be reemplaced if they are killed in a battle.

I just play the battle again if one of my soldiers gets killed, but it'd be handy to have a substitute while one soldier is being healed

> Personally I don't see any need for equipping gunsmiths and armourers. This could turn the game into another "gain resources and start to produce goods and weapons" strategy game. I suggest to keep the strategic part simple. Collecting taxes and hiring people etc. sounds good. But I think it would be sufficient to be able to buy (or repair) weapons in bigger cities, without having to take care of employing and equipping a gunsmith. Until now I actually never have bought (and very rarely repaired) a weapon. The weapons dropped by dead soldiers are more than enough to equip the own squad.

Sometimes the enemy drop weapons in good nick, but usually they need repair. Also, the guns wear out the more you shoot. Eventually, you will get a gun jam if you don't repair. 

> Non-aggression agreements with stronger clans seems an interesting strategic element. Have you thought about other types of agreements too? Maybe instead of non-aggression agreements players could also try to ally to another clan and not have to pay tributes. The player than has to join this clan in battles (maybe against an enemy both have in common) to gain reputation. If the player's reputation with the clan is good, the clan won't attack, but if the reputation is too low, the clan will abandon the agreement and start to attack.

The reason for this feature is because there will be an enemy that's close to the player's home and unbeatable in the beginning. The player then has his objective very clear, to become powerful enough to eventually over power this enemy. Also, the protection money paid will be very high and the player will be forced to expand to earn more taxes. I don't think I want to add more complex agreements

Sometimes the enemy drop weapons in good nick, but usually they need repair. Also, the guns wear out the more you shoot. Eventually, you will get a gun jam if you don't repair.

I know that and the idea of repairing weapons and armors is ok. I only believe that having to employ gunsmiths etc. to do these jobs, watch if they have enough to do and eventually sack them etc. could kind of overload the strategic part of the game. I would prefer the current design with some modifications. Major cities could be the places where you can buy and repair weapons and armors, sell stuff, heal your soldiers, hire squad members etc. So the players  would be able to concentrate on the core of the game, which is assembling and equipping a squad with the gathered funds.

One final thought: You could maintain the current campaign mode as a "simple campaign mode" and add the strategic part you are currently designing as another alternative, "complex campaign mode". I see pros and cons for both modes and you would give players the choice whether to play a more or less predetermined campaign with a focus on the tactic battles or a campaign that allows them more strategic movement and opens a multitude of strategic options. IMHO the current strategic mode is almost ready to use, only some minor bugs can be found. So I don't see the need of stopping its development. 

Ok, that's it for now. I will wait for the next beta to do some testing :-) Keep up this incredible work!

Developer

> Major cities could be the places where you can buy and repair weapons and armors, sell stuff, heal your soldiers, hire squad members etc. 

The problem with that is that the player has to travel back and forth to the repair shop location to fix weapons. With the new design, if an enemy counter-attack is expected the player's squad can wait in the current village, keeping it safe, while repairing / healing, without needing to track back.

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Hi, I'm glad to see a new update and thoughts on project roadmap!

Here is what I think - Instead of turning game into some sort of Galactic Civilizations (that has resource gathering from "captured points" and "Non-aggression agreements" BTW), I would better stay away from "strategic concepts" and stick with "tactics concepts", because there is a word "tactics" in the game name :) Since you decided to develop it on your own, what you've described would take years to implement and debug, while tactics part is already in a good shape and just needs polishing. 

Another good reason to stay away from strategic elements is that most players expect strategies to be MMO these days, that requires expansive servers. You gonna need to add a huge story line to keep people solo playing strategy with AI (currently I finish campaign in two days or so). What's a cheap way, you would ask - multiplayer will turn game into a sort of "chess" that folks can play over and over againg, making new... tactics! A simple peer-to-peer multiplayer doesn't need any anti-cheat complexities and will free up your hands for more challenging AI coding, rather than balancing boring economy math...

Also, be careful, your strategic part may overlap with these Russian guys, and they are solid from implementation stand point. So Instead of racing with them, I would recommend to stick with "strong fast-paced tactics PvE & Coop & PvP matches".  BTW, take a look how they did close-combat and weapon range circles. Another good thing to implement is bushes to hide in. If enemy doesn't see you entering a bush - you can stay there safe unless they come too close and they see you. That's where your new silencer will shine! Bushes may require to turn Middle East to South America, where bushes are more common, so if you not planning this, you may add wardrobes or dark rooms for same mechanics. You also may want to look at this and that project for some good tactics ideas, even though they are not turn-based.

As an option, thinking out-of-the-box on how to make game more distinctive, you may add more character tweaking parameters that will drive his behavior at battle... even in old XCOM characters did fancy actions during panic, and you may bring it to a new level by chewing previous player decisions with Machine Learning... that eventually turns your team into a well-trained AI, that can be picked as an enemy when you start a new squad, "making player fight with his shadow".

Developer

Hi Ursom,

Thanks for your feedback on the roadmap. Let me answer.

The plan is to first improve the tactical part of the game, then the strategic part.

I am not making the game much more complicated than it already is - I am just making the strategy part better. The current strategy design is really only a stop gap. In fact, the new version will make it a lot more like Jagged Alliance. It certainly will not be like Galactic Civilisations. Now the non aggression agreement is necessary, because the player will be right next to a strong enemy that he has to eventually defeat. Without the agreement the enemy would just attack and wipe him out. He will not be able to do it until he gathers and equips a stronger squad. This gives the player motivation and makes the game more interesting. Also non-aggression agreements are not for free - you have to pay a hefty fee to maintain them.

About MMOs, believe it or not, not everybody likes them. Some people prefer playing offline against an AI.

There are some squad based games that have almost no strategy part (for instance Silent Storm) and the next battle is just chosen by selecting from a list. That makes the game very one-dimensional, in my opinion.

As, regards hiding in bushes, that seems like a good idea, I will consider it.

I didn't really understand the last part about the machine learning.