Depth of this game?

[keith.lamothe]

I'm torn. Some folks just want to dink around.

That's fine, I'm just asking what's the lowest difficulty level they shouldn't be able to dink around with that kind of "relentlessly apply pattern, pay little to no attention to the actual board" strategy.  Because I'm assuming you wouldn't want it to work on Expert 4 any more than you'd want "put 30 space docks and 50 engineers on FRD-loop-build pointed at the AI homeworlds" to work on 9/9 in AIW

[x4000]

True on sandbox.

Envy: That's the word!  That's awesome, thanks.

In terms of not being that into the building side of things: well, that's a matter of taste I guess, honestly.

I'm actually wondering if perhaps I'm overthinking it with the Envy stuff, though.  I mean, I could still do that.  But what if:

1. Bandits just popped in as military buildings instead of a lone dude?  You would have to maintain siege weapons for that, because as we've already established you can't kill an enemy building with just dudes.  And since the bandits are consistently coming in as buildings, you can't just have siege weapons some of the time.

2. That doesn't address towns hidden behind towns hidden behind towns, though.  A simple way to handle that would be to be to go back to... well, I guess for lack of a better word Unrest, but just on a per-town basis.  And this would show on the town name, too, so it's not buried in the town itself.  Basically, with this:
- Every turn there is not an opposing-faction unit (bandits don't count) within X of the town, Unrest (or whatever: Social Decay?) goes up by a certain amount that depends on the difficulty.
- Every turn that there IS an opposing-faction unit within X of the town, Social Decay goes down by that same amount.
- When social decay reaches 100%, the entire town immediately goes bandit.
- Thematically, these dudes just don't feel the need for protection from belonging to the faction they were a part of, so they declare independence (anarchistic independence?).

Combining those two things, we rock the boat less in general, and basically insure:
a) That there are siege units all over the place, making for much trouble.
b) That any towns that are sequestered away from the enemy will fall, and fall fast on higher difficulties.

When you combine those two things, I'd think it would be hard to keep siege units away from enemy towns, leading to some turnover.  And I think it would be hard to keep sequestered towns, leading to challenges there.  This puts the bandits less in the spotlight than just whole bandit towns being a thing, but it's still not the sole focus being on the bandits because of the second point.

This also seems easier to explain and understand, and is more implicit in the game rather than being part of the metagame.  It's also quicker and less destructive to code, so I think at any rate I'll try this first and see if it's enough.  If not, then we can try something more drastic.

[keith.lamothe]

That's sounding like a better ratio of "work" to "addressing problems", yea.  It may still be possible to cheese simply because you never actually _need_ to take something down (as you would in red+blue<yellow => lose, though I do understand that's counter to your core goals) but it may require enough thought that it's game enough (for 1.0) simply to derive the cheese.  We'll see

[Mick]

You could steal a term from the Crusader Kings 2 folks. Decadence.

[Pepisolo]

The refined idea certainly seems like a decent simplification of Envy. If you could add that and then just see if it cuts the mustard, that'd be cool. If it doesn't quite work out then the Envy system can come back into play, if you don't mind potentially having to try out two different systems.

Maybe give the towns three states: restless/contented/militant or three better words.

[Tridus]

I haven't played the game yet (eagerly awaiting release!), but I've been following this thread. Based on what the mechanics were describing, it actually sounded to me like you were describing a system that could best be described as "Faith". When it's high, it's good.

In peace time, when towns are prosperous and all is well, it starts going down. Why worry about it when the town is doing so well on its own? If it gets too low, you get town revolts and people splintering off to start their own bandit town, because they're atheists or something.

If the town is being attacked, it goes back up as people find it again to pray for help. Or if they're destroying buildings, it also goes up as they're thankful for their good fortune in the war.

Now I realize that might not be what you're going for, but I think it's easier to understand than "everything is good, so unrest is going up." That's counter-intuitive.

[LaughingThesaurus]

So... if I caught unrest right, the idea would be that if red can't attack blue, red gets more unrest, and thus more bandits spawn. However, this could very easily go completely the wrong way. I've been playing a game that so far has been okay... aside from the fact that blue charged straight at red and got murdered, and now red's got blue completely contained in town. Blue's not going to be dying anytime soon, but can't really do anything to attack blue. Thus, unrest spirals completely out of control and the game is unwinnable just because my units ran into their own deaths.
Or... is it going to be a case of 'red is attacking blue, so that keeps the unrest reasonably under control until I can get blue back in the game with some kind of army.'
Looking at your most recent idea, I'm still wondering about number 2. Again, I have the faction that produces military units that immediately die. So, blue loses an entire town eventually because they're killing all of red's stuff in a way that I can't seem to prevent? I should emphasize, the faction that's doing the containing has literally a third of the military infrastructure as the defending faction (I used the colors interchangeably and it's wrong but whatever).
In any case I do very much like the idea of bandit towns. I don't know why I would willingly introduce seige weapons so that my two angry families can murder each other more easily other than for the sake of smiting bandit towns (with units, not with Smite).

[x4000]

@LaughingThesaurus: It sounds like you've arrived at this game's version of an AI War stalemate.  IE, it's hard to progress, but you're also not likely to lose unless you do something a bit too risky.  As with AI War, this is frustrating because this is actually a form of loss condition and the game should just kill you.  Except in THIS game, if you can just wait it out you'll eventually win.  If woes don't get you.

But with the shift to the bandit keeps (rather than full bandit towns, I'm going with a single-tile keep for now anyhow; bandits can still of course get full towns if they take over yours), likely this would either push red back so that you can balance blue better, or would go ahead and push blue into death.  Either way, hopefully breaking the stalemate.

I've also been looking at the numbers in more depth and realizing just how off the siege weapons have been in their attack stats lately.  I've fixed that up for the next version, and that should make a big difference here, too.

Fingers crossed.  And, to some extent, one step at a time.  I think the new system is a big step in the right direction, and if we need further refinement or additions then we certainly can do it.

[Cinth]

This is starting to feel like bandits need to be a fleshed out NPC faction.

[x4000]

This is starting to feel like bandits need to be a fleshed out NPC faction.

That again is really something we want to avoid, for all the reasons I mentioned above.  Aka, in this game you're supposed to have no adversary other than the situation.  But bandits are certainly part of the situation, and now are more a part of it.

[Cinth]

I wasn't thinking of bandits as a faction like the Greeks or Norse.  Maybe faction was the wrong descriptor for it but was the first word to come to mind.

Bandits are getting their own unique military spawner and have a few unique units already.  I was thinking of adding some depth to that aspect.  Scaling based on difficulty and number of keeps adding, new units and creating more chaos for players to combat.  Something that says you need to keep bandits in check or those guys are going to cause some severe headaches

It might be a bit late for something like this but I think it has potential (who doesn't think their ideas have potential).

[Winge]

Why not just reuse Crime for the terminology?  Except, instead of going down with military unit production, it decreased with building attacks, etc.  The word is small, demands attention, and is understandable in the context.  "People are never more united when they are fighting a common foe."  If one side does not feel threatened, then their base instincts will lead them to crime, and down the dark path of Murdoch.  However, seeing your farms and towers flattened around you has a way of bringing life back into perspective.

I was somewhat skeptical of the idea at first, but I agree with you now, Chris.  This seems to be the right direction to return to the game you have in mind.

[x4000]

I wasn't thinking of bandits as a faction like the Greeks or Norse.  Maybe faction was the wrong descriptor for it but was the first word to come to mind.

Bandits are getting their own unique military spawner and have a few unique units already.  I was thinking of adding some depth to that aspect.  Scaling based on difficulty and number of keeps adding, new units and creating more chaos for players to combat.  Something that says you need to keep bandits in check or those guys are going to cause some severe headaches

It might be a bit late for something like this but I think it has potential (who doesn't think their ideas have potential).

Oh, I gotcha.  Yeah, in general that sort of thing sounds good.  We can't do new art for units, though we can for tiles to some extent.  But in general giving them more personality and such is good.  Their keeps all have unique names now, for instance.

[x4000]

Why not just reuse Crime for the terminology?  Except, instead of going down with military unit production, it decreased with building attacks, etc.  The word is small, demands attention, and is understandable in the context.  "People are never more united when they are fighting a common foe."  If one side does not feel threatened, then their base instincts will lead them to crime, and down the dark path of Murdoch.  However, seeing your farms and towers flattened around you has a way of bringing life back into perspective.

I was somewhat skeptical of the idea at first, but I agree with you now, Chris.  This seems to be the right direction to return to the game you have in mind.

I think that Social Decay is more interesting just because it feels more unique, but yeah it's kind of the same idea.  I still think I'm going to base this on proximity to enemy units, though, rather than building attacks (because proximity can be evaluated once per turn, whereas unit attacks would only make sense with each attack, which would undervalue this, I think.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes.  If social decay winds up looking too large in the text, we'll adjust.

[Cinth]

I wasn't thinking of bandits as a faction like the Greeks or Norse.  Maybe faction was the wrong descriptor for it but was the first word to come to mind.

Bandits are getting their own unique military spawner and have a few unique units already.  I was thinking of adding some depth to that aspect.  Scaling based on difficulty and number of keeps adding, new units and creating more chaos for players to combat.  Something that says you need to keep bandits in check or those guys are going to cause some severe headaches

It might be a bit late for something like this but I think it has potential (who doesn't think their ideas have potential).

Oh, I gotcha.  Yeah, in general that sort of thing sounds good.  We can't do new art for units, though we can for tiles to some extent.  But in general giving them more personality and such is good.  Their keeps all have unique names now, for instance.

The basic framework I had in mind is more dev work than it is asset work.  I also had in mind an avenue for expanding what the bandits could do down the road (expansion/DLC type additions).  I'm gonna hit the drawing board and see if I can flesh out this idea a bit more.