Dr Franknfurter

Join Date 08/2005

+22

Regions/areas and victory conditions

I was thinking about different resources and wondered about how big they can be, a single tile, 2x2 tiles, how about if some resources are presented as regions, say a 5x20 area or larger in shapes defined by the contours of the environment. Breaking up the world into magic rich areas, fertile grounds or more interesting ideas (wasteland, toxic, plague ridden, draining, corrupt). The difference would be that you'd either gain a benefit/penalty simply by controlling that region or would gain access to new buildings in that region.

My gripe is that now if you have a bit of 'fertile land' you have a single farm, it shouldn't be strange to see 3 farms next to each other if the land really is fertile... and some things should give you a benefit without building on them. "farmland" should give an empire wide boost to food if you control it and should be a large area, not a single spot that can be attacked/destroyed easily. But also some things would be interesting... picture a wasteland providing an empire wide penalty separating two empires, you wouldn't be pushing for cultural border expansion in that direction which would be an interesting buffer. Or perhaps you'd be more willing to spend essence if you found something useful, (therefore have seeing all but obvious region types unlockable with research as can be done now). It would be an interesting twist on culture victory if you had to control key regions on the map, a less aggressive victory condition encouraging fighting like with like, trying to spread culture into regions to block your control of them.

My only thought that's a little unique is a twist, imagine if you can see the boundry markings for regions and not (or even so far as never) what they are unless you control them or spy on them. During map creation you can divide up a map like the maps in say Dawn of War Dark crusade/soulstorm... then when playing if you control a region and find that it has no use at the moment, perhaps you could give it a use. Just like you can build a farm on a farm, lets say you own 5 10x10 regions on the map that are blank... maybe you could make something in them: necromancer's cropland (generates or allows increasingly powerful undead with regions controlled), griffin valley (mounts/troop bonus), fertile land (plain res boost to your races speciality), marshy (corrupt land to prevent the use by other races)...etc. The question then is if they are created temporarily or permenantly, passively by the controlling race or actively by overland magic spells, if they allow buildings or require buildings to function and how they can be changed by changes in ownership or with magic.

I'd like the extra level of tension around another race by thinking... "if I pushed my borders a little, I could turn his land into a patch of *insert region* and then be able to build a *thingy*" or equally "he has a lot of *thingys* if I spent essence there, then he would lose that region and wouldn't be able to attack me with any *thingys*".

I'd like to be able to say "don't try to take *my death valley* or else!/and i'll give you money?/and i wont try to take yours" or to be able to share the benefits of regions with allies (share or trade), imagine the power of a band of united necromancers spreading death into the valleys against an alliance of men healing the captured valleys. Maybe you would corrupt a region just before it gets taken to slow the enemy advance.

On victory conditions, a victory similar to the Twilight of the arnor's capture the crystals type victory could be done with less aggression and no annoying crystals if you have to control 'n' regions, these should be regions you'd otherwise not want. E.g. 'n' wastelands. Also that anything less than 'n' doesn't start the counter, eg settings of n=5 with 7 wastelands on the map, you'd need 5, 6 or 7 wastelands to win. 5 would start a countdown, 6 would shorten the countdown, 7 would end it. It'd play the same as twilight with n=1. One interesting twist would be a setting to make each player start on top of a critical region, so that victory by controlling the regions would require aggression or teamwork but not the absolute elimination of a single player. You could do the equivalent of becoming a vassal by giving up control of your key region.

Another possible use of this idea is to give some of your starting bonuses in the form of your starting region. If you play as "Ithkul" then your first region when you control one will be "Ithkul homeland" and therefore you'd want to protect your first city at all costs lest you lose your racial bonus. It could encourage steamrolling, but if the bonus were small it'd just be a nice trophy to remember your past conquests by.

Thoughts?

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Your first two paragraphs describe well a phenomenon which the Civilization series did, as one of the few things it did, at least handle, if not particularly well. A little "corn" field, in the CivIV iteration, gave you a bonus without doing anything, and a bigger bonus if you exploited the bonus with an improvement, and a bigger one if your technology was later improved. I think this idea could be adopted for Elemental, with a few twists.

I like your idea, and would merely like to add this to it (perhaps I misunderstood you and you already said this) or elucidate what I think could be done:

- Each and every tile on the map can be flagged to have certain properties. Some of these properties can include "fertile", "very fertile", "plain", "forest", "iron", "barren", "rocky", "hilly", "mountainous", "alpine" (e.g. nearly impassable without correct technology or magic), etc. etc. Map creation should have algorithms governing the sensible interconnection of this type of attribute distribution.

- Thus "patches" or "regions" of land could occur, which would "merely" be larger sets of individual portions of the attribute in question.

- These flags need not be, at least need not always be, mutually exclusive. It should be possible to have a region of land, for example, 20x20 of plains; in it, there are 15 occurences of fertile land in 4 groups (2x1, 2x2, 4x2 and 1x1) 4 occurences of very fertile land; there are also, say, 4 occurences of a different type, say, iron or woods; these could also be on the same tiles as the fertile land, and the player would have to choose how to best optimize his needs according to the situation. Perhaps some flags exclude others (say, wasteland and fertile), but not all need to.

The latter part of your post I think is novel. There could very well be a (faction-specific? customizable? toggleable?) victory condition called, for lack of a better word, "Empire Regional Type" -- where you must control X number of Y-type terrain for Z number of turns. Magic should be an interesting option in terraforming and thus directly affecting your win possibilities. You might be a Sunflower kind of nation (think "House Highgarden" in that mediocre fantasy series Brad seems to find so fascinating) and thus be able to win by controlling X number of very fertile terrain tiles for Y years, while your opponent might be some nasty Morgoth kind of person who needs to control wasteland and yet another one of those Dothraki needing to control plains. Exactly what the conditions are should be able to be tweaked in game setup; perhaps you can even spend sovereign points in manipulating how this type of Regional victory condition works. I think being able to toggle this type of VC on and off would not be difficult.

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I suppose what I was picturing first was something akin to Conquest of the new world, where "gold vein" was an object on the map at the centre of a circular mask of boosted gold/mineral production. The same with fertile land. You had a decreasing bonus with distance. So in reality if placing a single farm you'd place it directly on top of it. Which would be quite similar to elemental now, with a mask of 1x1. In conquest outside the mask/region was normal production, elemental would be 0 or minimum.

The difference to conquest, a game I did like, would be using terrain to generate interesting shaped masks, between two mountains or along a coast/river. To be able to change them, and to have different ways considered of controlling them. (other than being the first to spot them). Even with no blank masks, having the ability to change the mask by overland spells as part of a victory condition would be interesting. (especially because without blank masks and if the new mask had no bonus, you'd win by destroying your resources)

Really I would like your House Highgarden vs Morgoth battle and I think it'd look beautiful if done well.

Perhaps a new suggestion.... Have the size of the mask be adjustable by events, magic or research. Have fertile land masks grow over time in your borders, while mineral masks shrink or vice versa for a Morgoth type race? it would be a way of limiting resources in the late game if the mask shrunk down reducing your production. And require investment, magical or mundane to maintain production. (such as gaining new fresh resources from the enemy by trade or conquest)

But about mask/region control, I would like your resources to be safe from magical modification within your borders.

Key: //\\ mask edges, ---distance, x centre of resources, [town] city owner

//[You]---X--)--(--\\-[enemy]

if the borders ( and ) shift:

//[You]--)(-X------\\-[enemy]

you'd still be within the mask of the resource, but the enemy would control it, and therefore be able to corrupt it. That would disasterous if it were your main food supply and they simply sealed the resource, or changed its mask area, or turned it into swampland.

Still, for it to be fun I'd like some resources to be different, have more potential. Eg tier 1, 2 or 3 resources. Split into groups in whatever way, groups of living resources, material, magical, unique... or simply rarity. You can use magic to manipulate within a tier/group.

A victory condition of X tier 3 "dragon graveyards" would require to find and control X powerful tier 3 objects, say an adamantium vein, life spring or whatever fitted into that category. These would be hidden at the start and be interesting when fighting against someone who had Y tier 2 objects or Z tier 1 objects. Picture 3 races fighting all looking at a simple iron resource as either good for troops weapons, good to prevent someone turning it into an alchemists or one small part of the X alchemists victory condition.

Perhaps, rather than a victory condition, they could instead simply unlock an 'ultimate' unit or spell, dragon graveyards would generate a bone or ghost dragon, fertile lands could unlock a 'life force' overland enchantment type spell making all your units regenerate.

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Adding something else to the discussion, without commenting on the points raised above...

I would like quite a bit to see terrain changes during the course of the game - but not only changes made directly by the player or the AI while in, say, terraforming. However, these changes could be tied to what the player or the AI do indirectly, id est, as in environmental damage or overexploitation of resources.

One simple example would be farming. Everyone knows that if you don't pay attention to the soil you will end having diminishing returns after each crop, with the terrain becoming infertile after a certain threshold of natural soil fertility is passed. Well, wouldn't that suck? Indeed, but think technology and magic are there to fix this problem, so if a player wants to remain competitive in his crops, he ought to develop advanced farming skills or steal it from his neighbor. Of course, a player could also chose how much would he want to explore one single terrain with, say, an 'intensity' slider. If you explore more than the terrain natural threshold (unique for each terrain), you will produce more resources during the beginning, but soon you will have a useless terrain that would cost a bit to reconvert in the future (if proper technology/magic is developed).

A few more things that would really challenge the balance of the game a bit: climate changes would change vast swathes of terrain into something else, creating a huge chaos in certain areas; powerful and unique spells could change the climate in certain areas, changing the terrain permanently or temporarily; intensive logging and other intensive extractive activities could lead to amplification of deserts bordering forests or other impactive environmental damage that could bite the unprepared player back in the future.

Sure, each faction will deal with each of these changes in different ways. Perhaps deserts are awful for the majority of them, but some might actually thrive in these regions. Others will be more at ease changing terrains to suit them. That creates another layer of combat: the environmental one. Perhaps you might want to destroy that forest protecting your farmlands from the desert if you think your enemy might take the region sooner or later. Or even creating dams in your rivers cutting the supply of water from your neighbor bellow while forming defensive lakes in your territory. Surely, messing with the climate or terrain should have unintended consequences also! That would make things exciting.

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Just thinking about a way of implimenting that... how about a few variables hidden at the start for weather? it could begin at any value, -100 or less for iceage, +100 or more for burning deserts with any changes in this resulting in changes over time to the landscape and regions. I did like the warming start to ffh2 although resources being destroyed or swapped, rather than revealed was a little annoying... although interesting. I would prefer if the changes were visual mainly and more gradual... although perhaps some extremes would unlock resources that extreme loving races would use.

Perhaps you could see it with a spell or window.
A graph,
y axis: hot to cold,
x axis: another variable, hostile or peaceful
with a spot, small for stable, large for unstable.

So good and evil could fight changing the world from hostile ice monsters to peaceful penguins and weather mages could fight as well from frozen wastes to forests and jungles. The more fighting the more unstable the weather? represented by a spot of increasing size, representing instability, allowing eventually for ice demons to wander around a green and fertile lands and for that to make sense. I would like something like that to apply. Perhaps it could be a requirement for some things or unlock abilities or spells. Perhaps some summoning spells would require the correct weather to support them, some buildings could be weather situational. Another idea would be that global weather and regional weather is slightly seperate. Not too complicated but have your weather be more stable and have a different starting point than those of another race. So you could have a war between an ice mage and a fire mage. Ice casts a global cooling spell, it would affect the global rating... which would change the magical weather upkeep for the fire mage, lower it for the ice mage. Run out of mana? watch your lands get invaded by ice.

Integrating it into the previous idea... Your newly captures resource/region will change to your preferred weather (if you have or set a magically affected weather) If you build an environment specific building and the environment changes... you lose control of an area, attacked with weather magic or can't afford to maintain your weather... then your crops freeze. If you have smaller weather magic spells you could cast them on a region to have cheaper local effects even against the overwhelming effect of stronger weather mages.

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Dr. Frankenfurter, are you thinking of Dominions3 scales? I see many parallels.

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I've never played dominions3... so i'm not sure how close the idea is. Although if you can see bits that worked in another game you could probably say what you liked or didn't like about it based on your experience?

Edit: Just glanced at the strategy wiki of scales/god design in dominions 3 "Every province has a set of scales that measures how the land is influenced by divine might", quite similar in some ways to what I was thinking. Although I wasn't thinking of using it as a faction editor with racial picks, more just another aspect to magic, innate or activated. Unlocking buildings, spells and changing wandering monsters...links to your race setup but not that significant... anyway, unlocking things, offensive uses and visual things, rather than giving a 15% boost to research... if we're still talking about weather magic and it's relation to your dominions field of 'misfortune' penetrating your lands. I wouldn't mind if those types of bonuses were applied to certain resources, but they should be in addition to unlocking things, not instead of.
It sounds quite random in dominions to me "In the beginning of the game all scales in all countries are randomly set." with those random things affecting '...Growth gives +2% Gold, +0.2% population and +15% supply. ' I'm not a large fan of the small %boosts, especially not random ones (if they're really random they should have a net effect of zero anyway and just be random for cosmetics) but rather I'd like you to be able to attack an enemy by freezing their lands or turning them into sand, less directly than a full attack. And for you to control a region and be able to make it into something quite special. I suppose you could do it with specific building slots on the map for unique buildings... but buildings and unique buildings have already been talked about.

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