korn469's idea to let buildings affect other players' bonuses is interesting. One could go even farther and let buildings have different bonuses depending on how many other buildings of the same type exist in the world. But we must be careful with the consequences of our choices. Allowing the fact that buildings provide bonuses the more buildings exists of the same type in the entire world could possibly trigger these effects:
> a player is encouraged to build guilds of the same type because they give bonuses to each other
> a player is discouraged to build a special building if his opponent has a lot of city with the same guild that would benefit from that building more than he would.
is this what we want? Maybe these are a nice effects, or maybe not. If they are too strong, they would encourage the mono-guild style of play, which is possibly less fun than leaving the option of building several different guilds for the same realm. I mean, rules should be such that a player that wants to build different guilds is not penalized if compared to the mono-guild strategy.
How about this couple more ideas:
> the first thieves guild to be built in the world becomes the Thieves Guilds Headquarter. All other thieves guilds tht are built later in other cities must pay a small fee to the Headquarter.
> We could allow for each guild to be able to perform a given mission - e.g. the thieves guild can perform a "stir unrest" task in a target enemy city for some gold. The merchant guild can rune an "establish trade route" task to foster commernce between two cities. A paladin guild can perform a "holy quest" task and bless a champion with special bonuses for all battles related with a given quest.
Thinking back to my previous idea I realized it is probably difficult to imagine how the accountant's corporation may provide units to defend the city
Here I attempt to summarize the ideas seen so far, with a small addition of my own:
4. [EDITED] Fighters’ guilds must be unlocked as a technology in the Warfare Tech Tree. Similarly, Academies and Corporations must be unlocked in the Civilization and Magic research trees respectively
5. Once a corporation is installed in a city, the effects are:
- N new buildings become available, and X of them are unique (only one can exist in the whole world) and have certain requirements to be met before you can build them. Unique buildings may possibly have effects that affect all other guilds of the same type in the world.
- The city receives specific permanent bonuses and maluses.
- Each corporation can perform a special task once every n seasons, at a cost (e.g. thieves guild can increase unrest in a target city controlled by an opponent. Engineers guild can slow down production in target city; Paladin guild can give bonus to champion during a quest...)
- Depending on the Type of guild, it will:
- Add an additional unit of defenders when the city is under attack, if a Fighters' Guild (warriors, paladins, assassins, rangers), with different units for different Guilds;
- Add a permanent enchantment to the city when defending against enemies, if an Academy (mages, monks, warlocks, druids), with different spells for different Academies;
- While fighters' Guilds and Academies have a maintainance cost, Corporations (merchants, accountants, engineers) provide a small income to the city, but no bonus when attacked
- When the city turns level 5 the guild can be upgrade to a special type (e.g. Paladin guild becomes Order of Talos...) with special other effects.
- The first thieves guild, paladin guild and so on... of the entire would receives funding from all similar guilds built after that from any player
Maybe the thing is becoming too complicated? I think even a simple version may improve the game a lot in terms of replayability and flavor.
Btw can you come up with a name - other than "guild" - for Fighter's guild? So that we can call all of them guilds, or refer to them as Acamedies, Corporation and *** depending on the type of Guild we are talking about...