Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game.
So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game.
Here’s how it works:
Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person.
The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage in an attack they can potentially do), defense (how much of an attack they can potentially deflect), their health (how much HP they have), and their speed (how many attacks they get in a round).
These traits come from giving the unit weapons, armor and equipment.
It’s in what you equip your unit with that things get..interesting.
Let’s look at a late game unit that a player might potentially design (and none of this is set in stone as beta testers will have a lot of say on this):
I have created a unit called “Dread Knight”.
Equipment:
- Twilight Honey Pack (adds 10% more HP to player).
- Koladia leaves (increases health regen by 10% per turn).
- Potion of Valor (provides 10% damage bonus)
Weapon:
Armor:
- Mithril Helmet
- Mithril Plate Mail
- Leather Boots
Now this may even be a simplified unit design depending on where the beta takes us. The point being, the creation of this unit may hinge on several different resources being under the player’s control.
Now, in say Civilization IV, if the player didn’t have oil, they couldn’t build tanks. A unit would have a single resource requirement total.
But here, because players are designing their units, there may be several resource requirements. Which begs the question, what happens if you lose control of one of them? How should the game handle it?
I can think of a few different options:
- Option A: Unit can’t be built. Straight forward but it could get tedious as players would have to design a backup unit or something which could get very micro-managey in a non-fun way.
- Option B: Unit takes longer to be built. The issue here is how much longer should it take? If it’s only a little longer, then controlling resources is largely meaningless. If it takes a lot longer then it’s almost worse than option A because the player may be unaware that their main unit is now taking 5X longer to build because they lost control of their twilight bee apiary several turns ago.
- Option C: If the missing resource is weapons/armor then the player is informed they must substitute the weapon/armor, if it’s equipment then the item is not included on the unit. This simplifies things somewhat and encourages us to try to make as much of the “bonus” stuff fall into equipment. In the case where the twilight bee apiary is taken by another player, the unit is still built minus the twilight honey pack. The player would be able to see that they’re missing it still and the game would go as normal.
I’m a little biased for option C because I’d like to see the resources treated as bonuses rather than as pre-requisites. We keep the armor and weapons as straight forward as possible and have the “power” be in a large number of optional equipment the player can add on.