Lite CityBuilder With Fantasy Theme And Autonomous Units

[MoLAoS]

For those who are interested I am about a month from releasing my current side project:

I've been working on a side project lately using my game engine because I am building up energy for the long haul to the various graphics/gui/pahtfinding upgrades which I hate doing.

Sorry about the huge size, its mechanics vary from uncommon to unique and there is no spoiler button here to put each description in a separate box.

Edit: Forgot, the beta version will be released around Christmas. All the engine stuff is done and about 95% of the game play coding is set, barring any bugs that are found. I am mostly cleaning up the XML and adding the remaining buildings and units, then I will just need to get all the credits documentation done.

The engine is open source and the units are controlled by simple XML files. All the stats and date and items and resource stuff is data driven in the XML.

The nearest comparison is sort of a blend between Majesty, in that you don't have control over mobile units, and maybe something from Tilted Mill since it has quite a big of economy and some pretty complex, optional though, production chains.

Production chains are mostly tilted towards the end level. Multiple types and grades of weapons with various enhancements your units can buy for the weapons they purchase and so forth. There is some low level farm/market/guild/house economics. Houses buy food and clothes which increases their taxes. But no multiple food types. Markets can build shops that provide extra money but require farms or various guilds that produce items to be built in order to construct.

Economic guilds produce basic goods that go into the production of items or gold but they can also harvest resource nodes in the environment for more valuable materials that increase power of items or create alternate effects. For instance rare herbs that alchemists make new potions with. Metals which the Metallurgy guild makes ingots of and sells to the blacksmith to make better weapons. Farms also produce crops like cotton for the clothiers guild which sells to your citizens as well as sell cloth to the people who make robes and what not for mages. Leather to the tanner who sells to the leather worker and what not.

End line production buildings are leather worker, armorer, robe maker, weapons maker, alchemist and so forth. There are advanced structures like the foundry for most item lines as well. Foundry also sells things like structural enhancements to buildings and other such things. There may be siege weapons as well.


Orders(The combat and priestly and magical orders that provide combat units):
You can build some military and defensive structures which are modified and upgraded from the kingdom treasury. However the most powerful fighting units come from the Orders. Orders also produce new equipment and consumables. Some Orders produce new structures. Each Order has its own theme with its own strengths and weaknesses as described farther down.

Each Order has a Motherhouse which does all the production and upgrades and construction. Once you build the Motherhouse everything the Order buys must be purchase from its treasury. Multiple Motherhouses can be built but they are quite expensive. Part of the cost of each Motherhouse is put into its treasury for initial purchases until its goods sales and taxes on member units kick in.

Each orderhouse, mother or chapter can have its individual tax rate set. At 50% half the money the members put in as dues is kept by the house to pursue its evolution while half goes to them kingdom to be spent on non-Order things. The rate can be put up or down from 0-100. Each unit has its own tax rate as well which determines how much wealth it puts into the Order coffers. It defaults to 50 as well. This is to allow lower level units to maybe spend more gold on items enhancements and consumables. Higher level units who have all the permanents and only need a bit of cash for consumable resources can get a higher tax. It can be reset to a lower level if new items come onto the market.

Each building built by the Motherhouse follows a similar pattern of a personal treasury which gets an initiate influx of cash from the Motherhouse treasury. Chapterhouses, built at the motherhouse, cannot do anything but create extra housing. They have a base number of extra order members and can make room for more.

Motherhouses have limited space for units even if you put it all into housing ups and you have to decide what path of the Order to pursue at each Motherhouse. That is why multiple ones are allowed. The expense keeps you from just getting 2 or 3 per Order and/or ignoring chapter houses.

Motherhouses can produce special units, a higher tier member unit which takes more space and more cost for fewer units as well as a single leader of the order who is much more powerful.

Furthermore each order has an individual style. The Order of Defenders which makes basic swordsmen features cheaper and more plentiful units. They have a larger base contingent and their barracks upgrade provides a larger housing increase than other Orders. Their chapterhouses are also cheaper and their buildings and facilities require less of a population. Did I mention houses provide population to man your buildings as well as produce taxes? Their motherhouse only provides unit type upgrades to allow new skills like bleeding and movement debuffs to enemies, no items and what not. Their champion and leader units may have some buffs however, and they may even have an extra unit type called the bannerman which gives a buff to nearby defenders and guardians.

Another melee warrior guild the Lunari(I don't have time or skill currently to make my own models and one of the creative commons licensed GAE/Glest compatible factions I got my models from was a moon based faction) has a totally different character. They can imbue their weapons with the rare lunar light damage type against which no monster, or only one or two, has any resistance. They can learn a skill which creates a lunar emanation which stacks based on the number of fellow order members to provide a magic shield and increased energy/mana. They have incredibly powerful but expensive champion units with various powers.

The other current melee order(there may or may not be more based on model availability and whether too many models shits on people's graphics memory limits) is the Chaos Warriors. They are heavily armored, in chaos, with high resistances to many damage types and health. They are slow but fearless, ie they don't run until they are at 5% health, compared to higher values like 20% for defenders and 35% for lunari swordsmen. Their leaders can summon various minions of chaos and possibly extend some of their Order's resistance to nearby units.

There are also 3 archer factions and various magical factions.

[qubodup]

I have moved the thread to "design/ideas", as "projects" is only for existing, released projects.

Looking forward to your release!

[MoLAoS]

I am making incredible progress towards the release. I managed to snag a pack of 100 resource icons from cartographersguild.com that are free for free games as well as a set of more generic fantasy icons that I am using for items like potions and armor and other things. I may be able to use a set of plant models I found as well, haven't tested getting them into the game's native format. The art was a huge hurdle for me since I can't pay and even though I could make some passable icons and models and textures I haven't really got time if I want to keep on schedule. So that was really great.

I have created 51 resources that I currently plan to use in the game. Resources can be both produced in structures and harvested from the environment in order to encourage territory control. Top tier resources will be far away or in dangerous areas but will be required to keep up with increasing numbers and strengths of monsters. I think the game can realistically contain about 300 units depending on the complexity of their AI. I've been working on some basic optimizations to cut down on lag. It may be that computers over 4 years old won't be able to play the game to its full potential. I ended up creating a more complex economic system than I originally intended as well. There are several food types and various materials with different strengths and qualities. Basic items come on units plus markets/stores have a second tier of items that don't need to be produced. Tiers 3 and higher must be produced from resources like mining ore, processing into ingots, and then smithing into weapons and armor. Cloth and Leather must be gathered and processed and so forth. Potions are created from various plants that you can farm or gather. You need to process ingredients and then mix them into potions.

Based on the number of houses you have your population will purchase items like food and clothing and medicine which puts money into guilds stores and markets. So the market system is more complex than Majesty or Warlords Battlecry but less complex than a full fledged city builder.

Combat like defending from attacks, raiding and hunting are required both to survive and to tech up to better gear. Monsters are also able to drop materials for potions and armor and such.

Various types of crystals are mined and processed to produce magical items. Buildings require both wealth and materials. Some new materials allow structural enhancements to buildings for increased health.

Even with the constant adding of features as I progress through the development process I am definitely on pace for a late December release date.

[Skorpio]

This sounds like a very cool game and I'm looking forward to playing it. Have you got any screenshots yet?

[MoLAoS]

This sounds like a very cool game and I'm looking forward to playing it. Have you got any screenshots yet?

I do not have any screenshots or videos of this specific game, but I made some demo videos for other gameplay using the same engine and many of the same art assets.

The problem with the engine is that the debug version gives off some errors when you try to hook the graphics so you need to compile a release version specially to make videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZe2R0LGQJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoHTr4m37Bs

These are the 2 videos I have. I'm not really a video person, so they don't really have any sound and what not.

[DGMurdockIII]

any progress on this

[MoLAoS]

I made some good progress but I've been distracted by EVE Online.