="svenskmand"]charlie {l Wrote}:I never really liked the whole tile claiming aspect of it.
This might be an opportunity to do something original rather than just copy. Something like the borders in Civ/freeciv which limit where you can build to and pick up your creatures.
I actually think that one of the more interesting parts of DK1 and 2 was when you and the enemy had adjacent claimed types, then you imps would compete and fight to get the most land. And as the land also controlled the amount of mana you had, then land was a valuable asset.
I was thinking we could add what are basically "veins" which run through your claimed land to gather up the mana. We could then make it so you get more mana per turn for having a good layout of veins. You could score this by calculating the ratio of the outermost perimeter of the region that your veins cover divided by the area of the same region. This gives you a very high score for web-like dungeons with lots of tunnels and rooms and a very low score for a big square dungeon. This encourages the players to build more interesting looking dungeons.
As for implementation, we could have a room which you build like any other. The difference would be, you can only build the vein tiles on tiles touching another vein tile on exactly one side (a new one can then be added touching a second side so you can make lines but not cover an area). Then when you calculate the score you calculate the ratio above assuming that the region covered is any tile within N tiles that are covered by veins and is claimed. During the upkeep round of the game turn you start at the DT and "walk" the vein tiles. Veins that you cannot reach (because the enemy has destroyed one of them) will be made inactive (or possibly destroyed entirely).
The way the rules I have laid out (the scoring and the restrictions on building veins) if you had a single DT with lots of arms running out radially (like a starfish) you would get a very high score since the perimeter is huge, but the covered area is quite small. The tradeoff is if the enemy cuts off one of the arms near your DT you lose a lot of score (slower mana regeneration). To combat this you could connect the end of two arms. This means that the enemy needs to make two cuts in two faraway places to completely sever a section of the tiles. However, by doing this you increase the area in the whole pie wedge and you decrease the outer perimeter; this lowers your score to begin with, however it makes it more stable (i.e. the enemy has to hack their way through the dungeon to kill it, rather than just knocking off arms). I will try to sketch up a picture in inkscape to illustrate the idea.
EDIT: This would also couple nicely with the thing I just added about how the claimed tiles "creep" outwards. You could only allow them to creep 3 or 4 tiles from the veins you build so the dungeon doesn't creep out forever.
-Buck
Vein scoring.svg- An example of how the scoring is calculated for several different dungeon designs.
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. But i think that it would be even more interesting if you let the chance of a gave-in be proportional with the room size, and then there is a coin flip, to determine if the room should gave-in, every time you dig to expand the room.