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Elemental: Grand Ambitions

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Elemental: Grand Ambitions

from Elemental Forums
 

Elemental: War of Magic


 

 

It has been many years since you've gathered your collection of vagabonds and founded a kingdom, and lifetimes of progress since your people had been ducking in caves, smashing flint together to make flames. On the blood of their ancestors your people have built a mighty nation, stone by stone, cut from sweat of hard labor and the agonies of great thinkers. You have reaped: they have multiplied. They grow bold, restless and vigilant. You, however, are a fossil, a relic from a forgotten era, receding into your palace even as your kingdom blossoms. This is their time, the time of grand ambitions...

VERSION 1 OBJECTIVES

  • Balance the game for much, much higher populations and larger, more epic kingdom. An "average" kingdom should have more than a hundred thousand people, with larger kingdoms "the sky is the limit". The largest cities should range upwards of a hundred thousand people.
  • Balance tactical battles for much higher numbers of troops. Hopefully thousands of troops, even if this requires a little abstraction.
  • Alter many of the games tiles to reflect an even bigger world. Buildings will be scaled down on maps to give a sense of the size of the world and the populations.
  • Split prestige from population growth and use prestige for something else.

VERSION 2 OBJECTIVES

  • Tech tree expansion in the LATE late game to reflect a more "civilized" world with a Renaissance/Enlightenment feel. The idea is that special conditions are required to "activate" these technologies, and not with any reliability.
  1. Adventure will be much more focused on exploration and practical exploitation. "Conquistador" type adventurers. Adventurer-scoundrels. Letters of the Marque.
  2. Civilization will focus on enlightenment style government and technologies. Parliaments, governorships, modern hospitals, artistic conservatories, printing presses, etc.
  3. Diplomacy will get some treatment in the next version.
  4. Magic, instead of simply becoming more powerful, will simply become more readily available to citizens in terms of the "occult" and mystery cults. This should be really powerful.
  5. Military will improve logistics considerably, and give you early, early gunpowder.
  • Populations will be stored in rural areas and on resources.

VERSION 3 OBJECTIVES

  • NPC overhaul. Ability to grant titles, offices, etc to NPCs. Ability to send children to school. Skeletal personality system.
  • Diplomacy Addon. More "formal" declarations of war, with specific ultimatums and aims.
  • Revolts should be possible if certain conditions trigger one.

VERSION 4 OBJECTIVES

  • Attempt to build a personality system out of the skeletal one I built in Version 3. This will give NPCs a measure of "free will", based on archetypal motivations which will help them choose who to marry, how many children they have, whether they will join a rebellion against you, etc. This should support all kinds of nonsense, like conspiracies, debts, personal assets, interpersonal relationships, etc where the sky is pretty much the limit.

ABOUT

This is a mod, at its core, with a very simple goal: huge empires, huge populations, and huge armies. Simply, the game will be rebalanced for a more dramatic and "epic" perspective of building a kingdom. Much larger populations numbering upwards of hundreds of thousands of souls. If the engine can handle it and my meager skills allow it, there will be the kind of armies that Elemental was going to have and should have had. That is, thousands.

Many game objects will be reworked to reflect a more civilized world. Another thing I'd like to do is scale many of the game objects up to make a much bigger world, for example, where a house once was might actually show up as dozens of houses, an entire neighborhood, basically. Important structures like palaces should look impressive towering against tiny buildings.

If I can get around to it and I develop the skills for it, I'd like to implement new game play mechanics to reflect the problems of large empires, like nobles and peasant rebellions, etc, as well as a restructured Diplomacy system that feels more like geo-political struggles than simple tribal disputes.

I think this mod is achievable. It doesn't really require as many art skills and 99% of the assets will be ready made in the game, though some building might need to get reskinned to reflect small scale. Plus, this isn't as taxing on my novice programming skills as other projects might... My eventual goal is to build a total conversion mod with Dark Republic... I hope Grand Ambitions will give me the kinds of skills I need...


THE GRAND AMBITIONS TEAM

Mod Leader: MagicwillNZ

Contributors: Ynglaur

128,924 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

I've been brainstorming a couple of things and I want to know what you guys think.

Contract System

As I've mentioned before, I'm going to use a lot of stuff from Grand Ambitions for Dark Republic. One of the things I wanted to use in both mods was the concept of "unit contracts".

The unit contract system is an alternative method of experience designed specifically for enormous unit sizes. The basic idea is that you can prioritize experience gain based on a rank you give newly formed units (Conscript, Regular, Veteran, Elite, etc), simulating how an army might transfer good soldiers to more specialized, more elite units. All garrisoned units will have access to a pool of troops of differing experience, and depending on the priority of that particular unit they may be able to pull experienced troops from other units or lose their own.

The challenge would be to balance the composition of units. Too many elite units and they'll become mediocre and expensive. Too many conscripts and you're not effectively taking advantage of your troops.

Immediate pluses:

a) No ultra elite peasants. A band a war-hardened peasants armed with clubs will only remain so until they garrison. When they do, those elite peasants will be sucked into regular army units whilst new peasants will take rank.

b ) Experienced troops are earned in combat and not trained. You can't just make someone elite.

c) Elite units are valuable but not so rare you always try to keep them out of combat.

Immediate negatives:

a) No training system. There might be a way to adapt it but there's no immediate need for one.

b ) Might be confusing for some players.

c) People might get really attached to their super-elite clubmen and might not want to see them getting taken apart into different units.

d) Gets hairy with multiple races.

Other ideas:

It might be cool to buy and sell soldiers by level of experience.

Populations

One of the critical #1 functions is to get Kingdoms to be huge population centers. How exactly that is going to be executed I have no idea yet, but there's a couple of directions I could go, and honestly I'm not decided yet.

OPTION A: Keep things pretty much the same, but allow housing to carry much, much more population with generally much higher levels of prestige (like maybe 10 times the current prestige). This is definitely the most "doable", you could probably do it right now.

OPTION B: Flip things around. Let food resources determine population growth, and allow housing prioritize where people eventually settle as opposed to prestige. In this option there really isn't a strict upper limit to population, simply as population reaches Malthusian levels it'll slow down and eventually stop.

OPTION C: Allow "rural sprawl" across kingdoms that hold populations but are not specifically built by the player. I like this idea but I'm hesitant to suggest it because I'm not entirely sure how to do it. Compatible with Option A and B.

OPTION D: Allow for migrations based on a variety of factors. I don't this would be difficult but some people might get frustrated when all their people ditch their hellholes. It would be a interesting way to make cities compete with each other.

 

Well that's it for now. If I get the time I'll try and prototype some simple things into python.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

YNGLAUR has joined the party!

His magicks will know no limits!

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Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

 

OK, got an interesting thing for you guys. This is a city grid. Pop it into your Elemental/gfx/decals folder, then run the tile editor. Instant streets. Aren't I clever?

There's more. If you wanted to, you could use the grid to make a template for all new street designs. Let me be frank. My grids are ugly, they're essentially an experiment. But, if you make a better street design, you can simply replace the files with your own and you've got a whole new set of streets with pretty much zero effort.

In addition, I'll be working on building a couple new jigsaw pieces to support winding streets, plazas, etc. If you build tiles around them, it won't be difficult to switch around different street designs.