guillaume-alvarez / shapeofthingsthatwere Goto Github PK

At the moment a discovery has a fixed list of pre-requisites.

It is possible to have a 'group' pre-requisite but not enough to prevent being blocked from some discoveries and will worsen after #24.

For instance the metals are hard to come by: require hill for the ore, forest for the fire, etc. It leans toward a pyramidal system whereas it should be a dense network.

The first step to prevent that is to allow multiple ways to get to most discoveries. For instance metallurgy could be discovered from experiments with metals and fire or from earth fire then allow to find metals from ore.

Thus the 'previous' list for a discovery could be

• either a simple String list to allow from simple pre requisites
• or a list of String lists, with an implicit OR between different list

I'm still not sure what the easiest way is to load it from json.

Once the 'boat' discovery is made the armies should be able to enter sea tiles.

Anyway they won't be able to progress very far on deep sea tiles without many related discoveries and policies.

Let say each tile produces some quantity of goods: FOOD (oat, wheat, beef, etc.), MATERIAL (stone, iron, wood, flax, etc.), LUXURY (gold, silver, wine, etc.) depending on its type.

The quantity produced is increased at each technology and policy. For instance GRASSLAND produces FOOD, when discovering oat (positively affected by GRASSLAND and PLAIN) each GRASSLAND tile produces +1 FOOD.

The quantity produced for all goods is summed at the power source (i.e. village/city): this is the power the city can sustain. Every turn the current power slowly progresses toward the sustainable power (be it positive or negative).

It means having lot of tiles allows to support a bigger city.

In case of tribute, a part of luxury (and only luxury) is given to the overlord.
In case of revolt the current power in the original city is not modified, but will progressively reduce as it lost tiles.
When creating an army, it is sustained from the MATERIAL part, that thus cannot sustain the city itself.

When clicking on city the influence around is shown, if you go to next turn, the number are not updated. You must hide then show these again to see the new numbers.

Achieve different purposes:

• revolted source is more visible
• makes sure there is no other source or map border at contact
• avoid multiple revolts on adjacent tiles

The player initially sees 'NOTHING' repeated for each faction. It is clearly not intuitive and should be improved so that it is clear:

• he will discover something
• he cannot know what but knows in which direction he is investigating

It is important the player empire is not just a color on the map.

One way to personalize it is to add factions or social groups to the game:

• army leaders
• rich merchants
• cultural elite

Which one is prefered by the people? Which one is in command of the state?

When making decisions (choosing policies or discoveries) the player must know it will advantage one of these groups. The prefered group should provide bonus/malus to the empire, but failing to keep balance between them will also reduce the empire stability (see #19).

These groups might be personnalised, so that the player can ask them their advice, then either follow it or anger them.

A council (ala King of the Dragon Pass) could also be created with members of the different factions.

When discovering the "religion" concept every empire should be able to define its religion. The options could depend on the discoveries already made. They would provide bonus depending on the religion. For instance :

• main god domain
• main god attribute
• second god domain
• second god attribute
• preferred sacrifice
• how are priests chosen
• etc.

Every influence source can have its own religion, even using gods defined by other empires. Polytheists religions are not that missionary and thus should not easily colonize other cities. They are mostly a part of the city internal social organisation.

Organized missionary religions are a next step.

See https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-line-endings

Should be added in file .gitattribute:
*.java text eol=lf

Being a leader is a matter of chance for a big part. The player should not be subjugated by mere chance. He must be able to continue playing but as its overlord, bringing the light of civilisation to a new center.

Restricting this to power sources of same culture might give it an interest.

Text labels with line wrap activated show two lines but in the space of only one line. The table width should probably be set to the label before inserting it so that it can computes the correct height.

It happens with:

• whelp menu when selecting destination for a tribe or army
• long notifications, for instance discoveries with many effects

To matter in the gameplay, a discovery must have an effect on influence. Thus most should use the

Are currently implemented some cost reductions depending on terrain type. We could also have some source power bonus.

Some major discoveries may provide bigger bonuses to the user, balanced by a malus. For instance "cart" discovery may increase cost for mountains and hills and reduce cost for plains.

At the moment the AI never makes use of armies.

The gameplay is quite obscure at the moment: different numbers are modified from discoveries that are not clear at all for player. Initial behavior is to align almost every thing as percentage but it is clearly not working. Their behavior should be simplified in core model and appear in UI:

Influence model

• influence is the strength of the empire control on every tile, decreasing from the tribe/village/city source
  • shown when selecting a tile
• terrain cost is the minimum influence required to control a tile
  • shown in discoveries screen
• military power is an help to increase influence in focused situations (wars, territory near armies)
  • shown on armies button, per armies in armies screen
• growth is the increase of influence power per turn (should try implementing it as a simple mille value applied every turn)
  • should be shown (+x/turn) next to current source power
• stability is the limit to the area covered by influence
  • detailed in policies screen
• instability is the missing stability and a chance for revolt when superior to a tile influence
  • shown on policies button
  • detailed in policies screen

Discovery model

• discovery progress is a percentage of the points for next discovery, increased from a base level + tiles of a certain type depending on the discovery + bonus from past discoveries
  • shown on discoveries button
  • should be detailed on discoveries screen
• discovery bonus is added at each turn to discovery progress
  • should be shown on discoveries screen

At the moment any empire can make any discovery provided it has the correct terrain. It causes the different empires to be quite similar.

It also prevents some empires from progressing in the discovery set: neither forest not hills nor mountain terrains is a huge restriction that can almost never be overcame.

A solution would be to make two changes to current discoveries system:

• only the first (or first two/three) empires could make a discovery, the following ones already researching it would fail, the other ones could not select it
• discoveries could be learned from other empires (at a fixed rate depending on relations, borders and trade routes between empires)

When selecting a SelectBox widget (combo box or drop-down list) the screen flashes quickly to black before displaying again the expected content with the opened list.

It is easily reproducible in the diplomacy screen.

The design goal is for new cities to pop from distant and scarcely controlled lands.

For this we will use the empire stability mechanism:

• it is a percentage, starting at 100%
• lost when losing battles and changing policies
• regained slowly over time

For every controlled tile over which influence is decreasing and lower than instability we could randomly check if the tile should revolt.

Then a revolting a new city would be created on the tile, as capital to a new empire. Its culture would be the same as the original empire one. It would start with the same discoveries/policies.

Trade should be an important feature of the game. It means routes appearing on the map on which neighbouring empires get a few. The traded objects should depend on discoveries or a "production" policy.

It should be possible to pillage trade routes with armies.

Many discoveries should increase the 'trade' indicator of an empire and thus the probability the trade route pass through its tiles and the fee it gets from it.

Revolters get for free their source tile and a big bonus on the surrounding tiles.

The bonus should only be added for tiles owned by the empire it revolts from.

Before passing turn, the player should be notified he did not set its flag, or select a next discovery combination.

He should be helped by a notification indicating how to do it, opening the correct screen.

If the player discards the notification he should not be asked again the next turn.

Diplomacy options should appear when making discoveries:

• weapon -> war
• city -> tribute ?
• writing -> treaty ?

In fact war, tribute and treaty could even be discoveries by themselves.

They should formalize the diplomatic state between the different empires and have a direct impact on the influence on map. For instance:

• treaty -> no influence sent above the other party on its tiles
• tribute -> channel power from a capital to the other
• war -> double influence increase or target on the antagonist

When power is bigger than health it gets reduced to health/2.

There should be different disaster depending on the terrain:

• floods near costs
• drought in plains and desert
• storm in plains and grasslands
• diseases

The diseases should be quite special because they would start somewhere on the map then contaminate neighbors with low health, reducing the power by a dozen percents every turn.

What is a game without a possible victory?

The game should end at some point:

• count years and stop at a max time (end of antiquity as long as discoveries don't go further)
• have only one leading empire on the map
• discover all the coded discoveries

When starting a game (all defaults) the screen should be centered on his capital city, not on a random one.

If there is no human player, at least center on first AI empire city.

I bet the issue is in OverworldScreen code.

It looks like sometimes a tile near the influence source is not influenced directly by the source. It often happen when the source is not the main influencer for this tile.

Games should be saved in json format. Having a human-readable format will help debugging.

Main menu must include buttons to load an existing game. Pause menu will have a button to save current game.

Having a huge military power should help counter instability.

Should it reduce instability by total military power or only the part that is not used by armies on map?

Second solutions means the player must chose between creating more armies (and thus more control on extension) and having less revolts.

We need a different screen to show

• discoveries
  • last found one
  • researched one or list to choose (already exist in discovery screen)
  • menu link shows progress to next discovery (already done)
• policies
  • list all available ones (already exist in discovery screen)
  • menu link should show current stability (decrease when changing policies, grows slowly to 100%)

The gradle wrapper scripts needs to have the gradle-wrapper.jar in tree/master/gradle/wrapper; as described there: http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html

Could you add this jar?

In selection menu the influence list does not show empire color, everything is black.

Maybe the base text color should be white for this libGDX feature to work?

The game is about discovery. Discovering technological/social/scientific/practical things.

It should also be about discovering the map.

The fog of war should hide territories outside

• player empire
• its neighbors
• the empires it has a relation with
• the tiles that once belonged to player empire

In fact it could simply be a list of tiles whose 'discovered' ones are removed.

At the moment they get the discoveries list but the bonus are not applied again.

At the moment armies are pretty useless: they just act as secondary sources. It makes wars pretty boring. This should be improved by letting armies have a larger influence when actual combat takes place, like it does in reality with the great conquerors of old.

When two warring armies stand on neighbouring tiles at the end of turn the smallest one should be destroyed. The victorious army power is reduced from the defeated influence on the tile and added to the victor influence on the same tile. An army symbol appears on the tile and a notification is issued to both involved parties.

Warring armies are armies

• from empires at war with each other
• armies from different empires both one empire tile (entering an other empire tiles is an act of war even if formal War was not discovered)

When an army neighbours a warring empire capital, the capital influence on its tile is reduced by the army power.

Both these new mechanisms should help submit enemy cities.

Following reading of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamonds, it would be interesting to discover the wild varieties for modern corn, wheat, etc. They would be pre-requisite for their domesticated counterpart, the modern version being also much more potent in terms of growth.

It would be a good occasion to also add all the other cereals and pulses mentioned in the book as staples of some civilizations food production.

At the moment, once vassalized an empire will stay as such even if the main empire is stroke by a disaster.

It should re-evaluate the related forces from times to times.

At the moment the only impact of the player on the map is the "flag" he can set on some tile.

It should be replaced by armies, or forces:

• start at the capital
• can be moved to any flaggable tile, one tile per turn
• once arrived increase influence on the tile, serve like a secondary influence source, its initial power being the player military power
• can move to other players tiles only if at WAR
• two armies from different empires on the same tile should trigger a battle:
  • compare military power + die (1-6) for both empires, the greater wins
  • losing one is "killed" (spawn back in capital with slowly growing power)
  • lowing one gets a stability malus
  • vanquished empire gets an influence loss on adjacent tiles

Then we may improve the mechanism by allowing user to customize army composition and have multiple armies with lower military power...

Having multiple islands separated by large chunks of water is pretty boring without the mean to move over water to discover other continents.

The map should be generated with a main island, and maybe smaller ones close around.

Religions are two-fold:

• it is a cultural feature than can propagate from its source
• it can be chosen by an empire as its official cult

When choosing a religion an empire can also change one of its parameters.

Religion parameters

Type:

• Animist
  • best stability
  • reduced growth
• Veneration of the dead (Shintoism)
  • better stability
  • low cultural assimilation
• Polytheist (Ancient Greece or Egypt or Rome...)
  • let choose a prefered gods trinity (for instance the Warrior, the Wife and the Trader) giving bonus depending on chosen gods
• Dualist (Manicheism)
  • better stability
• Monotheist (Judaism, Christianism, Islam)
  • greater propagation
  • Allow religious war

Attitude to other religions:

• Integration
• Tolerance
• Specific status
• Intolerance
• Inquisition

Values

• Hard work
• Spiritual life
• Wealth
• Family
• Victory in battle

When a new policy is available the player cannot know it.

A notification should be displayed everytime a new policy is discovered. It should be blocking if it is the first policy of a type discovered by the player.

ATM when the player selects a research he can no longer change it, even in the same turn.

It can be frustrating, so he should be able to change it between selection and ending turn.

At the moment a "conquered" source will be quite indistinguishable from the main one.

In fact the conqueror should have two choices:

• destroy the conquered, for instance if it estimates it too close from its own
• enforce some diplomatic state on it (treaty, tribute, etc.)

It would be a nice touch to have on screen an indication a city is tributary to another one, maybe some flow from the vassal to the overlord, like the links between policies in the Democracy games. Or a secondary color?

Buildings like theatres, amphitheatres, temples, aqueducts, etc. could increase city growth rate.

Policies like republic, democracy, oligarchy, gerontocracy, citizenship, city leagues, elections, etc. could impact city growth rate, stability and military power.

Sciences like logic, history, geography, philosophy, etc. could improve the discovery rate?

The application logs in sysout: it won't be correct for gamer use and it does not help development that much.

It should be replaced by a proper logging system, allowing to log in console or file, and showing for a log line its time and source logger.

I'm still not sure what API to use. @GaetanVaysse do you have one to suggest?

If you click on a city, and you press "we want no change", and then click away again. The little popup wonn't go away before you press it.

Civ5 is also working this way, as well as MoO2.

It only avoids a click per turn but the game seems much more dynamic at the same time : you must be able to browse the data before making a choice, not after.

At the moment the notification only shows the impacted city, also give the power lost.

In a map we need a map overlay where tiles are colored according to their influencer empire color. It should be clearer than the simple border.

The alpha channel should depend on the ratio between the influence on tile and the source power. It will show the weak points.

Technically speaking, the overlay information should be cached between turn chances, just like the influence zone borders are.

It must be possible for a desktop user to

• download an executable file
• install it (optional)
• launch the game

Two versions are required, one with JVM and one that use the one already installed on the computer.

In game current state nothing (except for influence spread) happens on most of the turns. In a turn-based game it is boring not to have actions to make at every turn. Consequences from previous actions would be fun too.

On the discovery mechanism, maybe instead of selecting a discovery and waiting for it to end the player could select every turn a direction in which to investigate. It would have a change to cause a new discovery, or nothing may happen (or previous discoveries may be reinforced).

The policy mechanism effectively permits to make choices, but once done there is little incentive to modify them. Maybe the player could be asked to choose a policy type+discovery every few turns, with an incentive not to re-use the same old policy.

An other idea would be to have an event every turn, the kind of event being selected randomly from the different stats of the player (depending on discoveries and policies).

Having the possibility to create armies from start would also provide something to do to player. Maybe the cities could move slower (and on greater distances) with an obligation to get as far as they can until they settle and the armies could move faster (1 tile per turn).