Newest Blog Update (city buildings)

[KGB]

I just took a look at Piranha's latest blog entry and the screen shot there.

It appears the city view menu is now detailed in a manner similar to Civilization (or a base in an RTS game) and from the looks of things you can erect what appears to be 8+ custom building in a city.

My personal opinion on this isn't favorable. While I enjoyed Civilization I was never a big fan of games like that where you spent a lot of time upgrading city buildings. It's one the of reasons I always found the original Galactic Civilization/Master of Orion games much better than their sequels where you had a lot of micromanagement of cities/planets etc.

This causes the primary objective (building and moving armies to conquer the map) to become less important than managing all the upgrades/build structures. It's a primary reason why Warlords still has a big fan following. The other problem is that it makes the learning curve ever higher for players as they have to learn the city builds in addition to managing production/armies/heroes etc.
Simpler is indeed better as many players now are struggling with effective game play managing even the city walls concept (based on the number of players I've seen who have never upgraded their walls in any game).

I *hope* the following is also included:

1) A game option to play without city upgrades turned on (ie just building towers and upgrading wall levels). To be honest, this would probably be a setting I'd use very often and I suspect many old War2 players would as well.
2) The city view itself has something to indicate what structures are inside. There would be no way to hide that information so players should be able to easily see (several flags or simply clicking to see the city view on any city) what structures are in any city not just their own (I've never been to say Paris but even I have heard the stories from travelers/merchants of it's marvels compared to an average city like Brussels).
3) The map generator needs a way to randomly assign buildings to cities in a manner like production and a way to manually place buildings when desired).

KGB

[piranha]

The first reason we started talking about building was that most games use the structure. You construct a building to train units. The people we saw who tested warbarons thought the buy production screen was a hire mercenary screen. So the reason for buildings was to make it easier to pick up. Seems to be the logic people expect.

I played those games too and I know what you mean. Having something to do is fun in the beginning with 3-4 planets but then starts to become less interesting. I'd say its a problem with most classic strategy games that late game becomes tedious due to building management.
The idea is not that you will spend a lot of time with building management. Buying a building instead of buying a unit should more or less be the same management wise.
There is some changes that allow for more options in cities.
Main difference is that you can upgrade city income, upgrade city view radius and army buildings have 4 units so you either buy a new building or upgrade a army building.

We haven't tested it yet but I don't think it will be like civ or MOO.

1. Sorry there will not be this kind of option. But I do think the new stuff will be acceptable.
2. When you open the city you can see buildings and levels, when you mouse over a city on the map you get basic information.
3. Yes this part is in place. There is also quick options to select 5 or 6 different city levels to quickly set a city quality.

[KGB]

Piranha,

The first reason we started talking about building was that most games use the structure. You construct a building to train units. The people we saw who tested warbarons thought the buy production screen was a hire mercenary screen. So the reason for buildings was to make it easier to pick up. Seems to be the logic people expect.

Strange. Which people tested the game? Where they typical turn based strategy players or RTS players? Anyone who has ever played Warlords or Age of Wonders or any of the other well known turn based strategy games based on fantasy wouldn't think the production screen was a hire mercenary screen.

Players from RTS games would of course expect to add buildings in order to produce units. That's a staple of RTS games along with resource gathering.

It's always been my assumption that 90% of the players playing here are coming from the Warlords universe. I could be wrong but the posters definitely all mention Warlords or Age of Wonders or other turn based fantasy.

I played those games too and I know what you mean. Having something to do is fun in the beginning with 3-4 planets but then starts to become less interesting. I'd say its a problem with most classic strategy games that late game becomes tedious due to building management.

Exactly. That's the one thing Warlords did well. There was literally no tedious management of cities. Even vectoring was designed to reduce the tedious need to move every individual army. That micro management is something that Warbarons should strive to eliminate.

There is some changes that allow for more options in cities.
Main difference is that you can upgrade city income, upgrade city view radius and army buildings have 4 units so you either buy a new building or upgrade a army building.

Upgrading view radius is good. Although it could have been tied to the level of city walls so that the 2 were combined instead of being separate. I honestly can't imagine upgrading the view radius on my cities unless it's like 5 gold for +1 view. Anything more isn't worth the money given you can build towers or use units to scout. Plus it's useless in games without FOW.

I'm not sure what you mean by buildings have 4 units. Does this mean you buy a building (say the one that looks like a Tree) and you suddenly get access to 4 units which I assume would be forest based (Elves, Unicorn etc). Then if you bought another building for your city you'd get 4 more different units. So it would be possible to produce 8 or 12 or more different units in 1 city based on the number of buildings you added? If that's the case, it really is an RTS based model where a single building produces multiple units (usually building is upgraded via research which I assume you are doing away with).

I find it strange you can upgrade income based on gold. Either the cost will have to be very cheap or this isn't going to make any sense. For example, lets say it costs 100 gold to increase a cities income by 10. That means it takes 10 turns just to break even. That's a long time and I doubt I'd ever do such a thing as even in 20 turns I only get 100 extra gold which isn't much money. On the other hand if I can spend 10 gold to increase the cities income by 10 then yeah, I'm doing it because in 10 turns I make 90 gold which is a good deal.

1. Sorry there will not be this kind of option. But I do think the new stuff will be acceptable.
2. When you open the city you can see buildings and levels, when you mouse over a city on the map you get basic information.

I hope it really is easy to use and doesn't require much strategic thinking. Because as I said, it seems many players are struggling with city management now when it only consists of buying production and upgrading walls.

I hope the mouse over on the map includes neutral/enemy cities (income, walls, view radius etc). If the other buildings are only for producing units and not for things like adding extra strength/moves/faster production times then there is no need to give out that info. But if there are buildings that increase strength/moves/faster production time those should be available on the mouse over.

Looking forward to playing to see how it all works.

KGB

[kenc80]

OK I got to chime in here. You guys know i'm a big War2 guy and thats what brought me to Warbarons.

First KGB's comment:

Strange. Which people tested the game? Where they typical turn based strategy players or RTS players? Anyone who has ever played Warlords or Age of Wonders or any of the other well known turn based strategy games based on fantasy wouldn't think the production screen was a hire mercenary screen.

Players from RTS games would of course expect to add buildings in order to produce units. That's a staple of RTS games along with resource gathering.

It's always been my assumption that 90% of the players playing here are coming from the Warlords universe. I could be wrong but the posters definitely all mention Warlords or Age of Wonders or other turn based fantasy.

I agree with this. The major of appeal to me of Warlords 2 was the lack of complexity but not depth. It was pure strategy plain and simple. Very little micromanagement, just stacks and dice. What I like about your game, is that it blows away single player warlords...youve perfected the online battle with humans in a way thats perfect. No client. You guys have done a helluva job.

I hope it really is easy to use and doesn't require much strategic thinking. Because as I said, it seems many players are struggling with city management now when it only consists of buying production and upgrading walls.

I share KGB's concerns here. I even posted in the strategy forum reminding players to check ruins for gold. If they arent looking for gold in ruins how are they going to get into city management on this scale?

I remember debating KGB in the forums on the amount of complexity in beta 3 and how it was becoming more like DLR than War2. Now I feel like the debate is, is warbarons more like DLR or more like evony/warcraft/civ?

Again - I know this is beta and you gotta try stuff in betas. I'm excited about the new beta no doubt. I cant wait to see the lava terrain and sea monsters haha. But I do definitely share KGB's concerns about complexity.

I'm excited! but nervous!

[piranha]

The people who we watched haven't played warlords before. Our goal is not to just pick up old school warlords players but to reach any gamer who can enjoy a strategy game.

I think there are a couple of different ways a game can be complicated. It can have a interface that increase the time it takes to learn. I'd say many old school games had that problem but it wasn't as big of a problem back then as it is now.

Adding buildings to the game does change the game mechanic and hopefully makes it a bit easier to pick up for new players, but also as you say adds management.
When it comes to the new city management I have thought the same things as you do. I'm a bit worried about how it will be with 20-30 cities but like Kenc says, this is beta and this is when we can try things.
Perhaps view radius will turn out to be a useless upgrade so we just include that with the wall upgrade instead for example.
There are other new things in B4 that might turn out to not be the best ideas but we want to test it out.
Going back to B3 probably wont happen but if just makes the game less fun or more complicated without adding fun strategy it needs to be toned down.

Exactly. That's the one thing Warlords did well. There was literally no tedious management of cities. Even vectoring was designed to reduce the tedious need to move every individual army. That micro management is something that Warbarons should strive to eliminate.

I totally agree with this. But I also think that games released after W2 have added new things to the table that are good. It will be a delicate balance but the good thing is that we can keep perfecting this thing.

The gold upgrade for town hall is currently set so that the first levels only take a few turns to recoup for while the last levels take more turns. I think its something like 3 turns - 12 turns. All this stuff will have to be balanced.

City management will be more buttons and first it might seem more complicated but I think mew players will know what everything is.
We will have to see.

I expect strong opinions , and we definitely listen to them.
Mouseover work on neutrals and enemies.

[ezras]

I too am a little concerned by all these big complicated changes that are coming in Beta 4. As I have said before I am here because I love Warlords and the simplicity of it. Simple is beautiful and if these great improvements subsequent games made after Warlords and W2 were so marvelous why are we here at warbarons rather than playing warcraft of starcraft or those games that 'improved' on the model. As developers it is your decision but you might want to take a quick straw pole and ask the dedicated players out here already. It is a competitive market and venturing out there is quite brave and again I can't thank you enough for bringing this game back to us. So in your city you would buy a building that produces a new type of unit rather than buying that unit? I guess it could remain simple. But upgrading city wall should upgrade the city's view radius.

love you guys for all you do.

[piranha]

You will probably be sceptical about some of the new things in Beta4.

When I created hero inspect in B3 I was first thinking about which bonuses to include. But after a while I decided to include every bonus even if I thought was completely useless since it would give good information to use when fine tuning the hero popup.

Id say there are similar ideas about cities and some other new things. Better test this out properly to know what is good and what it not so good.

Another new thing in B4 is resources.
There are more resources than gold available in B4. They are not required but can be used to produce better versions of units. For example there is elephant and armoured elephant. Armoured elephant which has 3HP instead of 2 requires wood and iron to be produced.

Gathering wood and iron is done by controlling a saw mill (located on forest terrain) and iron by controlling a mine located on either snow or hill terrain. We wanted to increase the importance of other terrain than city.


B.t.w Interesting comment Ezras. I think we have to be careful to keep the fun. But its worth testing out ideas too. We played several games of W2 1-2 years ago and after a while it felt a bit limited, like I wanted more options and possible strategies.

I think me and snotling will be able to test B4 next week so its pretty close now.

[KGB]

Piranha,

Another new thing in B4 is resources.
There are more resources than gold available in B4. They are not required but can be used to produce better versions of units. For example there is elephant and armoured elephant. Armoured elephant which has 3HP instead of 2 requires wood and iron to be produced.

Gathering wood and iron is done by controlling a saw mill (located on forest terrain) and iron by controlling a mine located on either snow or hill terrain. We wanted to increase the importance of other terrain than city.

Does this *resource gathering* (a staple of RTS but generally not turn based games) apply to only an elephant or to any unit? For example armored Cavalry or armored Dwarves etc? Do you have a mined inventory of iron/wood that you maintain so that you can build this armored unit later or does it only apply to units made while you own the resource?

Increasing the importance of other terrain is something DLR/Warlords IV did with sites. But there was no resource gathering involved. Sites were simply attached to cities and applied their benefits to any unit produced there (extra gold, extra strength, extra moves, extra hits, extra view, -1 production time, blessed). Those sites could be razed so they had to be guarded (even ports were sites that could be razed). It makes the resources valuable but doesn't over complicate the game forcing you to get multiple resources and then combine with a single unit which would make things very complex as you had to decide whether to make a 2 or 3 hit elephant and keep an inventory of iron/wood that you mine etc. I much prefer the DLR model for its simplicity while at the same time adding strategy to the game (controlling the sites, quests to get control of a site, raze a site etc).

Can sites not appear on terrain other than what you mentioned? Do you have to have snow to have an iron mine? You should be able to have a site located anywhere, not just on a certain terrain location.

KGB

[piranha]

All units exist in a enhanced version and can be produced with the right resource. Most units require 1 resource.
You pay when the unit is completed. If you don't have the resource you get a standard version instead.

You can only place 1 type of resource on a certain terrain. So on snow you can only mine iron.

Resources can be sent between players so in a team game you can send resources to allies.

I'm a bit worried that the sites concept will be better than our resource idea. At the same time we want to try something else than just saying, okay W3 did this, lets replicate that.
I think you could say that we started out making a online version of warlords 2 but during our journey we started changed our goals a bit and would like to take it in our own direction than just copying every thing detail by detail.

There have been several occasions where we wanted to do something else and our community described a similar idea in warlords that was better or at least a proven idea that worked and we changed into that instead. Apparently warlords have been made in several versions and there have been time for testing and perfecting the product.
We will have chance to try this system in a day or two and you should also be able to test it very soon as well so we can evaluate and change / improve the idea.

[KGB]

Piranha,

Looking forward to trying out Beta4 to see all the new features.

My biggest fear with how you've done resources is all the extra management needed for them. I assume you'll mine X amount per resource per turn. Over time you'll accumulate resource stockpiles like you do gold. This leads to things like:

A) When you capture an enemy city, will you loot some of those resources like you do his gold? Logically you should if there are stockpiles.
B) When you want to build an enhanced version of a unit, do you have to go to the production screen and select an enhanced checkbox and remember to uncheck when the unit is complete requiring you to every turn potentially visit your cities to see where you are spending resources?
C) Can you convert gold into resources? The simple economic model of Warlords has always been gold = everything in your kingdom other than cities/units. As in you use gold for upkeep (rather than farming or needing a farming site), production, city wall upgrades (rather than needing a quarry) hiring heroes etc. So logically you should be able to spend gold to buy needed resources.
D) If you have accumulated say 10 Iron, can you in 1 turn build 10 enhanced units in 10 different cities or are you limited in some manner?
E) Can you spend double the resources and get double the effect (say 1 Wood = +1 strength, can you spend 2 Wood and get +2 strength)? DLR sites were additive (up to max 9 strength/4 hits) so if you had 2 strength sites attached to a city you could get +2 strength units. This led to players deliberately razing cites/not rebuilding in order to have multiple sites attached to 1 city.

I think trying new things is a good idea. At the same time some existing concepts in DLR/War4 can easily be improved on because while I love DLR/War4 sites, there are changes that could improve them. I guess I would have preferred that you introduce just 1-2 at a time instead of a massive change like Beta4 where it will be hard to evaluate all the new things to see how well they work because there are so many of them that it may overwhelm players. For example I was expecting in Beta4 Towers and Gold Mines to get players used to sites and their value strategically. Then in Beta5 you'd add new/more sites and potentially the resource concept.

KGB