Sunday, April 2, 2017

Future warmap changes


As part of my effort to change and improve the warmap, I would like to present you my current plans and thoughts. I'll work on them at the side, while I continue to make and upload the usual content, since it'll take quite a long time to finish everything.

Most changes will be for the "map" system, before you go into the strategy battle. Instead of moving your forces around with some slow choice, I'm going to make it into a worldmap, where you can send your troops to active battles and improve your cities, recruit new troops and much more.
Outside of battles, all upgrades and recruitments will happen instantly, but you won't gain or lose any recources over time.  Once a battle is active, the system will change to a turn based system, during which things take turns to be build, but you gain or lose recources each turn. The active battles will have a "deadline", until which the enemies have either conquered the area or retreated, so you'll have only a certain amount of turns to work with each time. This is for balancing reasons, since you could otherwise improve your country endlessly outside of battles.

As seen in the screenshot, you'll have some rescources which will be generated over time during the turn based phase, while the storage will hold things which you need to built yourself each time. Those unique recources are either required to build, recruit troops, or to give a boost to the gain of a certain recource.

There are 27 possible buildings, which can be built for different benefits. The actual number to get into the game might still change of course.

Buildings and troops will cost supply for each turn. Should you not increase your supply gain enough and the supplies drop to 0, your Moral starts to drop until it get's to 0 and none of your forces make any damage anymore.

The new system is planned to support up to 15 allied and 15 enemy units, to allow for bigger battles. All normal units can be changed to any of the 6 base classes, given that you have enough resources to do so.
Special Generals can be recruited as well, to give units a certain unique buff.
Unusual forces, for example consisting of tamed monsters, might be added as well.
All of the above changes depend on how well thing will work, when I try to get them into the game, and might be changed depending on it.

The changes will also affect the Skilltree upgrades for the warmap and the research options in the Laboratory.

The upcoming changed to the tax and policy system will also affect the warmap. Taxes will, depending on whether you set them high or low, raise or lower a counter during the normal gameplay. This counter will decrease or increase the population gain during the warmap turn based phase, during which the counter goes down again, until it's at 0 and has no effect anymore. This way, your choice on the "real time" taxes will affect the warmap in it's "turn based" system afterwards, making the choice more important.

Strategy map changes:


I'll add different animations for some classes, and add an animation for ranged units that attack, to make it easier to tell when an enemy attacked.

Before each battle, the winning and losing conditions are going to be displayed on the screen.

At the moment, enemies attack you if you're within 2 tiles walking range. This gives a big advantage to all 3 AP and ranged units, since the're certain to get the first hit. It also makes it unlickley for enemies to help their allies, when they're being "lured away". That's why I consider changing it, so that enemies not only attack when in range, but walk 2 tiles when your forces are 3 tiles away. This increase in range will hopefully improve the enemies, and make them less static or bystanders during their allies battles, without making them much stronger.

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