Playing the game

[Shadow]

I know a lot of the spa room doesn't play RWL that much, just sticks to the forums. Why is that?

What could I do (codewise) to make the game something you would all want to play? Any and all ideas are welcome, whether you think they are feasible or not.

[Ungatt Trunn II]

The ability to buy/unlock upgrades of a semi-permanent type. For example, one could after reaching a certain number of a troop type, unlock an upgrade for that troop the sticks around until it falls below that. And having a high net worth allows you to unlock a limited number of powerful upgrades that are of course lost when your net worth drops below that point. Also purchasable upgrades, maybe a different set of "mercenary" that has a totally different purpose. Like you could hire Cluny the Scourge and while not an actual troop, it gives you a bonus to defense or something. Perhaps these upgrades also have a penalty? I don't know. Or have artifacts that players have which make their networth skyrocket, and the only way to get it from them is to buy it if they sell it on the market, or kill them. Maybe this already exists and I don't know because I haven't played the game in years. Who can tell? Maybe we need to include an X factor which makes mindlessly calculating every move obsolete, as unknowable variables are bound to show up and ruin your day. Maybe I'm an idiot and have no idea what I'm talking about. In fact, I know that last one is true. Don't argue with me.

[Shadow]

Well, there is an idea along those lines that popped into my head a while ago. It would be a buttload of work, but if I thought I could interest a lot of people by doing it I could motivate myself to get on it ^_^. It's more or less along the lines of one of your ideas (semi-permanent upgrades) as well as providing variability across players even of the same race.

Half formed idea popped into my head, have a read:

The problem with cities as they are is that they are too easy to defend and their worker capacity breaks the new worker mechanics. Making them easier to take makes then not worth the investment, as does nerfing their output. Instead of this, Peace recently proposed that you could have a single, upgradeable city that you built up over time. I really like this idea, and I have a few ideas to flesh it out:

At first, everyone would start with one city, which would occupy 100 of their starting land, called their capitol, and they could choose one of three minor directions for their capitol - they could make it a farming centre, and industry centre, or a market centre (say). The bonus would provide a 5% boost in that area, or something along those lines.

Every 2000 turns used, the player would gain the option to upgrade their capitol. It would double in size (you would need the extra land to build it), and you could choose another one of three, slightly stronger boosts. Max turns used in a turbo round is about 13000, so you would have 6 such upgrades over the course of a month if you were fully active. Abilities in the city could include things like the option to put troops on leave or store food temporarily, get a larger bank, etc. All kinds of stuff to make networth a little bit more stable, since in 3.0 it is highly volatile. On the other hand, to achieve this you would have to stay dedicated over the whole round since upgrades are based on turn use.

The cost of upgrades would depend on both your net and the median game net, so that it would be robust against people dropping net just to upgrade.

Every turn, your city would decay by 0.1% - that is, after 1000 turns, it would revert to the previous stage. You could avoid this happening by repairing it regularly, which would incur costs which would increase as your capitol advances, etc.]

The capitol cannot be taken, except to kill you, ie, it is not part of your regular land pool. We could make an attack capitol mission, which would either damage the capitol, with the aim of causing it to revert a stage, or take it entirely if it is all  you have left, thus killing you.

This gives players a sense of achievement through the round, and something to build toward that is not just net. We could also introduce all sort of neat features into the  game and allow you to customize your warlord to some extent through the choice of options (with 3 choices per stage over 6 stages we get 729 possible end combinations). It would reward activity and hard work with the tools to get more from your activity over time, without allowing people to pull way ahead early by just dumping all their resources into the thing right off the bat.

Some ideas for advancements:

choice of boost to food, cash, or indy
choice of boosted worker recruit, reduced training death for troops, or reduced training death for leaders
choice of extra bank capacity, or a food bank, or reserves for your troops (FaF style)
choice of offense boost for a particular troop type, or extra land taken, or extra damage for missions
choice of defense boost for a particular troop type, or reduced mission damage, or reduced land loss
choice of faster healing, reduced losses when defending, or reduced losses when attacking
...lots of options. We could think of appropriate names for them.

Additionally, we could multiply defense power by (1+capitol land / total land), so that your defenses get more potent as you get closer to death, culminating in doubled defenses when you are defending your capitol. The current take city mission system could be easily co-opted as the damage capitol spell.

In short, this has a lot of potential to give players lasting goals to work towards without unbalancing things, since everyone will grow at a similar pace. It would obviously be quite a bit of work to code and such, but so much as been done lately that I am optimistic about the possibilities.

What do you guys think?

[Ungatt Trunn II]

I suppose it would rustle far too many jimmies for the random variable thing then?

[Shadow]

no, random variables are easy. It's just that they have predictable averages over turns, and 550 turns in a run is enough to hit pretty close to the average every time (read: it wont do much)

[Ungatt Trunn II]

Have extreme outliers. Like when doing food stuff, out of no where there's a drought let's say and you lose all your food because god hates you. Or maybe tell everyone to stop being such a nerd and calculating everything?

I'm trying very hard to be coherent here. That's a challenge in Spa. Oh and also there can be positive outliers like you find a a diamond the size of the moon and become fabulously rich. Very rare things that only happen maybe once every 20 runs who knows.

[Shadow]

ah, random events

yea, that's definitely doable.

[Ungatt Trunn II]

Okay, well couple that with the variables of an unknown quality and who knows. Whooooo knoooowwwsss. No one, that's who. That's the point after all.

[Shadow]

That's a good idea, and potentially not that difficult. I could even tweak it to be more likely to give more bad events to those doing well, and good events to those doing poorly, etc.

Ideas for events?

"Finding" cash/food/loyalty
being attacked and losing land to mysterious raiders
taking desertions at random
extra troops joining you

more ideas?

[Ungatt Trunn II]

"losing" cash/food/loyalty

Maybe random revolts? That'd be certainly interesting. One second you're a rat, next a wildcat no warning at all.

[Krowdon]

I like those ideas. I just want more people to come play the game.

[Shadow]

random revolts sound fun

[Krowdon]

For turbo or regular?

[Shadow]

I do all my code for 3.0, so turbo for now, reg once it gets there if people like it.

[Ungatt Trunn II]

Here's one that may make no sense at all.

When attacking a warlord, you may randomly get a thing that appears saying something like "A dissident within the enemy's ranks is offering you information for a price" and if you pay that price, which could be just money or food or a troop type or whatever, and you get espionage statistics. This would be a rare thing as well but could come in handy for particularly challenging foes.