UNDER DEVELOPMENT: This list should be better formatted for reading comprehensibility.
UNDER DEVELOPMENT: I am certain that many features that should be listed were forgotten.
CORE: At map initialization the game should run a map generating script, capable of placing forests, mountains, natural resources and other terrain features on a pre-made landmass map with 3 different regions defined by their climate. These map features should be somewhat unevenly placed to give different strategical advantages to different parts of the map.
CORE: the script should be able to place different resources in coherent, sane places.
BLOAT: Eventually I want the game to be capable of creating new landmasses and navigable oceans on initially empty maps
CORE: The game should create a reasonable number of neutral cities. Neutral cities will be depicted as conglomerations of small buildings. Selecting one of those buildings would select the city unit, a dummy, invisible unit, whose selection circle would represent the city size. It is through this unit’s abilities that the players interact with the city.
CORE: Cities can belong to four civilizations, northern, inspired by celts and vikings, eastern, inspired by sumeria and other early middle eastern civilizations, western, inspired by greece and rome, and southern, inspired by egypt and nubia. Civilizations differ only in aesthetics, location and language.
CORE: Cities should have civilization appropriate randomly picked names.
CORE: Cities should have a loyalty value towards every faction. This value can be either positive or negative, a negative value would be designated as resistance. At the start of the game, all cities except players’ starting cities should be neutral, having a preset resistance value towards every player.
CORE: Players should be able to conquer these cities through military action. Attacks done against cities influence their loyalty value towards 0, meaning that an enemy city will decrease its resistance towards the attacker, and decrease its loyalty towards the owner.
BLOAT: There should be pacific ways of converting a city; bribing their governors, servicing them, spreading propaganda, inciting revolts and buying them from other players.
BLOAT:a city should be able to give “quests”, and should be able to notice when a player does it a service: like killing the marauders that were raiding it
CORE: For a player to be able to interact with a city he should first have control of it. Cities will be controlled by the player they are most loyal to, or if it’s loyalty is close to zero towards every player, it will be given control to the highest ranking military commander in its vicinity. If a higher ranking commander arrives and the previous commander is still within city grounds it will remain in the first commander’s control until he leaves the city’s vicinity
CORE: Military commanders should be able to build fortifications within city grounds. Fortifications would increase the efficiency of the military commander in keeping the order within city grounds, and lessen the expenses of maintaining the army on the field. Fortifications are tiered: the first fortification a commander can build is a camp that can be upgraded to a barracks, then a fort, then to more impressive fortresses
CORE: Cities should be distributed across the map with a density influenced by the environment of the region in which they are placed. Plains and coastal regions should have medium frequent, medium population cities. Forest lands should have frequent, low population cities, desert lands should be bare of cities except in fertile regions by oasis or riversides, where cities should be very populated
CORE: Cities should have different number of inhabitants. The inhabitants of cities are abstracted and are represent as numbers. They can be distributed by players through several fields.
CORE:peasants: food is required to feed every inhabitant, or the population growth goes negative. Food production is influenced by the number of peasants plus any environmental factors on the region the city stands.
CORE:workforce: workers producing goods produce gold and increase the speed in which empire buildings and troops are produced, as well as the rate at which the infrastructure increases. Infrastructure represents housing as well as sanitary and civic installations; it influences population growth and loyalty\morale.
CORE:merchants: large enough cities can employ merchants to multiply the city’s gold production, and (bloat)bring a little scientific advancement.
CORE:military personnel: large enough cities can afford the maintenance of a militia and some military infrastructures. It requires some gold, and costs the town some productivity, but towns properly equipped with military infrastructure and personnel are able to commission troops faster and possess a standing army they can send out in case of attack and helps in keeping your subjects loyal
BLOAT:Scientific research: through the sacrifice of considerable sums of gold and productivity, alchemists, engineers and philosophers will increase the chances of technological breakthroughs that can improve many aspects, including military performance, population growth rate, etc.
CORE:a player should be able to recruit soldiers from cities he controls.
CORE: a city not equipped with a barracks or higher tier of military infrastructure can only recruit peasant levy. these have no training and are poorly equipped. They perform badly in combat and have low morale, but are cheap to maintain.
BLOAT:Recruiting peasant levy from a city lowers the city’s loyalty.
BLOAT:Possessing a great number of peasant levy relative to your empire’s population lowers loyalty across the empire.
BLOAT:Possessing a great number of peasant levy relative to the number of professional soldiers lowers the empire’s reputation.
CORE: a city equipped with a barracks or higher tier of military infrastructure should be able to recruit professional soldiers. Professional soldiers are better equipped and trained, and perform much better than peasant levy in every sense, but take time to train and are expensive to maintain.
BLOAT: a city equipped with a military academy properly maintained by military personnel allows a city to produce highly trained and specialist soldiers that benefit more from the tactical capabilities of skilled commanders.
CORE:Possessing a high number of these elite soldiers increases the empire’s reputation.
CORE: Like soldiers, a player should be able to recruit commanders from cities. Commanders should only be recruit able in cities with a somewhat high loyalty.
CORE:Commanders should have a tactician skill that increases with every battle, won or lost, and increases attack and defense of troops under his command.
CORE:Commanders should have a reputation value that increases with every battle won and is halved with every battle lost. Reputation influences both friendly and enemy troop morale.
CORE:Commanders should have an administrator skill that increases with time spent controlling cities. It increases productivity of the city under its control.
BLOAT: Commanders should belong to abstracted noble families associated with the city, and should bear surnames relative to that house.
BLOAT:Noble families should change every time a city is conquered.
BLOAT:Noble families should have a loyalty value of their own and one should be able to convert them, and should need to please these noble families to maintain their loyalty.
CORE:players should be able to define which weapons and armor its troops should wear on a city to city basis.
CORE:different equipments should have different characteristics and weight, reducing a unit’s walking speed, as well as different training times.
CORE:swords, axes and spears should be among the possible weapons, along with bigger, two handed versions
CORE:swords are fast and lethal against lightly armored opponents. They’re easily trainable, but still benefit from higher forms of training
CORE:Large swords are slow, but even more lethal, perform well against armored opponents, and can cut through spears disarming enemy spearmen ranks. They can’t be used with shields and aren’t very useful at parrying. They require great training time.
CORE:axes and maces are cheap and dangerous, even to heavily armored soldiers. They are simple weapons, easy to master, but not very versatile
CORE:large axes are refurbished woodcutter tools. They’re perfectly capable of cleaving a shield in half and caving in the steel helmet of an elite soldier with a single swing, but are slow and unwieldy, can’t be used with shields, and aren’t very useful at parying. They require little training to learn everything a soldier needs to know about it.
CORE:spears range from simple sharp sticks to... metal tipped sharp sticks? They’re quite simple to use, really, just poke them with the pointy end. Useful in formations, these weapons benefit more from a commander's ranks in the tactician skill. It’s easy to train soldiers into passable spearmen, but they benefit greatly from an elite training
CORE:sarissas are longer sharp sticks. It’s the same really, but you can poke them from afar, making them useful to keep the enemies at bay. They benefit even more from elite training and a commander tactician skill, being seriously gimped without it but devastating under a proper tactician. They require a little more training to be usable. They’re heavy and cumbersome, so be prepared to defend sarissa spearmen ranks against skirmishers.
CORE:ranged weapons require some more serious training but are cheap to maintain. Ranged weapon soldiers have limited ammo and are useless in close combat, so they tend to retreat early and live longer than the average soldier.
CORE:javelins are sharp sticks that you throw, pointy end first, at the incoming hordes of enemy soldiers that are charging your way. They don’t fly very far, and are heavy enough that you can’t carry that many, but are cheap and lethal, with some armor penetrating power that arrows tend to lack and some extra tissue damage as well. Using them well requires some training, but if you give enough of them to unskilled hands you’re likely to score some hits too.
CORE:bows range from simple, cheap weapons that you produce en masse and equip hordes of peasants with, to expensive composite pieces of masterful handcraft and deadly accuracy. Learning to use them isn’t easy, though, and mastering them is a lifetime achievement. Elite Sharpshooters… even the name sounds like poetry to a tactician. They’re expensive to produce and extremely useful, as well as extremely fragile, take good care of them
BLOAT:crossbows. The great equalizer, these weapons are the instant version of a sharpshooter: just add peasant and stir. They’re quick to master, deadly, very accurate, and most of all, armor piercing, but they are expensive to produce and with a slow rate of fire. They require some technological sophistication to be produced
CORE:There should be 4 classes of armor; none, light, medium and heavy.
CORE:light armor uses leather and other relatively cheap and resistant materials to reduce damage done to soldiers. It’s better than nothing, but it isn’t especially effective against most weapons, still, it is light and versatile
CORE:medium armor uses metal components arranged in a malleable mesh like maille or scale armor to complement and reinforce a suit of medium armor. It is more expensive and certainly heavier, but it offers the most protection for the least encumbrance
CORE:heavy armor combines medium armor with a breastplate and other solid metal components, it is very expensive and heavy, and due to it’s component’s rigidity it severely limits movement for the untrained soldier, but it is virtually impenetrable to arrows and swords
CORE:helmets and caps should be available. Caps offer less coverage and protection, but full helmets limit line of sight and ranged accuracy
CORE:There should be two categories of shields, and at least two different aesthetic options for them
CORE:regular shields provide some protection against missiles and during melee combat, but require the use of one hand, making them impossible to use with two handed weapons
CORE:formation shields are larger versions of the regular shield. Large enough to protect both the wearer and his left companion, they offer excellent protection against missile weapons, and because they attach to the forearm instead of being held in one hand, they can be used with long spears that require both hands to wield. Heavy and cumbersome though, these shields make the wearer march slowly, and a skilled tactician as well as elite training is required to benefit from the formation shield’s advantages
BLOAT:Horses!
BLOAT:War machines like catapults, trebuchets, siege towers, siege rams and ballistas should become available with some technological advances.
