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Living World Project

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Apr 6, 2009
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Map Name: Living World (Subject to change)
Creator(s): Nelisje85
Development Stage: Exploring possibilities

Gameplay:
-City Building/waging war
-Emphasis on Raids to loot recources from other players.
-First a Multiplayer map, if succesful perhaps a campaign


Features:

-Random Map creation
-Map evolves during play
-Trees grow and terain types change during play
-Harvesting system somewhat like Troll tribes
-Units are Born instead of trained, they age and die depending on race.
-4 Races, Ne,Hu,Or,Ud. perhaps more.
-Unique playstyle per race

I've posted this idea in the idea factory as beast and bumpkins map:
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/f462/beast-bumpkins-map-124194/

Thank you to:
Peterrab

I might have bitten of more than i can chew but id like to try and make this work, so i might be asking for help often. just hope i can actually finish this map.



Some years ago i ran into a game called Beasts and bumpkins, Id really like to know if it would be possible to make a map like this.

I don't think i currently posses the know-how to create anything like this. But i'd really like to try and make a campaign and/or multiplayer map based on this game with a warcraft twist to it. (after i complete my Hero-def map)

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Well, this is the idea as far as i currently have it, seeing enough difficuties apart from balancing to work out.

I think in order to have players attacking there should be bounties to be given for attacking/raiding. but bases should be sufficiently defended that they wont be wiped in a single orcish or undead raid. forcing players to balance out between raiding and gaining resources and keep building on a huge invading army

Main issues:
-Controlling birthrates and aging.

-Working out the undead population system

-Needing to know and keep track of the age of a huge amount of units.

-If undead have a hero, how does it revive and how do you defeat them

-Reproduction system, how to check if an adult male and female are in the same house and then chance them on having a child.

-Make orcs reproduce fast and be agressive without them becomming too powerful.

-A lot of things i havent considered yet.

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For those of you who dont know Beast & Bumpkins:

You start of with a few villagers (Male, Female, Boys and Girls), The kids grow up and become adults that are able to do work (Harvest, Construct, Learn proffesions, etc.), the adults grow old (and generally become useless) and die.
To keep your villagers alive and help them be productive longer you need to provide them with food (based on 4 seasons), water and housing.

You gain new villagers by have male and female villagers mate. and gain gold by selling them food and out of taxes.
To create soldiers you need to train your villagers at a cost at a barracks or other building like it.

this is what gameplay i'd like to recreate in a nutshell.
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Now for the warcraft twist:

The emphasis will need to be more on warring or on economy depending on the (warcraft)race of your choice. But I havent worked out the entire idea yet.
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Humans:

As usual they will be the "average" Race. Having a longer lifespan than the orcs but a less agressive playstyle, they have a little lower reproduction rate than the orcs forcing them to be a little more careful with their units


Night Elves:

Low birthrate, but the nightelves cant die of old age, the nightelves will grow slowly, but become a force to be reckoned with when left to grow to a reasonable size. When a Nigthelf dies it will become a wisp wich can harvest or be used to grow into ancients. Altough this will have Nightelves wanting to lose some units to create the slow but powerful ancients, they cant afford to lose to many of their normal Nightelves in the game because it would slow down their growth too much. i hope this will have the nightelves use a tactic having smaller raids to harrass the growth of the other races before pulling back and luring any pursuing army into their ancient-defended bases.


Orcs:

I hope that a High birthrate and a short life span will force orc players to keep attacking. their weakness will be their offensive based hometowns with lower economies that will force them to attack and raid for gold.


Undead:

Having NO births the undead will have to depend on killing other races to gain corpses wich they can turn into their own units.
I think i would like to have the undead race start off with a Powerful(Hero?) necromancer wich can turn corpses into undead units. the larger and more powerful undead units costing more corpses to create (I really need to work this system out).
Stopping the Undead from becomming too powerful, the Undead will get damaged when not on blight during then day. forcing the undead player to attack during the night and then recall his forces when daylight comes.

The Random terain system:

I'm not starting on this until im at least done with the human race. but the idea is to create the world based on random features. then grow it from there to resemble something natural.

I nthought this might be doable, to set a point X and create a preset landscape feature around it using triggers, then pick a point B, offset to point A by a certain distance and create a random preset feature there aswell.
After a set number of preset features are set, along with preset features for the different races starting locations, the world will grow (read: Trees, terain types etc.) and evolve a bit after wich random doodads and recources will be placed. until the map is ready to play

Will get back on this later
General Gameplay

The general idea is to have people build up their cities or towns, though this will take long and the game might get boring because of it, I'd Like to put an emphasis on raiding recources from other players to keep players on their toes and gameplay fast and action driven

The normal races will have to protect and raise their children, learning abilities along the way to either help further your empire or make them into powerful warriors or casters

Gameplay will differ between the different races wich i'll get back on later.
But I intend to make a difference between the times of year and day or night to bring in an extra sense of timing.
For example: human players should be scared of the night because of attacks from the undead players, vice versa the undead should time their attacks because of health loss and/or debuffs during the day.

Also, the terain should be something to take into consideration when attacking defending.
For example: I'd like to make night elves shadow meld when they're close to trees. Along with their ability to move quickly and set traps players should be careful of unexpected ambushes and such.

Time System

Here I'll try and explain the mechanics i intend to use for the age of units and the effect time will have on Gameplay.
If you see any problems i havent thought of or have better ideas please do tell me.

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Time

I intend to use time to grow "living things" such as units and trees. apart from most undead units all units should age, altough some wont be able to die of old age

Timeflow will be one of the following options:

Straight:
1 year is one day, one night. after the night has passed all units will age 1 year. The pro is that its easier, the con is that this way time will affect gameplay a little less and it will be less dynamic, all changes happening at once.

Seasons:
1 year is 4 seasons, 1 season is one day, one night. the pros is that time will affect gameplay more and will be more realistic.
In the spring spawning young animals trees and flowers growing, grassland expanding, time to plant crops etc.
In the summer the barren lands will grow
In the fall crops will be harvested
In winter snow might fall slowing movement

More ideas are needed and i need to work this out better
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Day and Night

During the day Humans and orcs will work normally but their workers will have to retreat to their houses during the night in order to regenerate any mana or HP they lost during the day(I'm still trying to think of something that might push human and orc units a little harder to hide in houses), and more notably have children(different races will have different birthrates) and hide from undead attacks.
Undead will receive damage for not being on blight during the day, forcing them to attack at night. I hope this will introduce a fun element that will cause non-undead players to fear nightfall.
I'm not yet sure what bonusses or debuffs nightelves will have during day and night.



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Unit Age

My Ideas for the aging system are as followed:

I was thinking of using either the unit custom value or the unit's level to show as age, I havent decided yet wich will be best.
If i use the levels to store age the only problem i see is that i wont be able to level up units to use as ranks. The pro's are that unit age is easily trackable and i can use the custom value to store the units desire for food, something i'd otherwise have to use health or mana for (wich I'm not a fan off since its conflicts with some other ideas i have).
If I use the custom value to store the units age the only pro is that i can use the Levels as different ranks in proffessions.

For old age i currently have 3 options as well.

1. When a unit hits a certain age depending on its type it will die.

2. After a unit hits a certain age it will have to pass a periodic dice roll or it will be killed.

3. After a unit hits a certain age it wont be able to increase strength and agility anymore and it's Strength and agility atributes will begin to decrease, when it hits a certain number (probably 1 or 0) the unit will die. (Old units will likely be killed off this way before they hit this anyway due to low HP)
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Production System

This is the biggest issue for me right now, since i can't figure out where to start on this.

The idea is:
Units harvest lumber, stone, iron and maybe some other recources. these recources need to be stored somewhere, and be taken to construction sites and workshops when they are needed.
Now this is something I think I CAN do but I'm clueless about how to automate this since you wouldnt want to issue multiple orders everytime you want something done.

If anyone can help me with this please share your ideas

Issues are:
-how to produce things using the items a units has to get from a storage area to for example a build site or forge
-How to make raiding lucrative without it being to easy to plunder the entire stores of a town (My idea here is to have wherehouses wich share stock and drop random recource items when hit, depending on what is in stock

Now the forge part wouldn't be to hard if it didnt had to have an option to automate production. and the build site thing has the same issue with some extra's my thought was to make the buildingsite have a "stash" when this stash is filled construction can begin. but i havent found a good way to go from the filled stash to begin construction that would feel natural. The other problem being is how to lay down the blueprints in the first place

If i cant figure it out i might simplify things a little and get back to it later.
Abilities

My idea for the abilities is to use a combination of dice rolls and requirements to learn skills.
For Example:
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Unit A has frostbolt lvl 3, whenever he casts frostbolt and his INT is above a set level he will roll a dice, if he passes he learns frost nova.
Unit B has more than twice the AGI of the unit thats attacking him, if he passes a dice roll he will learn evasion.
Unit C Has "Build lvl 1", when its controlling player has researched "advanced building" unit C will have a chance whenever he builds something to learn "Build lvl2"
Unit D Has lvl 2 Warstomp whenever he uses his ability he has a chance to raise it to lvl 3

maybe the same will go for 2 abilities for example aunit needs to have maxed out pillar of fire and earthquake to learn volcano.
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The same goes for raising Agi, Int and Str.

Example:
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Unit A has Str as primary attribute, when he attacks, he rolls a dice, when he passes his strength is raised by one.
Unit B has Int as primary attribute, when he attacks, he rolls a dice, when he passes his Int is raised by one.
Unit C is attacked and hit, he rolls a dice, when passed Str is raised by one
Unit D uses an ability, if its an "Strength" ability like Warstomp he will have a chance to raise Str (and/or Int if it uses mana) , If its an mages spell he will have a higher chance to raise Int same goes for Agility like abilities when used/triggered like evasion or windwalk
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I realize that i may have to make it harder to raise stats depending on how high a units stat already are, but maybe the Age factor can take care of that, an Ancient Night Elf being far more powerful than a much younger human unit


I still have to decide on/think of a system to hold the spells for different units.

Options:
1. Spells are only available to certain classes, max. 4 per class, when a unit changes its job it will lose all his abilities. (Easiest)
2. Spells are only available to certain classes, max. 4 per class, when a unit changes its job its learnt abilities will be stored in a spellbook, he will relearn them when he changes back to an old job or maybe they stay available but hidden in the spellbook making them harder to acces. (Not sure if this can be done, i have no experience with spellbooks, but I'm affraid it will limit the amount of spells available to any race.(with exception of undead))
3. Units can learn upto 4 spells during their life, and "write" them into a library, making it possible for other units who make the spells requirements to learn its first lvl at a library (doesnt seem Too hard to do, using multiple libraries or spellbooks in the libraries but limits the influence of classes (an innocent looking villager could cast a volcano)

I've thought of multiple variatons of the above but cant decide, like always good ideas are more than welcome here.

The Races.

I intend to do the first version with the four standard races (Human, Orcs, Night Elves and the Undead), But i will make race selection happen after the map has loaded, making it easier to add other races like tauren, trolls, naga or anything anyone can think of later. (I'm not yet sure if i will do this, i just like to keep my options open.)
The plus side of this being that i wont have to do all races at once but i can add them one after another, giving me the ability to playtest and work on other issues after i have completed the first race.

Like i stated before there will be some difference between the races, generating different types of gameplay.
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The races:
Humans:

The First race I will do because this will be the most Allround race and from this one it will be faster and easier t do the orcs and night elves, plus the undead will need another race to feed from.

Description:
The Humans will be an allround and industrious race focussing on production and, especially at the start of a game, defending their town(s).

Gameplay:
The Humans will be a city-builder race, focussing on expanding their city and production. Most of their units will have a defensive aspect to them, but in the late game their high surviability will enable them to do a good deal of damge to enemy cities before having to retreat.

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BUILDINGS:

Warehouse:
This is where goods are stored, all stores a player owns will be linked, if a store is attacked(or for example: hit 10 times) it will spill some of its goods.
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House:
This is where your villagers can sleep safely, restoring health and mana in privacy. most notably this is where your villagers can have children and are relatively safe to hide from attacks
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Library(optional):
This is where skills are taught, if a unit learns a new skill, not yet available in the library it can be stored here to be tought to other humans
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Church:
This is where priests and paladins can be trained, also the church will generate mana wich can be used to cast "wonders"
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Barracks:
This is where the human basic military units are trained.
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Arcane Sanctum:
This is where Human casters are trained

>>>>>>>More to come<<<<<<<<<<
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Units:


Need to go, will continue later





Will add more later, if you want more detail on something, or want me to describe something i havent added yet, ask me and i will add that to my post first
 
Last edited:
Level 3
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Apr 6, 2009
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please DO comment if you think if i should do something one way or another. I'm still not really sure about wich way to go on a lot of aspects
 
Level 3
Joined
Apr 6, 2009
Messages
41
Putting this one in the cooler as ive been asked to make a hero defense map.

If anyone feels like working on this map your free to do so.
 
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