Realm of Wonder - City Simulator

[gurra_geban]

Renamed the map to: Dark Hearts!

Hellu guise.
Thought i'd post about my current project to get some fresh thoughts on it.

In Realm of Wonder you play the leader of a group of humans, settling an uncharted territory. So the first thing you do is choose a good area to build your hall, and then your settler will become a hero unit which is then your leader.

The leader is customisable, meaning you get to choose his class and 2 skill packs (with 4 skills in each) for him to use. When you have chosen these packs your villagers pop up along with a scout and an engineer, and now you can start building your town.

Guiding your people is hard, and there are lots of management issues like battling the plague, getting your population to grow, gathering food and so on. You will have to trade with other players to get a resource vital for advancing the techtree, Wares. Luckily your villagers all pay taxes every 120 seconds. The goal for any leader is to create a glorious city, in which the case he wins the game.

But then there is a twist.....

One (or maybe two) of the settlers in this area is a "bad guy", who controls another evil team on the side and has easy access to vile monsters and beasts. This settler is bent on dominating this area through destroying the other towns and killing their leaders (yes like werewolf ^^). This "bad guy" can only be identified by looking upon him, as his town is completely ordinary. Or by noticing that the soldiers of the town doesn't fight the evil monsters he in secrecy control...


Features this far
-14 New Structures to Build
-24 New Upgrades to Research
-35 New Units to Train
-4 Leader types and 1 Bad Guy (Dracula... yesyes vampire )
-3 Different capturable types of "Sites", which are in random places of the map for every game.
-3 Types of "Site Mercernaries" which spawn for the owner of the Site
-Battle the plague amoung your people with hospitals and wells
-Supply housing for your villagers, and villagers to your houses
-Get your women pregnant by using the mens "Man" aura (XD)
-Trade with other players by land or sea
-Keep your people content with your rule, or face rebellion
-Provide food for your people by breeding pigs, fishing or hunting
-Balance your Income vs your Upkeep to get a steady tax revenue
-You can now contruct fishing ships to scour the sea for fish, and return to the harbour when they have some to share, adds a whole deal of atmosphere
-Added a description and background story in the loading screen
-Added a bitchin cinematic tutorial! Good for the bound to be newbies ^^
-Added religion, priests, holy power vs unholy power and "the blessed one"
-Added decorative details
-Added the "Final Bastion" for the bad guys. If their human hall is destroyed they must create a final bastion in 5 minutes. If the final bastion is destroyed, the bad guy is defeated!
-Victory conditions are changed and finished!

The filesize is at 3 mb already gotta have to weed out some stuff perhaps ^^

Screens

Leader being chased at nightfall

Mid-sized human town

No-mans land between undead and a human town

A pig farm with pigs roaming about

 

[Vengeancekael]

So how far have you gotten with this?

 

[gohan43]

sounds pretty cool....and why worry about 3mb when you still have 5mb to spare : )

 

[Dr. House]

because maps with lower file sized gets dld more. if seen it on epicwar maps of 200mb gets downloaded like 200times in 10min or so

 

[gohan43]

i dont think someone would download a 200mb lol but my point is that he still has room for other stuff and how far into this project are you?

 

[gurra_geban]

Pretty far, but iv'e got ways to go... The thing right now is just mashing in alot of features as i want managing the city itself should be more important and interesting than for example the micro of your troops in a battle, and thats mostly why im posting about it here, to get fresh ideas...

My latest addition was a Tavern structure, which has 5% chance to hold a feast every 20 seconds, which then costs 1 Ware (special resource, which is only gotten by trading). Then feast increases happyness, and has a chance to remove the "angry" buff.

Im thinking of making temple structures for worshipping gods and dieties for slight bonuses, but i rly don't know which bonuses shoud come of that...

Any suggestions for structures or features would be appreciated... Have in mid that all players play the human race, and there is no wc3 style magic involved, more like large scale magic rituals and stuff (no spells costing mana with 3 secs cd ^.-)

 

[Handycombinder]

Sounds nice enough

 

[gurra_geban]

It's really taking form now!

I've gone through most of the features in the game now and fixed all bugs i've seen ^^ "probably" bug-free for now, and alot better interface and balance... Still hard as hell to manage your town, but hopefully players will find it interesting enough to try again, and get a hang of it all.

I kinda suck at terraining, sad to say I just don't have the patience for it... I've made some "areas". A forest, which looks good, some generic plains and shores, which are okish and a mountain which looks like crap...

If anyone would like to do the terrain for a diverse landscape it would be nice. The landscape would be of epic size, and would have to be within the frames required for the gameplay. Otherwise any terrainer interested would have free hands!

 

[DocDude]

sounds like a pretty cool idea

but i myself would prefer if it would be a more open game where there are no "Bad guys" but everyone can use monsters and trickery to fail the other palyers and everyone can win by servel conditions (being the last one alive or having a wonder city). people can seek an hidden artifect that transformes their leader into a vampire or some other evil being

and remember that the new file size limit with 1.24 patch is 8 mb, so you dont have to cut off stuff.

 

[gurra_geban]

8mb, is that soo? (YES!)

i believe an open game like that would take too much time for the average b.net player to like, and i want some sort of diplomacy to be involved, as well as the intrigues from having hidden "bad guys" in the game...

think lan gaming, with 8 of your pals around all trying to trick eachother and form alliances with who they think is a good guy, and throwing accusations left and right... fukken priceless =D

although i might make a "free play" game mode, which i've already thought of actually, the standard game mode goes first...

tried it out with some friends on a private game on b.net today... at first, pigs didn't breed for all players (i made a slight miss ), but that was quickly fixed and then things went smoothly... it has a high learning curve, but it seemed as if they like it though

 

[DocDude]

you should atleast have a number of mods, cuz there are tons of "who's the bad guy?" maps out there.

and if you'll do the free play in a smart way you can still make tons of bluffing and suspicion. you make one (computer) player as an mercenry player, which all humen players can pay him to attack someone or something, then people will start "WTF? did you send it?! we're allice!" "no it was him!" and funny stuff XD

 

[gurra_geban]

yeah, that gamplay is kinda awesome! i did that once but with tribals and poor triggering, i probably would do it alot better now...
and yeah, i know the "whos the bad guy" isn't the most original idea, but this map will bring it to a whole new level, trust me ^.- the techtree is already quite massive =D

i was thinking of, for the lulz making an "epic event" mode... you know you are playing the mode but not what event will occurr, and then BAM! All villagers on the entire map become zombies, or dragons invade or whatever ^^

 

[DocDude]

OR (that's a big or of someone who just got an idea XD)
you can make it random.

i mean there is a chance that there is one bad guy, two bad guys or non at all, people will freak out XD

anyway dont get yourself overwhelmd, start with the basic things and mod and only then make the others or you'll never finish XD

 

[gurra_geban]

^^
haha, yeah actually ive made a possibility of up to 3 bad guys, randomly =) the only cap of the amount of bad guys is the amount of players (there can only be 1 bad guy for every 2 players)... although there is always 1 bad guy, so thats kinda what the standard mode is about.

but having 3 bad guys on 6 players would be kinda interesting... draculas undead minions relentlessly attacking you during the night, while cultists try to awaken cthulu from the sea and some other bad guy (not thought of) does some other evil shit to you ^^ insanity and intesity is ensured

 

[gurra_geban]

Sorry for double post, but i gotta update with an alpha battle report.

Tested it with 5 guys on b.net, of which one was my m8 on ts. Started out good, all new ppl ran the tutorial and kinda understood it.

My mate got randomed into dracula, and hes played as him when we tested 3 times before so he knew what it was all about. He started building an undead bastion near my and another good guys base...

I held out good at first but more and more ud kept coming every night until i was brought to my knees. Luckily, the gnomish laboratory i payed off to join me produced a steam tank the same night which churned through the undead after a long batte, but many of my villagers were dead and no gold was coming in, so i was at a dead end...

Then, all of a sudden another player started sending me gold, and my ally also fighting the undead near his own base fought a good fight, and turned the tide with a catapult he managed to produce. I managed to get the upper hand of draculas undead minions but couldnät kill his base due to the strong towers.

The next day tribals started attacking from the south, catching me off guard and killing many of my villagers and razing my food sources so again my town was brought to it's knees. People were starving, there was plague and riots from time to time. Now i called for aid, and people were sending their troops, as well as the catapult used for the other undead hive.

A few nights later my tank is destroyed and my leader hides in a burning shelter when daylight comes, lucky me undead can't take daylight and are destroyed. Now help arrives in the form of 12 spearmen and some archers, right after some axemen arrive from another ally and when night comes the catapult is unloaded at the river nearby.

The fight that night was quick, with that many soldiers. and i could hear my m8 on ts not sounding very happy.

A few nights pass and the undead bastion lies in ruins, dracula escaped but peace has been restored!


This game was utterly epic, until draculas minions wasn't strong enough to do anything, and he was to fast and strong to kill, so it turned into an eternity game. Gonna fix that, but the replay is purely awesome

 

[TheHunterKiller]

Sounds interesting, though some screenshots would be nice.

 

[gurra_geban]

As requested got a few screens up! Have in mind the terrain isn't completed by far... Hugget Sukker is currently working on it.

The screens are from the recent match!

 

[Hugget Sukker]

I like seeing those glimpses of real play now. Gives a much better impression of it

I'd love to try it on b.net at some time. You'd like to keep a low file size, right? It's just that I had thought of importing a few custom trees maybe. That could really flavour it up. But I can make it just fine with only War3 doodads also.

 

[gurra_geban]

import some new!

sure id like to keep down the filesize, but atmosphere goes first!
If u got msn or anything u should sendme a pm, so i can add you... Makes it easier for u to join when i host it ^.-

 

[gurra_geban]

Battle report 2

Game started good, everybody ran the tutorial but then ppl started leaving -.-
One of my m8es disconnected and that was that, 2 players left where one was the high priest of cthulhu and the other was me

Although we got to test all of the abilities of Venger Satanis high priest of cthulhu, which seemed to be bug free at least, and it was nice to be able to host a full game (even though this game was just 6 players) as there was enough bad guys to go around.

All and all it was a bg, but i'm awating the terrain now so i can upload the beta version here at the hive and have some real interesting games hopefully. The gameplay as it is now is hard like hell with a high learning curve, but when you get the hang of things it's really a fun game. But you must expect to die from managing your own city at least twice before "mastering" that part.

The option to make a "fresh start" when you get down to 0 population really helps the new players to explore the city management features. Gonna keep improving the tutorial without adding time to it and figuring out new ways to make the game easier for noobs.