On Sep 13, 2005, at 12:25 AM, Andrew Sayers wrote:
The primary purpose of fruit should be to increase/decrease various
skills based on some complex rules, which encourage trade. I've got a
complete system worked out that would do this, but it's still just an
idea - I'd love to hear different ways of doing the same thing.
Food could be classified along two axes, "type"
(animal/mineral/vegetable) and "origin" (tree/ground/sea). Each type
could correspond to a weakness, and each origin to a strength:
Animal: makes you slower
Mineral: makes you eat more
Vegetable: reduces armour
Tree: makes you faster
Ground: makes you eat less
Sea: increases armour
So for example, eating a vegetable from a tree would make you more
vulnerable but faster, while eating an animal from the sea would make
you slower but better armoured. The strengths and weaknesses could be
weighted so that eating both would make you faster and better armoured,
rather than just canceling out. It might also be better to leave out
the contradictory combinations (e.g. tree animal) so we don't get
"super
foods" with no weaknesses.
To make things a bit clearer (for those of you with fixed-width fonts
at
least), here's a grid of possible foods:
Animal Mineral Vegetable
Tree honey orange*
Ground worm potato
Sea salmon salt
Since most teams would be unable to get at all types of resource, trade
would be very useful - especially between teams whose local foods have
opposing properties.
In light of our recent game in which we discovered trade was completely
useless in all situations, ( :P ) I've come up with an alternative
model. It's somewhat more intrusive than the above, but it would
promote trade more, as well as expansion, and allow somewhat more
interesting maps, I anticipate.
Basically, there would be many resources, rather more than our current
4. None would be absolutely necessary, but all would be quite useful to
have. Thus, you'd want to trade, and you'd want to expand your
settlement to reach other resources you don't have.
For example, there might be three kinds of food: One that makes you
tougher, one that makes you faster, and one that makes you eat less. I
don't like the penalties because then if you had more kind of food,
they'd just counteract and make you have no benefits either (removing
any usefulness in variety.) On the other hand, if globs eat one of each
food, and one increases their armor, one their speed, and one their
stamina[1], then you'll be a lot more powerful than an opponent whose
globs eat only the food that makes them faster.
It would be a rather flat and not too effective system if it did not
extend beyond food, though. I'd suggest around 5 building materials,
for which each building takes one or two, possibly with more at higher
levels. Necessarially, no important function would be limited to
players who can access one particular resource: You can build inns with
wood, but to prevent wood from being overly influential, you can also
build some other kind of food-building with clay, or stone, or
something.
Of course, Inns would still be the best food-building. It's just that
they wouldn't be the ONLY food-building. You'd want to seize or trade
for Wood ASAP if you didn't have any to begin with, to build your Inns.
However, a map designer could place a patch of wood in the center as
the ONLY wood on the map, and people who didn't get there in time
wouldn't starve to death.
The big problem with this is that it would take more buildings to be
designed, more graphics to be made... Maybe instead of buildings
requiring a certain resource, they could be treated like globs with
food: Certain resources help the buildings more in certain ways. Wood
makes the building serve globs faster, stone gives it more armor, and
algae, I don't know, gives it more oomph? Of course, the benefits would
max out at about half of the building's cost, so that a player wouldn't
build an inn all with wood when stone is available, so that having more
resources is actually useful. Different buildings would still benefit
more from different resources (some benefiting none, like building
towers out of wood) so it would generate variety.
Hmm, after all that, the idea is less complex than I thought: Ditch
fruit, split wheat in three, and make the kinds of food/materials given
to globs/buildings effect those things' performance.
[1] We need a way to refer to it other than "Makes them eat less" all
over the place. Besides, "stamina" is a good word for the amount of
time you can go in one stretch.
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