sniggles

Hi gang

I'm sorry but i wasn't sure if this has been done yet or is on the to do list.......

I keep getting surprised by Grond!

Just worked out how to get the AI to globally anounce that he has been created (to forewarn you)

Not too difficult to code.

Has this already been addressed or should i just post the code here in my humble effort to help you guys out.

Really do need some indication that Grond is on the way.

Again - apologies if this has already been covered.

OKAY - more ideas

Thanks to suggestions from ' guest ' i may expand the economy system slightly or make it more complex if you like.

Originally i wanted to make money harder to accumulate in the early game and you can easily achieve this by lowering farm incomes from 30 to 15 or even 10.

The new idea is to also make us care about the level or promotion status of our resource buildings so it is a sort of mini worry or challenge in the early phase of the game when you are setting up your base and getting your economy going.

To achieve this is not too difficult and all the macros (settings) are already in the water (gamedata) file.

A typical vanilla farm in the game has......


Income - 30

Experience needed to reach level 2 - 1200
Level 2 bonus production multiplier - 1.25

Experience needed to reach level 3 - 2700
Level 3 bonus production multiplier - 1.5


The new settings i am testing at the moment are.......


Income - 10

Experience needed to reach level 2 - 2400 (double - but could try 1800 if you are impatient)
Level 2 bonus production multiplier - 1.5

Experience needed to reach level 3 - 5400 (again double or try 4000)
Level 3 bonus production multiplier - 2.0


You can see from the stats that it now takes longer (double the experience needed) to reaach level 2 and 3 but the production output is higher when our farms get promoted.

This means the player is still struggling with money management and hard financial decisions early in the game and for longer (when he is only getting 10 income per farm) but if he manages to look after his farms (or at least a small group of them) he will reap the rewards in mid to late game and have adequate to good money for his plans.

In early testing it looks good and it really hurts now if the AI takes out too many of your promoted resource buildings.

This is probably as complex as we should go with the economy system because this game is very hectic and action orientated in mid to late game and as i have mentioned befroe - it is not settlers or civilisation.

Let me know what you guys think.

Thanks for all your excellent ideas guys.

Regardless of how long or short these adjustments will make our skirmish battles the more i test out the changes i can see that we should definetely lower the income from farms and the 'delay between shots' to some extent.

It may not be necessary to use my extreme settings but if i can win a skirmish battle with farms set on a third then we do need to drop the income by some amount.

You could say that my initial settings of 10 for farm income and 1 to 2 seconds for delay between shots would be classed as very hard and lead to loooong epic skirmish battles.

Therefore if you use 15 for farm income and say 500 milli seconds to 1 second for delay between shots (hereafter now abbreviated to 'DBS') - this would represent a medium difficulty and lead to average length skirmish battles.

You get my drift.

What the SEE team have to decide is what would be a good compromise - how long should a skirmish battle last.

That's like asking how long is a piece of string - actually if anyone uses that old proverb on you just say - twice the distance from the ends to the middle - LOL - SORRY - my sense of humor is crapp.

About the idea to have a more complex economy system - very interesting - BUT - we mustn't forget that this is not Settlers or Civilisation. The gameplay is pretty fast and fluid really (even though it has been slowed down a lot with SEE) - and i don't think a really complex farm system is worth the efort to mod.

Maybe farms could be a bit more involving like someone suggested whereby there production and 'value' is very low at level 1 but a lot more at level 3 and it takes a lot longer to reach these levels. In other words a more extreme version of what the game already uses.

Would make resource buildings more valuable when they reach level 3 and i may actually care if they get destroyed at this level! At the moment - farms promote so fast i just plonk them all over the place and forget about them - interesting - i may play around with there production values and do some testing.

May even be worth building walls around a group of farms you want to level up and protect!

Remeber - MODDING - is addictive - just because we can mod something doesn't mean we should!

Anyway - back to my testing.