Sim City-State

[richy]

I figured I’d write down some of the ideas I had for the Sim City-State game, and see what people think. I've already started writing the attributes and costs of some buildings and units, but there will definitely be some balancing issues to work out later on.

Game Overview
Each player runs a city. The goal is to build the biggest, most powerful city.

There is no start and no end. Players can join in and start a new city at any time. Likewise, players can lose their cities to wars at any time.

Gameplay
There are three basic resources (food, wood and stone) and three special resources (horses, iron and gems/pearls). Depending on which terrain your city is on, you will generate each turn a different amount of basic resources and up to one special resource.

In addition to this, there are two commodities, gold and prestige. Gold is obtained through taxation (i.e. in function of your city’s population) and prestige is obtained from defeating monsters and building Wonders.

Resources and gold are used to build military units, city buildings, and world wonders. Military units are used to defend your city or go on the offensive. Buildings give you some variable bonus. World wonders give you a major boost of prestige, but they are very expensive and only one of each can be built at any time (if a city with a wonder is destroyed, the wonder can be rebuilt by another player).

Prestige helps in boosting your city’s standing. More prestigious cities will attract more people, and grow faster.

Military units allow you to defend your cities against attacks. You might be attacked by a random monster, or by another player who’s after your city’s resources. If you build a large enough army, you can decide to go on the offensive, attacking monsters or players yourself.

Player interactions
Since no city can produce all resources, players have to trade with each other. You can trade resources and military units.

If you’re not big on trade, you can conquer other cities and steal their resources.

I might add some kind of national politics system, kind of like the UN. All cities would vote on a Capital City, which would get some kind of bonus. There might be votes on national resolutions as well, which will give players bonuses or penalties for obeying or disobeying them.

City politics
I haven’t worked out that aspect either, but I would like there to be some kind of city management aspect. Not the straightforward Civilization way of clicking to pick a government system, but rather by asking the player to make policy decisions on randomly-generated issues and extrapolating the resulting government system from that.

[tomanta]

Seems like a good start, I'm just not sure about the chance of completely loosing your city. Loose resources/being set back, perhaps. There are a few ways it could work, though - important things would be restrictions on who can attack (you don't want a super-powerful player conquering all the newbies) and alliances where a large, powerful city can offer protection to a smaller one and get tribute in return.

[richy]

I don't like the idea of hard-coding restrictions on whom to attack. There should be a gameplay reason for super-powerful players to spare newbies.

Newbies will start with some military units, so they won't be completely helpless. And conquering them simply won't be profitable: you'll need to expand your military units (as defenders will have the advantage, as in Risk for example) and you won't gain much (as the newbies won't have much you can take as spoils of war). Do it too often and you'll waste your whole army. Your city will be defenceless and at the mercy of other players.

I definitely agree with the tribute-for-protection alliance idea though.

[Peterdevore]

Sounds a lot like Travian. In what ways will your game be different?

I assume you want to make it a browser based game?

[richy]

I'd never heard of Travian before today.

There are certainly similarities. But I guess key differences include the fact that my game doesn't have an end game (it goes on forever), it has a political aspect as well (both within the city and at the national level), there are more resources (the link you provided doesn't list them, but judging from the picture there are only four resources while my game will have six) and consequently I would expect a lot more variety in units and buildings, and there are outside enemies (random monsters, so you're not only attacked by rational players but also by random events).

Your site does raise an interesting point - it's possible for a player to create several villages and use a main city to plunder them for resources. I'll need to find a way to protect against that. Hopefully our game server will only allow one account per email address, and take care of the problem.

[Nerissa]

richy said:

...Hopefully our game server will only allow one account per email address, and take care of the problem.

Make sure you get this into the platform / lobby thread, it's something we're going to have to keep in mind there.

[peterdevore]

Not having an end game makes it harder to balance. You could end up with alliances or even single players that are so powerful nobody dares challenging them. Having NPC attacks or disasters strike large towns/players could be used to counter that though.

Generic balancing rant follows

Lots of units and resources would also make the game harder to balance. Most massively multiplayer games (especially browser based ones) have best practice guides you have to follow in order to seriously compete. Any of the following in a guide doesn't necessarily mean it's unbalanced, just that it's balanced for a playstyle I don't like:

• Do the following in exactly this order. This will take more than 2 hours of play.
  
• Reroll or recreate your character/town until you start with a resource/attribute you have to have.
  
• In order to get the most gold/resources/XP you have to limit yourself to the following game areas/research choices/skill tree.
  

If certain options within your game are unbalanced, players will naturally look for the best way to exploit that. By doing that they actually rebalance the game for themselves, creating a new kind of game within your game that is just a fraction of possible choices or a lot more tedious.

The problem is that if you don't reward powergamers somehow, they will vocally declare your game to suck and alienate new players. Since we're not making a commercial product, please keep in mind that you can safely say 'to hell with the powergamer'.

Generic balancing rant ends

I'm still not sure on what scale you are planning the game. Do you want to make it massive or limit your server to maybe 100 players or 32? Smaller scale might be a lot easier to build and balance. It also enables you to use mechanics that are more resource intensive, something like weather simulation or terraforming maybe?

[Nerissa]

ege02 pretty chill ege02's Avatar ege02 is offline Old 03-21-2008, 05:05 PM

How about an RPG-Strategy game where you start from scratch and build a house, a village, a town, a city, and eventually a nation, with the help - or hindrance - of other players? Sort of like Settlers (not Catan, but the video game), but with an emphasis on fantasy RPG elements like monsters and magic.

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[richy]

peterdevore said:

Not having an end game makes it harder to balance. You could end up with alliances or even single players that are so powerful nobody dares challenging them. Having NPC attacks or disasters strike large towns/players could be used to counter that though.

That's a good idea. That would prevent a lot of problems I've been trying to tackle, like the aforementioned need for a gameplay reason to keep more powerful players from praying on weaker ones (you won't do this if you need to keep your army to protect against a likely Dragon attack) and the need to keep players interested in the game after they maxed out their cities (on-going campaigns against monsters could help).

peterdevore said:

I'm still not sure on what scale you are planning the game. Do you want to make it massive or limit your server to maybe 100 players or 32? Smaller scale might be a lot easier to build and balance. It also enables you to use mechanics that are more resource intensive, something like weather simulation or terraforming maybe?

I'm thinking massive. A D&D nation with each forumer leading his own city to success or destruction, over and over.

There won't be terraforming. It will be possible to build buildings that can improve resource production though.

No weather simulation. There won't be real-time events. If weather is included, it will be as a random event ("This turn, a tornado struck your city, killed X people and destroyed building Y"). I hadn't thought of putting in this kind of random events, but I guess they could make things more interesting (if they are rare - too often and they'll just make the game random).

[peterdevore]

Ooh I have a great idea. You could make a karma system. If you attack players with a force way outnumbering theirs, your karma goes down. If you attack players with karma below a certain level, your karma goes up regardless of overpowering forces.

Low karma could increase the likelihood of disasters or make your citizens unhappy. Or you might choose to only have positive effects of high karma. This will only be workable if the relative strength of forces is known to players in game though, and I can imagine reasons to hide that.

This article is a good read on how game mechanics can have a positive social effect in multiplayer games. (BTW, if you block javascript with something like NoScript, you can read Gamasutra articles without having to log in)

[richy]

Well the game already has six resources, two commodities (gold and prestige) and two political dimensions. I don't want to add more, lest it becomes too complex to balance or play.

But it's still a good idea. I could integrate your idea as part of the prestige. The prestige is how glorious your city is; you increase it by building palaces and statues and world wonders, and by defeating NPC monsters. I could see adding a mechanism to compute the prestige of attacking another player, which would be function of both players' relative military force. So if the attacking player is way stronger than the defending player, the attacker loses prestige while the defender (if he wins) gains prestige.

[andrewjay]

This is also similar to another game I started playing a few days ago - Ikariamp

It's pretty fun - you play as Greek city-states on an archipelago of islands.

Your idea of prestige kind of fits in well too - settlements on the same island share resources, and share the costs of upgrading them. It keep track of how much you have contributed, so you can see who has been helping out and who hasn't. There's no real benefit from having given the most, but it's an example of what could be done.

In all though, I think it might be a little too ambitious to try and put another contender into the (at least currently occupied, if not slightly crowded) pack, with huge artwork and server demands. Interesting ideas though Rich.