I'm starting the design for a few civs I want to try out, but the one that is perplexing me the most is the Nomad nation.
In order to model a nation of horse riders, such as American Plains Indians, or ancient Genghis Khan-era Mongols, you would pretty much want to do away with cities as a center of population. But there are several problems with this design:
What do other player's attack and what rewards do they get for attacking?
My initial thoughts would be to make all of this civ's "cities" into settlements, limited to one pop, much like Kurotates. These could be called "trading posts" or something. Now you have something that other players can attack (for small reward; one-pop city) and tools for controlling culture, gold, trade, tech, religion and resources. And these are nearly essential for a Civ4 game, really. (Dungeon crawls and other scenarios aside.)
But this still leaves all of the problems related to production and improvements (since settlements don't produce or work tiles).
If you just auto-spawn units, then the player is not making any choices, so this seems unfun.
If you use variant-workers (e.g. horse herders) to work the tiles, lots of AI work has to be done if a non-human player is going to be able to use these workers. And I remember how fun it is to use Priest of Leaves units to cover my lands once with forest, manually. Now do that for the entire game. Again, this is not fun design.
So the goal here should be summed up as:
Ideas or comments?
In order to model a nation of horse riders, such as American Plains Indians, or ancient Genghis Khan-era Mongols, you would pretty much want to do away with cities as a center of population. But there are several problems with this design:
What do other player's attack and what rewards do they get for attacking?
- How do you generate and record population?
- How do you create gold, tech, culture, trade?
- How do you create cultural boundaries?
- How do you create units?
- How do you all the civ to collect resources?
- How do you track religion?
- Where do buildings and wonders go?
- What do tile improvements do for this civ?
- Also, how do you match-up against the player's choices in a more traditional civ game; such as build infrastructure or build units? Or push for tier-two melee or tier-two archery. Or play a builder-game or go for early-conquest?
My initial thoughts would be to make all of this civ's "cities" into settlements, limited to one pop, much like Kurotates. These could be called "trading posts" or something. Now you have something that other players can attack (for small reward; one-pop city) and tools for controlling culture, gold, trade, tech, religion and resources. And these are nearly essential for a Civ4 game, really. (Dungeon crawls and other scenarios aside.)
But this still leaves all of the problems related to production and improvements (since settlements don't produce or work tiles).
If you just auto-spawn units, then the player is not making any choices, so this seems unfun.
If you use variant-workers (e.g. horse herders) to work the tiles, lots of AI work has to be done if a non-human player is going to be able to use these workers. And I remember how fun it is to use Priest of Leaves units to cover my lands once with forest, manually. Now do that for the entire game. Again, this is not fun design.
So the goal here should be summed up as:
- Add design elements that add to and develop the goal of a non-city oriented Civ.
- This Civ should be capable of winning any victory, except maybe Cultural, although not necessarily ideal for every victory.
- Operation of this Civ may be different from--but should be no harder than--managing another civ's workers, specialists and City productions.
- Ideally, the process of managing this civilization utilizes some of the same decision processes as normal city management, so AI coding is modification and not writing from scratch.
- The civ should still be vulnerable to standard AI-initiated attacks, whether that is barbarians or a AI-player's Stack-of-Doom, or else the player can never truly lose the game.
Ideas or comments?