Nation

[Roads]

Since there is nothing coming out that really gets me excited, I've been thinking and talking with some people on another board about a game idea I've had for a long time. I'm posting here just a very short overview.

The game would be nation building beginning at the city level something like SC4. Unlike SC4, the focus of the game would not be about traffic or pollution or how many citizens you can get into your city. The game would be all about survival, especially early on and building a nation from cities that have flourished. Think about it in terms of the pilgrims settling the new world and the hardships they encountered.

You would have both a national economy and a city economy. The national treasury would be funded by taxes from the city and any residential, farms or private enterprise on the national map. Actually the game would begin by placing residential areas on the national map and the city screen (a zoomed in view) would only be available when you incorporated an area. Gameplay would include characters (great people) born randomly that could perform special tasks such as leading a caravan from one city to another. It would not however be like cavarans of the past in Civ. These characters would have stats such as how long they can go without food and water and a caravan crossing a desert could encounter things like sandstorms or die of thirst if not properly supplied. The game would be real time so you could see such things as a caravan traveling along or much later trains and ships moving between cities.

Like Civ the game would begin early in man's history when life was sustained by agriculture and hunting. Your early cities would need to be built in areas where rich farmland, fresh water and game was in abundance. The challenge early on would simply be to keep your citizens alive - your population wouldn't grow easily and would be hampered by many problems. For example, the game animals in an area could only support a limited population. If the population grew too large and the area was hunted out, starvation would ensue. Of course advancements in agriculture would fix this situation as time went by.

There needs to be at least 2 or possibly more national maps. Naturally the obvious one that you normally see and then one which would show soil fertility, altitudes, resources, game animal concentrations and possibly the water table. These of course would help you determine where you set your little group of followers down. Altitude would be important for determining where certain crops would grow well such as coffee. I imagine having a little hamlet high the mountains somewhere built only for the reason of supplying coffee to the nation. Getting the coffee out might be quite a feat tho as it might have to be moved by donkey. Altitude would also be important for building things fairly early such as grist mills and later damns. Of course the big thing with altitude would be the water table and fall as it run downstream.

We do have ideas on what the game ending should be but right now we are concentrating on the early game and that likely would be the entire first release. I would be willing to invest at least $10,000 if we could get people interested and some people who can really produce the work. I realize this is not much money but there might be other people willing to invest if enough people get interested in it.

You can read the entire thread here:
The specific thread link does not work. You can click on this: http://simcity.9.forumer.com/
and then "other games" when site comes up.



Of course it would be fine to start a discussion on this thread as well.

 

[damunzy]

Sounds pretty cool but very complicated- not really a money maker. Would have to be a work of love.

Here is the direct link to the thread: http://simcity.9.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=541

I like the "asteroid bombardment" idea.

 

[Roads]

Yep damunzy it would be a work of
Actually I would like nothing more than some game company to pick up the idea and use it. That way I would get what I really want and that is to play the game.

It would be complicated but nothing hard to understand, just lots of details. Also I hope we can make it very simplistic on the surface so that a player could go in, play the game and do OK - that many of the things that could be done in the game would be completely optional - things that people who wanted to play on a more advanced level would want to do.

About the bombardment, thanks

Also thanks for fixing the link and if you have any ideas or suggestions on what should be added or changed, please post.

 

[damunzy]

posted a nice long thought over at the SimCity forum.

 

[GoodGame]

I'm skeptical that you could have a detailed city simulator running while managing an empire of cities. Dual scope games are pretty hard to play. Better would be say a capital simulator where you had some influence on how the nation region ran (Caeasar comes to mind as being such a game). A good game should have a tight focus.

 

[damunzy]

@GoodGame: In some ways I agree- but, there are always successes out of the ordinary.

 

[Roads]

GoodGame, I appreciate what you are saying. However I don't think it will be a problem in Nation because even tho the game will have events, the focus will be on planning and executing your plans. Often when an event happens, say your caravan is caught in a sandstorm, you will be given the choice of waiting it out or pressing on. Of course it will be a dilemma because the caravan stands a chance of getting lost in the desert if you choose "press on" or running out of water and dying of thrist if you choose "wait it out" - but still it will not be a matter of taking a lot of time to handle a situation. And, you will always have your pause button handy if you need to do other things in the game as well.

 

[Roads]

I want to correct one thing I said earlier. The game will likely be both real time and turn-based. The reasoning for this is directly related to what GoodGame was saying about being focused. The problem with complexity in a game is not understanding how to do something but simply getting lost in the details - just having too much to think about at one time - and this can be a real problem with real time. This, while important is not the main reason. One of the things that is toublesome and absolutely would not work for Nation is that the cities are not on the same timeline.

After the nation gets fairly large I'm afraid updating every city and its economy and the nation's economy in real time would require too much processing power. The solution seems to be to only update some things in real time and others at the end-of-turn. This would also allow the game engine to time events so they occur at the end or beginning of a turn so you are not in the middle of doing something when events occur.

Also I would like to give a striking example of why a nation building game needs a real city simulator. If you have war included in the game and I don't think it will be in the first release but you could include some real fun things in it. For example you could burn/blow up a bridge to your city and hold off the enemy's advance. You could actually enter an enemy city and set it on fire. No more attacking a city icon.

 

[Jerrymander]

Sounds very interesting, actually. I didn't like the distance that I always felt from my cities in SimCity 2000.

This could bridge the game between a city-building game and an RPG.

 

[Roads]

Yep, you get it Jerrymander

Regardless of how cynical people are, all of us god gamers, to some extent, somewhere deep down in the recesses of our mind, entertain the idea that our citizens exist and their livelihood depends on us.

That is one of my reasons for wanting great people in the game. It will give the game more of the feeling of a real world - or at least a fantasy one.

 

[GoodGame]

I'm a little confused on what the game display is. Is it essentially a small civilization game only played at the level of a Sim City map (e.g. individual buildings and 'zoning blocks') that is large enough to contain multiple cities? I can imagine that as a playable game. My intial comments were about a dual scope where players played a game of Civilization with the 'city view' screen actually being a Sim city game where they manipulated zones, etc...; That I feel would be unplayable.

 

[Roads]

Yes GoodGame, there will be two maps. A national map, large and hopefully huge, big enough to contain wooded areas, plains, mountain ranges, deserts, rivers, maybe even a partial sea and a city map. The thing you now consider unplayable but which I hope you will reconsider.

When working a city map, traffic and pollution need not have a lot of depth - not nearly as much as SimCity. Truthfully, traffic does not interest me at all. So at the city level you would not have nearly as much to think about as a game based entirely on city simulation. One thing I dislike about Civ is that the nation is built top down so that the cities are not real entities. They don't have individual economies and problems with them do not seem realistic. This is why the nation needs to be built from the bottom up. This is what would make the game interesting - the idea that each city would be built differently, supplying different things and needing different things. You could have riots in your city for a just cause. For example, maybe you decided you had a strategic location somewhere and built a city there then had touble keeping it supplied with the basic necssities of food, shelter and clothing.

But to further address the concept of dual scope, I don't think it applies because the scope of the game is building the nation. From the time you first see your national map, your thinking should be "where do I build my first cities and in what order?" This of course would be based on what you can tell from the info maps. As time goes by things would change. Resources such as iron, silver and gold would pop up. Industries would randomly show up in some cities such as a smelter. You couldn't build these yourself, they would be completely random and only rarely in more than one city, and would require resources.

While I don't doubt the concept of the game is too complex for some people, for others it gives an opportunity to do a lot of strategic thinking. You know in Civ how you nearly always have a city where you move all your troops for travel to another location - the one you almost always move your ships from? Wouldn't it be good if that city grew because of the commerce generated by the travel thru it? And wouldn't it be good if you could build that city, not because of the resources it was near but because of its strategic location?

 

[GoodGame]

A key problem with the dual scope is not necessarily intellectual depth, but interface depth especially when the two maps have to be managed simultaneously, which is why I'd recommend the game play primarily take place on one map. Managing details on two maps simultaneously, where both required several levels of decision-making and parameter consideration, would be a headache for the average player. Maybe with a picture-in-a-picture interface where you could track the other map while focusing on the one might be manageable.

 

[Roads]

GoodGame, you won't have to worry about managing both maps simoutaneously. I guess it was another thread where I talked about the game being both real time and turn based. It will be real time so that you can zoom in on the national map and see such things as a caravan traveling along or a Great Hunter going after big game animals or mount and pack animals. Regardless tho of the speed the game is set on the characters in the game will appear at normal speed. The game will only run real time until the end of each year. At that time the player will have to hit the turn button and this is when such things as population growth will be updated. This will include such things as caravans which will be instantly placed at the point where the game calculates they should be. However some things will be updated at other times. The player can pause the game at any time and do whatever he pleases such as open a city screen. These screens will be updated both when they are opened and closed.

Of course I would love to have one map that you could zoom all the way from a view that shows the nation just in detail enough to make out roads, etc., i.e. a bit more detailed than the SC4 region map and still zoom in enough to zone city areas. From what I understand from reading other forums, this is not possible considering all the detail that needs to be in a city.

I'm still in the process of doing the game design spec though and certainly welcome criticism, comments and suggestions.

I keep hoping there's some people besides me who would actually like to play this.