I see that your warrior has 17 movements. That translates in cost and time to build. Since Procipinee doesn't have this kind of movement, what is the point of having such movement if the unit is to be stacked with her?

As I said in the epilogue, the pacing is the real problem.  But 25 turns to do the above? No way.  

In my view, the above should have taken place in about 50 turns.

The first 10 turns felt right in terms of pacing.

The second 10 turns felt pretty good.  But after that, it started to slow down too much.

A lot of that was caused by having to build so many huts (5 turns a crack) and then not having enough tiles to build economic, research, or spell tiles.   I lost 20 turns easily just because of the huts. Then I lost another 20 turns due to everything being slower to get because I didn't have non-houses doing things.

Are turns and tiles being used to represent real-world units of measurement? Does 1 tile represent a X meter * Y meter area? Or are they simply "tiles". Same thing for turns: does one turn represent X days, or is it simply a "turn" ?

Establishing some real-world units of measurement will help refine the pacing.

As it stands right now unit movement is about 2 or 3 times too slow (coming from 1G). Huts should take no more than 4 turns, probably even 3.

Now I was just thinking about huts and houses. Now when you research houses and your city levels up, huts are turned into houses (good idea.) Now how about if you placed some huts or houses (lets say 3 huts) and your city levels. Those three huts in those three tiles are now six huts. Basically you setup the basic community and as the city grows, homes expand too.

Broke the post! WOO!

Make hut building faster and allow them to hold more pop to conserve building space. After all they are huts not houses!

Also add other bonuses to houses. Having a normal house after any cataclysm is no small feat considering that the priority of new empires would be to build other things first: (military, resources, food)

100 turns too LONG for that little? Are you guys nuts? In 100 turns you should barely be starting your second city, with a population of maybe 50 people. Give us time to explore, learn the lay of the land. Remember people this is a tiny map - On a gargantuan size map, you should hopefully not have even had a chance to discover how big your landmass is by that point.

Frogboy- will it be possible to maybe add a scale to the game (slowing down building, research, population growth etc.) so people who want super fast games (like having all this happen in only 50 turns) can turn that on, and people who like slower paced games can get that too (personally I think what you described should be 250+ turns easy)....

stager: yes. There will be a pacing option but it'll be different than what we've done in the past. You'll be able to change it mid game back and forth to suit yourself (kind of like in Sins where you can hit + or -).

Well that will be.... interesting.... One second it takes 30 turns to research something, than with a flip of a switch it takes 3 turns.... I'm assuming (hoping) that this can be disabled for multiplayer and won't be essential for playing in any way? Will this effect movement and "game time" as well? I.E. with the speed turned "Up" do units move further per turn, and do kids age faster? Any other obvious questions I missed?

Hmm, even if you remove the housing to shrink the city size, that still seems pretty dense me.  My gut feeling, having not actually played 1Z yet, is that either cities should be much smaller (1/4 tile for all improvements, not just housing?) or some other mechanic should discourage founding them that close together.

I can honestly say that I have NEVER been "aroused" by a forum post...

Until now!

This preview shows that this game is everything I hoped it could be and more.  I now actually fear for it's release because I'm going to fall into the rabbit hole and never come out.

@Stalvos - Too much information.....

I have to disagree with you on this. True, there could be a little more variety in the appearance, but at least in the bottom screenshot Amarian looks like an actual village with all those huts. If you need to build less huts to house the same amount of people, then it would start to look more like a militairy base and less like a place where people actually live. To me it would really kill immersion if I have to conclude that a city has a huge population because there are nearly a dozen houses in it. As in the real world, most of the surface area of a city should be used for housing people.

I'm not suggesting that you should have to use more tiles for building houses, because that wouldn't be a lot of fun. But the visual aspect is important too. I think it would be bad for the whole atmosphere of the game if even large cities would appear to only have a handfull of houses in it. When I look at the screenshots that I link to below, I can believe that those are actual cities.

http://www.mmorpg-center.com/wp-content/gallery/dawn-of-fantasy/dawnoffantasy041.jpg

http://www.sg.hu/kep/2001_02/age_of_wonders_2_hir0225_01.jpg

This is one of the reasons why I don't like building on the map, because it's very hard to get the atmosphere right visually without having to build a whole lot of houses, which isn't fun for (most) players. I know it's very unlikely that you will change this part of the game, but I just want to have it said.

I have to agree with what others have said. Don't cut out all the housing because it makes the city look inhabited. I do agree however that it takes too long and huts should be a quick 1 turn build pretty much no matter what.

Great story demiansky!! Geez, you sound like you really understand what this game needs. It sounds like my idea from the Bartering in a Post Cataclysm World post.

From Frogboys story, when he was talking about building up an economy, it was sad to think that it meant just grabbing random coins and using them. Gold pieces of an olden time would be of no use compared to raw goods, just like in your story. After some time, as you collected and minted your own coins and allowed folks to use those coins to buy goods from you an economy would form and they would have use again. However, before then, I think coins should have no value when compare to "materials" or "metal" or whatever.

I think there needs to be a separate system for housing, but yes, i agree, don't take it away, it makes the city a lot more believable to have them there. It frustrates me in games like these when cities don't have that epic feeling when they have large populations.

How and Why does your Sentinel have 17 move!?

In any case, you could either make huts cheaper both in time and materials (What I prefer), in some ways this might go hand-in-hand with giving cities more squares to build on.

or you could make each housing unit house more population

OR huts could be the "Mass Population" Unit, which can hold ... a LOT of people, and increasing tech increases how many people you can cram into your huts/slums. And then Houses, Manors, the rest, can hold about half as many for increasing Prestige n Commerce.

If it required level 5 cities, you'd hardly ever see it done. Either way, yea we want to prevent newbies from needlessly crippling themselves, but at the same time lets not hold their hands and suck their thumbs for them too. At level 3 they are far away enough that the player not knowing what the the fack they are doing should only slightly cripple themselves.

Is it possible to have decimals for unit-upkeep?

Frogboy's post made me think that a single soldier unit should probably cost 0.1 gold in upkeep, and a party could cost 0.3 (25% discount) gold, and a company could cost 0.73 gold. (27% discount)

In this way, a company is indeed cheaper than ten individual units, as advertised in the tech tool-tip.

a unit of 50 soldiers could cost 3.5 gold per turn (30% discount), and a unit of 100 soldiers could cost 6.5 gold per turn. (35% discount)

a unit of 250 soldiers could cost 15 gold per turn (40% discount), and finally a legion could cost 50 gold per turn (50% discount)

And finally, (for soldier upkeep only) maintenance costs would be rounded down to the lower whole number at each juncture. Thereby, if you only have two individual units and one company, "expected" payment is 0.93 gold, however rounding down, this means no maintenance (or free units).

So that when you have enough units to go over 1 gold per turn (10 soldiers, 3 parties, or 2 companies) you will start to pay Military expenses ... beginning with 1 gold per turn. Personally I think this is the best way to handle unit maintanence, given the example from Frogboy's post.

I don't have any scientific reason as to why we should always round down on military unit costs (other than historic cases of the people paying for a certain percentage of the military/not funded by the state), simply that it "feels right". I suppose that if only even rounding was used, then there would be no difference between (0.73)x4 and (0.75)x4 ... which would completely ruin the point of Companies being cheaper than parties. That difference between 25% discount and 27% discount would be apparent at each multiple of 4 when pertaining to companies. 4 companies would cost 2 gold per turn, (would of cost 3 per turn if 0.75 cost). Now, with even rounding, that difference becomes meaningless, useless, and 4 companies would always be 3 gold per turn whether we had a 25 or 27% discount.

I suppose what I mean to say, is that always rounding down makes tiny decimals more important for this type of necessary thing.

Now I will support the argument of my Values. @ turn 50 (ellegedly) w/ 350 people in my empire, and only 4 gold per turn, I should be able to support 30 soldiers or so? well, if I have 10 individual soldiers and 2 companies, my costs will be 2 gold per turn. If I have also recruited a Champion, my costs would be 3 gold per turn (Champions are always a solid 1 gold per turn fee)

Now, later, when I have my City Level 5 with Tax Offices making 25 gold per turn, I can support a brigade of 250 soldiers at the fee of 15 gold per turn ... or any combination of units which doesn't exceed 25 gold per turn. If I had no city maintenance or other reasons to have extra gold, I could also support a platoon of 100 soldiers for an additional "6.5" gold per turn, making the total to be 21 gold per turn in fees. I could have an additional 4 individual units, say scouts, without upping the upkeep. This leaves me room to pay for 4 champions, and still breaking even.

Another possibility might be to have any individual Soldier(s), while stationed in a Town, have no Upkeep cost, but once you accrue 5/10/15 singles, they automatically become a named section ready for the field and the appropriate Upkeep costs kicks in using the fractional costing idea thus keeping the use of Party, Company, Battalion sized groups still a better over-all cost per, value.

That way, someone couldn't try and keep 300 single soldiers at home for any length of time, just to try and save on upkeep costs. But could always have a small defense force left at home to defend the city at no added cost other than feeding them as any other civilian in town.

The new Civilization game does something like this. I think it's a great idea and is a good way to de-emphasize armies and rushes in the beginning of the game. Each person in your kingdom should have 1 attack and 1 defense by default. When you "conscript" a person, they get training that gives them an additional 1 attack and 1 defense for the most basic level of training. Higher levels of training should give higher attack and defense, just like gaining levels should do. On top of the person's intrinsic attack and defense skills, weapons and armor would add additional attack and defense.

Let's face the facts here. If an enemy sent 15 conscripted peasants at your city in an early game rush and you have 100 citizens in your village, it's going to hurt, but you're not going to loose the entire village if the entire village fights. However, some of the villagers will be unable to fight (too young, too old, crippled, etc) and so you should not get all 100 villagers mounting a defense. Let's say maybe 40% would be in fighting shape and so you would have 40 attack and 40 defense against 30 attack and 30 defense. You would win the day, but would take some heavy casualties.

In this case, the attacker would have gained ground against you because person-for-person, they won out due to the training they devoted to those 15 conscripted peasants. Even though they did not take the city, maybe they reduced your population by 30 where they only lost 15 people. But, also with the odds in favor of the villagers, they may actually have had a bonus to attack and defense so maybe you only loose 25 people to the attackers 15, or perhaps get lucky and break even. Also, you should get a defensive bonus from the fact that your people are fighting for their own families and livelihoods and will therefore fight much more vigorously.

Now, let's say 50 more turns go by and you now have 250 people in your village (some people in the country side heard of how your village drove away the attackers [your village gained prestige for winning] so they flocked to the village for added defense). But, now another attack force has arrived and they are well-trained soldiers armed with metal swords and wearing leather armor. They each have an attack of 5 and a defense of 5 and have been taught to fight in formation. These 20 attackers fighting in formation negate any bonus you get due to overwhelming numbers because their formation fighting allows them to manage the number of people they each face at any given time. They are now fighting your villagers 1 or 2 at a time and have much better attack and defense than any one or even two of your villagers have. They kill 80 of your people loosing only 5 people of their own and finally your villagers surrender.

So, training and weapons should matter a lot, but your villages should be able to defend themselves against a very early rush. If you had trained 10 people to defend the village and they faced these 20 attackers along with the rest of the able-bodied fighters in your village, you would probably have won and saved the village. So you can't just let the villages defend themselves for the whole game, but they should not be helpless or just surrender to any attacking force.

In the late game, with large armies, the overwhelming odds should trigger something where the villages just surrender without even trying to defend. But larger cities where the odds are better due to their shear size should end up triggering actual battles. If the larger cities are being decimated, then at some point, they will still surrender.

When figuring out how the battles go for undefended cities, the game will need to figure out how many able-bodied people are actually available to fight. It should use the number of people available to determine what the odds look like and then calculate bonuses to defense or whatever based on those odds.

Doing things like this also opens up the possibility that you could have racial traits like 'Martial Arts Way of Life' where everyone in your kingdom is instructed in martial arts and it adds 2 to their attack and defense and reduces conscription/training time by 50% (they only need to learn how to fight as a group). Because they spend so much time training their martial arts, it would reduce productivity for everything else (farming, building, research, making money, etc). For example, you could assume they spend 2 days a week worth of equivalent time learning martial arts instead of farming or building or whatever. Thus, their other activities would take a 2/7 penalty.

Another possibility would also be 'Female Warriors' and 'Male Warriors' check boxes which would make more people available to mount a defense if attacked. So, if you wanted all your warriors to be women, you would check just 'Female Warriors'. If you wanted them to be men, you would check 'Male Warriors'. If you wanted both, you would check both. So, instead of only having 40% available, maybe you now have 80% available. Combined with 'Martial Arts Way of Life' it would make a powerful combination that would allow you to not worry about building an army for a long time.

This would add a lot of new dimension to the game. You would have to keep your opponent's capabilities in mind if you decide to attack their cities. If you went up against an enemy with these options, you would know you need to bring a much more powerful attacking force.

A lot of this has to do with movement and scale. We need to keep in mind that a person can, in real life, walk about 20 miles a day when traveling. On horse-back, 50 miles a day is a good number. Depending on how many days each turn takes, movement points in the game should generally match what can be done in real life.

However, there is a difference between traveling to get somewhere and traveling to explore. When traveling to explore, your movement per day is much, much less, but you should get increased sight range. When traveling to get somewhere, you get no sight range outside the tile you are in (unless you're flying), but your movement should be realistic.

Right now, it seems that the biggest problem is that all units are treated as traveling to explore. Armies and most other individual units don't move like that in real life. They move to go somewhere and do no exploring. All their energy goes to getting to their destination. Scouts expend tons of energy covering large areas while moving very little in any one direction. Elemental needs to have similar mechanisms. If you want to send an army to your enemy as quick as possible, that army should have no line of sight at all. If you accidentally run into another unit, you should have the option of attacking it, allowing it to pass, or attempting to go around it. If you travel with a mounted scout, that mounted scout would give you one tile of site in one direction around your army. So, you should travel with at least 8 mounted scouts to keep 1 tile of sight around your army in every direction. A flying scout could give you several tiles of sight around your army in all directions.

Fixing the movement stuff so it is more realistic like this would solve the issue of having turns not be meaningful enough. You would also then have to decide whether you want to move quickly or whether you want to actually explore. It also means that when you are not in exploring mode, you should only have a small chance of seeing a dropped purse or running into an overturned caravan or finding remains or whatever. You may move right through several tiles with those things and never realize it. However, when you later bring a scout through in explore mode, you would then find them.

Yes, the scaling is off and needs to somewhat reflect real-world measurements. Based on the amount of space that cities take up, the tiles can be no more than half a mile (a quarter mile would probably be more accurate). In the case where the tiles are half a mile, a unit should be able to move 40 tiles in one turn when not exploring or maybe 5 tiles in one turn when exploring on open land or 3 tiles in one turn when exploring in forests or 2 tiles when exploring in mountains/hills. This would be assuming that a turn is a day. In that case, children will never grow up in the course of a game.

If your turn is 1 month, then children can grow up eventually. However, in that case, a city needs to fit entirely on a single tile and each tile needs to cover probably 100 square miles (10 miles x 10 miles). Units exploring would be able to explore that area quite well in a one-month turn. Remember, they would have a 1-tile sight around them, so they are really exploring an area 30-miles x 30-miles in that one month, which is probably reasonable. Units not exploring should be able to move 60 tiles per turn to be realistic. They would have something like a 0.1% chance of actually discovering anything that might be in their tile when they are not exploring. In this case, cities could be literally one tile apart and never worry about running into each other.

Now, if you make the assumption that the units hunt for food as they travel, then they should take no upkeep in terms of food and the movement should be reduced because they will spend some time searching for food. If they take food with them, then they must have a limit of no more than maybe 5 days travel from friendly territory before they will be out of food and be required to hunt for food, reducing their rate of travel. So maybe you could give units in friendly territory a bonus to movement due to the fact that they can get food readily and don't have to waste time hunting for it. In neutral or enemy territory, their movement would be slowed because they need to spend time hunting for food.

So, if we assume that hunting is required when traveling, then in neutral or enemy territory, travel is done at 30 tiles per turn using 10-mile square tiles. This would assume about 6 hours of travel time each day devoted to moving. When in friendly territory, you could assume a full 12 hours of travel each day and 60 tiles per turn movement.

Now, you could compromise and do 1-week turns. At 1-week turns, it takes 936 turns for your child to come of age. But, then your number of miles traveled per turn is 140 in friendly territory or 70 in enemy/neutral territory. Each tile could then be a 5-mile square. Movement points would be 28 tiles in friendly territory and 14 tiles in enemy/neutral territory. Of course, at this scale, you still don't have cities showing up on the main map or blocking movement of units. If you make the turns one week, then you need to have the tiles as half a mile and do 280 tiles of movement in friendly territory or 140 tiles of movement in enemy/neutral territory.

With tiles so small, movement would appear more analog than digital. That is, movement on the map would appear to flow smoothly and paths would appear more curved. Armies could end up taking up several tiles on the map. You could also make an army camp and it would really appear on the map. When the army goes to 'camp' mode, it would spread out to take up even more tiles because of the extra space required for all the tents and fires. It would be a pretty impressive site.

In my view, the above should have taken place in about 50 turns.

Well it depends on the size of your world. How many cities in average each player should be able to build before needing to capture ennemy cities?

If it's around 3 to 4, then it would have taken 50 turns to reach the full size of your empire, not so bad. If it's 6 to 9, then it might be too long.

I am designing a similar board game and I change the size of the land according to the number of players. More player = bigger map. If you do not perform a similar counter balance, getting a large map with few players will take a huge amount of time to fill it up. It might be what you want, but that will meant that it will take much more turn to reach your full size. So you might have to consider map size in the number of turns you want.

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Building Huts?

I think I missed that part, but in my point of view, building hut is boring and it shoud be abstracted by the game. You are building the special buildings. Even if you only see these buildings on the map, we know that there are huts in there for the civilians, there are just not shown because they does not need to be managed since you should only mange special buildings.

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Population

There is really too few population. Near the end of the game, you are going to end up with millions of people, so why should you manage individual people at the start. I think your should manage hundreds of people like in R3K II. Ex: 32 soldiers and 162 population = 3200 soldiers and 16200 population. But only show the hundreds in the interface for easier calculation.

The game is supposed to be epic, so it is normal that there is a lot of people.

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Movement

Making units move faster can make you require less turns to do what you want. In Civ I always find units way too slow.

Another issue that needs to be addressed with scaling is build times. At 1-week turns, it should take just one or two turns to build a hut. But, if you have 50 people in your village, you should be able to build 10 huts simultaneously. Something like a watchtower would take maybe 5 people working on it, but you could still build 4 of those simultaneously. Maybe 10 of those 50 people are children and 5 are elderly leaving you 35 people to be productive. 15 people would be gathering food leaving 20 people to work. Only 2 people are needed to build a single hut.

If you do 1-week turns with .5-mile square tiles, then you should have areas where all tiles in a large swath of land are farm tiles or wheat tiles or orchard tiles. You could send a single pioneer out to a single .5-mile square tile and have that one person work it as their farm. You would keep sending out new pioneers to adjacent tiles to build more farms to bring in more food to grow your cities. A pioneer unit would probably be a "family" which would be 4 people.So, instead of recruiting a single pioneer, you should really require 4 to build a farm.

Sending a pioneer out to a mine would not make sense if a pioneer is one person. Instead, you need to train 20 people as pioneers and send the group of 20 out to build and run the mine. These things would reduce your city population just like armies. It helps mitigate early game rushes.

Now, when you build buildings like the watchtower, you must staff that tower 24/7. That means you just allocated 3 of your 50 population to staffing that watch tower. When you build a market, you probably need 4 people per city size allocated to that market during the day. You can do that by making the market allocate 4 of those 47 remaining people to it and allowing an additional market or multiple additional markets for each increase in city size. Now you have 43 people that can build new things. So you build a blacksmith shop and it gets manned by 2 more people. You build a library and it gets manned by 2 more people leaving you at 39 people available for building things. But, to build a library, you need 10 free laborers to actually work on the building at all, even though it only allocates 2 of your population to work in library after it is built.

Building a palace would take 100 laborers or more to build it and would probably allocate 100 or more people to working it.

This sort of people accounting needs to be in there in order to get build times and requirements adjusted properly and to keep army sizes sane. People building large armies should have fewer people resources to build other buildings and run other buildings. So, when you see someone ahead of you in research, with more food in storage than you, walking around with an army twice the size as yours, you know for sure they are really trouncing you in people. I remember a previous post way back in the day about how having an army of 10,000 people should really mean something. But that will only happen if people are allocated as resources for upkeep and used as requirements for building each type of building. Making this happen will drastically assist in balancing out the game and make all of our decisions about how we play it much more meaningful.