Ideas - New Units and Buildings (Brainstorming)

[pawel95]

Yeah, I think that it is very hard to implement such ideas. However i would say, that it will be nice, if you implement the original Siege shop up to here. Later you could add more cars, or sth. like that. So the players could NOW post problems, with the normal siege shop and you have more time to think about this problems.
Also Krom, you are right, that the AI is one of the best things in a tactical startegy game. So i think that this is a really important thing, on the highest position!

Do someone, when the next update will come? I have heard sth. like in 2 weeks?!

[Kridge]

2 weeks? Thats fast. I think it will be somewhat later.

[GreatWhiteBear]

Well, Lewin told me a while ago that he was aiming for February, guess what month it is now.

[Krom]

Two weeks it totally unrealistic from 2 points of view.

- There are no important bugfixes since last update and introducing new bugs we might have inadvertently added while refactoring our old code could be pain. E.g. per-player road/house-plans do not count as anything groundbreaking by any standards, but they might have added a couple of bugs around.

- We have not yet implemented anything noticeable from our planned "Features list" either. We were going to add at least 2-3 items. Currently the soft shadows are our only big improvement over the last demo.

In other words we have not done anything worth a release since last demo and we still have lots of refactoring left. If you ask me about next demo release date - maybe a month or two. That largely depends on our productivity.

[SirCabbage]

I know krom that my other ideas are to radical- at least for the time being. But would you still consider implementing the carts (obviously without the wheelwright, or any game altering changes). Because you never really commented on those- yet they are most likely the most important idea I put forth for building orientated players like myself

[Krom]

I'm sorry, could you please quote the cart idea in your post, I have trouble searching through forum. I am more of a builder myself, so I would look forward to that!

P.S. From builders point of view I have already made this short list of ideas for KaM (both from me and other players):

Roadsigns objects, buildable?
They will feature some short texts on them

A food camp for feeding soldiers on big maps. You build a food camp like a warehouse but with only food. You don't need to build a road to it to build and supply it. It would be a fairly simple building so only wood would be required. It also is destroyed very easy.

Add new house: Lookout tower
Sight range = 20+
Owner=recruit
Reveals FOW while owner is inside
Recruit warns player on enemy troops in sight. (atm there's a warning only if player already attacked)

Add new house: Fish-dryers, it will take fish in buckets and dry it up on the sun (similar to Tannery)
Add new resource - dried fish

Add new houses -
clocktower (with working clocks showing real time and a bell),
well (no idea),
tavern (shows gossip info on enemies),
training grounds for army (promote soldiers to veterans without combat)

[SirCabbage]

Certainly, In fact I will repost all of my purely building ideas. It was under my proposed changes to balance the siege workshop.



"Cart -
Cart Costs 2x Wheel 2x Lumber
Delivered to the School After being built, can be used to train a cart puller. Which is a serf pulling a cart. Carts are already seen in Knights and Merchants, and seen to carry a lot of goods due to the marketplace. It seems silly that they wouldn't use them elsewhere. Carts could not DELIVER items, instead they would simply be used to collect large amounts of completed goods and return them to storehouse

This would lower the serf traffic, and let them do more important things. Cart priorities should start with the things serfs often ignore, such as raw materials or completed food and take them back to the nearest storehouse. They could also be used to Deliver goods to other storehouses (and only other storehouses)

The Cart item could also be trained into a Colony Cart. Which would be allowed to take a large amount of wood, stone, gold and some basic foodstuffs (similar to the original starting amount) and make a new colony. Once Arrived at it's destination, it would unpack into a storehouse, and would train 4 serfs and 4 labourers using the gold on hand. This would also be able to used in multi-player missions as an alternative way to start a round, with any participating parties having to find their start location with a cart, or clear an army/enemy base from the location before moving the cart in. Before you think that sounds too unrealistic- just how did the storehouse get there in the first place?"

You could implement this without using wheels, and simply reintroduce the seige workshop purely for cartbuilding. Or simply slot it in somewhere else. The idea is to allow for that late-game glut of resources to be minimized.



"Wheelwright
As mentioned above in the section on possible changes to ballistic equipment (and adding of carts) the wheelwright would add a new level of cost to things that otherwise are unbalanced. It would also add an extra level of realism to their construction. The wheelwright could use the current icon of the siege workshop, while the siege workshop could use a small icon of a catapult. As Kridge noted, the wheelwright could also be used to make other things, I myself considered wooden barrels (without using iron, unlike wheels) as an extra layer on wine, however, that may remove wine from its perch as early game easy to get food.
Granted, if this was the case you could just as easily make changes to fishermen, to make them fill the void and have their fish stocks replenish over time, but still. It would make more sense to make barrels for wine, but my idea is mainly around wheels. Besides, if we were to make it make something other then wheels it would need a more general name. Cooper is the name for a barrel maker, but that wouldnt suit in making wheels.
The wheelwright would use a carpenter to produce 2 wheels from 2 wood and 1 iron. They would be expensive to make in bulk, and thus would reflect the cost of making siege or carts more obvious."

The required building, though, it isnt really NEEDED- it was more to help balance the other siege tools.



I suggest, if you are a building player like myself to go back to page 9 and look at the following bolded ideas


Geologist

Marketplace Changes.

Forrester Return (this one may sound odd, but for a builder it would make it a lot easier for us to make sure our towns don't get littered with un-needed trees and stumps and could instead focus all woodcutting in set areas while providing easier serf access.


If you ARE looking for new features to make another release worth wild. Carts may be the one- lets face it the marketplace already HAS a cart sitting outside of it and someone above commented they would be willing to help with sprites for my ideas.

[SirCabbage]

Also- to directly comment on your list...

Roadsigns would be nice to designate different town names- but their functionality seems rather limited.


Food camp is a nice idea, you could make it so that it can only be supplied by carts - if you implemented my cart idea. Make the cart hold a large number of food items then have it send them to the camp. And make the camp be built by a serf pulling a cart with the wood inside it. That way the camp could still cost a fair amount of resources- but still be easy cheap and weak to get up and running. All you would need is a button on the food camp saying "restock" and you could order serfs/carts to restock 'x' amount of food. Sending serfs would be of limited use- so using a cart that can carry 20ish of each food item at the same time would be great. To minimize the need for sprites you could use a cloth roof cart (doubling up on how I picture a colony cart looking) so that people didnt need to SEE the items inside.

The cloth roof used in the construction of the camps, colony carts and restocking could even allow you to add the sheep farm idea. Make it so the seamstress can make cloth instead of dresses (or including dresses if you ever decide on using my wife idea as a plugin). It would be extra good too, because if you allowed sheep to be slaughtered and sent to the butcher like my take on the sheep farm suggested, it would loosen the strain on the home base even with the new feed camps.

Erm, sorry I kinda went on a rant about the food camp Idea. I can't help myself, the moment I started thinking about that idea, all the ways you could implement that balanced just flooded into my head


Lookout tower - Nice, I do like that idea. Saves on stone- uses alpha sprites- but it may be rather useless till a fog of war option is enabled. Though for builders like us it would still be useful to help us expand our towns... but the idea of it being an "early warning system" is pretty pointless of now.

Fish Dryers - >_> Erm. While I see the point of drying fish from a storage and freshness point of view... is there really much reason for this besides adding an extra process before you can eat it? I mean, if it DID add an extra process it would certainly give more reason for fish to be replenish-able.... That in mind, yes, it is more realistic to prepare the fish so yeah it IS a good idea.

Clocktower - Considering we can run the game windowed looking at a clock isn't hard- but I admit it may be of some limited use considering the hours it can take to play a good building game. Just make sure it isnt affected by speedup, linking it to the real time is a nice workaround for that.

Well - I like water as a resource but in KaM there is really no reason for it. Unless you made stables, pig farms ect require it... or if you ever made a beer food. But realistically there isnt as much call for water.

Tavern - That sounds hard to implement. But i suppose, spending 1 gold, or 1 wine, or even 1 beer if you insisted on the well idea to get a general idea may be nice. like, "last I heard the Blue enemy had 34 militia!" or "People say that food is scarce in the Yellow camp. They are down to their last 20 sausages!" So I suppose it could work...

Training grounds - Hrm, reminds me of settlers 2 like the well idea does. It would have to have a pretty high cost, or training time though to make it balanced.

[GreatWhiteBear]

Cart sounds suckish, unless you put horses in front of them.
Lookout: Got stuck in alpha stage of the original game.
Clock tower: That would be too much: Space, trouble, resources. Also, they didn't really have clock towers a lot in the dark medieval era.
Tavern? Really? That would be too much: Space, trouble, resources. A good player knows what his enemies are up to.

What could be useful is a tab where you can see the amount of soldiers the enemy has in your LOS.

[Krom]

I agree with GWB, the cart the way you suggest it is hard to implement and does not makes much sense without other changes (such as e.g. separate villages)

[SirCabbage]

Horses, serfs, I dont really mind which.

As for the colony cart concept, that would not have to be implemented at the same time as the basic cart anyway. What I mainly want them to do is simply lower serf workload. As it stands now with the current AI, resources can stay stuck in limbo, and NPCs stuck doing nothing for hours, as the serfs take weapons into the castle.

yeah GWB. I agree, the clocktower and tavern are useless- I was just trying to imagine how the hell they would even work. I was commening on krom's list remember with that.

[GreatWhiteBear]

The cart would be a great idea, in certain ways, under certain circumstances.
WARNING, DRAMATIC GAMEPLAY CHANGING FEATURE
Colonial cart:
ONLY FOR BIG MAPS (Bigger than the current maximum size.)
The Idea: You fill a cart with up to 10 resources or 4 people.
You could send out a caravan of lets say 10 carts with:
4serfs, 4 laborers, 30wood, 40stone, 10gold.(80resources and 8people= 10 full carts)

When you unload the carts, you need to name your new base/village or add them to an existing base/village.
In your statistics screen you can switch between bases/villages.
You place a storehouse and a road will be placed in front of immediately.
Laborers will start digging up the storehouse and road.
Serfs will get wood/stone from the carts and give it to the Laborers and storehouse.
Storehouse is completed: Serfs unload goods in the storehouse and from there on forth everything can go like normal.

You can also transport goods to your other bases of your team.
So, you can establish a forward base, and have food being delivered to that base without needing a food production in the second base.
You can also use it for a tower line far from your base or for supplying troops far from your base.

Requirements: "Cart", Horse, recruit(driver)

[caykroyd]

i can't see a real use for the food camp. I mean, whats the point to keep food there if you don't keep serfs there to take the food to the soldiers. The serfs would have to come from the base to the food camp, get the food from there, and then feed the troops, so... bad idea.

About having more than one village. I think that is quite cool, could add a lot to the gameplay. As GWB said, you should be able to swap villages in the statistics. You should assign new buildings to villages (by default they should auto-assign themselves to the closest, road-linked village [storehouse]), but also, you should be able to change the buildings from one village and assign to the other (I don't know if all this is possible. I can't think there is much point if one village can't "communicate" in some way with the other one)
I lift a point about schoolhouses: Would the units produced there, be assigned to anyone of the villages you have, or only to the one the schoolhouse is assigned to??
But i really like this idea... And also I didn't forget the trading between players idea, and the idea of digging up roads (fields and vineyards would be good too)

Colonial cart: That is nice for the "no storehouse" initial setting. I don't know if you should be able to build one yourself, though.
Transport carts: Not bad. I'm not totally convinced yet.
Training Grounds? Sorry, doesn't sound good.

Fish Dryers: Only if there is any change to the current fish system. Like SirCabbage said, the fishes could be replenishable. But overall i think it would remove the Fisherman as that "Fast, urgent food production" house.

Lookout tower: I'd heard about it with the fog-of-way stuff, and i think the alarm that enemy was near would add a nice detail to it, making it more balanced.

Geologist: I think this should be optional in the games. In maps with large rocks, but not made to make any iron chains, only leather, the guy could make many iron mines and as many geologists, and have a nice iron production. But the building could also be a nice addition. He must come out not very often, and most times return without finding any new iron/gold/coal?

Forester return: Well, i think the way it is is ok; There isn't any addition in having a forester (You can now have a woodcutter and set him to "just cut"). If you had 4 foresters you couldn't have only 1 woodcutter; They would cut 4x faster than the woodcutter would plant, lol.
Wheelwright: If carts or siege equipments are ever released, the wheelwright could be a nice addition to slow down the production.

Any other ideas???


I got quite carried away but these are my opinions.

thanks for listening.

[matheusaqui1]

Well hi people, I will try explain my idea about a new troop.If you don't understand nothing, please tell here and I will try again.
I thought , a barbarian under one horse is a good new troop and the warrior two.
I am not good on the computer but if can make a new building , where all the weapons put there, and you can do all possible combination.What i am tried to explain is you can put a recruit with a lance and a iron armadure or a recruit with a sword , a wooden shield and a iron armature.This is nice, because if you don't have the weapon necessary to make the troop you can do the possible troop.

Thanks, if i am very bad to write in inglhish tell me and i will be better.

[SirCabbage]

The cart would be a great idea, in certain ways, under certain circumstances.
WARNING, DRAMATIC GAMEPLAY CHANGING FEATURE
Colonial cart:
ONLY FOR BIG MAPS (Bigger than the current maximum size.)
The Idea: You fill a cart with up to 10 resources or 4 people.
You could send out a caravan of lets say 10 carts with:
4serfs, 4 laborers, 30wood, 40stone, 10gold.(80resources and 8people= 10 full carts)

When you unload the carts, you need to name your new base/village or add them to an existing base/village.
In your statistics screen you can switch between bases/villages.
You place a storehouse and a road will be placed in front of immediately.
Laborers will start digging up the storehouse and road.
Serfs will get wood/stone from the carts and give it to the Laborers and storehouse.
Storehouse is completed: Serfs unload goods in the storehouse and from there on forth everything can go like normal.

You can also transport goods to your other bases of your team.
So, you can establish a forward base, and have food being delivered to that base without needing a food production in the second base.
You can also use it for a tower line far from your base or for supplying troops far from your base.

Requirements: "Cart", Horse, recruit(driver)

um, GWB. My Cart idea already had space for your so called "colonial cart" Called the colony cart if you read again, which reads very similarly.

Good to see we are on the same page though. Your last message made me think you wernt.