Casting Wind Overview: Take over the world using leadership and tactics, or help villages survive in the turmoil. Genre: War/Peace, leadership, strategy, tactics, diplomacy, roleplay, humanitarianism, social interaction, government, political system, RTS, RTT, massively multi-player with forum support. Introduction: Chapter 1: The Legacy Define your village, give it a name, choose a locale. Define some structures in your village. Define some villagers. Define a sacre treasure that embodies the traditions, believes, identity, and history of your village. Chapter 2: The Threat The bandits are coming to raid your village. Their objective is take the village's sacre treasure. Choose whether your [let them take it] or [fight back]? Chapter 3: A World in Turmoil You have defended your village, but also learned that the world at large has fallen out of control. There are battles and suffering everywhere. Decide what the village will do. Will your village help the other villages in need? Will your village isolate itself? Will it step up and unify the land once and for all? Game Rules: R1: If your village treasure is destroyed, you are out of the game. R2: If the world has no person from your village, you are out of the game. R3: A villager with nothing to eat will starve to death. R4: A villager that is healthy can have kid with another villager. R5: A kid turns into an adult in one week (reallife time) R6: An adult villager can only have kid one time every two weeks. Real Time Tactics Components: o Melee weapons/skills o Ranged weapons/skills o Immobilization weapons/skills o Magical weapons/skills o Capturable weapons o Buildings and immobile structures Real Time Strategy Components: o Assignment of villagers to resource gathering or prodcution tasks o Movement of villagers o Mobilization/Arming villagers o Trade, treatises, negotiations o Choices of alliance/relation with other villages o Construction of buildings Comments? Questions? Want to try? If you want to play a simulated game-run please post these: 1. Village Name 2. Locale and/or architecture style of your village 3. Building(s) and villager(s) in your village, based on Initial Points 4. Village treasure: Name, what it is, its story, and its legendary mythical power 5. Additional roleplay information For 3, please follow this rudimentary formula: You start with 20 points. You can spend them like this: 3pt = Farmhouse 2pt = villager 1pt = village child 1pt = village animal 3pt = other civil structures 5pt = military/combat structure 4pt = villager who has combat experience If you spend all 20 points to get 10 villagers, you are defining a normad group that perhaps just forage for food, or a group of refugees who had just ventured to into the area. Example: Village of the Wild Rabbits A location with mild and dry weathers. Villagers grow potatoes and peanut, and also do some hunting of small animals. Houses are simple wooden huts. The village treasure is a leather wizard hat with rabbit ears passed down through generations. It is said that the hat is a symbol of friendship and it could talk to its wearer. 12pt = 6x Villagers 6pt = 2x Farmhouses 1pt = 1x Village dog 1pt = 1x Village ox [Edited by - Wai on June 8, 2009 8:54:43 PM]

Illustration of concept

Blue: Human faction
Red: Human faction
Yellow: Human faction
Grey: AI (Radiers, Bandits)

Each flag could have units that belong to one or more players. Each player can invest more than one unit in each flag, and invest units to more than one flag, of the faction.

Some situations:

a) Red is attacking Blue. The round flag at {a} is assigned to guard the tower because it looks like Yellow wants to capture/destroy Red's tower.

b) Yellow intercepted a small Red flag. A battle period begins. There are many possible outcomes depending on the abilities of Yellow's flags. In this case, Yellow is just trying to rob Red. Inside the battle, Red might choose to retreat, to continue, or to try and kill the Yellow flags.

c) The small Red flag is reinforcement on the way to attack Blue. But it saw some bandits north and decided to have a small fight on its own

d) This high ranking flag is about to cross the river using its special ability.

e) Yellow meeting some raiders.

f) A major battle where Blue is the defender and has cover of the tower. The outcome of this battle is determined by the collective results of individual battles.

g) Red goes through the forest and meets a small team of Blue.

h) Blue fighting back some radiers. Although a player might have units in all of Blue's flag, the number of battles that the player can play is limited by his Available Battle Time (ABT). Since {f} is a big battle, the high ranking players will most likely be spending ABT on that fight, and expect to fight back-to-back as the second wave of Red might arrive. Therefore, some other players would need to fight {g} and {h} even if the high ranking players also have units in {g} and {h}.

This game has a property where if someone uses your unit to fight and it survives, it still earns xp. So when you fight, you also level up someone else's unit and when other players fight they level up yours. By investing units in Flag that makes good use of its troops you will get your units xp more so than leveling them up yourself. You still need to log on and check on your units to upgrade them, but in terms of gameplay, knowing which flag is good to follow in just as important as being able to fight well yourself. Follow the battle results and rotate out tired units.


Tradeoffs

Advantages of joining a flag
o Let your units get xp even when you are away
o Let your units get xp even when your ABT has run out
o Flag with more units have higher change to survive from battle
o Have more choices to decide which battle to play
o Help your faction by fueling big armies

Disadvantages of joining a flag
o No longer have complete control on whether your units will survive


Advantages of not joining a flag
o Complete control over the fate of your units

Disadvantages of not joining a flag
o Progress of your units limited by your ABT
o Very hard to fight in larger battles because you have too few units
o Stuck to a few attack options due to low unit diversity


Advantages of letting others join your flag
o More units makes a flag much stronger faster
o Have units that you cannot make yourself
o Allows other players to defend your flag while you are away (in addition to letting the AI defend)
o A quick way to level up your field commander to have even larger flag
o Have more influence over the world

Disadvantages of letting others join your flag
o Performance of other players could affect the lives of your units
o Leveling up units of other players, who could switch alliance at some point

[Edited by - Wai on June 9, 2009 4:57:55 PM]

Of Military/Civilian tradeoffs


Major Establishments
Each village can only have two major establishments, one at the village, and one at the region of the village. The one constructured at the region will appear on the map if the region is attacked. As such, it can be damaged in battle and the number of maximum buildings possible is determined by the land area of the region.

When a unit of a player enters a region, the player can interact with any of the establishments within the region. The player can also interact with establishments in villages if the village leader has allowed permission.

Types of major establishments:

Inn - A place where units can rest. You set the price.
Iron shop - Where equipments are made and sold.
Silo - Where grains are stored. Grains are sold to Inn.
Armory - Where equipments are stored.
Stable - Where horses/warbeasts are kept, raised, and sold
Training Camp - Where units are trained in melee combat
Archery Range - Where archers are trained
Magic Academy - Where mages are trained
Siege workship - Where siege weapons are made
Townhall - Where civil upgrades are researched
Market - Where many things can be bought
Trading Union - Where caravans routes are set to allow automatic import/export of goods
Keep/Command Post - A structure that allows advanced tactical researches. Makes your region looks cool.
Barracks - A structure that is like an inn, but now the flag is paying for the expenses and it is only open to units that are part of a faction flag. This is also the place where units without a flag are assigned.

All of these structures requires some working villagers. You need to assign villagers in them for them to be functional. When you upgrade an establishment and it gets bigger, you need to assign more villagers. If you don't have enough villagers of your own, you could let someone else's villager to fill in the shortage.

Minor Establishments
Multiple of these can be built inside a village as land area permits. The regional leader can also build these on the region map if there is room.

Types of minor establishments:

Farms - Provides food
Houses - Allows your units a place to rest
Lumber mill - Allows you to get wood efficiently
Silo - Your own storage of grains
Mining camp - Allows better mining efficiency
Well - Stores water
Dock - Makes ships
Graveyard - Where the dead rests


Defensive/military structures
Defensive/military structures can be built in a village or in the region. The player will control all construction inside the village. The regional commander is responsible for building regional defense structures.

Tower - A defensive structure
Walls - A defensive structure
Moat - Dig it if you the region has no surrounding river
Gate - An entrance that you can be opened and closed

Each of these structures, require some villager as workers to maintain or to make them functional. Note that if you let someone else's villager fill a post, that player could pull out their villager anytime they want.


Money
The regional commander can tax the villages or demand resources for constructions. When a flag raids a village, the flag commander gets all the loot. The commander can decide whether to share the loot with other players. A village normally gets its money by forming defensive parties to secure local resources (from AI bandits), make stuff and sell stuff. A village also gets money from their establishments that are open for business.


Establishment transformation plans
These plans are upgrades and resources that a player can get for an Establishment. For example, a Iron shop with an archery range transform plan allows the shop to be transformed into an archer range to train archers. The transformed facility will not have the full capacity and efficiency of a real archery range, but it is better than taking down the shop and rebuild an archery range if the need is only temporary. Only workers that work at an establishment and visitors to the establishment will know its current function. To the outsiders, your Iron shop is still an Iron shop. This allows you to build revolting forces under the radar of your regional commander. It doesn't matter how well your faction is doing. If your villagers are starving to death you need to do something to save your village.


Rebellion activities
When your village is trying to overthrow the regional command, you can do so by:

1) If the regional command is weak, do it by yourself in one go. Declare your own flag and just attack the regional command. A battle period will begin. This is what you could do if your regional command has gone AFK for too long to your liking.

2) Team up with other upset village leaders, then revolt. Possible do it while the main force of the regional command is out attacking stuff. Take out the regional command and then shut the city gates.

3) If your force is much weaker, you might need to do it over time by weakening the regional command here and there. (You could also do it this way just because you like it like this.) Using your own raiding party, you could raid towers, establishments, and gate houses just to kill the other villagers. In each of these incidents, a battle period will begin. Depending on what weapons you use and what your units wear, the regional command might figure out that you are the terrorist. In that case the regional command could declare you an enemy inside his regional and send its flag to attack your village. A village that is destroyed is just destroyed. It doesn't free up land or anything.

4) If the village relic of the regional command is not highly defended, steal it and destroy it.


Where to start your own village
When you first choose the location of your village, pick a location where the local regional command invites new villages. Alternatively you could pick a village in a region that is controlled by AI or by no one.

[Edited by - Wai on June 10, 2009 3:59:57 PM]

Neighbors

Your neighbors are the closest villages to your village. Their decisions could affect the health of your village. There are many relation you could have with your neighbors. Some dynamic examples:

o Bandits tend to raid villages that have the lowest defense in a region. If you are the weakest link your village will get attacked more often. That could be good or bad depending on your stance. If you are trying to level up the combat skills of your villagers that could be good as long as you win the fights.

o Neighbors rely on the collective strengths to defend a region.

o A neighborhood that specializes and cooperate could grow faster.

o You and your neighbor both want to build an Inn in the region.

o Your neighbors are your closest enemies if you flip or if they flip.

o When the game first starts, regions do not have human commanders. They are run by either the AI bandits, an AI local tyrant, or some king that is too passive in accepting the terms of the enemies. It is up to you and your neighbors to decide when to take action, and who gets to the be commander of the region if it succeeds. If the neighbors don't do anything, the chance is that the AI will eventually kill off the village. For example, a tyrant would keep asking your village to provide villagers to fight a war, your villagers could die in battle while your home village could be attacked by bandits.

Migration

Migration is an action where the player leads all villagers in the village to another place to rebuild a village. The player does not get to save any structure of the old village, but the player could bring along resources in caravans. The process of migration has three discrete stages:

1) The abandonment of the current village
2) The movement to a new location
3) The settlement at a new location

During stage 2, the player will have no home village. The villagers, while on the road, could be vulnerable to attacks. To migrate to a new location, the player would command the villagers and belongings to travel to another region, enter the region (either the region let you in, or you enter by force), and select a new land in that region.

Migration is an action usually done in respond to imminent overwhelming invasion. You migrate to somewhere with better protection. A player does not need to have a village, but the village relic must still survive somewhere.

Real Time Tactics

Melee (swords, spears)
Melee units can generally defend better against other melee units fighting in front of them. Therefore, you have a higher chance to kill an enemy when you can surround the enemy. When a unit is injured, sometimes it is better to let that unit stay back than to have it fight till it dies. Having too many units on the screen might not let you retreat your wounded units in time. You should also retreat tired melee units.

Special topic: Immobilizing vs Killing

By default, when a unit is wounded it loses its ability to fight. The wounded unit might fall down on the ground, or slowly crawl/walk away, but it is not dead. By default, units do not attack enemies that can no longer fight when other enemies are still present (because it is dangerous to do so). Therefore, killing often requires an additional command (if the enemy did not drop dead). To kill an enemy is to reassign the unit to attack a wounded or fleeing enemy. Killing the enemies can also be done after the fighting. In that case, the units will walk around and kill all the wounded enemies one by one.

Special topic: Enslavement

Wounded enemies can be captured and used as slaves. Slaves can be used like villagers but they are not your villagers.


Ranged (Bow and arrow)

Ranged units are vulnerable when they are attacking. When a farmer attacks a bowman who is trying to release an arrow, the bowman will always get wounded. Therefore, the ranged units need special attention to keep them away from melee combat. Arrows can run out. Bowman with no arrow cannot attack unless they other means to attack. Since arrows could miss, it is better for bowmen to fire at a crowd so that an arrow could hit someone else if it misses its target. The player will control where the bowmen stand and where to shoot at.


Mages

Similar to bowmen, mages are vulnerable when they are casting. Casting requires mana, which regenerates slowly, usually in terms of hours or days in real time, but their spells could be very powerful. The player's tactical decision is to decide what spells to cast to maximize the effects. Spells are not limited to attack spells.


Siege weapons and cargoes

These are units that could be stolen by the enemy. Some siege weapons required trained villagers to operate. Therefore, you could capture the enemy's catapults but being unable to use them. You would need to bring them back to your townhall to figure out how they work. Siege weapons are in general not accurate. They are for attacking big targets. Tactical decisions include where to use them and whether to bring them to battle.


The importance of melee units

Since melee units are the only ones that can absorb attacks they are the fundamental units of an army. Assuming that they have shields. Shooting enemies in the back is better than shooting them in front of them.



Units with mixed skills

There is nothing that pervents a unit from carring melee weapon, bow and arrow, knowing magics and knowing how to operate siege weapons. They take longer to train and require more equipment, but result could be useful.

Supported Archetypes
The followings are some village archetypes that the game supports by providing the player the means to play the game with behaviors associated with the archetype. These are not "classes" that the player choose in the beginning of the game.


1) Evil Warlord
A evil warlord is one that destroys other villages, enslaves villagers, and makes the other villages do what he wants in general. The power of this archetype comes from the player's ability to win battles and maintain logistics within the territory. This player is an excellent player in terms of strategies. For all players, the game keeps track of the number of villagers a player killed and enslaved, and villages destroyed or captured. An Evil Warlord would generally have an astonishing stats in these two areas. "Oh my! You killed So many people!!"

2) Popular Leader
This archetype only fights in defense or in response to rising Warlords. In general, the territory of this leader has other players as they do not have as many slaves to work for them. The relation among is territory members is cooperative. To achieve this archetype, the player must be fair and a good communicator to gain respect from its member villages, yet decisive and have good strategic sense to respond to threats inside and outside the territory.

3) Neutral Leader
This archetype only fights threats directed to them and do not interfere with other oppression and aggressions directed to others. This nation might gain wealth by selling supplies and weapons to anyone that can afford them. The terrority of this archetype is characterized by high defense, industrial and technology levels. Their high defense prevents an Evil Warlord from simply destroying them.

4) Isolationist
The player of this archetype chooses locations that are difficult to attack or have high defenses that makes them very hard to conquer. Unlike the territory of Neutral Leader, the Isolationist territory might be so underdeveloped that it is not worth invading.

5) Supportive Village Leader
This player has a village that resides in a territory with a stance that the player likes, but does not lead. The player knows that his participation is important in the overall well-being of the territory and enjoys being a productive member.

6) Revolutionist Village Leader
This player has a village inside a territory but is plotting to overthrow the territory.

7) Leecher Village Leader
This leader takes advantages of the territory at large to gain resources here and there and exploits the other member villages without getting caught.

Re: Hierarcy of territory:

The tribal land that the player begins with does not grow bigger through time. Each of these pieces of land are connected to a region. When a player controls a region, the player has the regional land to form an organized region. Within a region, there are still multiple villages. In general, the player does not own all the land of a region. The regional commander only has command power, he does not own all the land.

A region has a collection of villages. The player that has command of a region still has a village somewhere. (A region could have just one village.)

A Nation in general is a collection of regions that do not attack among themselves. At least one player must have the command over all of the regions in the collection for the collection to be called a nation. (A nation could have just one region.)

An Alliance is a collection of two or more Nations, where no player has command over the entire Alliance.,


Re: Territory terms

I didn't really think about how the names of a village should change as it become more populous. I think that the players would name the villages so that in the game, the villages will be addressed by their names. The player can choose how their villages are called, and the game displays the population/industrial level of the village.

A village is a small piece of land. A village is the basic unit that represents the player. Some example identity/names of a village:

Village, Tribe, Town, Resort, Summit, Vally, Spring, Sanctuary, Camp, Forest, Pasture, Cave, Cliff-face, Waterfall.


Regions have connectivity on the world map. It is a basic location of an invasion. A nation in general is a network of regions. Regions are what you see on the world map. A region that is a fortress would show up on the world map as a fortress. Identity/role of a region:

City, Harbor, Pass, Gate, Walled City, Trading Hub, Rest Stop, Front line, Fort, Fortress, Training Camp, Capital, Plains, Plateua, Forest, Swamp, Canyon, Desert.

Marriage
When the players marry a male character and a female character, the couple will have kids and one of the players will have control of the kid. If the spouse is a slave, the master player will have control.

Genetics version 1
Kids will inherent one random trait from each parent. If the two randomly selected traits are the same, the Kid will have only one apparent trait.

Genetics version 2
Traits have affected by the dominant/successive qualifiers and some traits are formed by a combination of a few genes, like how Biology 101 describes.

Some traits are hidden and would be shown as hidden. The players would just have to guess that those traits are.

In terms of game mechanics, the player could start getting the villagers married after the initial defense.


Achievement metrics:

The game counts the genetic/trait of the villagers of a village, the number of marriages, the number of marriages formed with other player villages, number of marriages from slavery, and the population count.