Kingdom Empires

Rule Your Nation the Way You Want It To

Welcome to this thread. First of all, I just want to say this is an idea. Not a game in development. If it was, then I would tell you. Anyway, there are no screenshots, but I take it you can read. As well as that, if you have any suggestions, I'd be quite happy to look at them. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them.

What Is Kingdom Empires?

Kingdom Empires is a game where you can gather resources in your world to build the kingdom of your dreams. You can build villages, mines, and Wood-Chopping Areas (the name is currently out of my head), but it all costs something. At first, all you have is 200 Wood, which is just enough to build a Wood-Chopping Area. Then, with the gold you have (1000 at first), you must hire workers, who wish to be paid for their duties. They give you wood. Once you have 500 wood, you can build a Crafting Area, where you can build equipment. You then decide to build them axes, which enables you to chop the wood faster. Then, you can build Mines, Farms, and once you have all the resources, you can finally build your first building, in just under 10 minutes. Fortunately, that's just in time before night falls. Which means, you have just enough time to persuade somebody to buy the house. You choose the price of the house. From 100 Gold, to 1,000,000 Gold, it's completely up to you. However, the lower the price, the more interest their is, so if this is your first house, why not make it a cheap 250 gold? Somebody will have interest straight away. You've got someone settled in? Good. That means you know at least one family will survive the night. It's a simple game; gather resources, build equipment, build buildings. Really, it's not too hard. However, sometimes, Monsters attack Villages, or even another Nation. Yes, another neighboring nation may invade you, and then you have to defend yourselves, with as many guards as you want. Then, it's up to your guards.

Features

• Gather Resources; loads of ores and resources to find, smelt and use!
• Make up laws for your nation, and find the people that break the laws.
• Different Races. At the start of the game, you can choose a race, between Human, Elf, Lizardman, Catman or Troll. Depending on the race, you can have different laws.
• Rivalry System between Empires: Anger another Empire, you become rivals, and therefore, you have more of a chance of being invaded. Same goes for the other way around.

More Coming Soon. Sorry it isn't very detailed, but the game is still just an idea.

Basically, you gather many, many, many, many (insert 20 more many's here) resources contstantly. For example, you have over 35 ores to find, which each have a special feature, as well as a normal feature. I know there are similar titles on the market, but I think this will be a free to play game.

It also actually depends on what game mode you are on. If you are on single player, npc's move in, however, in Multiplayer, the leader of the server is the empire, and so, you have more features on the multiplayer, such as Mining or Wood Chopping yourself, and moving in to a house.

You can't really "fail", unless you lose all your land, and then, you can just basically become a friend of an Empire, and then, once your well enough known, you can just have that as your empire. You can choose many different directions, however, at the start you might feel a little bit "told" what to do. After that, you can do what you like.

After reading the main post, and the sub posts, here are my initial comments.

1) Your intro paragraph is long, and doesn't give us any idea why we would play your game, instead of the many others like it, already out there, as PyrZern brought up:

o, as an idea, what sets this apart from other similar titles? Also, mind you, others are already on the markets.

Really, this is an absolute vital. unless you have the resources to compete against the more sizable releases, you should be focusing on what makes your game special, not white noise.

2) your starting paragraph is to vague. It sounds like white noise. you spent a lot of detail on things that are similar to other games, but little time on the list that actually separates things out. as an example, I'll start with resources, something you spelled out vaguely in your at the top.

Gather Resources; loads of ores and resources to find, smelt and use!

There are reasons games limit them selves to just a few resources to gather.

Basically, you gather many, many, many, many (insert 20 more many's here) resources constantly (spelling fix here, please use spell check)

While I'm not opposed to a game that has more resources in use, find me a popular game that has 8 or more resources. I've seen them, but I've never seen them do well. While it can be done, you shouldn't be saying "lots of resources". you should be telling us how that will be fun. Just because its there doesn't make it interesting. more often it makes it challenging on the design to keep the product entertaining. Again, tell us what will make more minerals, more fun. Often its easy to get distracted thinning that we can make an existing game or genre better by just adding more. Adding more should NEVER be your guiding principal, but instead, focus on what makes it more fun.

Make up laws for your nation, and find the people that break the laws.

This part sounds like it could be its own game all together. And it doesn't imply much about how it works. the game is essentially a city builder with wars. usually with these, you are not managing things at a 1 person level, but at what would affect thousands or at least hundred of people (not individuals).

So essentially you've introduced an idea that doesn't naturally lend it self to the game your talking about. You need to clarify this out more.

What is the premis of makign up laws? How does it work? Are you presented with laws, and say yes or no? If there are law breakers, and you 'find' them, what is involved in that, is it like an FPS here? do you see them run through a street in your game? do you set up bounties? is this another real player or an NPC?

A City Builder game is typically focused on the grand scheme of things, keeping large numbers of people happy, and yet it sounds like your game steps outside of that to chase down a bad guy.

I hope you don't take any of this as an offense, its meant as serious questions you need to think through.

The general ideas are, 1) you've focused your description on the things that make it the same as hundred of other games out there, change it to focus on what makes it different, what makes it better. 2) for the areas that are different, it doesn't feel like you've thought through how much one single sentence now adds huge amounts of unclear work later. If you introduce an idea that goes against the nature of the game you just described, you really need to explain how it will work, and particularly why it will be fun, and how you will bring that out.

[quote name='Milcho' timestamp='1358168637' post='5021377']
A game that has 8 or more resources to use, though not in the RTS/citybuild genre would be minecraft.
[/quote]

I was at first surprised you found something on that, however, the entire game is focused around the reuse of those materials. In a city builder/tech tree game, the materials are only supportive to the political, tech tree and construction needs. I.e. You don't really care about the materials, you care about what you do with them. For instance needing the materials to build with, or enhancing your ability to get these materials. But you already will have so many other things for the player to apply strategies to. In mine craft, there really isn't any political use to the materials you have. You are building for 1 usually. (Cities, in Minecraft are typically built and discarded. People don't tend to play to get a house someone else built. The play to build the house them selves)

However, I would offer this advice. I believe you can use more materials, successfully but don't make the player need to focus on them. just make your general mining structures/skills cover all the materials at once. or upgrade them as the come.

For instance, focus on the need for wood, stone, and iron. In the background, you have a stock pile of other materials, and you can click on your mining facilities for stocks on other materials. Typically they should do just fine. However, once you advance past a particular point, and start building certain things, you get notices about running low on "tin" or "copper" or "copper chloride hydroxide, AKA atacamite", and by clicking on the material type, you can see what types of things it gets used by, and what is the biggest hog.

Then you can offer the player advances in extracting better quantities, offer advances in requiring less of this material, or offer advances in finding mining sites with higher amounts of this material. But then once you have that underway, the player can essentially ignore it again. You can still offer the option for the player to go to detail levels on the additional materials and research improvements for them, but the player doesn't need to unless something goes wrong.

You can include uncommon materials in a trading system by not including it as a common board. but a player who is low and needs more, can request it. Then the server can look for online players who have a growing supply (increasing faster than they can use it) who have at least twice as much as the request, and offer that player X amount for selling it, with details saying they have plenty in reserve. Even let the player higher an "advisor" (ai) in the game who will auto sell in certain circumstances.

The key thing is that the games that use large amounts of materials are typically singularly focused on one player alone. Like Rune Scape or other material mining/smelting/working games. Even though those have LOTS of players, all details focus on 1 player at a time, as far as most players are concerned. trading tends to be far more adhoc in those games.

Since your game starts on the political side of managing a city, I would recommend that in general, you don't make the players nit pick over dozens of materials, but just ones that are boldly needed to allow the player to use other 'fun; mechanics in the game.

While I say all this, I have also wanted a game like this, but have never found large amounts of materials fun to play in a large scale game. I'd love to see it be done, but I don't believe the 'fun' of a strategy game (like a city builder) comes out with massive material types. PLEASE prove me wrong. I'd like to see this work.

[quote name='Milcho' timestamp='1358168637' post='5021377']
while a 80% iron 20% carbon should yield a stronger alloy
[/quote]

You'll need to work on your numbers, steel is typically 95% iron and about 0.5% carbon and the rest fillers of other metals to help with other issues, like protecting from rust or oxidation, keeping an edge, making stronger, etc...

but that goes back to my previous post. Carbon is cheap, easy to get, and used in such small quantities, that you really wouldn't notice. It seems more like a feature upgrade, that you could focus on improving alloys, and express to the user which direction you are going in. but ultimately, it is a minor part of the game.

Perhaps you could still do this, but essentially just upgrade your mining stations to extract the new materials you need, but when very little is required, it should receive the same amount of attention.