Alpha Design

Designing Cultura

I'd like to pause for a second to develop a clear goal for the alpha and just blab a bit about the game I want to create.

Checklist

• RTS Interface
• Management Interfaces
• Diplomacy and AI Factions
• Menu Basics

RTS Interface

The core of the game is very much an RTS, the ability to scroll around and watch your empire do work in real time. But, the ultimate intention is not for you to individually control units. As you progress you spend more time managing your empire than you do individual people. There are three main RTS interfaces that will happen: Direct, Partial and Indirect. Direct control means units that do nothing unless you tell them to do things. This will remain true of military units in battle and of only some civilians units (all units at the beginning of stone age will be directly controlled). As you automate more of your labour through the various management interfaces they begin to act automatically. The intention is that as your society gets large and you try to maintain direct control, then you will likely lack enough focus to keep everything running smoothly. Partial control means individuals who are tasked to certain tasks but you can still give them one-time orders. Those one time orders will cause them to deviated from their automated behaviour but once completed they will return to their original task. For indirect control, units will not listen to your orders at all. Instead the only way to manage them is through the management interfaces. At much later stages of the game, such as well into the classical age, portions of the population act completely autonomously and you only affect their behaviour like any government of today: incentives, tax policies, tariffs and so on.

Management Interfaces

The management interfaces are a slew of UI dialogs that you can access in game (which will pause the game) that let you handle different aspects of your society. These interfaces are likely to have to morph through the times (depending on technology). The goal of these interfaces is to lower the amount of direct individual interaction with units in order to manage your society. It is also through this interface to do some special actions such as claiming or abandoning areas.

Wealth Management: An interface that looks at the total stocks, the stocks owned by regions, by individual people and allows you to distribute wealth to individuals. The accuracy, or the ability to have these numbers, will likely depend on technology and bureaucratic size. In addition to that, I am intending to add administrative cost (someone has to count, keep track of records and then physically hand out goods) to distributing goods as an incentive to streamline good distribution without direct government (you) intervention.

Region/Empire Management: This allows you to look at population level and owned structures. It also allows you to claim or abandon regions. Abandoning regions is more common early on when you might leave to find new food sources. As well you can see happiness/health score and perhaps secondary information such as change of disease, revolt or natural disaster. A tab or transition to another screen should allow you to set various social policy. Right now, I'm only thinking of taxation but whether I wanted a "rule" base engine or something less fancy I'll have to contemplate. I don't want it too complex to play but this is already a fairly niche game so whatever.

In addition to the Empire Management it should probably feature a second for population and animal growth (for directly owned animal herds). Since population growth is dependent on food it should be affected here. I figure all new births are in the spring. Because what the hey.

Industry Management: This allows you to assign labour to particular tasks, for all seasons, for particular seasons. Also allows you to set production minimums, maximums, quotas, rate limits and so on.

Technology/Culture: Here you can see the tech tree, culture trait leanings and of course spend tech/culture points to acquire new techs or cultural traits. This should also show you the cumulative effect of your various cultural traits

Diplomacy and AI Factions

The other meat of the game is about diplomacy and so I need at least the existence of AI factions in the alpha. Maybe the AI will be really bad or whatever, but I just need them to exist to allow diplomacy to be conducted (albeit not very useful with a player that does nothing). Of course later on AI factions will play a major role in making the game "fun" because they will be a dynamic part of the world.

Menu Basics

For the alpha, at the very least, we need new game functionality (with world generation) and saving/loading. Other than that, I don't think I'll spend any effort into graphics/audio settings (well in fact I have no audio as of right now :) ). I just need a fully functional menu.

Inspiration

There are a number of games inspiring me to make Cultura, the two most important are Civilization and Dwarf Fortress. Unlike Civilization, this is an RTS (so I suppose more like Rise of Nations). Unlike Dwarf Fortress this is about managing a society rather than individual dwarves.

But because I focus less on individual needs and more on social needs, the focus of the player changes to bigger management decisions with industry, diplomacy, trade and war. Those reflect ideas I pulled from other games. An industry-chain for each finished good; this is like Settlers. Diplomacy based on trade-routes but also intelligently reacting AI: trade is like Anno series and diplomacy is more like Galactic Civilization where they don't simply have a flat point-score in making decisions, they take in the context of the socio-economic condition of the game. But the world is vibrant, with a mixture of mundane, fantasy and steampunk. The exploration of the world is more like Master of Magic where you always wonder what strange new resources exist "over there", or what creatures you might encounter and must deal with.

Ultimately, I'd like to eventually see a game where some Mundane society is sending a trade ship across the ocean carrying ivory carvings when it runs into a kraken just off the coast of a fantasy nation under blockade. Then... BROADSIDE!

Look and Feel

I'd like to capitalize on the 2dness of the graphics that I am implementing and what would be a good fit is a "painterly" look. I think that'd be the most bang for the buck. It'd look really slick but not require any extra special graphics tricks compared to what I am already doing.

For the game itself I'd want it to be a mixture of direct control and indirect management. The entire goal is for you to be building a history with the society you are shaping from the very first days of the discovery of fire all the way on forward. It should be personal, it should be your tribe and you should feel like its leader. But, it's not meant to be about controlling individual people, it's about the whole society. So as you progress you should feel like you are capable of doing more grand things while the society takes care of itself.

You'd start off with a bunch of cave people, the first races being human/elf/ogre, and you need to go out and explore the world. You must find natural caves at first until later you can begin to construct buildings. Before sedentary life you might abandon places seasonally to go on the hunt for more food in different regions. The environment is vibrant, lively with an ecosystem you have to follow. But it's a living environment. Perhaps you want more cherry trees instead of pine trees, so you slowly over time shift the eco system of regions. Then as the land becomes more productive, you can support more people and so you go on from there to build a greater and greater society.

The tech tree is meant to be slow and more about differentiating your society from others. So it's more about very specific technologies with a small section devoted to cultural technologies where you define culture specific luxuries and cuisine. You develop specific good-preferences, value systems and so on which will affect how you manage your society (preference for specific goods will push you to develop those industries) and how you might interact with others (a preference for peace versus war).

Another aspect of the tech tree I hope to differentiate from Civilization is the elimination of the "1000 year war" problem. Where, in the time span of a single war, you can move through 2-3 ages worth of weapons. I think that breaks a lot of the suspension of disbelief. By the time you send your archers and warriors to the frontline, there are axemen and chariots following up behind and finally swordsmen and catapults. I want Cultura to be a game where you don't just "feel" technological progress but there IS technological progress throughout the game yet at the same time you play out whole scenarios in the same tech age.

I accomplish that through being very specific with technology. You develop the burin before a chisel and needle. You have to research scrapers before you can do leatherworking. It's very in-depth and involves a lot of small improvements to society. There will be no clear line between stone age and copper age. You will just slowly shift your industries into the latter. But, I like having a player be able to invest their time into something, have it last and mean something and for them to be able to sit there and formulate grand plans for world domination, to have to worry about this faction and that, while still using stone axes and after all those plans have finished... new technologies and factions come about to upset the balance. I want a player to fight 2-3 major wars just in one age, have convincing stories and history about it and then move into the copper age.

The ultimate goal is for a player to find archaeological ruins of their own making in Cultura. Why, these caves? These were the ones you lived in back in the early stone age but now that you've built Rome in a neighbouring region, they are merely a curiosity.

Less talking. More Raiding.