Kristo wrote:Ok, but that's being different for the sake of being different. We'd still have two common resources and four rare resources, whatever their names. What do you mean by a resource that "doesn't come out of the ground?" You mean like mercury from an Alchemist's Lab?
Frankly, yes it is being different for the sake of being different, but I fail to see a downside (okay, there's probably not much 'point' either, but a bit of flavour never hurt, right). As for Mercury, you do realise it's extracted from cinnabar right, ergo it comes out of the ground?
Some interesting thoughts there Metal Wolf. Now for some of mine (just the town ideas for now):
Size/Growth
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Size: For me, Capitols have always seemed too big to be a one-per-player, I mean they garner twice the income of anything else, so I'd like to modify the numbers a bit, so Villages are still 500 and Capitols 4,000, but in the middle, Towns are now 1,200 rather than 1000, and Cities are 3,000 rather than 2,000, each level being about 2.4 the last rather than 2 times, and with the jump to Capitol being only 1.4 times.
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Population: I've never much liked the current system where towns just jump from one income level to the next, so I'd like to propose that rather than being absolute sizes, the various levels are the 'upper limits' of town sizes, with the population increasing by 10% per day, so from a village of 500, the population jumps to 550, thence to 605, then 665, then 731 etc, with income now being 1 gold per person.
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Employment: Of course once you have a population you have to give them something to do. Building would be the main use of course, but dwellings would also require workers, and of course population would go to become soldiers (many non-population creatures would get minders/groom instead, and high-level creatures may require several people, Knights for example). The population available for building would thus be restricted to those not employed elsewhere, and thus, big buildings may take several days to complete (or you may be able to complete several smaller ones in a single day if your city is big enough).
Dwellings
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Effort: In current games you can only get a set number of units, whether they be base or upgraded, but I'd like to change that, I'd like to make it so that you can get more base creatures than upgraded ones, so say you have a building where the base creature costs 50 gold and has a growth rate of 5, so the dwelling has 250 effort points. The upgraded creature may cost 70 gold though, so the dwelling now has 350 effort points, but it's up to the player how to use them, to buy the 5 upgraded creatures, or to get the now 7 base creatures (350/50=7).
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Common: Okay, not so much to do with the actual dwellings as the creatures inside them. The Common is the building that is now the prerequisite of all dwellings. The Common also serves another purpose than just an arbitrary pre-requisite though, it also allows you to employ all the unbought creatures in your dwellings in town defence for half the price you'd pay to actually buy them, thus, what looks like an empty town may actually be quite well defended.
Mage Guilds
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Libraries: No longer are Mage Guilds the first 'magical' buildings available, that has now been replaced by libraries, buildings that hold 15 spell scrolls (the same as Mage guilds used to, but there's no limits on how many spells per level, or even that each level has to be represented), or more in some cases. Nor is there any limitations once the library is full either, an existing spell may well be dumped to make way for a better spell, be it from a hero's spell book, a spell scroll, or some other source.
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Scryers: Of course, a library of magic is no good if it has no spells to fill it, and while a hero may bring in the occasional spells, most of the library's spells will probably come from the Scryery. The Scryery (employing Scryers) produces a new spell every week (or sooner depending on the level of the Mage Guild), and holds a spell on its books until anew one replaces it.
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Mage Guilds: No longer the sole magical buildings, MGs now play a lesser but still important roll in the magical make-up of the town, they reduce the time it take the Scryery to produce new spells (level 1 reduces it to 5 days, level 2 to 4, etc, until at level 5 a new spell is produced every day). They also act as mana regenerators for heroes, producing a certain number of spell points per day (say 50 at level 1, 100 at level 2 etc.).
Taverns
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Individuals: As it currently stands, every tavern a player owns has exactly the same heroes available for hire, despite the fact that they may be on opposite sides of the map, so I'd like to do away with that and replace it with a system where each tavern hosts between 3 and 5 heroes, with no two taverns getting the same hero.
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Factions: I've always found it annoying that the heroes you get are always more-or-less random, so a Haven town may well find itself able to hire a demon hero. I'd like to change this so that a player has an increased chance of getting a hero of his own faction (40%) or an allied faction (30%), but a lower chance of getting a neutral (20%) or enemy (10%) aligned hero.
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So, what do you think?
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) which leads the garrison when the town is attacked.