Discworld theme

[The Beatles]

All right, given the votes in the poll, it looks like we're moving to a Discworld theme.

We've sorted out our spam, we're making game-balancing changes, our host is back, it looks like we have our stuff together moreso than we've had in years.

Volky, I expect a lot of input from you here. You probably know Discworld best of all of us, and you worked on the old race balances in detail with I think Freen and neo. As I recall there was a google spreadsheet -- can everyone check their Docs accounts and see if they still have a link to it? I looked in my google docs and gmail and didn't see it. Maybe it was with a different provider.

I've only read one Discworld book (Hogfather and I loved it), so take what follows merely as a sketch.

What we need to decide:

1. How many and what eras. We'll call them regions or cities or locations or states, something. For instance, Ankh-Morpork, Fourecks, Klatch, the Rim, the Hub, Uberwald, the hills where the witches are, etc. etc. Up to a point, the more the merrier. And we must do a better job of balancing them. Everyone is in North Africa right now on the servers. I'd rather see equal distributions, and if that means making the places identical, I'm fine with that. If we do have differences, it's easy to see how era bonuses will tie in. The Hub would have a food penalty but the Rim would have a food bonus, because crops grow better there. So on and so forth.

2. Troops and races. How is this going to work? Race is the race of your leader, and troops are just a few standard units like pikemen, swordsmen, archers, ships? I think that would be the least confusing -- keep the names the same across races. As to the leader's race, I can think of a lot of races offhand. Humans, trolls, Igors, dwarves, whatever there is. Now, I'd rather see fewer races to avoid confusion, but I'm not actually against having a lot of races. Also, I think for balance's sake, we ought to have several races for each strategy, and no useless races. If, say, trolls and dwarves are equally good choices for an indy strat, then maybe we'll see half the indies plump for a troll and half go for a dwarf. I would love to see mixes like that.

3. Heroes. Here are the heroes we have defined right now:
War:
25% attack bonus -- Matthias
25% defence bonus -- Cregga
25% ratio bonus -- Mactalon

Peace:
50% food bonus -- Grumm
50% rune bonus -- Methuselah
5x slave bonus -- Bella

Special:
+2 heal/turn -- Brome
attack bonus based on how many times you're attacked -- Martin
1% instead of 3% losses -- Perigord

We may want to scrap useless ones like Methuselah, Bella, Martin and Perigord, and weaken really strong ones like Grumm and Brome. I'm fine with completely new functions for heroes.

And I don't even know where to start on what the names for the existing ones should be. I vaguely think Susan might be handy for something, but I could be wrong. This is where I expect Discworld fans to really shine. Pterry's drawn such a rich array of characters, this should be fun.

4. New names for spells.

5. New names for in-game items. Thank goodness we have wizards, though they're useless in Discworld, so our spies might have to be called witches -- or keep them spies, I'm fine with that. Scrolls? Gold should be dollars, right? Workers could be peasants, workers, or as they are now, slaves.

I'll be glad to get stuck in with balancing and stuff once we have the basics down, but until then it's over to you guys.

[Ruddertail]

While we're changing things, and since we have coder enthusiasm, etc. I think we ought to settle a couple old issues.

First, land. Do we want to stay with the standard promi land flow, or do we want to move towards something where land really doesn't change hands much? Either is fine, but this has come up from time to time. If we're going to want to drastically change land, we should keep this in mind as we code.

Second, heroes. There was talk a while back about making heroes a viable strat unto themselves; special hero buildings, resources, powers, etc. that would allow one to focus on building a force of heroes, rather than on massed troops. Do we want to try this? If so, this should be the basis for our re-imagining of heroes.

[The Beatles]

It would make more sense in a Discworld-type mostly static world rather than our pre-civilised tribal world, for land not to exchange hands so much.

As to heroes, that would be nice but also more effort. And I mean in working it out and implementing both. So if we can get some quick ideas to balance heroes out a bit, I'd rather do that first so we can leave them in the game and not have to take them out. Then we can re-imagine them later.

[Ruddertail]

Hero fix. Right, that's the ticket.

As for land; then how? Do we go back (again) to the low-land grabs? Do we move towards a situation in which land is completely or almost completely static, and runs are spent doing something that does not involve attacking for land - that is, either make attacking for resources a real part of the game, make developing land (in the form of cities, towns, estates, mining complexes, etc.) a real part of the game (thus necessitating making these parcels hard to take, i.e, a full run just to split off the equivalent of a few thousand acres), or some combination of the two?

Personally, I rather like the idea of mostly spending turns developing land; not attacking each run, but building up for strategic conquests and holdings of specific parcels, with one or two strats actually designed as "raider" strats, which make fairly light attacks on a number of people, dealing minor damage and gaining resources from their non town/city lands. I'm not exactly sure how that'd work out, though.

[windhound]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/DiscworldShelf.png/800px-DiscworldShelf.png
Guy wrote some books, lol. Somehow never heard of that series, have heard of Pratchett

As far as the Eras, I'm assuming each race in Discworld has a default area they're from - or atleast concentrated in. Determining era/location by race would give you the diversity you're looking for, given people choose different races.

Races... going off zero knowledge of Discworld, but presumably there's races that are more likely to lead and those most likely to be pawns. Choose the best known / most controversial of each.

Really need to be careful with redesigning game play. Its easier to make a boring game than an interesting one; part of the charm of promi is that your entire empire can change dramatically from run to run.

Glad to see FAF getting some attention, cheers guys.

[Gen. Volkov]

As far as the Eras, I'm assuming each race in Discworld has a default area they're from - or atleast concentrated in. Determining era/location by race would give you the diversity you're looking for, given people choose different races.

To a certain extent, you're right. However, humans are everywhere. Vampires are in Uberwald, Dwarves are in the Ramtops and Uberwald. Trolls are mostly found in the mountains. Can't really have Ankh-Morpork as a location in this setup though, unfortunately, because it is like a combination of every major metropolitan city. Everything and everyone can be found in Ankh-Morpork.

I think Beatles idea is better, but we should just leave Fourecks out, only one story is set there and it doesn't have a wealth of detail to draw on to flesh out a location. The Rim is basically where everyone lives, the Hub is too cold. It think Ankh-Morpork, Klatch, and Uberwald would be best for locations. Ankh-Morpork could either be a generalist or forager location, Uberwald would be the hawk location, and Klatch would be the indy location.

As for races... you have wizards, Trolls, Dwarves, various forms of the Undead (Zombies, Vampires, etc.), Werewolves, Golems, Gnomes, and Elves. (But these are not Tolkiens elves, they are the badass Fair Folk of Celtic mythology. So not a playable race, IMO) Oh, and Humans of course.

Humans would be a generalist race, dwarves would most definitely be indy. Trolls... they are big and brutish, not so much indy though. Heck, they wouldn't even have a standardized set of troops. If you are looking for a bare minimum of races, vampires, humans, and dwarves would probably be best. They are the most heavily featured in most of the books. Well, Trolls too, but I'm having a hard time trying to figure out where they would fit in the standard promi model. Trolls are incredibly dumb, incredibly strong, and incredibly hard to kill. (Well dumb unless you super-cool their heads, because their brains are super-conductors. Work fastest when cold, work the best when the temp is a few degrees above the lethal temp for a troll.) You'd have to give them massive bonuses to attacking and defending, and minuses to everything else. I don't know what sort of strat you could build around that.

It would make more sense in a Discworld-type mostly static world rather than our pre-civilised tribal world, for land not to exchange hands so much.

Yes, but unless we freeze land entirely, as per Rudder's suggestion, I see the same problems we had before. I think we should either revamp how we do land entirely, or keep the land flow as it is now. If we keep it how it is now, we can just say Discworld is at war. (Which did happen in one of the books)

We're gonna need new names for heros obviously. The question is, do we name them after characters or Gods? I can see an argument either way, but the way we have it set up now, some sort of God is probably the closest analog to our heroes. Kinda hard to see Rincewind shaking the earth, unless he's being chased by a herd of elephants. (Which has happened) Susan, of course, would never go in for anything as ridiculous as being a hero. Death might get a kick out of it, but overall, I just don't see the characters from the books working as heroes as we have them set up.

As for troop types, if we elect to stay with the regular promi land model, swordsmen, crossbowmen/archers, and pikemen would be the standard units in most armies. Ships would be triremes or biremes. Of course if we include Ephebe, they have cool stuff like Archimedes mirror of death. They are basically the Greeks, as everyone imagines them.

As for knowing Discworld best... yeah. I've read every single book Pratchett has ever written. He is easily my favorite currently active author.

[The Beatles]

Great. I forgot about the Gods, they sound just the ticket for Heroes. And they can easily be in the service of several empires/tribes/warlords at once.

For locations, I want to emphasise that I do not want to see the kind of distributions we have now -- nobody uses X and Y, everybody uses Z. If that means no location bonuses, fine. If it means trivial location bonuses, or multiple locations with the same bonus, that's fine too. In the Discworld, one additional danger might be that everyone will want to be in Ankh-Morpork.

Trolls were in the original Promi, but I agree, they're not essential, especially if they don't fit into the story cleanly. I'd rather have fewer races with real purposes than a lot that nobody can figure out and nobody uses.

Volk, if you agree, let me know what your final ideas for the locations and races are, and I'll set up an online spreadsheet somewhere.

As to land, I'm not proposing a HPR-style game. (And "Discworld at War" sounds like a pretty awesome game name.) But if we changed land flow dynamics just a bit -- maybe made troop losses heavier, or gave a general defensive bonus, or decreased the proportion of land grabbed, it would maybe change the game so that the only dynamic is, grab land at the beginning of run, use and run, lose it all when you log off. Because that gets boring after a while. Plus long-term structures (maybe an evil guy hogging all the land at the #1 spot, maybe a long-term alliance) are fun. You played through a lot of old RWL and Warbands and even some ME sets with me, you know what I mean. I definitely think that we should adjust the dynamic, even if we don't overhault it radically. And I'm unconvinced that it needs a complete overhaul anyway.

[Ruddertail]

I'd agree on races. One race per strat, with a generalist, is probably all we really need. Volk, high offensive/defensive would be a plausible thing for team play with a revamped land system; they'd be kind of the team citadel, hold excess resources, etc.

No one's proposing an HPR style game. If we do revamp, my thought would be that there are too distinct stages; building up, and war. War wouldn't be mandatory - you could get through a round by just defending yourself, which would probably mean fighting at least one or two wars - but those who fought a number of successful, victorious wars and gained the spoils (land, and we should add some credit for victorious battles - use the experience system to add to NW?) would have an advantage. . . assuming they didn't wear themselves out in the fighting. It'd be a balance between expansion and maintaining power, just like in real empire building.

But, yeah, that'd be a lot of work, and might not work without totally remaking what this game is. So if we don't want to go that route, that's cool.

In terms of what we do otherwise. . . I'm somewhat hesitant to just slightly modify land flow. I do NOT want to see increased defensive bonuses, or, just as bad, increased troop losses. Troop losses are obscene beyond all proportion right now, for the attacker - it may be necessary for balance, but it's ridiculous. In either case, it becomes too easy to lock land. Sure, having an emperor to fight is good, but making him impossible to beat is not.

As far as reducing land flow by cutting land gains, well, we did that. It overpowers spies beyond all measure. If we nerfed spies across the board in terms of production, we could balance them with casher/farmer, but indies seem to come out a little on the weak side. Long-term buildings are cool, but they raise the issue of how they are protected/taken/destroyed. It might be workable, but we'd have to be careful.

[windhound]

...btw, the following are available -
http://discworldwar.com
http://discworldonline.org
http://discworldgame.com
http://dwaw.org (discworldatwar)
etc

keeping frostnflame is prolly fine, but it might fit with the theme better to have another entry domain

[Freenhult]

Do we all have access to Google Wave? That might be clean enough for us to upload a file and then modify and share around.

[Gen. Volkov]

For locations, I want to emphasise that I do not want to see the kind of distributions we have now -- nobody uses X and Y, everybody uses Z. If that means no location bonuses, fine. If it means trivial location bonuses, or multiple locations with the same bonus, that's fine too. In the Discworld, one additional danger might be that everyone will want to be in Ankh-Morpork.

If we still want to have the strats we use today, then I think the only option is to have all the bonuses be the same. Otherwise all the magers will be in one location, all the indiers in another, all the foragers in a third. In fact, let's just have one location. Ankh-Morpork. It's where all the action in 90% of the books take place anyway, and that way we don't have to deal with bonuses, or everyone wanting to be in Ankh-Morpork. Let's just set the whole thing in Ankh-Morkpork.

Volk, if you agree, let me know what your final ideas for the locations and races are, and I'll set up an online spreadsheet somewhere.

Vampires, Humans, Dwarves. Mage, Generalist, and Indy respectively. Humans should be able to cash and forage better than Dwarves or Vampires.

As to land, I'm not proposing a HPR-style game. (And "Discworld at War" sounds like a pretty awesome game name.) But if we changed land flow dynamics just a bit -- maybe made troop losses heavier, or gave a general defensive bonus, or decreased the proportion of land grabbed, it would maybe change the game so that the only dynamic is, grab land at the beginning of run, use and run, lose it all when you log off. Because that gets boring after a while. Plus long-term structures (maybe an evil guy hogging all the land at the #1 spot, maybe a long-term alliance) are fun. You played through a lot of old RWL and Warbands and even some ME sets with me, you know what I mean. I definitely think that we should adjust the dynamic, even if we don't overhault it radically. And I'm unconvinced that it needs a complete overhaul anyway.

I agree that we don't need a complete overhaul, and I do want to see the current game dynamic change. I don't like the direction of the current proposals. We want something that will change the dynamic, but we don't want to create an emp-friendly environment, or one that is too static. I have a completely different idea, see the other thread.

[Freenhult]

This needs to be actively worked on. Volkov, when you get some time talk to me on AIM. There needs to be a substantial upgrade to the Game Guide when we do this and if we can compile links or pre-written statements to put in life will be a lot easier. Also I think I remember how to add pages as needed so that won't be a problem.

I think that all in all, if we're serious about this everyone who can devote time. (Like maybe 4-5 hours a week) should sign up for this and we can delegate tasks out.

[Gen. Volkov]

I should be free tomorrow. Hopefully I can catch you on.