Re: Prestige and Fruit (was Re: [glob2-devel] Gameplay guidelines)

[Eli]

On Sep 13, 2005, at 12:25 AM, Andrew Sayers wrote:

> The primary purpose of fruit should be to increase/decrease various
> skills based on some complex rules, which encourage trade.  I've got a
> complete system worked out that would do this, but it's still just an
> idea - I'd love to hear different ways of doing the same thing.
>
> Food could be classified along two axes, "type"
> (animal/mineral/vegetable) and "origin" (tree/ground/sea).  Each type
> could correspond to a weakness, and each origin to a strength:
>
> Animal: makes you slower
> Mineral: makes you eat more
> Vegetable: reduces armour
>
> Tree: makes you faster
> Ground: makes you eat less
> Sea: increases armour
>
> So for example, eating a vegetable from a tree would make you more
> vulnerable but faster, while eating an animal from the sea would make
> you slower but better armoured.  The strengths and weaknesses could be
> weighted so that eating both would make you faster and better armoured,
> rather than just canceling out.  It might also be better to leave out
> the contradictory combinations (e.g. tree animal) so we don't get 
> "super
> foods" with no weaknesses.
>
> To make things a bit clearer (for those of you with fixed-width fonts 
> at
> least), here's a grid of possible foods:
>
>         Animal  Mineral Vegetable
> Tree            honey   orange*
> Ground  worm            potato
> Sea     salmon  salt    
>
> Since most teams would be unable to get at all types of resource, trade
> would be very useful - especially between teams whose local foods have
> opposing properties.

In light of our recent game in which we discovered trade was completely 
useless  in all situations, ( :P ) I've come up with an alternative 
model. It's somewhat more intrusive than the above, but it would 
promote trade more, as well as expansion, and allow somewhat more 
interesting maps, I anticipate.

Basically, there would be many resources, rather more than our current 
4. None would be absolutely necessary, but all would be quite useful to 
have. Thus, you'd want to trade, and you'd want to expand your 
settlement to reach other resources you don't have.

For example, there might be three kinds of food: One that makes you 
tougher, one that makes you faster, and one that makes you eat less. I 
don't like the penalties because then if you had more kind of food, 
they'd just counteract and make you have no benefits either (removing 
any usefulness in variety.) On the other hand, if globs eat one of each 
food, and one increases their armor, one their speed, and one their 
stamina[1], then you'll be a lot more powerful than an opponent whose 
globs eat only the food that makes them faster.

It would be a rather flat and not too effective system if it did not 
extend beyond food, though. I'd suggest around 5 building materials, 
for which each building takes one or two, possibly with more at higher 
levels. Necessarially, no important function would be limited to 
players who can access one particular resource: You can build inns with 
wood, but to prevent wood from being overly influential, you can also 
build some other kind of food-building with clay, or stone, or 
something.

Of course, Inns would still be the best food-building. It's just that 
they wouldn't be the ONLY food-building. You'd want to seize or trade 
for Wood ASAP if you didn't have any to begin with, to build your Inns. 
However, a map designer could place a patch of wood in the center as 
the ONLY wood on the map, and people who didn't get there in time 
wouldn't starve to death.

 The big problem with this is that it would take more buildings to be 
designed, more graphics to be made... Maybe instead of buildings 
requiring a certain resource, they could be treated like globs with 
food: Certain resources help the buildings more in certain ways. Wood 
makes the building serve globs faster, stone gives it more armor, and 
algae, I don't know, gives it more oomph? Of course, the benefits would 
max out at about half of the building's cost, so that a player wouldn't 
build an inn all with wood when stone is available, so that having more 
resources is actually useful. Different buildings would still benefit 
more from different resources (some benefiting none, like building 
towers out of wood) so it would generate variety.

Hmm, after all that, the idea is less complex than I thought: Ditch 
fruit, split wheat in three, and make the kinds of food/materials given 
to globs/buildings effect those things' performance.



[1] We need a way to refer to it other than "Makes them eat less" all 
over the place. Besides, "stamina" is a good word for the amount of 
time you can go in one stretch.