Advisors

[alms66]

Advisors have always been planned, IIRC, though it's never been discussed in great detail how it would be implemented. I like the idea about being able to choose a "style" of advisor (from despot to religious, etc.) though. It would go well with the plan of interlinking the character model and the advisor system that was discussed before.

At the moment, I'd rather be pushing for larger, random-map games than advisors, which involves a lot of individual things that need doing, but I could see advisors coming soon after reaching that milestone. They'd be much more necessary and useful then, IMO.

With that said, what I'd like to see is an advisor system somewhat similar to SimCity4. Each advisor would have a picture (let's say for the sake of this discussion these pictures run vertically along the right-hand side of the screen) with a small grey border around it. The border would change colors depending on how important the information the advisor has for you is (green - not extremely important, yellow - moderately important, and red - extremely important). Clicking the advisor's icon would bring up a small box similar to the current "event" box that pops up every turn. There would be a list of events and suggestions, each being a link you can click to get further info or open a game screen to. This "event" box, can be hidden or constantly shown, by player preference. This would eliminate the need for the event window itself, as all events would be listed under the advisor that the event is associated with, eliminating one annoying pop-up (In case you didn't know, I don't like pop-ups. I don't want anything shoved in my face, if I want the info, I'll go get it.).

Well, it's kind of hard to describe, so I'll try and mock-up a screen of what I'm talking about sometime soon.

[Traian]

I've been reading more on government and riots etc on the main site. The more I read this stuff the more I can't wait for a full scale version of this game.

There will clearly be many different concepts to learn and important things to know in order to be successful, so I was wondering if there will be an advice and tips system to aid the player as the game runs.

I know there is something similar in the new demo, but I had in mind an advisor system where you could roughly pick your advice based on how you wish to rule. So if you want to be a total despot, you will get advice that specifically looks at what's going on in the game, and then suggests "give x group more money and recruit more soldiers in city y". Beginners could use this and perhaps even a breakdown of reasons for failure of thier government etc in order to make it clear why they failed and help them to learn to play the game better.

Perhaps even something similar to civilization II with advisors competing for your attention and argueing with eachother, although much more complex in nature... just a thought... Maybe those power blocs could voice their opinions in full sentences to give the player an instant idea of where their opinions lie...