Planning for Demos 7 & 8

[Mark_Everson]

Ok, Laurent sounds fine by me. BTW did you ever make the change to handle the Parameters for tech on a one-per-civ basis? I think I need to do the same for econ, and haven't yet thought in depth about the best way to do it...

All:

I am making good progress on the auto-migration of people to empty squares in the Dawn scenario. Its Fun to watch your people spread out all on their own! Not to mention the glow I get thinking of all those mouse clicks that are not needed to tell 'em what to do. I should have it done soon, but when soon is will depend on RL committments.

[LDiCesare]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
BTW did you ever make the change to handle the Parameters for tech on a one-per-civ basis? I think I need to do the same for econ, and haven't yet thought in depth about the best way to do it...

Each civ has its own ParameterLevel, so I didn't touch the Parameter stuff, which is one per archetype.

[Gary Thomas]

Things to do soon:

1. Make provinces spread
2. Check the popup menu to make sure it isn't overburdened with code
3. Add some events to Dawn 1 and test them
4. Add a victory condition to Dawn 1 and test it
5. Move images.xml to the tiles directory (now done)
6. Put build orders in xml files

Cheers

Gary]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Gary, sounds good. I will try to formulate a straw-man plan for using all the goodies in your post, and other stuff, in Demo 7. Since I was foolish enough to volunteer to participate in a school function with my daughter it'll be a bit.

[Mark_Everson]

Starter proposal for final D7 plan

Hi All:

[I have added heavily to this post on June 2. Look for the ------- to see the new material. Any changes in the material above the line will be in bold. ]

I think our previous efforts have had two big stumbling blocks in terms of getting lots of feedback from playtesters. The first was a lack of a tutorial, and the second was the absence of really challenging scenarios to keep the play tester motivated to keep playing and trying out new things. We already recognized as a group that we needed the tutorial aspect added in demo 7. (Well, OK, virtually everyone else in the project bludgeoned me into it , but I do agree in retrospect it's the right way to go.) I have tried in the proposals below to also address the "lack of challenge" issue. If we can achieve something like what I've laid out here, I think Demo 7 will be vastly more successful in eliciting comments from playtesters than was Demo 6.

This is a draft of a final proposal for what goes in demo 7. we have Not agreed to all of this stuff, this is just my version, based on previous inputs from everyone, of what should be in there. I am also going to throw in some new things that basically Laurent and I have talked about in terms of using the early military-tech and Econ-tech hookups to give players an idea of what is to come with the tech model. I'll try to in the proposal indicate whether something I'm saying is pretty much already firmly in the plan, and pretty much agreed to buy everyone [plan] and ideas that are held by one or more people, but where I believe we haven't reach consensus yet [idea]. Some of these ideas will require a moderate amount of coding beyond the current plan, so we need to carefully consider if the extra feature is worth it in terms of the trade-offs. I will shamelessly steel text from anyplace in this thread and elsewhere, so don't take this post as my implication that these are all my ideas, or even my words I'm also a bit pressed for time today, and I'm doing this with my dictation software. If you see a grammatical error within the meaning is still clear, is an indication that I am lazy, not illiterate

There are currently to scenarios slated for demo 7: Dawn1 and Delenda. Dawn is it as in Dawn of history, and delenda is a Punic war scenario. Dawn is intended to serve both as a fresh-slate game like the start of civilization, and also serve a duty as a tutorial, introducing players to game interfaces and models. The idea is that players would first use the Dawn tutorial, and then move on to delenda for some more advanced features, and more complex game play. However, as has been stated by most everyone, we need to make sure that we don't bore people in Dawn1! I will first go through my proposal for the final demo 7 implementation of Dawn, and then follow up with delenda if time permits.

Proposed Dawn implementation (in order of what handled in tutorial):

1. [Plan] A settler unit, which can settle a square. Actually, we have a way to add settlers to a military unit. The settler people essentially piggyback on a horde unit. On settling, the settlers vanishe, leaving the horde for defense or exploration. The implementation also allows to for player-ordered colonization. The first frame or two of the tutorial will presumably consist of the player finding a place for they would like to make their first settlement, and then creating settlement. One further thing I would like to see is an overlay on to the image of a military unit that is carrying settlers so that the player can know when a military unit has settlers attached to it. However, if this is too much work, we could certainly skip it. I expect that is the game goes on the player should be prompted to make at least one satellite settlement to both promote civilization growth, and give them the idea how to do it. [Implementation issues: as far as I know the only issue is whether we can show settlers are on board a military unit]

Another, separate issue, that has already been coded, is automatic migration by the people. In Dawn 1 your people will automatically colonized adjacent squares if it is economically attractive for them. This is both fun to watch, and helps to make the point that we are working hard to reduce micromanagement in Clash. [Implementation issues: non]

2. [Plan] A map which can be explored. There are a variety of victory conditions that we can associate with map exploration. Gary has put in one tile with horses and one tile with wheat, the player must discover these tiles to achieve victory. Exploring a map will introduce the movement interface to the player. [Implementation issues: none of]

3. [Plan] An economy that can be used to build things. The conventional economic interface will be very stripped down at the beginning of Dawn to reduce the slope of the learning curve. The player can currently invest in military units that are technologically available, economic infrastructure such as production facilities and roads, and [idea] technological research. In the first introductory look at the Econ interface, the player will be prompted to build one or two more military units. [Implementation issues: none]

4. [Plan] The tutorial stuff above all involved the new Events model that Gary has created. There is also a set of code for handling conditions. They are stored in the civilization concerned. Example are "horses have been discovered by this civilization". This in turn would be queried by the tech model to allow "horse breeding" as a technology. [Idea] the previous sentence was meant by Gary I think is an example, but I would actually like to use this in the demo if possible. More about this later when I discussed Technology, and how we might include it. [Implementation issues: this area is fairly far along, but as far as I know has not been tested in detail. I expect further issues will come up as we actually use the model, in terms of small additional features that are needed. I'm also not sure on the exact specs for the message boxes that appear for the tutorial. An important consideration is that we be able to dictate the screen position of the box so that it doesn't cover the feature that we want the player to look at. One further thing that we need is the ability for one message box from the tutorial to call another when the player is done with the first. Gary has raised the possibility of yes-no responses in these boxes, but I'm not sure if we need that at this point. ]

5. [Idea] Military wasn't really covered in the original Dawn 1 plan, but I really think we need it both to introduce important elements to the play tester, and also to make the demo more fun. My proposal for starting out the tutorial on military is to first defeat a "barbarian" unit that just sits there. My notion is that we should put the barbarian unit on, for example, the horses tile. Since exploring the horses tile is a victory conditions, it is necessary to defeat the barbarian unit to win the scenario. I also think that at some point, when the player is more or less on their feet and has been introduced to the military model that random barbarian should start appearing. This might happen on turn 10-20 or so. The barbarian should target a nearby colonized square. The barbarians would generally appear in single units or small multi-unit TFs. The average size of a barbarian incursion should grow as the game moves forward, but there shouldn't be so many of them that it becomes a chore for the player. The first few barbarian incursions would be used as examples to illustrate points about the military model. [Implementation issues: determine whether to use Events model or hard-coding to generate barbarian appearances. Existing AI would need the trivial modification to target populated squares instead of cities.]

6. [Idea] Technology is coming along, and actually does things the player can see. I am in favor of including its effects as much as practical in demo 7. Some ideas we've come up with are summarized below. (A) fighting battles would increase power of units, as could be seen by the player by increases in size of the power circles. Economic activity would result in slow gains in farming technology, making more people available for production and services activities. (B) Direct Investment in RPs (in the econ gui for now) can improve techs in A. (C) We could use discovery of the horses tile plus generation of horse technology research points (say once you settle the horse square, or given as a big blob of RPs upon discovery) to push the horses tech level to the point where an additional unit is possible for the player to build. I think this would be a chariot for Dawn. Ideally the chariot would turn the tide making the previous barb threat impotent. I'm in favor of doing all three options, and am eager to hear what others have to say. [Implementation issues: A and B basically complete, C could be either easy or tough. Gary, would be events system be up to this with minor tweaking? FE if discovery of the horses just gives bunch of RPs. One larger implementation issue that is unresolved is the ability to specify technology levels for civs at the start of the scenario. The Dawn scenario is pretty much ok starting at minimum tech levels, but levels for many techs in delenda should start near a value of 10 or so. This is not just the trivial issues since the tech level determines the rate of increase of technology given constant research points. ]

7. [plan] Victory Conditions – So far we have:
(A) Achieve Population of X I think 100k is reasonable now that we have the auto-migration stuff
(B) Find the horse and wheat squares
(C) To those I’d add achieving building of a chariot unit
[Implementation issues: not sure where this stands, but A and B were in the original plan.]

Well, that roughly finishes my notion of a Dawn tutorial scenario that will lead the player through a lot of features of the game relatively painlessly, and yet still play a little like the game. Please in making comments try to abide by the format and numbering scheme that I've already used since that will make it easier to make this post a living document that keeps track of the current plan. Ideally within the next few days I'd like to have the final plan agreed to.

------------- New Material June 2 ----------------

As you may have noticed, the post above doesn't cover all the implementation details. I think it is more practical to lock in the high-level strategy first, and then if necessary the coders can discuss the lower-level implementation details. Of course, part of the knowledge going into what the higher-level spec will be is knowledge of how tough different things would be to implement.

Delenda (Punic war scenario)

Delenda is a quite detailed scenario that Gary has put together. I'm not going to go over everything, but just say where I think incremental changes to the currently existing scenario would help make the playing experience better. I'm also not going to discuss some minor implementation things that the coders already know about and have planned. Finally, if anyone reading this document doesn't have the either the demo 7 code or testbed, and wants to be in a position to comment on the existing Delenda scenario, let me know and I will send you the testbed.

D1. [Idea] Delenda is a good-looking scenario that has a lot of potential for really interesting gameplay. I believe the biggest issue right now is that it's far too easy to win. I have two modifications to suggest that I think wouldn't be that difficult to implement.
(A) Give each side default economic orders that will use their production capacity effectively. At the simplest this could be putting all tax resources into building the best military unit available. (I would specify best combined arms task force, but we currently don't have a way to mass units into TFs once they are built.) an alternative route for some of the taxes would be investment in military technology to make existing armies fight better. [Implementation issues: need to discuss, but I don't think this should be too difficult]
(B) Difficulty levels modified initial force levels. Simply allowing the opposition to start with a preponderance of military forces would go a long way toward making Delenda a real challenge. Here's my proposal for how to do this. Give the player the option (perhaps in the options menu where fog of war and other things are set) to select a difficulty level in the range easy to very hard. The default starting level for the scenarios would be "easy". And easy level would mean the default number of forces are given to a computer opponent. Other force levels would give multiples of starting forces. For example if the multiple were 2 and enemy force determined by the scenario to start as one legion and 2 light horse would instead start as 2 legions and 4 light horse. I think the difficulty levels and multiples could be something like the following: easy = 1x; moderate = 1.5x; hard = 2x; very hard = 3x. We can decide which way we want to round for 1.5x later. We could also use the same settings to make Dawn more challenging for those who would like to play it that way. In this case the multipliers would affect the barbarians that I proposed above should appear. [Implementation issues: I have to hear from Gary first how tough he thinks this will be. Gary? My guess is it wouldn't be too bad or I wouldn't have suggested it, but I could be completely wrong.]

D2. Ship boarding needs to be implemented AFAIK. Naval operations will be an enormous asymmetry between the capabilities of the player and the AI civ in the scenario. For Demo 7 the AI will not understand naval operations. That's one of the reasons I am pushing for the difficulty levels. [Implementation issues: unknown]

D3. I think the map should not start hidden. It doesn't make any sense that the Carthaginians don't even know where Roman is that the start of the scenario. My assertion is that no squares on the map should be hidden, but that toggle for should remain turned on for the scenario. [Implementation issues: I think this is easy to do]

D4. Laurent had an idea to include an improved legion unit that would be made available to the Romans once relevant military techs became high enough. Seems like a good idea to me, but I will leave it to him to elaborate. [Implementation issues: I think most of what we need for this is already available, or would require relatively little work. One possible exception is if setting tech levels by civ is absolutely necessary to do this, since setting tech levels by civ may not be easy.]

OK, that's what I've got right now. Please let me know what you think on my proposals, and make any counterproposals or assertions of your own. I will update this document as additions, refinements, and deletions are decided upon.

Thanks,

Mark

[edit] later June 2 added item 7, which I'd forgotten about.

[Mark_Everson]

The post above has been significantly modified and I'm just posting this so people are aware of the fact.

[LDiCesare]

Comments on both scenarios:
Dawn:
4) Sounds like a good idea.
5) Barbarians should take control of the square they rampage so that the player feel they are threatened. Spawning them should definitely be an event. Targetting them toward some square is more of an issue. I think one standing barbarian and one invasion should be enough, unless initial playtesting proves it's boring to have nothing more to do.
6) Note that point A, although coded and working, is a bit hard to see, as it would require huge increases in power for the power circles to grow significantly, which would be unbalancing in turn. I don't know how to give more feedback to the player. Maybe testing some tech level and popping a message like "Our knowledge of tactics increased our unit strength by 10%"? The Delenda scenario would be better at telling this to the player, see below.
Starting tech levels is an issue. For military, I can fake things by making some units available only to certain civs, which makes sense for legions and elephants in Delenda, but could prevent Dawn scenario from building high tech units (cough!) like archers, phalanx or light cavalry. I am pretty sure we can have tech levels per civ implemented however.
7) Sounds good.

Delenda:
D1/ Clearly better econ orders are needed. Even hard-wired build phalanx + elephants orders would make Carthage much more threatening. Agreed on the multiplier proposal, although it might be possible to do it a bit differently like adding a tag for difficulty level in the scenario file, and if the difficulty is that level or more, then put the units inside the tag in. That would allow for instance to add a combined arms option for the AI only at higher difficulty level (easy: cavalry + phalanx, moderate: more of them, hard: add a bunch of archer to the TF).
D2/ Ship boarding is modelled but lacks UI. I believe we had an agreement on how to do it in some thread. Having a transport boat and a trireme could be good, as it could allow the AI to blocade one port and prevent the player from using his superiority(he knows what ships are for) until he built a navy to protect his transports.
D3/ Yes, hidden map is a pain in that scenario, but fog of war should be in.
D4/ I detail a bit: When Rome reaches a certain level in Military Tactics tech, the Legion unit they could build is replaced by a better Cohort unit. We could spice the thing a bit by telling the player at the beginning that their military tactics haven't been very successful recently and it could be a good idea to find out new ways to use their armies. Another message would appear when the tech level is reached (right now, the econ orders frame changes, but unless you open it you don't know). The text could explain that units have gained x% in power thanks to new tactics, and that it is advised to build cohorts instead of legions now.
Technically, the replacement of a unit by a more modern one works. I am not sure econ issues are fixed, but that seems feasible. I do not need different tech/civ to code this.

[Dale]

Sorry for the lack of feedback on the tutorial for Dawn guys, I've had the flu the last few days. But I've get something for you to look at, which will be ready in the next 24 hours.

I'm writing the text for each tutorial screen (which will follow Mark's guidelines above). I'm using the context of different people giving advice or asking for new things (IE: in 3 the city chief will ask for a garrison unit thus introducing building a unit through the econ window).

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

I agree with most of the things you say, and so only discuss the differences of opinion.

On 5 I agree with you that the barbarians should take control of squares they conquer. But I think having just one barbarian incursion will be too little to keep the player's interest. I would like to see barbarian groups coming from several different directions to reward the player for building roads and doing other intelligent things. Let's see what others think...

I've gone ahead and implemented territory changing hands. Thanks for the clue of where to look! For now territory changes hands anytime there is an uncontested foreign military presence in a square. I made it so the province names are maintained, as we had discussed previously either on the forum or in e-mails. So the first square in Gaul that Carthage takes will become a new Carthaginian province called Gaul. Any other conquests carved out of Roman Gaul become part of this same province. If the Romans take it back it will be added to the Roman Gaul province.

Hey Dale, sorry to hear about the flu, and looking forward to seeing the examples you're talking about!

All:

In my playtesting today I noticed some odd things. In delenda I saw what part of the problem in the AI is that makes it not much of a challenge. Even though Hannibal is a large task force/command with phalanx and light horse components, the light horse always outruns the phalanx, giving Hannibal much less odds than would be the case if the TF moved together. I think that's a bug it's important to change to give the AI some punch. Another confusing feature of this behavior is that when you click on a square with any component of the Hannibal force, you see the whole thing. I believe this is a feature Gary put in, but it can be quite confusing. In the future perhaps we can show components of the active command that are in the selected square so that they are somewhat distinguished from components of the command that are outside the square.

More about D1B..
It occurs to me that rather than having explicit difficulty levels we could simply construct an easy and hard level of each scenario as an independent scenario. This is a variant on Laurent's suggestion. So there could be Dawn (Easy) and Dawn (Hard) as two of the selections when you open up the scenario choices. Actually, I guess there would need to be two versions of the Hard one, since there would have to be a "hard playing Romans", and similarly for the other side. I think this is preferred at this point since it doesn't involve any new code, and the forces can be easily hand-placed. I also did some experiments and found that to make things reasonably hard you need to approximately triple the forces the AI has under its control. (But that is assuming 100% military build orders for the player civ, so if we fix the orders problem this could be reduced.) Another AI problem was that sometimes AI forces just sat there even when there were plenty of city targets available. These things should be fixable with only extremely small tweaks of the existing AI IMO.

[Dale]

Tutorial texts for Dawn......

Any comments? Is anything wrong? I believe this gives a good foundation for new players to play a game.

Maybe the second tutorial should go deeply into the models (especially economics ).

[LDiCesare]

Hi Dale,
Overall, I find it good.

Technically I don't know Gary's event model enough so I don't know about the named buttons to chain things. I just thought it would be good to be able to show an image with the text (the advisor face for instance).

A few comments on content:
-We must make sure the God's name is correct if we show a religion in some screen. Not very important.
-elephants aren't as fast as chariots. Probably, but I think horde would be better than elephants since I'll restrict elephants to Carthage in the Delenda scenario, and hordes are much slower in any case.
-Objective 2 screen 3: The advisor should make it clearer that it is probably a very bad idea to fight now. The way you put it, the player has to wait 2 turns before being told not to fight. It might be a good idea to introduce moves' cancel order here just to allow the player not to move into the opponent if they had planned to.
-Defending borders: Considering the economy we will have, it will probably take time to build a unit. How long? That may imply we won't be able to react fast, and thus the text might become something like: 1)Let's prepare an invasion on the wheat fields, tehn 2)We'd better use this army to protect ourselves, we'll take the wheat later. Depends on time needed to build the unit. See a small concern below.
-I believe the Group All/Pick Up Settlers text is different in your text and the popup. That may have changed or I may remember wrong.

My concern about building units is they currently take population down, by 5000/unit.
First, this should be 500/element, since elephant units have a single element and shouldn't take as much manpower (unless you feed elephants with people?).
Second, this may be too much for Dawn. In that case, we could either reduce the number in general or for the scenario in particular.
Opinions?

[Mark_Everson]

I think you're off to a good start Dale! You covered a lot of good info in the tutorial . I have a lot of little corrections and modifications to suggest, but I'll leave those for later, since I have the misfortune of being at work ! I'm going to focus on some big high-level points I'd like you to consider addressing in revisions. I will also bring up some tutorial-enabling code issues that will make things work better.

I am a bit concerned that not enough introduction of how critical parts of the current interface and game models work has so far made it into the tutorial. FE there is no mention of the Events box at all, and the fact that clicking on a line in it will give more detailed information. When combat happens it would be good for the player to click on the one-line battle report in Events and then see a detailed report of what happened. It would also be good to say that the battle model actually handles the combat in some detail, and when there are ranged weapons they shoot first at range etc. Not a lot of detail is needed, but just enough to get some flavor of what's going on under the hood, like you did for the Econ model, would be great! Another big detail missed is that Power Circles on the main map are never explained. I think its best to talk about those first, and then bring up that the power lines in the units box are just PCs looked at from the side. The power circles and lines are much more than just a health indicator. I think they are best described as a military power indicator. And they allow the player to look on the map at our force vs theirs and estimate odds of winning without even thinking much about it.

I know that the level of detail to present in the tutorial is a delicate balancing act, and will admit that I could be going too far on some of these, so lets see what others think on this. One good thing to do in general to see what details might be included is to skim the D5 and D6 Comments threads, to see what people asked questions about. And another is to look over the manual and see what big things that were mentioned there haven't made it into the tutorial.

On objective 2, making the wheat square a bonus source of food is fine. I was thinking it might also give an immediate boost to Farming Tech symbolizing adding another grain crop to the "package" of foodstuffs available for planting. Similarly the horse square could boost horse tech. We can also make wheat and horses economic specials, and possibly have merchants distribute them. I'm not sure if that'd be cool, or too much detail! Maybe better for a second, more advanced, tutorial scenario like the one you were hinting about for D8.

On obj 5, it just seems too choreographed, inventing chariots just in time to save the day. My guess is you should break up 5 into a few steps.

5a would be barbs are coming, so you should build maybe another few units and start moving to defend. Here you can explain a bit about where to defend. Since movement is simultaneous, forcing battle isn't always trivial. Suggest they defend colonized territory that is your best guess as to where the barbs will attack. We can refine once the barbs are actually hooked up.

5b would present rumors that there are much bigger barbs about to show up and some details on from which directions they might come. Suggest at this point: building roads to move troops quicker; investing in horse tech; building more troops. Then when chariots are available you can explain their characteristics and emphasize they will wipe the floor with the barbs, but only on relatively flat terrain. If the player doesn't have chariots by the final big incursion, it should be very difficult to win.

I'm with Laurent that the traditional units may be just too big to work well at the start of Dawn. I think the simplest thing for us to do is make up a 'light' horde unit with only maybe 4 elements. And we need to change the code so that population withdrawn depends on elements and numbers of men per element. Are you game to do that Laurent? Another thing is that units built in a square should draw population proportionally from the entire province. That is especially critical in Dawn, where even 2000 people is going to be a Substantial proportion of any square's population.

That's it for now, great to see this taking shape!

[Dale]

Mark & Laurent:

Thanks for the comments. Remember, this is the first draft, and refinement IS needed. That's why I presented it for comments.

I do have one major concern about unit size. 5000 men? OUCH! That's HUGE! Even by Roman standards that's 5 Phalanxs!!!! Remember how the Romans came up with unit hierarchy:

- 10 slaves = company (they would pick up weapons when attacked) (10 men)
- 10 companys = legion (100 men)
- 10 legions = phalanx (1,000 men)
- 10 phalanxs = army (10,000 men)

Even at the height of Roman power, when they controlled Europe, Rome only had 11 armys (110,000 men).

Probably for a more "accurate" depiction, is the American Indians when the Spanish got there. Both the Incas and the Aztecs could only field a couple of thousand men in battle, and that's throughout their whole empires.

During the Boer war, the Zulus had like 40,000 warriors (I'm pretty sure it was that, not certain though) and they called up old and women!

In musketeer times:
- England used to have a MAX callup army of about 210,000, and France wasn't much better.

In modern terms:
- Most military units have 1000 men (300 * 3 companies + 100 support staff)

In the context of Dawn, 5000 denizens (start size) should be defended. Therefore you must need a unit, and one to explore.

5000 = 2500 men + 2500 women
2500 men = 833.3 kids + 833.3 young + 833.3 old (just averaging here)

That means you have a military MAX pool of 833.3 young men. In the context of Clash, my suggestion is something like this:

- Start off at 500 men units.
- At the time of Sun Tzu's (maybe Military Formations technology?) increase this to 1000 men units.

BTW, I also feel warrior hordes shouldn't take much time to build at all (geeze, all they did was give them a spear or club with no training).

Anyways, that's my two cents. Sorry if I've got this all confused in the context of Clash.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Dale, your points are quite reasonable. I think for much of history, a decent approximation is that there will be a standing army of something approaching 1% of the population. (At least when they Had standing armies.) In times of emergency it can get several times larger IIRC. What I wanted to avoid when we formulated the 5k/unit thing was swarms of units, especially moving around individually. FE the 4th C Roman Empire had a standing army of something like 350k [Penguin Atlas of Modern History, p5]. Even at 5k/unit that's a LOT of units.

The units really are meant to be quite big since this is really supposed to be a grand strategic game. We don't want to get down to the fracas level . But Dawn clearly makes 5k units impractical.

Maybe we should go with 1k units for the earliest parts of history. Anyway, we should move this discussion to the mil thread. If you put your post there, I'll move mine .

[Dale]

Mark:

Both posts moved with reply.