Hello all, I have been working on my game design which is working out well but i have just hit a brick wall in the design. The Age of Empires series have an advancing system of Dark Age -> Fudeal Age -> Castle Age -> Imperial Age and others like it. What i need is a system which is different and i have thought of many different ideas but none of them have any appeal or just don't seam logic. These things are things such as: Timeline system 0years -> 100years -> 200years etc., no system which is not an option because i need something that will mark out when players can recive new units and also status upgrade which is like this: village -> city -> kingdom or something of that effect. Like i said these just were not any good. Do any of you guys have any ideas?

How about advancing the species.

monkeys => caveman => homo sapiens => ... => homo technicializards => komodo people => lizardmen => ... => lizarthian

Some species wouldn't advance as quickly e.g.

;cockroach => cockroach => cockroach => bug people => shelled tyrants

Then at each evolutionary stage you could enable a selection of possible evolutions :

Eg..

homo sapiens => earth people             => nuclear children

I like the idea of branching tech paths. Asimov's books feature a key split between the humans who went into space and developed high-tech gizmos and robots and fancy stuff and the humans who stayed on Earth and became incredibly efficient with limitted resources and huge populations. It would have been impossible for one group of people to accomplish both of those goals.

So Kuladus's idea about actually having new "species" arise from key decisions would be a good way to reflect these key watershed moments in history, when a cusp is reached and a decision made. The psycho, idealist, MMORPGRTSFPS-designing side of me want to make that sort of thing arise epiphenomenally from the best game engine ever imagined, but abstracting it will be almost as good, and far easier to implement and balance.

Thank you guys for your ideas i think i am able to continue my design now that i have that cleared up.
Feel free to keep posting ideas i may still need them

If you need to mark out when players will receive new units is a tech tree out of the question? I'm thinking about the randomness of history. If, for instance, the Chinese had used gunpowder for more than just fireworks and religious functions, we might all be speaking Mandarin today. Just a thought.

Actually Wav, they did use gunpowder weapons. It's an obvious development, and they were not stupid :) They had primitive grenades and gunpowder-propelled arrows fired from carts; a battle could have thousands of carts, each firing hundreds of arrows. It's just not well documented. They also had the first cannons, a technology that took hundreds of years to travel to Europe, where it was perfected to the medieval cannons that everyone recognizes.


Anyways, back on topic. I love Kuladus's idea. Another one occured to me, you could have a broader technology tree that deals with real technology instead of upgrades and units, a common feature in RTSs. So the discovery of iron would give you new units and stuff, like the new ages in Age of Empires, and at the same time work more like the usual technology tree.

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Original post by Jotaf Anyways, back on topic. I love Kuladus's idea. Another one occured to me, you could have a broader technology tree that deals with real technology instead of upgrades and units, a common feature in RTSs. So the discovery of iron would give you new units and stuff, like the new ages in Age of Empires, and at the same time work more like the usual technology tree.

Also, in order to discover iron, you have to have iron to begin with. By linking the tech tree to the (randomly generated) environment you will have a much more plausible world with more variety (and I mean variety with a good, in-game reason instead of the lame, hard-coded variety where faction A has the Tank of Ultimate Death and Überness and faction B has the Infamous Squirrel of Utter Destruction just because the manual says so). If there is very little iron, you will need very good technology in order to see that it's there. And just because you know it's there doesn't mean you know how to extract it (which would require more research, but could allow more choices in research).

If you want to start with stone age, all you have is stones. As you progress, you suddendly discover that different stones have different properties and can be used more efficiently. The iron was always there, you just had to discover it. That is, you can't collect iron early in the game, because "iron" doesn't mean anything yet. Now, if you collect iron (that is, you collect rocks, but they are really iron ore), the game will remember how much iron you have collected, but displays it as rocks (with all the other rocks included). When you discover iron, the game will start to display them as iron instead of rocks. You still can use them as rocks if you really want to.

Also the lack or abundance of materials should make it possible to specialize in certain areas, eg. if there is not much iron to make swords, the swords could be made much more durable by sacrificing "armor piercing" capabilities (after all, if there is little iron, there won't be many soldiers wearing full plate mail either (I'm purposefully ignoring the fact that you could use other metals as well for armor crafting)). Of course, such specialization could lead to problems if the game spans across a whole lot of maps with different environments (I'm not talking about the typical "Advance yourself from the stone age to the nano age in 10 minutes" gameplay, but rather a huge campaign that spans across a huge world and takes days, maybe weeks to complete), but that way there is a natural way to include variety in the civilizations in your game.

(And all these details need not add more micro-management; you can always include all sorts of automation facilities into the game for the less obsessive-compulsive people. [grin])