quote: Original post by Dæmin

BTW I thought about making a game like that, and in terms of training troops (for the human-like side) what you did was get peasants (generic people with no specific skills), and train them with the basics - then they became simple soldiers - cannon fodder etc, from there you''d progress in a tree like manner in training your troops for more specific tasks,

i.e.
A pesant -> Soldier -> Archer -> Ranger
Soldier -> Pikeman

Instead of worrying about a tree-structure or whatever, why not just have certain skills and/or resources needed for any given unit type, and you simply have to drop your (wo)men into the appropriate building and specify the result?

eg.
peasant->soldier (Soldier training + 1 iron)
peasant->scout (Scout training + 1 horse)
peasant->ranger (Ranger training + 1 horse + 1 wood)
peasant->charioteer (Chariot training + 2 horses + 4 wood + 2 iron)

and conversion would simply be a matter of finding the difference:
soldier->charioteer (Chariot training + 2 horses + 4 wood + 1 iron)
ranger->scout (Scout training, 1 wood returned)

and so on. It would work similarly to Colonization where a citizen can become a soldier or a scout, etc, depending on the resources available.