Question: I'm designing a 'turn based' game in which users have resources (ie, land and gold) as well as warriors that make up a players army. I'm currently designing the combat system such that if you lose, you lose gold in proportion to how much land you own (as opposed to losing a % of the gold you have). If you don't have the required gold, you will either lose a larger portion of your land, or you'll ultimately suffer more numerous casulties in your army. Does anyone know if this has been done before? And if so, was it successful (this, of course, is subjective)? You can stop reading here before this becomes TLDNR post... but my idea behind this is as follows: 1) When you are attacked, I don't want a player to lose everything upon a single defeat.. but I do want the loss to put them behind other players. 2) Making gold losses in proportion to % Land in lieu of % Gold penalizes a player for having spent all his gold before being attacked. Thus, while the attacker suffers from using a turn to attack a bankrupted player, and thus getting no reward (ie, no gold available), the defender will suffer more from the loss of addition land and soilders. 3) This concept should help prevent bottom feeding as players with lower quantities of land are unable to lose as much gold as higher ranking players (ie, rank is in proportion to land). Thus, it won't be worth the spent turn for a higher ranking player to attack a lower ranking one. 4) Also, I am planning on making the profits gained from 'attacking up' substaintially more than 'attacking down'.

But won't larger territories be able to sufficiently annihilate to smaller ones, making it a moot point?

Encouraging players to attack up like that could make for unstable gameplay, in which everyone targets the top few players and drags them down, making way for new top players to drag down.

yeah, and that sounds fun.

What if you paid a ransom for the number of soldiers you lost with the more experienced soldiers (or your commanders) costing more. This was standard practice in the medieval period.

Now, if you make it so that a loss of population form the army would have some economic/growth impact on the player, this might then become a viable technique.

Usually "soldiers" were just the men of the region conscripted into the army. So the loss of too many soldiers would deplete the workers and the country would suffer a significant economic loss. Also, the loyalty of the nobility would have been in some ways dependant of the "King" ransoming back anyone of noble birth that was captured by an enemy.

If your commanders/nobility offer combat bonuses if they are included in an army and their training takes time (maybe only through battle), then it will be import ant for the player to attempt to recover them.

If you have the victor able to choose the prices for the ransom (rather than have it pre-set), this might make an interesting social dynamic to the game and create a stronger economic base, and reason to go to war (because you can profit from it).

1) I'm not trying to encourage people to attack up so much as I'm discouraging people from attacking down. The idea is that the biggest gains can be found by attacking the more powerful players.

2) The economic impact of losing more soilders comes with the cost of having to replace your army. If a player gets attacked and loses a large number of soilders due to a lack of resources, he will ultimately end up sending future resources recoverying from the attack. This provides the more aggressive players with an ensurance that their attacks are meaningful.

3) The larger armies will be able to demolish the smaller players.... but it takes a lot of effort (this is by design). A strong player would have to waste many turns in sequence to kill off someone. During that time, they will lose their standing against their close competitors. This should also make attacking down less desirable.

P.S. These comments have been quite helpful. Keep 'em comming.

You may already be doing it this way, but I'd say it's important under this design to have the number of soldiers you can generate dependent on land, not just gold. Otherwise, the best strategy would be to stick in one small area of land and keep generating soldiers, so that you're building strength up while simultaneously being a worthless target to everyone else. Then you suddenly expand outwards and take everything. The way you described it now, it is only encouraging players to not take land until they are sure they can win. But if you need land to make soldiers, then it's ok.

That is correct. If I am setting a linear relationship between land and rank, it is imperative that land be required for growth. This will prevent the situation in which you just described.

Also (for clarification), as with most good games, the idea here is to design a system such that a player is forever trying to optimize their military and financial economy. So, to create some complexity, I have created a large number of variables the user should constantly adjust in order to remain competitive. One of which is the requirement of a barracks in order to house soldiers. In this case, 1 barracks will let you command 45 soldiers, and each barracks requires 1 acre of land.

Now, as a player progress through the game and gains more land, and can sequentially buy more soldiers, build more buildings, increase his income... a decision will have to be made to as to who to attack. What I want to do is to discourage this player from bottom feeding. Here are some situations detailing why powerful players have attacked the weak in previous beta runs:

-A low ranking player doesn't log in for several days and amasses tons of gold (or just doesn't spend it). Even though I imposed stiff penalties for attacking down, players would still do it if enough gold was involved (as gains were based a certain percentage of what they had). Would capping gold gains based on land prevent this more effectively?

-Some players (especially the better ones) would log in every hour on the hour to spend all their gold. This kept them from being targeted by other players. It also discouraged players who did attack when they found nothing was gained from battle. Does killing additional defender soldiers make it tougher on those who have way too much time (since they are logging in ever hour) while satisfying a player who comes away from a successful battle empty handed?

Anyways, I think this is a very classic consideration for turn based game design. I'd almost like to see this thread (and others like it) archived somewhere. If anyone else has any comments, let me know. Otherwise, I am going to proceed in this direction.