Hi!

Im designing a turn-based colony management game where you send survivors out on as grid-based map to search locations such as gas station, clinic, homes, police station etc. The location states what resources and items can be found (such as ammo in police stations, and medicine in clinics) and how much stuff there is there. You bring resources and items back to your colony (in the middle of the map) where you can build facilities and prepare defences for large attacks.

When scavening you can run into enemies and need to flee or fight, and more sound attracts more enemies (although this also drains the enemies, you dont just “create” more enemies by being noisy. This is similar to how “They are billion” works with the on-map zombies).

Each tile (location) has some parameters:

• Searched rating (when at 100% you cannot find more stuff here)
• Activity rating (how much enemies are still around, this goes down as you kill enemies, if you are noisy you can also attract enemies from adjacent tiles)
• Noise rating (goes up when you make noise stuff, such as shooting, dismantling stuff for resources or searching)

How can I make this interesting? One idea is to allow normal searching and “fast searching” which is more noisy but much faster. There can also be vehicles or other stuff that ALSO can be searched (apart from the “normal tile search”).

How could scouting be done? Would scouting be included in “scavenging” (collecting resources) or could this be a separate action survivors could do?

If noise is too high you can simply “rest” or “lay low” for a while, or move to another tile which has less noise for the moment. But maybe this isn't a too interesting game mechanic…

Any ideas?

Some ideas.

The colony sends scouts to collect information about a new area. An estimation about how many enemies around the place, how much food, equipment, weapons and ammunition might be there. Finding not infected people would be a top priority.

Then they calculate how many people will be needed to get there and carry the resources back. And how much will it cost the operation in resources and possible casualties. They evaluate if it is profitable and how much time would it take.

There are four games, one the stealthy scouting, two the scavenging operations, three the base building and fortifying, and four the wave attacks (I'm guessing).

To make it interesting, characters should be few, and hard to replace with different capabilities and personalities. The player would feel emotionally attached to them, excited when finding a new unique character and demolished when losing one. Scouts, scavengers, fighters, builders... they would have higher skills in their area of expertise to make them unique.

Operations would be time sensitive, the more time they take the higher the risk of backfiring. Also the base must be ready to defend from an attack in a given time.

One possible way to increase tension would be to make zombies able to track normal humans, and some kind of intelligence directing them. This explains why they attack in waves and why they react to normal humans operations in a somehow organised way.

Your description suggests a strong similarity between this scavenging activity and exploration/patrol activity in more combat-intensive turn-based strategy games, with the main difference being that units have a reason to linger in a particular grid location (to search and scavenge) and to return home quite often (to deliver resources). Retreating and fighting should be respectively more and less common than in a war game but not significantly different.

Turn-based strategy games use well-understood techniques to minimize unnecessary micromanagement and reduce moving units on the map to the interesting parts:

• player-controlled automatic pathfinding, to cross the safe parts of the map without trivial waypoint decisions
• automatically continuing an extended action (in a wargame often a patrol route or other multi-turn movement, in your case usually searching a grid cell) without requiring repetitive input every turn…
• …but preempting automatic actions and asking for input whenever an enemy is detected, to allow reacting to danger properly
• display unit movement ranges, to facilitate keeping a safe distance from enemies
• display grid cell status, to decide where to scavenge next

I think “scouting” shouldn't be an explicit activity but simply detecting an enemy while moving, searching or doing something else, in the same grid cell or at some distance, according to random chances (most likely, an enemy is spotted some turns after he starts approaching the characters after hearing a noise).
You might or might not want a special “combat” mode for the turns in which there are known enemies on the map.

Noisy search, vehicle search and other search variants and special priorities could be selected with menus and hotkeys, with the only difference being the outcome (e.g. a chance to find the same stuff faster and an increased probability to attract enemies with fast search).

I'd expect most of the interest, skill and challenge to be in the combat and quasi-combat situations (when the scavengers try to kill someone or need to run away) and in the rather high level planning of reasonable search missions balancing time, personnel, risk, expected loot and other factors. What do characters do when they aren't scavenging?

Reminds me of this game: https://www.kongregate.com/games/sarahnorthway/rebuild-2​

Check it out for ideas.

Yeah it's inspired by rebuild 3, state of decay 2, they are billions, orcs must die 2 and some other games as well.

There are some different things survivors do:
Scavenge and explore, Build the base, Research, Farm, Craft, Defend thebase from waves

But instead of zombies, there are orcs and trolls roaming the map, pouring in from portals, directed by an evil overlord ?