GameStrafe Browsergame Nations Development

[Simon Moon]

My general idea there was to make "one expert" per 100 inhabitants. So if you have 199, you get one expert, if you have 200, you get 2. Extra tax revenue is something you can make by building a special building that will take "left over industry" and create something that will make money. Same for food, if you have left over food, the population grows faster. I want to keep that part at least for the beginning simple.

[Kaninen]

I see the point in "leftovers", but that doesn't rule out the experts. But then again, I'm not the one that has to program the damn thing
So, what experts do you have in mind? I see how taxes and food are in check for now and officers might be a bit advance, but the merchants, researchers and doctors seem like obvious choices to me. If you want to set up the game so that you're rewarded with a new expert for every 100 citizens you've gotta have some choices for what you want that expert to do, otherwise it's kinda pointless right?

[TheGnome]

Originally Posted by Simon Moon

My general idea there was to make "one expert" per 100 inhabitants. So if you have 199, you get one expert, if you have 200, you get 2. Extra tax revenue is something you can make by building a special building that will take "left over industry" and create something that will make money. Same for food, if you have left over food, the population grows faster. I want to keep that part at least for the beginning simple.

All this talk about special buildings makes me wonder just how many buildings are we gonna have? If we're going through tech ages, I can imagine quite a bit.

[Panchovillaa]

the special citizens task is reminiscent of sid meir's civilization 3 , great turn based strategy game

[Simon Moon]

I was rather thinking as a representative scale...

This is only an example now, so don't take it for granted. You start with 100 citizens, thats 1 expert. That expert produces +2 food. The population only needs 1, and the second one goes into surplus, making the population grow faster +30% instead of +3% if there was just enough to come by for example).

There are 3 experts, food, industry and research.

Food is obviously as explained. Industry is used to build stuff. That is new buildings, military units, and the likes. Excess industry can be made into money.

Research is driving on the techs. Each tech has a requirement of research points. Some techs and buildings can increase that output.

So you need more people, put them into food production and you get more food, and in excess of food, more people. You want a new tech (which also might enable you to build more buildings and units) then you have to invest in research points. Want to build more buildings, than you will have to do industry. Of course in the normal course of play you would have to keep it all together. You have to buy military units for protection, but also, depending on your government, to keep your people happy. If you got too many units, in some places that again causes unhappy people.

Give me input on what you think. This veers off significanlty form cyber nations

[n00bf00d]

This sounds good. So you would probably need research in both industry and tech to produce, for example, cars. Maybe this would be an alternate way to get 'bonus resources'? These would be things that resources, such as rubber and coal, would improve research towards. (ie rubber and cool improve research towards auto's by 30%). This would improve over cybernations significantly in that you could keep your bonus resources, and the positive effects they bring.

[bassie999]

Regarding tax: why not add a Value Added Tax to the game, i.e. on each trade the supplying nation must charge VAT, which the buyer must pay. If the supplier does not pay the received VAT to the authorities, it can be fined or otherwise penalized.

[Ashen]

What about Pollution? Something that impacts other areas negatively and it grows as you grow. So you must find a way to manage it, either by creating more eco-friendly facilities or production control. As an added benefit for keeping it under control, your recources may become more efficient.

[PsylentStorm]

i like the experts idea, but 1 per every 100 citizen appears to be too high of a ratio, esp. if you really want players to make decisions on what to specialize in, youd want less experts/bonuses, forcing the player to decide what he really wants. having too many experts lets the player easily sort out how many experts he wants where. i guess it all depends on how many citizens we expect to have in the nation, so how about a limit on how many experts a nation can have?

[Simon Moon]

Maybe expert is the wrong word...

Each of these "experts" is simply a unit of citizens, representing 100 (or maybe 1000) of your population you acan tehn assign to one of the three tasks.

Pollution would be possible, say you create more industry than you have people units (multiplied by two or something) then you get for each extra 3 industry one pollution. That will have a negative impact on everything. You might be able to reduce industry, get techs that reduce it, buildings that reduce it, and so on. Also of course thats a good way to limit the industry stuff a little.

[Spectre737]

Looks intresting. GL with it :P

[Kaninen]

I think as this progresses it's getting harder and harder to come with constructive inputs. You obviously have the basics lined up Simon, and I think it's hard to discuss this on a theoretic level since I think everyone here has a basic idea of the game that might look and play different than what you're imagining.
Speaking for myself at least, I can't really bring anything constructive to this until I see some form of model of what you're imagining. It's much easier to come up with ideas and constructive critiscism if you have something concrecte to work from.

[TheGnome]

^^ Agreed.

I would still love to help out, but don't know exactly what you need. Lists of possible buildings or techs?

[Kaninen]

^^
Even that is hard to give, if we don't have the parametres to work with ideas from as I see it...

[Simon Moon]

I am still working on the parameters. I will publish a list when i got one (this weekend i will invest a few hours into this).