SeaMonkey
Posts: 804
Joined: 2/15/2004 Status: offline
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I like the sound of that! Another question, did Wasteland make the map worth something? What I mean is that the game engine should support an inherent value for every hex. Now I'll be the first to acknowledge that every piece of land or sea, for that matter, doesn't have some strategic / economical value, but for the editor and user mods there should be a function that allows a value to be set for each hex. For instance, ToW uses PPs as a monetary exchange for getting things done. Obviously hexes like deserts, swamps, and certain mountainous terrain would have the default 0 PP value. From there the designer would start setting values to farmland, perhaps 1 PP, mines, maybe 3 PP, oil fields, 5 PP, cities, industrial areas, ports and on and on. What a system like this creates is an internal value for conquest where most of the map lends an incentive to defend and to take. Now, there will be a cost for not defending huge swaths of land, not taking a more forward position of deployment, completely undermining gamey actions of the players. In short, it represents the consequences of real life expansion and contraction. To take it a step further, you could code a national policy for players' choice that enhances or detracts from the "monetary layer". Say a player chooses "scorched earth", then everytime a friendly hex in taken by the enemy the PP value drops to 0 and only slowly recovers over a period of time after the front lines have moved beyond that hex, the area has stabilized. Perhaps hexes that see no combat and or that are moved past quickly or abandoned would not have an appreciable resetting of their inherent value. Now, taking inconjunction with the logistical/communication layer, you see the real life dynamics of an economical infrastructure start to unfold, one that can be easily disrupted by player actions. Obviously a system like this will be somewhat difficult to code, another underlying layer, but during gameplay, even though it will have a very tangible effect on strategy, it will require very little from the players as far as actions, a KISS principle, and simple is always good.
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