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[rek]

Is war the only way to acquire territory held by another lord? Something I loved about Spore (perhaps the ONLY thing I loved about Spore outside the creature editor) was the ability to annex rival cities through trade and conversion. Exchanging land tiles would also be an interesting aspect – Lord Xyz will give you three tiles (flashing on the map) in exchange for one tile by the sea (also flashing), so he can build a port city. That sort of thing.

As for name ideas...
Lords of Conquest
The Long March to Victory
DomiNation

[batiali]

Is war the only way to acquire territory held by another lord?

Right now, yes. But I liked the idea to get territory by other ways. I'll definetly consider this. I'm currently thinking about tech-exchange with diplomacy. But I'm not sure if all these are in the scope of the project. Damn, it's getting bigger and bigger.

DomiNation sounds awesome! Lords of Conquest is great too. Thanks a lot.

[batiali]

Day 7 - Update 6

Updated Technologies

Combat mechanics have been added.
Lords create armies and send them to missions to get more lands.

[RCIX]

I think this one is my favorite!

[batiali]

Day 11 - Update 6 - 08.12.2011

I was sick for last few days and I'm still recovering... Not much is done in these days.
I managed to make a tool to easily add new technologies and edit old ones.
It reads from an xml file and overwrites it whenever you want.
It was also my first air application.
It's stupid to take a screenshot of a tool but I don't have anything else to show right now.



As you can see, it's possible to add multiple levels to a tech, set its prerequisites and costs for each level.

[batiali]

Day 19 - Update 7 - 16.12.2011

I'm having really hard times figuring out the AI for lords attacking other lords.

First I tried to have a battle manager which controls all the battles between lords.
Battle means two armies having a war in a land. One attacker, one defender.
Whenever a lord wanted to attack another (which is decided over a Relation class - more on that later) it creates an army from his available soldiers and creates a battle. The opponent answers this call and if he has units, he creates an army too and joins this battle. Battle manager handles this battle over time and decides who's the winner. Winners remaining units return to home and if the winner is the attacker, he gains the control of the land.

There were lots of issues doing it this way which I'm tired of trying to solve. And the main problem was whenever a lord gains a land, he gets more powerful. That makes him being able to get more and more lands. It's a positive feedback and once a lord gets more lands he just rules the whole world. I wanted add some negative feedback where gaining the control of additional lands should be hard, costs a lot, but returns more in time.

That's why I've made the decision of "defending soldiers die a lot less than attackers." They just retreat from a battle after causing enough harm. So, if a lord plays really aggressively and attacks all the lands he encounter, he'll shortly run out of army and his opponent in the other way, will get more and more army. It should be important to balance your army - economy - growth even if you are a very aggresive player. Otherwise, the game becomes a matter of luck where spawning point and lords nearby become really important.

By the way, I've covered lots of technologies in the game. When you discover most of them, you can see their effects. When I make the battle system working good, I will get another devlog video.

[Yameki]

Day 11 - Update 6 - 08.12.2011

I was sick for last few days and I'm still recovering... Not much is done in these days.
I managed to make a tool to easily add new technologies and edit old ones.
It reads from an xml file and overwrites it whenever you want.
It was also my first air application.
It's stupid to take a screenshot of a tool but I don't have anything else to show right now.



As you can see, it's possible to add multiple levels to a tech, set its prerequisites and costs for each level.

Whoaaa, seriously, don't change the look of that UI, i love it!!

[batiali]

Heh, it's an external tool that is sadly won't be in actual game :D

[rek]

There were lots of issues doing it this way which I'm tired of trying to solve. And the main problem was whenever a lord gains a land, he gets more powerful. That makes him being able to get more and more lands. It's a positive feedback and once a lord gets more lands he just rules the whole world. I wanted add some negative feedback where gaining the control of additional lands should be hard, costs a lot, but returns more in time.

I assume you have a RISK-style system in place whereby Lords gain a certain number of military units in proportion to the amount of land they control at the start of their turn. What if you excluded newly captured land from that equation for a set number of turns?

[batiali]

@rek - Hi mate, sorry I must have missed your comment. Excluding newly acquired territories is a great idea, I will definetly try it!

Day 26 - Update 8


Hello everyone,
I know I'm not updating as much as I should. I was trying to find a sponsor for my latest flash game and it's just been lazy times for me... Now I'm back to work!

I wanted to test fog of war for players. Here is some screenshots and definitions beneath them



1. First try on fog of war. It was a fast approach, but I wanted it to look better. Also, you may notice trees, mountains, gold mines in the map. Those are environmental differences of hexagons. They will have an effect on defending & production.
2. A better approach, and I've spent lots of time on its performance. It first fills the screen with black. Then iterates through whole land list and lowers the alpha values of pixels around a land depending on distance. It was a bit hard to optimize since lords may have more than 1000-1500 lands, it takes a lot of time to iterate all lands and create an alpha circle. But I managed to do it pretty performanced by only changing fog of war when player loses a land, and only adding another circle when player gets a new land. Also you may noticed it looks pixelated. Helps a lot in terms of performance!



3. That lord just researched scouting, therefore he has more sight around his lands.



4. This is how it looks in full screen.



5. 6. Some screenshots as the game progress. That orange lord was really tough! You don't want to mess with him. I'm glad how the AI turned out. There are still lots of thing to cover but they act really well right now. I will try to get a devlog video soon.




7. This is how purple lord sees the map. Orange lord doesn't seem a big threat, isn't it?
8. This is the real map.




9. The grass was greener...
10. DOMINATION!



And by the way, Domination is the new name of the game (thanks a lot rek!). I already bought playdomination.com domain. (Don't know what to do with it right now since I have 0 html knowledge But I'm learning! Any suggestions for how the micro-site of an indie game should look like or examples of cool game microsites would be much appreciated!)

[Ashkin]

I'm not sure I like the fog of war you've got going there. How about trying what you have in the first screenshot except add a border of 50% alpha?

[batiali]

I'm not sure I like the fog of war you've got going there. How about trying what you have in the first screenshot except add a border of 50% alpha?

You are not sure because of the pixelated transition or circular fog?

It's kinda hard for me to add alpha to 1st one. Currently I'm masking the whole map with scaled hexagons of a lord's land. I'm not sure how to implement an alpha border.

Making it like the second one is harder since I need to draw and fill hexagons with different alpha values in a bitmap. Any more ideas?

[Ashkin]

I'm not sure I like the fog of war you've got going there. How about trying what you have in the first screenshot except add a border of 50% alpha?

You are not sure because of the pixelated transition or circular fog?

It's kinda hard for me to add alpha to 1st one. Currently I'm masking the whole map with scaled hexagons of a lord's land. I'm not sure how to implement an alpha border.

Making it like the second one is harder since I need to draw and fill hexagons with different alpha values in a bitmap. Any more ideas?

Basically, do what you've been doing in the second screenshot, except instead of so many variations of alpha, just have 0%, 50%, and 100% black to make it seem simpler. Just a suggestion, I don't think it would work very well.

[batiali]

You mean sth. like this? Actually I liked it. What do you think?

[Ashkin]

Yeah, that's what I meant. I'm not sure whether I like it or not though. It was just a little suggestion.

[batiali]

Just uploaded another devlog video. Let me know your thoughts about the progress of the game.

Devlog Video 2

Yeah, that's what I meant. I'm not sure whether I like it or not though. It was just a little suggestion.

Thanks! I see you didn't like fog of war at all Let me know if you come up with any other ideas I can try.

[Netsu]

I think it would look better if the fog of war had the same resolution as the map, unless it's a performance issue. The two-step opacity is nice.

[batiali]

I think it would look better if the fog of war had the same resolution as the map, unless it's a performance issue. The two-step opacity is nice.

Yeah it's a performance issue. It's currently x4 scaled making it 16 times faster. But slowdown that fog of war makes is not that much, it's only noticable when I set simulation speed to x8. (Causes a 0.5 second lag when I had to redraw whole fog of war, but this is not an issue in actual game.) So I might switch back to same resolution later.

[Netsu]

I don't know the technology you're using but maybe you could only update the part of FOW in the vicinity of the hexes being changed and never redraw it as a whole?

[batiali]

Yes, that's what I'm doing. Still, when simulation goes on x8 times fast and lords gets bigger, they acquire / lose around 5-10 lands in a single frame. That's not much if the only processing done is FOW, but there are lots of other stuff going on, so I'm trying to make everything as much performanced as they can. Maybe that's only me writing shitty code at the moment but drawing FOW 16 times faster is something that increase performance significantly right now.