Alpha Map (p.s. I need a job!)

Sorry for the lack of updates! This has been terrible, but I have been super busy getting my resumé (seen HERE) into shape and sending out cover letters to everyone I can get ahold of. I did however have some things to report.

1. The alpha map is done. Hurray! It was a huge pain, some 60+ hours sunken into it, but I have it finally done, in high resolution vector format, ready to be turned into a finished artistic product.

(click to enlarge)

2. My iPad arrived, and with it a shifted focus, I now am at work laying out the foundation for Histocracy to become a universal app. This will allow people to only have to pay once for both the iPhone and the iPad editions. The screen real estate available on the iPad is truly deceptive, and it is the PERFECT solution for any sort of strategy game. I am super excited for the ideas and plans I have kicking around, and I may have something to show for it soon. It really all depends on how my job hunt goes.

P.S. This is an official call to everyone out there, if anyone has any jobs out there, pass them my way!

Companion Paper

I am so burned out but I wanted to post the link online:

Grab it Here!

Once I get some recovery time, the updates will flow again and progress will continue.

Whats in a name? UPDATE: Major Excitement

Now that I have a working, solid framework of the games mechanics (WOW took just over two months of solid work to get a playable idea base down) I have cracked open the iPhone SDK (hence known as "THE BEAST") and started trying to actually code basics together. But that is far too early to mention anything landmark or even tangible, other than the process has begun and full steam ahead (maybe later this week I can have something to show off). Don't worry though, I will still post expanded musings on different mechanics that I haven't fully combed over (here's looking at you nation morale).

Also this week marks the start of my companion paper. I some times forget that this is still a school project due March 17th, and so I really need a paper going along with this blog, and everything else I have done. I hope to come up with a solid outline, however as that isn't directly related to this blog I will only be posting select experts that pertain to the development cycle.

However here is something that I have been working on trying to figure out since the project began: What should it be called?

A name is its brand, this is something that you have to have a good hook, it is the first thing people really see when looking at the product (along with the icon) and it needs to represent while not falling flat or sounding contrived. Knowing this I took a look at what I mainly wanted to portray:

  • It is about growing a nation from the beginning of time 
  • It is about shrewd diplomacy 
  • It is about conquest
So what might be a perfect name? Instantly "Rise of Nations" popped into my head. "Perfect" I thought to myself... only there was one problem. It was created by Microsoft Game Studios in 2003. That lead to my discovery of problem number two in creating a clever, interesting name: it cannot be something someone else already thought was super clever and interesting.

Bummer.

So back to the drawing board I went. Between batting things around with other people a bunch of names were produced:
  • Nations of Glory
  • State of Agenda
  • National Conquest
  • Conquest of Nations
  • Nations of Conquest
  • War and Conquest
  • Radical Alliances
  • Histophillia
  • Histocracy
And a dozen more that I felt didn't really fit the mood of the project. After the long weekend of intense debate I felt "Histocracy" was the best choice. It is short, unique, clever, and mixes history with government. It also checked out with google as not having existed as some important big trademarked project. I quickly jumped at this opportunity to begin to lock down my new IP, registering the domain names histocracy.net and histocracygame.com to both point to the same url (these will go live hopefully later today once my FTP access unbreaks, the one time I need it working of course).

An important moment in my game's life has just been reached, and I feel renewed, revitalized, reenergized, and all sorts of other "re" feelings!

UPDATE: The site is now live with a very basic teaser. This is exciting it is like a real life project! Please tell me what you like more: histocracy.net or histocracygame.com for the site URL.

Spying on your neighbor.

Another previously unknown feature of the game, Spy Games.

What is this you might ask? Well, once you develop spy tech you can begin to get a number of spy points per game year. This begins the automated game of getting extra information sent to your news wire each turn. Each nation can hold a number of enemy spies total, depending on the size, however this number is unknown to the player. When you tap on another nation, you are given the option to set a spy priority, and with this it will randomly send out a spy to that nation for a certain amount of time (as long as that nation has an open spot). If there is no open spot, and you have not set a priority (low - med - high) it will not send out any spies. Spies give significantly faster updates on what is happening in the regions controlled by the nation, and can be given special missions to sow discourse (which uses up the spy removing them from play) however, this has a dice roll to succeed/fail and if it back fires you lose the spy, and the other nation is informed and you take a significant hit to nation relations. Each turn your spy is in another nation it also has a chance of still be discovered even when it is in its "sleeper" state.

Finishing a framework, the end of war!

It's monday, so lets completely wrap up the military complex framework! With this final push, I hope to show a completely full functional system (if not but barebones) that can be implemented and easily augmented for tweaking/balancing. Let us talk about it all then else shall we?

First, the defense tokens. These are fortifications that you can play into territories, but they cannot be moved. They auto advance in Tech Ages (unlike military units) and for the sake of rolls, have land unit rolling powers. However, they protect land units in that territory, so it modifies enemy rolls to reduce the number of casualties while also depleting its own "health" or upkeep. Keeping them in a city costs credit upkeep that is added to the military spending bill, and if you lower spending they cease to function. They also act as a way to counter attack, and where as normally a land unit might not be able to attack a sea or air unit, with a territory that has a defense token they gain firepower % to fight back.

When you play a military token, you are given the option if you want it to be Land, Sea, or Air. This is a rock-paper-scissors decision as they each have their own little unique role they play in war.

Land Units! they are bread and butter units of the game, you get them first and ultimately, they are the most important. Why are they so important you might ask? They cannot attack sea units and barely survive against air, BUT they are the only units capable of sieging a territory, and take it over. They are effected by terrain modifications caused by the ground, and have the lowest upkeep costs.

Sea Units! Wow something new eh? Sea units are fun because they can travel the wonderful blue ocean with ease. They are also upgradeable with fun new abilities that allow for land bombardment, and anti-air guns to deal with land and air units. They can only travel two hexagons from land until ocean travel is researched limiting their ultimate range early on, also earlier tech age ships can be lost at sea before you gain better navigation technology.

Air Units! These come last and are unlocked by tech research, They are devastatingly powerful to defense tokens and land units, but it comes at a price. They have a very limited reach, and you must first play an airfield card on a territory. They can move from allied airfield to airfield however, but the upkeep is rather high, even more so in foreign land.

The basic way damage is calculated is:
{(%of damage) x [(dice rolls) + (offensive modifiers) / (morale below threshold %)]} - (defensive modifiers) = DAMAGE! 
Which then gets thrown into a secret converter that then kills of the specific number of units to remove from the military unit in battle. You can also daisy chain military units on a turn, so you can have army 1, army 2, air 1, army 3 all attack in order against an enemy force. And if you have multiple units in the same territory for morale purposes it counts the entire group as one big unit for size comparison.

Now for the awesome chart that shows you just how much damage each thing does to each other:

Everybody works together

Update 2? I have been kicking it into high gear since I feel like I am so far behind!

It is all about diplomacy today. While attacking your neighbor may be fun if you don't be diplomatic about things you are doomed to fail! This is where your nation relations as well as government relations come into play, as they modify the likelihood of A) the AI accepting a trade/deal/alliance and B) your nation being ok with entering into an agreement with a nation. If you do something with a deeply hated nation your country will suffer as a result of public backlash.

By tapping on a neighboring nation's territory you bring up their diplomacy menu. From here you can instigate all interactions between your countries.

Trade
Fairly standard ordeal here, you can trade or sell (or a combination of both) cards, territories, and access to tech tree technologies.

Alliances
You can request nation alliances here. This is useful because by entering into an alliance, you are expected to come to each others aid. You can have the option to renege on your alliance duties but this will significantly harm your relations with other nations in that alliance, making it harder to deal with them in the future. You are rewarded by honoring your duties with morale bonuses as well.

Vassalization
You can either become or offer the option to be a vassal. As a Vassal you give a part of your population gain and credit intake to your ruling nation in exchange for a tight bond between nations. You cannot do this between nations that do not share at least neutral governments.

Treaties/Truces/Peace
You can request truces that will discourage attacks for a certain number of turns. These can be broken but if they do they seriously hurt a nations morale. With this you can offer territories, credits, or cards to help push a deal through.

Demands/Threats/Proclamations 
You can issue statements to other countries either threatening them, or promising them something (such as protection of independence). This straightens nation relations and can be used to sway/strong arm a country into doing something you want them too. An example is you can demand they pay you X credits for Y turns or you will invade them.

War 2.0 - The war'ining.

What a crazy week, I had a large speaking assignment on thursday and it ate up all of my day tuesday-thursday morning really putting me a bit behind. But being a few days late isn't the end of the world, and I think I have some cool stuff related to battle to show off.

As this game is all about conquest, military is an important part, just as important as the diplomatic side (which I will deal with next week).
I already went over a large amount of military stuff last week, but I feel that I can just wrap this up with a bit more information. Movement goes along a hexagonal based grid system (thanks for stealing my idea civV) which allows for a great deal of freedom, and each hexagon ties into the tile modifiers. You can go to war with a enemy unit if it is in a adjacent hexagon. Battles take place at the end of the turn, and most battles will take a number of turns to finish as you only get one base attack per unit per turn (this can be modified with cards). I would really like to have the battles animate similar to this where you see the units and the terrain attack each other, but that may be a bit of effort. If you wish to skip all the battle scenes you can just tap the button and It will give you your complete summary.

Also since information and distance plays into the game heavily, you wont always be able to see your battles take place right away. If you are close to home base of course you can see things go down, but the further you get from your nation the harder it is to see battles take place, and you get stuck with simple (you won/you lost) screens to keep you updated. This becomes less problematic as you upgrade your tech later on, and you can completely remove this with a card that makes your ruler supreme military commander.

Conquering Nations
So you are at war to take over your rival nation huh? Well as you fight your way through territories you have to take down the main city to capture the territory. Each city takes two base turns per one population size to bring until control. So if you have no modifiers and you wish to capture a territory with a population size 2 it will take your army 4 turns to take over. However while this happens the opponent does not have any access to that territory for income or anything.
As you take nations your map color creates horizontal lines showing your current conquest. You can then demand a nation cede them to you for peace, become a vassal, or just continue them and annex the entire nation.

News Wire
Time for some innovation! I wont go completely into this all the way yet (as I am still trying to figure it out gameplay wise) but this is the first phase of every turn. The game basically plays as follows:
News Wire -> Buying/Playing Cards -> Diplomacy and Military -> End turn (everything goes through)
The news wire is basically the overview of your nation, it shows everything that has happened to it over your previous turn in an headlined format, and you can tap the headlines to get a more detailed account of events. The crux comes in that reading in depth things that happen cost you points (haven't come up with a proper name for them yet). These points limit you to having to pick and choose keeping up to date with your nation as you try and make decisions. Of course you can get cards to augment your point total allowing for more information to disseminate but you have to be really selective in being able to cut through everything happening and determining what is most important for you to know at the given turn. Remember, due to logistics information also takes a certain amount of time to reach your nation, so you might be reading things that happened a number of turns ago (although it will always say the date a certain event occurred).