This is the first step on hopefully a very long and enjoyable journey. For some background, me and my friends have established a little tiny game studio where we are making our first ever game which we hope to release commercially. The game is quite large in a sense due to the fact that our knowledge on game design and programming in general is only highschool level. However, we do believe that we are well equipped for this challenge.
Our game is incredibly interesting as I personally have never seen anything like it before. It is a complex duality between that of a turn based strategy game and a real time strategy game. If that hybrid of an idea wasn't enough we also decided to throw in a boat load of randomness and make it a card game.
The idea is as follows.
You and x amount of other players or AI play on a randomly generated map consisting of board game tiles. These tiles are controlled by noise to create what looks like lakes, rivers, continents, etc. These tiles are then propagated with randomly placed game objects like rocks, bushes, trees, etc. The player starts off with 2 standard military units, 1 tech point, and 5 cards. The player will then use this first tech point to research the only available tech, Settlements. Now this is where the cards come into play. Every turn the player gets 5 cards, and they have to play 3 of them every turn. The other 2 cards are discarded and sent to the aution house where the other players can then buy them with gold. The currency of the cards. These cards are a mix. 2 of them are tech cards, cards given to you by research, and the other 3 are event cards. These event cards can be anything from a mysterios stranger, or you found gold. A card can either be flat out good, or it can be iffy. Iffy cards have a 50/50 of either doing something good or doing something equally bad.
Every turn the player recieves their tech points to research new things and their 5 cards. To make things even more complicated their are 2 currencies to take note of. The currency of the cards, gold, and the currency of the board, silver. Since the only direct interaction you can have with the board is controlling your troops, gold becomes very important as you will need to buy cards to advance. The cards are how you mainly interact with the board. The cards are responsible for the creation of buildings, troops, declarations of war, political policies, government types, allies, enemies, technologies, and so much more.
In the game you act as a god that has to control and manage a complex civilization and compete for the top spot batteling not only other empires but also the luck and randomness that accompanies the game.
Silver is used as the up keep currency. It is used for troop and building maintenance and is also required in conjuction with the cards for troop and building creation.
On your turn your able to create troops and place buildings if you draw those cards, while also researching and exploring. However, this does not mean you sit back and do nothing when it is not your turn. Even if it is not your turn, you are still able to move and interact with troops, allowing you to attack, explore, and connect. Troops work on a system we call stamina, where at the start of each turn the stamina is returned, but when they move the stamina is drained. This means that the players need to think about how they move in order to remian protected while also taking advantage of the game.
Unlike other games where economy is more so a back ground thing, in this game it has incredible use cases. Your economic power will allow you to conquer the world while also never laying a hand on another empire. In this game you have the ability to buy tiles from other players helping you to secure passage and movement. Furthermore, you also have the ability to borrow and lend gold and silver to other players, when they out down collateral. They could stake cities, land, units, buildings, etc all in exchange for your gold. If they default you collect all of their stuff.
Additionally, relgion and stability have a huge impact on the game. You can use religion to control the masses. If you have religious dominace in another empire, meaning you control all of their cities with your religion they will become your puppet state. If you delcare war they declare war, if you allie with someone they allie with someone. To add insult to injury stability is also important as if it falls to low you can see your beautiful empire divide into civil war. Every city that does not want you in charge will convert your troops in those cities into a disloyal group, meaning you have to fight them or you end up losing to yourself.
This game is heavily inspired by games like Settlers of Catan, Risk, Polytopia, Humankind, Civilization 6, and real life.
This blog is here for me to keep myself motivated and w anting to continue development of the game. I hope this made sense to all of the readers ;), and more is to come!
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