OLYMPIA: construction and population From: frits@ph.tn.tudelft.nl (Frits Kuijlman) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1992 21:28:56 +0000 The recent discussion about stacks etc. gives I think reason for further discussion on the construction business and population control. Please indulge me, I am just beginning, so some of the things I say here may already be in the game but haven't been seen by me. If we allow players to construct houses, towers and castles, and even turn the structures into towns or cities with walls, wouldn't we also need something to undo the construction? I mean, in the simple case that I want to leave my castle forever, but I don't want somebody else to use it, I want to be able to destroy my own castle. This should probably be a subskill of Contruction : Demolish. Side effect : I get a nice pile of stones I can sell. And no, it shouldn't be profitable to demolish castles just to sell the stones. In case of war there should be a way to break through walls by using sappers or siege engines. This would mean a subskill of Combat. Or maybe sapping would be a subskill of Mining... Of course, you first have to make siege engines, which would mean a cooperative effort of contruction workers and weaponsmiths. Well, I think others have probably even more ideas on this subject. One problem I see with this is that if we just implement this the game would go more and more to a combat oriented game. One way to counter this is to make the above skills expensive to use. Another way is to add interesting things to the other skills. For example with a subskill of Forestry I could create the Atnerk Memorial Park where Faeries and Trolls can roam freely. So: get the discussion and ideas rolling. By the way : how do I destroy my ship or another's ship? Something for shipbuilding, combat and seamonsters? And what about coastal defences? Or do I just sail into a storm? And now on to population control. Correct me if I am wrong, but I have the idea that every region in Olympia has a fixed population. Since the amount of people influences the number of men I can hire it would be nice if I could influence the population. One way would be indirect : if there are a lot of units in the area and business is booming people come to see what's happening. In the same way, if there is a lot of fighting people should go away. Increasing the population should go slowly : creating a booming town isn't done in a day. However, if Dr.Pain visits a region I wouldn't be surprised if there is not much population left the next turn. A result of this could be lots of refugees. If a lot of them come the local population wouldn't be that happy, and maybe would move away itself. To implement this we could maybe create some sort of 'satisfaction factor' for the local population. The better it is, the more people will come. The lower it is etc etc... Maybe a direct way to influence population would be spending on public housing. For example : if I construct the new Dezarne Villa Resort with plumbing, sewers and kindergarten and do some advertising I would think that people would come to me. Well, that's it for now. Frits -- Frits Kuijlman frits @ ph.tn.tudelft.nl Delft University of Technology The Netherlands Referenced By Up