Behind the curtains: Internal note for Bronze Age II test (Part II)
Introduction
Game development is an exciting and creative process, but let’s be honest — it is also challenging. And while players enjoy the game, they rarely see how the development happens — the process of building a game, making decisions, and reasons for taking one particular path remains behind the curtains.
We decided to lift such a curtain and offer our community a glimpse into the process of how game design decisions are made within the Mithraeum team. And thus, we publish one of the internal notes written before the Bronze Age II test. You can see what problems were significant for the dev team, how we tried to solve them, and now knowing the Bronze Age II situation, consider to what extent we succeeded in solving them.
Logistics
The task of personal logistics appears in conjunction with selecting an individual set of troops.
Players cannot just click on the map at the point they want to reach and get there. Each player must choose a suitable route that does not match his allies’ and must consider his army hiring and its size and political relations with the settlements he plans to go through.
Ideally, we want to move away from the factor of general battles where the troops of two opposing sides meet in one battle toward a series of small peripheral battles running parallel to each other.
Indeed, the enemies can counter pre-arranged plans, leading us to a situation where the player must make decisions independently and quickly.
The economy also synergizes with this system, with a possible outcome of settlements specialized for a specific task or certain situation.
Also, this system provokes the player not to use his resource or his allies (which would lead to a high value of the planned costs) but to transfer the maneuver expenses to the neutral or enemy players.
Fort Problem
Let’s return to the problems that came to place after implementing the Bonding Curve of troops. One of them is that the creation of troops is now not connected with the economic status of a particular settlement. Now the enemies cannot stop the settlement’s military activity if it receives resources from the outside.
Such a situation will provoke the appearance of “peaceful” settlements-farms and settlements-forts implicitly connected with them.
Most likely, it will lead to a situation where one settlement will tie down the forces of an entire clan simply by being in its rear. Why? Because it is not possible to eliminate it, and it will be necessary to be ready for the sudden appearance of a medium-sized army.
The solution to this problem is the mechanics of linking the ability to hire an army to the fort size.
The logic is that a “respectable” settlement will not suffer from this mechanic, still building a fort to protect the resources.
Settlement-fort, in addition to spending additional resources on building a needless fort, also loses the surprise factor (the fort does not grow immediately) and makes it possible to stop the military activity with small forces (just keeping the size of the fort equal to zero)
Settlers shortage Problem
Now it is not necessary to use settlers to create troops, and the question of what to do with them arises if there are more of them than the limit of all production.
We can solve this issue at the balance level by creating an intentional settlers shortage for most players.
However, the next problem is an extreme imbalance between a player with a settlers shortage and a player with a settlers surplus, which means that he can use them to build a fort.
The problem is further affected by the psychological trap of the player, who will most likely willfully ignore military risks, aiming to achieve economic parity. As a result, he might face a sudden military defeat, together with the economic lag, which can lead to losing interest in the game and initial enthusiasm.
There are many reasonable solutions at the mechanic level, but we will try to solve the problem more easily.
We want to divide structures into those that bring prosperity and those that do not. Moreover, the structures that bring prosperity will face an increased risk of plundering. As a result, the player will most likely prefer to develop the fort at the expense of the farm.
It will also be exciting for us to see how works the process of the gradual and natural shift of the player’s interest from economy to defense and then to attacking ideas.
Yes, we could solve this issue at the mechanic level, but it is inconvenient both purely technically and at a deep philosophical level.
We would not want to apply harsh methods — at the level of physics to drive the player into a confrontation with other players, as in the end, this can lead to the opposite result.
We are more inclined toward the approach of many subtle hints and light provocations.
At the time of publishing this article, The Bronze Age Test II is still going, and the final evaluation of mechanics by the team’s game designers is to be held later internally. In an effort to make Mithraeum better, we are in close communication with the community, gathering their feedback and ideas. Our community is our greatest asset and advisor.
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