This game will be a classic empire game. Each player tries to conquer all the territory. It will also serve as an experimental vehicle for peon AI. In this context, a peon is basically an ordinary citizen of a kingdom. Specifically, the king is not a peon. I feel that opponent AI is beyond the scope of this game, although it will figure prominently in later games. The major area I feel we can improve over existing games right now is playability. Remove all micro-management responsibility from the player; let his advisors (managed by AI) monitor various situations for him and make reports of situations that need attention. Peons should act intelligently by being useful and being aware of danger and acting appropriately. In fact, I feel the player should not be allowed to make any decisions that are not strategic. Or, to put it another way, any situation that would elicit a predictable response, should be dealt with by AI.
Example: enemies attack your city. Automatic result: all peasants rush inside the city. If the attacking force is stronger than the defending force, the defenders defend from inside the walls, and requests for reinforcement are sent to the nearest armies. If the attacking force is weaker, the defenders engage them outside the city in order to surround and annihilate them. Afterward, new forces are sent if necessary to bolster the city's defenses. Your military advisor will automatically distribute your defenses to protect the most valuable resources (in the general sense of "resource" as city, population, gold, or anything useful).
What does this leave the player to do? Your advisors are much less intelligent than you. They understand the relative value of some thing but not all. The player decides when to strike and where, and in general controls the direction of the game. Your advisors understand simple things like which cities are most valuable, where the weak points on your border are, where it is most profitable to build improvements, and many other things which relieve you, the player, from dealing with trivia.When your advisors are in doubt about anything, they consult you.
The primary goal of this particular game is to hash out ideas and algorithms to be incorporated into future, superior games, and to gain experience writing and planning games. Since the primary algorithms of this game are peon AI, all other aspects of the game will be simplified as much as possible while still retaining fun. Throughout the discussion you will see the phrase "for simplicity...". When you see this, just remember this paragraph.
The question of where soldiers come from. In some games, the player can "buy" soldiers with gold, or draft them and spend time and gold training them, or building the necessary building to "produce" them at a certain rate. There may be maintenance costs as well. Since I am aiming for simplicity, I think soldiers should be produced merely by drafting them. In fact in the general labor model, soldiering is just one kind of profession. At any time, the proportion of the population engaged in different activities can be adjusted to any desired distribution, without any transition cost. There may, however, be a cost to equip new soldiers. The question then is, is it recouped when soldiers move into another profession? Presumable they turn in their equipment, which can be reused. This is a good illustration of the issues that arise every time we try to add more "realism" to the game.
Your empire has a large number of citizens, which are basically identical (except for profession, which is very fluid). The question is, how do we make sure they are all being useful? The best use of citizens is as soldiers. You can draft as many as you like and they can't bloody well refuse. So having a well fed, rapidly reproducing population is very advantageous for military reasons. Obviously to hold all those people you need lots of land. You can colonize empty land, which is the primary source of new land in the beginning of the game, or you can take it from thy neighbour, which is the primary source of land later in the game - and a lot more fun.
Now that you have enough land, you have to get your people onto it.
More precisely, they get themselves onto it. Like bacteria, your population
expands to fill up all available room provided there is enough food. So,
that is the other thing you must procure in copious quantities. The primary
source of food is farmland. I haven't really though beyond that yet.
A more interesting question is, how exactly do the citizens distribute
themselves? In colonizing new land, we need an algorithm to decide how
many people move from where to where and when. This is a fruitful area
of research. We also need an algorithm to determine reproduction rates.
Since each citizen in your empire has a definite position (you can see
them if you look closely enough), there is not just some number that goes
up to represent growth. Rather, a good growth algorithm would produce more
new citizens where there are already a lot, but only up to a point. It
would also take into account the undesirability of overcrowding, which
tends to produce high growth rates in sparsely populated areas and low
growth rates in heavily populated areas, all other things being equal.
Of course, not all other things are equal. People congregate near valuable
resources such as water, food, shelter, gold, trade routes/markets, or
basically anything that proves useful to be near.
In terms of defensive capabilities, I'm thinking that a peon is basically harmless and defenseless.
So far I have only a very simple terrain model. A variety of terrain types will exist to provide visual appeal and different resources. For example, farmland can only be on certain terrain types. Water is special: it is impassable to land based units without a bridge or boat. So water is especially important for defense and borders. Perhaps mountains will also be impassable (except to flying units, if we add them).
For simplicity, terrain has no effect on movement (except to prevent it altogether in some cases).
The map will be based on hexagons. This is preferable to squares because unlike squares, the distance from one hexagon to any neighbouring one is equal. Hexagons are traditionally the most popular tile type in wargames.
For protection, your citizens will congregate in cities. A city is distinguished by having a wall around it. Enemy soldiers cannot penetrate the wall. I haven't really thought the seige thing out yet. I suppose in a successful seige, the attackers would eventually get in with ladders or something. But that's another discussion. Anyway, there are actually different types of fortifications. A city is the strongest and typically the only one that holds civilians. There may also be forts and outposts. These latter types exist only for military purposes. They may function as bases for raids or border patrols, or may be nothing more than guard towers with sleeping quarters. Research needs to be done here.
Unlike in some games, a city in our game does not have a fixed size.
I expect it would occupy as many hexes as necessary to house what it needs
to house (there may be buildings and stuff but I haven't really that about
that either), and would take on a shape imfluenced by the surrounding terrain,
especially mountains and water. Initially a settlement would just be a
village, which is a collection of people, farms, buildings or whatever,
without city walls. A village would just grow willy-nilly in whatever manner
is most convenient to harvest surrounding resources. When the village becomes
large and important enough, one of your advisors may decide to erect a
wall around it to provide security to your holdings there (if your advisor
is not sure, he may ask you). The point of citification may come sooner
for border towns, which lead a more precarious existence.
Between your cities, roads may be built (research is needed to decide
if this has some purpose). Within them, there may be buildings and streets.
Perhaps houses or something.