New Game?

[CSSS]

I have to admit. The detail and depth of the game looks beyond amazing!

[mercenarius]

Thanks for the kind words! And I am sorry about the delay in responding.

I got a little bored with the particular Ops Command that I was demonstrating earlier, and I decided to finish the last remaining enactment from the "Urbes" choice in the Civitas Department. You have seen this before, but here is a reminder:

Civitas Department.png (1.19 MiB) Viewed 1885 times

Clicking on "Urbes" will give the player the following menu:

Urbes Menu.jpg (195.1 KiB) Viewed 1667 times

The upper left choice, "Establish a New City...", hadn't been done yet. (The others are all finished).

After playing around with it, I decided that the players will need a submenu to help define their goal before actually making an enactment. Clicking on the upper left button will layer a new menu over the existing one. This is what that submenu looks like:

New City Options.jpg (202.65 KiB) Viewed 1667 times

If the player choses to "Establish a New City...", the choice for the enactment is made from a "Choice Area" which is pretty standard and you have seen them before. It does so happen that this is one of the few Admin functions in which empty city sites are relevant. Here is what that look like:

Build New City.png (1.2 MiB) Viewed 1885 times

If you select one of the empty sites as the target for the enactment, and click on Build City, you will get an Enactment Menu similar to this:

Build City (Empty Site).png (643.72 KiB) Viewed 1885 times

After that, it's about the same as other construction projects with the somewhat rare condition that any fixed costs are paid up front rather than on a pro-rated basis. It's admittedly somewhat abstract, but it is easy to understand. The idea is that the state has to grant privileges and benefits in order to convince people to settle in the new city. It therefore costs more to found a new city on an empty site than on the site of an existing village.

I'll post more next weekend concerning the other enactments related to establishing a new city or upgrading an existing one.

EDIT: sorry for the small sizes of the shots of the admin dialog itself. I scaled those down to make it easy to fit them into the post. The dialog at the runtime is bigger than that, of course, at least it is when the screen size allows it.

EDIT: I realized that the first version of the "City Options" menu was rather overselling the state's role in the growth of cities as it relates to city's classification (village, town, minor city, etc.). And I also realized that the renaming of cities needs to be in there somewhere. So, I redesigned the menu and changed the "Resettle Verterans" icon to go better with the other icons in the menu. This is much better, I think. I hope.

[mercenarius]

The "Sponsor Colonia" enactment is inspired somewhat by Gibbon's chapter on Septimius Septimus, and the need for the player to have a mechanism to strengthen a city's landowning class. There are indirect ways to do this, such as reductions in taxes for a particular city, and those methods will be the most commonly used. But I wanted to add a direct way.

Once completed, there is a Notification added. I won't bother to post a screenshot of that; you have seen examples already of similar notifications. But, since those notifications can be deleted, I also added a notice in the City's report dialog already. If the city received such a "sponsorship" its Monuments attribute will use a different panel and it will look like this:

City Report with 'Colonia'.jpg (224.28 KiB) Viewed 1480 times

A "normal" panel looks like this:

City Report with 'Beauty'.jpg (223.84 KiB) Viewed 1480 times

I will post something next weekend to finish up with the four "New/Upgrade City" enactments. And I will try to make it earlier in the weekend!

[Orm]

Looking good- And complex.

Any idea on what the play time will be like? Will it be more like Hannibal type of speed to do things, or perhaps like the behemoth War in the Pacific: AE?

[mercenarius]

Hey Orm, thanks for your kind words!

Yes, I have tried to make The Fall of Rome a deeper game than Hannibal and it is more complex. I haven't played War in the Pacific, so I cannot compare. I mostly stopped playing "other" strategy games with Rome: Total War. I have never played Europa Universalis, for example. I am told that it's pretty involved. I do have Total War: Attila and I didn't like it very much.

Any idea on what the play time will be like?

I hope that the shorter scenarios will take about 4-8 hours and the longer ones about twice that. I don't want to think about the grand campaign.

I am a little behind this weekend, as you can tell. Sorry about that!

I will post some screenshots a little later in the day.

[Orm]

I don't want to think about the grand campaign.

The grand campaign is pretty much all I think about when I think about this game. For some reason I can not stop smiling like an idiot when I do so.

At least I am not drooling. Yet.

[mercenarius]

At least I am not drooling. Yet.



Regarding the previous mention of "complexity" and such, here is the enactment area for converting a fortress to a town with the option of resettling the garrison:

Resettle-Convert Area.png (1.13 MiB) Viewed 1005 times

If the player proceeds, the enactment is confirmed in the usual way with an Enactment Menu:

Resettle-Convert Menu.jpg (209.9 KiB) Viewed 1005 times

It's a little more complicated than most enactments, most of which are really pretty simple. The "resettlement" isn't something that actually happened that often in the period covered by the game, but I want to provide a "what if" for this situation. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be crammed into the text of the Enactment Menu, so it's a little opaque.

So, what will be in the manual, but not in the enactment: the player gets a 50% discount on the cost of discharging the troops when this option is chosen. The idea is that they are getting a free land grant to compensate for that. Secondly, the cost of the discharge is NOT paid up front like the cost to establish the city. The text in the enactment menu isn't clear on that. But I really don't want to make the menu bigger and longer to read.

I disabled "maximum speed" because I feel that the business of attracting people to settle in the town cannot be made faster by hiring a larger workforce. And the cycle of agriculture cannot be changed, naturally.

I will go back and revise the "found new city" enactment in the same way, so what I posted a couple of weeks ago will be changed slightly. But only slightly.

I will try to finish this subtopic up next weekend, for sure. I keep saying that, but I do mean it this time.

[CSSS]

For once more in our lives,we will be able to play a monster game of ROME from beginning to end! Definitely worth a steak and margaritas if you visit DFW!

[CSSS]

For once more in our lives,we will be able to play a monster game of ROME from beginning to end! Definitely worth a steak and margaritas if you visit DFW!

[mercenarius]

Many thanks for the compliment!

I have revised the last option in the "City Options Menu" that was posted earlier. The "final" version now looks like this:

Revised City Options.jpg (169.83 KiB) Viewed 348 times

The last option brings up the usual "selection area" to choose a city. But the enactment menu itself has different options. It's somewhat different from most enactment menus, in that you really are choosing a type of enactment. This gives the player a "grab bag" of choices, as we might say here in the U.S.

Here is what the menu looks like:

Celebrate Games Option.jpg (180.16 KiB) Viewed 348 times

The first choice, as you can see, allows the player to stage special Games in the Emperor's name. This will the effect of reducing unrest in a city, and also of reducing the Emperor's Opprobrium level.

Provide for Repairs will begin an enactment to restore a city which has suffered damage from natural disaster. The repair enactments themselves are the same as those which already exist in other places: upgrade baths, improve water, etc. This option in the menu you see above will be one way to players to get a reminder which cities have been damaged. For example, if you delete a notification that a city got hit by an earthquake, there currently isn't any way to know what was damaged there. So, I have designed this as one way to solve that problem.

Renaming a city will raise an Emperor's Auctoritas by only a small amount (I haven't coded this yet), but it's one way to spend money and get additional authority. The choices of names will probably be limited to variations on the current Emperor's name. (Just to keep it simple).

The last choice is the place in the Admin Interface where the player can promote the expansion of a city. If a city has grown already to the point that it's close to expanding, this effort will be expensive but will always succeed. If a city isn't really large enough to expand, the player can still try, but there is a chance that the effort will fail. It will also cost more because there is more infrastructure to build and an effort to import or attract population must be made.

Here is an example of that:

Promote City Option.jpg (185.31 KiB) Viewed 348 times

I realize that giving the players a grand total for the cost will have many of us - myself included! - reaching for a calculator. Perhaps I will revise the text, although it's crowded enough as it is. This last enactment is deliberately an example of "If you have to ask how much it costs you can't afford it" in the sense that the State won't usually be looking to do this.

I especially don't want to encourage players to try to spend a bunch of money in the hopes of increasing the tax base and then making a profit from trying to be "The Expander of Cities" in the history books.

There is a little more coding to be done on this, but I figure that most of you have seen enough of this particular subtopic. I'll try to post new screenshots on something different in a couple of weeks.

P.S. Of course I will keep the steak and margaritas in mind!