Beginning

After taking a brief interest in Battle for Wesnoth, I was inspired to make my own take on a tactical skirmish RPG.

In the week or so I've been developing Carpe Regnum (working title), I've just about got it to a minimum(ish) viable product. There's no art, but there are battles, recruitment, individualised units, procedurally generated terrain, and a mostly functional AI.

I'm afraid I'll get bored of Carpe Regnum relatively soon and abandon it, so I figured I'd slap together a cover image and upload a devlog, to see if that keeps me invested. I have high hopes for this project. Its concept is better developed and its scope more reasonable than other projects I've abandoned (MON GAME is missing easily 80% of what I'd intended, and that's to say nothing of various little projects scattered on my laptop).

To begin, a world is drawn up containing around 150 provinces, all connected (as nodes) in a single graph by roads (as edges), then roughly 15 major factions are added in. Most of these are 'military culture', with access to infantry, archers, cavalry, and the like, while those beginning in less wealthy provinces are instead 'outlaw culture', with bandits, thugs, and thieves. Each of these factions will spread over several provinces. Then, each unoccupied province has a 'commoner culture' faction on it, defended only by peasants and hunters.

Each faction takes a turn, in which its every unit may move to a connected province. Moving to an enemy province causes a battle; battles between AI factions are run with a very low fidelity simulation, while battles involving the player are the main focus of the gameplay. Factions may also recruit units by spending gold, but only in the province with their leader or one of their heroes (I have not yet implemented or designed the hero system, but some units will become heroes who can recruit units [often different from those your leader can recruit] and take over if your leader dies [otherwise a game over]).

A battle consists of four phases repeated until all the units of one side have died or fled: missile, movement, melee, and magic. The missile phase is skipped in the first round. Battles take place in 3x3 maps, each tile containing 3x3 subtiles. Each side's units begin randomly dispersed on the left- (for the defence) or the right-most column of tiles. (Why did I do it all like this? In large part to make coding the AI easier.)

In the missile phase, units with a missile attack can shoot at an enemy unit in the same or an adjacent column. I'll cover damage a bit more when I describe the melee phase.

In the movement phase, a unit can advance or retreat to a subtile within a tile in another column or shift to a subtile in a tile in the same column. However, if there are enemy units in the same tile as the unit, then advances and shifts are blocked. Additionally, most defensive terrain (forests and hills) is considered difficult and can only be entered by a shift move.

In the melee phase, each unit can make a melee attack against an enemy unit in its tile. Damage values for a unit are expressed as a range; a typical infantry spear attack does 2-7 damage. Some units are resistant or vulnerable to certain types of damage; currently, this is only the heavy infantry, which takes 2/3 damage from sharp attacks (but not blunt attacks, making it weaker to macemen and thugs' cudgels). If the target survives, it gets a free counterattack at half damage.

In the magic phase, certain units can take special actions. This is intended as a catch-all for wizards, dragons, and the superhumanly skilled as well as for mundane but unusual mechanics. Currently, the only magic phase action is a horseman's second movement, which allows them to retreat before the next missile phase or advance to harass archers directly after killing the enemy's frontlines.

My next two major steps are to set up the buildings system and to significantly expand the variety of units available, including adding advancement and XP.

Currently, each province has some villages scattered about, as well as (sometimes) some towns, cities, or castles. Aside from generating income, these (except villages) provide defensive benefits. (As such, they are mostly concentrated on the left side of battlefields, since that is where the defenders begin.) I intend to allow factions to build more revenue-generating settlements, defensive fortifications, and special buildings with diverse benefits.

Additionally, I intend to do a lot of work on the current unit system. I need to figure out which units can be recruited by whom and how units can advance.

Advancement shouldn't be too tricky, but there are some thorns. In Wesnoth, I find the minigame of tactically weakening enemies so that your shaman or whatever can get the final blow (and thus the valuable XP) extremely tedious. Currently, my plan is to randomly distribute 1XP for every enemy that fled or died in a skirmish. The randomness might be obnoxious, but I think it'll support a more diverse set of strategies and play-styles.

I'll outline my plan for what XP does too. Once units have a certain (low) amount of XP, they become a veteran unit, with slightly higher stats. Some unit types (e.g., mages, possibly) might advance to a new kind of unit (e.g., red mage, green mage, white mage) but most (or perhaps all) will not. At a significantly higher threshold, units will become elite. Most units will branch off at this point, though usually it will be possible to forgo specialisation (e.g., a cavalry might become a knight or simply an 'elite cavalry'). Then, units can, again at a much higher threshold, become champion/royal/supreme/paramount (not sure yet) units.

Other than that, the question is how to manage access to unit types. One idea is an actual culture system, where there are several different cultures to which a faction might belong, some human and some elvish or dwarvish or what-have-you. Perhaps some humans can recruit clerics, whereas others have access to more powerful mages, or assassins, or stranger units. How this would interact with bandits, elves, dwarves, or aimless peasant factions (tangentially, beginning as a random one-province village will be the hardest difficulty setting), I cannot say.

Alternatively or additionally, special units might be gated behind certain buildings (you must build a castle if you want knights, for instance, or a church for clerics) , procedurally-generated story threads (no idea, but it sounds cool), diplomacy (if you befriend the elves, they pronounce one of your heroes elf-friend, granting the ability to recruit their special units, or they send one of their heroes to you), special dungeon provinces (perhaps to gain necromancers, you must find a profane grimoire in a long-lost tomb).

So that's what I've made and what I'll make. Congratulations if you managed to 1) find this obscure devlog and 2) read it. I'd love to know whether anyone but me reads this, and any comments or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

I'll hopefully post more devlogs as I continue to work on Carpe Regnum. 

(Merry Christmas!)