The food issue

[Muratus del Mur]

There is a problem.

Food should be stored by "parcel" (remind me to rename these to land lots or something more obvious in case its not).

Each parcel has its own food production and stored food, that feeds its soldiers and allows building of things only on that land. The player itself does not have an overall food production or storage, and i want it to remain like that.

The problem with parcels is that they can change after each move. This was the cause of the random food values. My initial fix was to store food evenly distributed with each land tile within a parcel, this allows of a live calculation of the food supply even if parcels split during an attack, or when they change id (very often during play, due to the land crawler that assigns them an id as it finds them).

This kind of works, because food is only added at the end of the round based on farms and number of tiles.

The issue comes when i need to consume food. As its not stored anywhere, there is no place i can subtract it from. I was thinking to allow each cell to remember what was consumed on it, due to building stuff, and thats ok, but what to do with soldiers, they move around. I could store that with each soldier, and remember its cost and use it to recalculate the food constantly, but its a bad ideea. This would lead to a sort of land memory, where you would receive the spent food every time a unit is killed, or a land tile is lost.

 

So..again, a summary: Because the land parcels change identity constantly, the food consumption and production can't be stored with the land itself, has to be stored with each cell, and recalculated constantly. But spent food is not like produced food, its fluid, cells can be lost, units killed, and the memory of the food they ate gets lost as well.

 

currently i have no solution to this...but i have a suggestion. I could split the food to all tiles at the start of the round, and also the food spent. This could keep the record, and distribute it evenly across all land cells. Food production or spent amount would still be erased when losing a tile, but there would be strange side effects.

 

One of the side effects would be that you would gain a small amount of food when losing a tile, based on your previous food consumption. Also there might be strange behaviour when merging or splitting parcels...but i am not sure what exactly.

 

Since i have absolutely no better ideea, and making the land crawler somehow remember the previous identity of each parcel is an insane task, i will go on with this. 

Please let me know if the outcome leads to an acceptable gameplay or not.

[Fyrd Argentus]

I have not played this game but am a student of military history.  Time scale of campaigning is typically far shorter than one planting season.  Campaigning happened just at the time when the crops were vulnerable and armies sustained themselves by foraging.  Food held at the end of a campaign was gathered and stored at strategic points that were fortified, and towns grew up around them.

So my suggestion, each turn do production, then track what is foraged by moving armies, then store what is not taken by them at either a strategic point, or off-board as a score, for use in future turns.  Unless of course you want to get into tracking logistical units and supply depots etc.....

And yes you could artificially say your fields produce at the beginning of the opponent's turn.

[Muratus del Mur]

i finished the described fix. It either the most briliant fix i ever made, or i am losing my mind and its the most idiotic change ever made. Either way, let me know how it works. Expect crazy behaviour after you build and destroy some farms and walls.

I could call this a pseudo blockchain method, as all the spending and income ever done by a player is stored decentralized in each cell

 

☸️:8.6678240740741-0.49189814814815

 

 

In here you can see the food each cell considers as produced (first number) and spent (second number)

Once this fix is confirmed by you i will remove this uglyness.

 

[Ledah]

I look forward to trying this out

So each individual cell needs to have the right food to produce something on it? Helps explain the random feeling of not being able to build in that case!

[MaGoHi]

all this time i thought farms next to water give me an advantage, they dont xD

[Muratus del Mur]

3 hours ago, Ledah said:

I look forward to trying this out

So each individual cell needs to have the right food to produce something on it? Helps explain the random feeling of not being able to build in that case!

not really, each land parcel (distinct division of land cells grouped together), has its own income (based on number of cells and farms) and its own food consumption (based on units and high level walls). the build links enable when you have enough food to build that thing. I explained the cost in a separate post.

If the link its not active, its just because you don't have enough food to build that thing.

Food is the only 'money' involved in building structures and units.

3 hours ago, MaGoHi said:

all this time i thought farms next to water give me an advantage, they dont xD

Its not important where farms are placed, but this is a very nice ideea, i might implement it at a later time when i will have nice artworks for the farms, so that the farms near water will actually look different

 

Players will have a rank based on their performance (streak in multiplayer fights and such), i am thinking to add a sort of ranking, or medals, based on what things you helped fix or what ideas got me to implement.. this with the farms would be one. I intend to copy best gameplay ideas that made a difference in md, into this one as well... things like consecutive active days, medals, land loyalty, kings..etc.

[MaGoHi]

4 minutes ago, Muratus del Mur said:

Its not important where farms are placed, but this is a very nice ideea, i might implement it at a later time when i will have nice artworks for the farms, so that the farms near water will actually look different

yeah i noticed, this is probably one of those momnents where we look completely different at things xD

[Muratus del Mur]

I consider the food issue solved. If anyone things otherwise please provide exammples/screens.