Game Design 1

It occurs to me that the very nature of this project, besides as a progression of vague technical feature discussions, is not obvious.

So here goes: The preliminary game design behind Dawn of Civilization

Dawn of Civilization is a historical RTS. It is designed to reinvent the RTS genre, and does so in a number of key areas:

0. Empires. Your typical RTS facilitates matches between up to eight human players, with one winner and up to seven losers. This is a nice competitive idea, but it makes games between more than two people rather silly and unnatural. You're all squashed together, and all duelling to the death. It's quite obviously a game.
Dawn of Civilization inverts this trope completely. For each competitive human player, there is a noncompetitive AI player who will intentionally stay several steps behind the player. Various improvements in every aspect from multiplayer victory conditions to diplomacy are all designed to a single end goal: that by the end of the game there should be two or three sides, each composed of multiple players working towards the same goal, in an epic struggle for final domination.

1. Map size. Contrary to the typical RTS map, which is one or two square miles, maps in DoC are approximately ten square miles in size. This makes games longer, larger, and more tactical: scouting is essential, and it is possible to maneuver your own forces so as to render an enemy's slower troops useless. Harrying, attacking of supply caravans, ambushes, and more are all made possible by this feature.

2. Landscape camera. A major problem generated by large maps is navigation. RTS games normally make use of a minimap to let the player move quickly and accurately around the world; however, as the developers of Supreme Commander doubtless quickly discovered, minimaps become unfeasible once the main map reaches a certain size. There just isn't enough resolution and visual accuracy available in a minimap to differentiate between locations smaller than cities, or to quickly locate and zoom to one of your scouts, on a map this large!
Supreme Commander's solution was to introduce a full-screen minimap, accessed with the spacebar. This made it possible to navigate successfully and restored the functionality of the minimap; the problem was, it became entirely too possible to play the whole game in this mode, without zooming in to watch the battles play out on the surface level. Something was lost in this approach that Dawn of Civilization cannot afford to lose.
Dawn of Civilization combines several different approaches in an attempt to not only restore the fundamental functionality of the minimap, but to surpass it. The main, and most obvious, of these is the game's camera. Like Empire Earth, it is freely rotatable and zoomable via the right mouse button; unlike Empire Earth, you can zoom down until the horizon, with all its landscape features and distant forests, is clearly visible. Thus, navigation becomes a question of knowing the map, and familiarity with specific landmarks - mountains, deserts, oceans, peninsulae - will follow during the course of the game.
Additionally, there is a minimap present in the game to assist in cross-map navigation; while it will not differentiate between densely packed locations, it allows you to move from one spot to another with effortless ease.
Finally, there is the icon-based in-world interface. Taking a cue from X3: Reunion, every far-off object of note - cities, villages, or armies - is marked with a tiny icon that follows it along the edges of the screen, and on the horizon if the camera is looking along the landscape. These icons allow for instant navigation to friendly cities, sites of important battles, etc., as well as providing visual reference for the player when events (such as ambushes!) take place. They occupy the interface region easiest to move to for the mouse cursor - the edges of the screen - and stay neatly out of the way when performing normal RTS actions.
These icons may be navigated to with a simple click, or used to task units to by right-clicking them. This, for instance, should allow you to assign future units to a specific army, to go there when they are completed.

4. The Resource Production Chain. Dawn of Civilization is a hybrid design. While its battle engine is an RTS, it includes many elements common to city building games like Caesar or Anno 1701. Primarily, every resource must be harvested or traded for, then modified by buildings in your city to reach its final, usable form. Just as important, every soldier in your army will come from a specific house, and every working building in your city needs workers. As the final piece in this puzzle, every worker requires food and other resources for upkeep.
The net result of this system is that players will be given more to do during the early portions of the game, building cities rather than building bases, and armies will be naturally constrained by the strength of the cities that field them. Sieges become possible. Trade (and the disruption thereof) becomes a necessity. The whole game is made more complex, more challenging, and more fun.

5. Morale. Morale is common to all houses and soldiers in the game. For houses, it represents the satisfaction of their workers, and is reflected in how hard they work. A happy worker will produce more than the standard amount of resources; an unhappy one, less. For soldiers, it is divided into global and local morale: global morale is dependent on the happiness of that soldier's family back home, as well as how long he's been away from home. Local morale depends on food supplies, that soldier's state of health, and the way the battle is going. Retreats and routs are possible. A wave of arrows, even if not particularly effective, can cause an enemy army to flee in terror. Tactical possibilities are bolstered tremendously, without any complication to the battle controls or user interface.

6. Supply. An army marches on its stomach, and its stomach must be satiated by its home town. Likewise, siege weapons such as catapults and ranged soldiers will require wood and stone in order to keep fighting. For these purposes, the Caravan unit is designed. Each Caravan unit carries with it several hundred resources - food, wood, and stone - and distributes those resources to nearby allied units when needed. It will additionally call automatically for more resources from nearby allied towns - resources which will travel, visibly, across the map and may be raided. Disrupting supply lines becomes a viable tactic. Attrition becomes a very real danger. The player is not overburdened with micromanagement - he merely has to keep enough caravans with his army to support its full strength; more for extended campaigns - and a number of satisfying, interesting approaches are added to battles.

7. Diplomacy. The standard options are, of course, available: alliances and tribute may be employed by anyone. But when you conquer another player, things get interesting. You have the option to raze their city, effectively removing them from the game and giving yourself a small amount of loot. But far more tantalizing is the option to establish them under your rule: They work with you, win with you, or lose with you, as the case may be. You can exact regular tribute from them in the form of a certain percentage of their incomes, or a certain percentage of their soldiers, and it is in their best interests to march to war alongside you. But beware being too harsh, or too nice - for they have the option to revolt and become independent once again, or even to ally with your enemies - with the understanding that, should they fail again, they will be destroyed.
Thus, diplomacy and player-to-player relations are a much more interesting and varied aspect of gameplay, extending interest in the final portions of the game as two or three great empires clash.

8. Factions/Technology. You don't start out by choosing a faction like "Romans" or "Zerg." You start out with exactly the same options as everyone else does. Instead, you must perform research during the game, and make choices when you expand your city ("Era up") that will determine the course your civilization takes, the special units you have available, and more. This prevents players from losing before the match begins - for instance, you choose the Minoans, a civilization with advantages in naval combat, but spawn in the middle of the desert. It also makes player choices during the game much more dynamic and fun, compared to the normal grind.

9. Multiplayer matches. In the typical multiplayer match, everyone starts out level; then players are eliminated until one player, or one team, stands victorious. But this pattern is plagued by a fatal flaw: Rage-quitting. A defeated player, or one who sees he is on the losing side, will generally quit rather than face defeat - leaving the victor with a hollow victory, or perhaps no victory at all. By keeping defeated players in the game, but tying them to their conquerors as subordinates, we can not only make the endgame interesting, but keep the interest of even the defeated players through the last battle.
But this would be no fun if there were seven winners and one loser, as might well happen if it was not designed carefully. Thus, there is a cutoff point for victory: Once you conquer two other players (including villages), you become an Emperor, and from then on have only the possibility of an outright victory or an outright loss. Similarly, if you are conquered the points you get from completing the match begin to decrease. And finally, if you are wiped from the game entirely you gain no points.

Points (in ranked matches) for achievements are as follows:
10 points: Emperor, victor. There will always be someone who scores ten points.
9 points: Allied with the victor, never conquered.
8 points: Conquered once, originally vassal of victor.
7,6,5 points: Conqured more than once, originally vassal of victor.
4 points: Emperor, loser.
2 points: Originally Vassal of loser, conquered once before the end.
1-0 points: Originally Vassal of loser, conquered more than once.
0 points: Razed.

And that is the basic game design for Dawn of Civilization. More in-depth description will follow, including unit and building concepts and the tech/era tree. Also, more technical ruminations will follow - probably a lot more. 'Till next time!