Projekt "W"

**Sascha Willems** · 18-01-2007, 07:21 PM

Those that read my blog already know about it, the project is making good progress (especially compared to some of my older projects) and I managed to get a lot of stuff done within the last few weeks.

First I implemented a basic AI, it'll construct buildings depending on the needs of a region, creates armies and (builds and) assigns units to them. It also knows what regions are most endangered and then will assign the biggest armies to that region and it'll also attack other regions. So you can now actually in fact play the game instead of just trying out the features.

Then I got my stuff done on the technology tree, which I (very much like the list of buildings) pushed back and back for a long time. But now I have most of the technologies to unlock buildings and such in the game, though the final technology tree will be around two times as "big" as the one now in the game.

And most recently I pushed myself to work on translations. At first I wanted to do this with the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow the documentation is so bad (it actually won't even mention how to exactly access the localized strings or how to switch betwen languages on the fly, if that's even possible) that I decided to make my own solution. So now I have another tab in my WeltEdit where I do localizations. It's a plain string grind, and eacht identifier (e.g. szTestString) has a single row for each language in the game. And those then get exported to XML and within the game I now only call my own function LocalStr which then selects the appropriate string for the given identitifer based on the currently set game language. Plain and simple but works.

And since reading is stress for the eyes, here is a new screenshot to relief your eyes a bit (click for bigger shot) :

Other than the above mentioned things I really did a lot of smaller things, like preparing some features to be used by the AI (e.g. automatic battles), added some stuff to the GUI for better usability, created a lot of small icons for buttons and dialogs, etc.
And next on my list is balancing (already did some smaller changes), which includes the prices of units, buildings, etc. That's something I have to do, cause otherwise I can't continue to work on AI.

**Chesso** · 18-01-2007, 09:47 PM

Ok so I'm like half dead atm lol (had no more than a couple of hours sleep the last week) but is this like an RTS? Cause... that's some heavy stuff there lol and it sounds like it's coming along very nicely.

**Sascha Willems** · 18-01-2007, 10:29 PM

No, as I already mentioned it's a turn-based game. Making something like this realtime would overwhelm human players and leave no room for strategic decissions, so this is some old-school turn-based strategy gameplay.

**Chesso** · 18-01-2007, 10:48 PM

Oh so a similar idea however it's turn based rather than real time.

Very cool all the same.

**Sascha Willems** · 18-01-2007, 11:40 PM

I got another little "extra" for you. From the very beginning of the project I had a function implemented that could save the current "politcal" situation to a bmp with the regions colored by their owner.

So I decided to make a nice animated gif that shows how the AI will attack and overtake other nations. But please note that this is only the basic AI. The whole GIF spans 300 game rounds and a new image has been taken every ten rounds, so it shows 30 different images !

If you're interested, you can see it here (~800 KBytes). Nothing fancy, but it's nice to see that my humble AI is acutally able to do something

**Chesso** · 19-01-2007, 01:17 AM

Nice work.

**cragwolf** · 19-01-2007, 04:18 AM

Do you mind some criticism? In that AI map, I don't like the way you divide up the world. You seem to do it based on nothing other than area, although that's not quite true because Australia is divided up into 12 regions, while an equivalent area of southern Africa gets divided up into 5 or 6 regions. This despite the fact that the equivalent area in southern Africa has many times the population of Australia, which is barely 20 million.

I think you should base your dividing up more on population. There really is no need to divide Greenland up into almost as many regions as China! Even basing it on population might be simplistic, because natural resources would be another important factor, too. So maybe the Middle East would require more regions with this more complex division scheme. Present-day national borders reflect a mix of geographical and historical concerns. Your regional borders should do this as well, with the extra 70 years of future history in your story.

Maybe one way you could justify your division scheme is by awarding higher points for conquering one region compared to another. Conquering a Middle Eastern region filled with oil reserves (ooh, but maybe we've run out of oil by then?) would gain you lots of points, and conquering a chunk of the Simpson desert or the Greenland ice cap would net you very few points. Maybe this would be a better way to do it then my suggested schemes in the previous paragraphs.

You seem to have 5 ?ºberstates: America, Europe, an east Asian state, a pan-Arabic league, and one other one. Please don't tell me the other one is based on Australia, New Zealand, and some Pacific islands. I can not see how 70 years of history can turn this region into anything other than the sleepy irrelevant backwater it currently is, reliant on the military protection of America, and the technology flow from Europe, East Asia and America.

One thing that concerns me is how you will simulate nuclear war. Nuclear weapons really screw up a lot of assumptions about military strategy. It can really restrict what countries or blocs of countries can do to each other. I hope you have thought through such strategic issues as mutually assured destruction, launch on warning, and second strike. Of course, this is just a game, based on a speculative future, so you can always assume that nuclear weapons were never invented in your universe. Nothing wrong with that!

**Chesso** · 19-01-2007, 05:10 AM

Well i'm not sure but the game probably isn't based on real life events, so it could be layed out in the shape of his name if he wanted it to.... lol.

**Sascha Willems** · 19-01-2007, 01:05 PM

The scenario of the game is semi-realistic, which basically means that I only took the current world political situation and made a scenario of my own out of it. So if you talk about how e.g. the division of the worldmap, please bear in mind that it hasn't got much to do with how our world is divided. When creating the regions I actually didn't thought of populations or other regional stuff (like e.g. natural ressources, historical importance, etc.). And then I just made the new "regions" so that they are around the same in size and such, I didn't put too much thought into newly dividing up the world.
And moreover the whole scenario is hostile. I know that such a scenario will be very unlikely cause of e.g. world economics and other ties (e.g NATO, the UN, G8 and so on), but I need such a scenario for my game idea to work.
So maybe it would be best to think of that earth as an earth somewhere around 70 years in the future but within a parallel universe, which in terms of technology evolved very much like ours but in a much more hostile way. I mean today there are still hundreds of conflicts and wars, but they're all on a more or less smaller scale.

And as for the nuclear war, you're right. At first I wanted the player to be able to build silos for nuclear rockets in each region, making up for a permanent nuclear war. But I scraped that idea, cause as you said, that would make all other military aspects useless and it would end in a fest of spamming nuclear rockets around the world with letting all other game features aside.
And so in the current game draft (maybe I'll still change this at some point) there are no global nuclear weapons when you start the game. First you have to do some research (which will take some time) and then you can set your global project to create a nuclear weapon. The global project is kinda like research, but you only have one project (out of the different ones, with each nation having special projects besides some that all nations can use) that needs a lot of ressources and time to develop. So if you have researched all needed technologies and have put all the time and ressources needed into a global nuclear weapon you can finally use it. But I'll tweak that in a way that it'll become impossible to use this in the very early stage of the game, and after one use you have to again put time and ressources into the project, so that it also can't be reused instantly.

And thanks for that criticism, as constructive criticism is something I always welcome!

**cragwolf** · 19-01-2007, 03:17 PM

Hi Sascha, it's good to learn about the thought processes going on behind a game like this, so I really appreciate your response. I think I like the way you plan to handle nuclear technology. Also I think this project already shows how complicated it can be to design a game that is even semi-realistic. The real world is incredibly complex!