Future of Goblin Camp

These are some of my thoughts and plans regarding Goblin Camp, and the direction I want to take it in. These shouldn’t be taken as things that I will do as-is, instead they are more of a guide to what I envision for GC.

General direction

My goal for Goblin Camp is to be a fun city-builder with a robust economy and military system. With the economy regulating itself once it is built, the player can then concentrate on military matters. Of course the economy will require fine tuning whenever circumstances change, and quick responses in case of disasters such as plague or fires.

Designing defenses should be easy and intuitive, and it should be possible to make strategic choices which affect the outcome of battles. Primarily combat will be about defending your settlement, but raiding other civilization’s settlements is definitely on the list.

I want to concentrate on macro rather than micromanagement. You won’t be looking at labour settings for individual creatures, nor will you be ordering anything at individual workshops. Instead the player’s role is to situate buildings efficiently to allow products to flow well, set the aims of the industry and the military. Various managers will handle the micromanagement.

Goblins and orcs (especially goblins) should be considered expendable. Sure, orcs will gain skill in their professions, and protecting your long time experts will increase your industry’s efficiency, but when it comes down to it an orcs life is a short and brutal one. Rank-and-file orcs won’t be given much personality, only if an orc distinguishes him/herself and is especially long-lived will they be given more details.

Terrain elevation will be simple. Mostly everything will be on one level, but it’s possible to dig out the ground to make pits or a moat. Flying creatures will simply ignore terrain, and guards in towers firing down at invaders is achieved using Status effects.

Given that the player is on the side of orcs, the traditional fantasy “bad guys”, Goblin Camp will go with the bad guy theme ala Dungeon Keeper. Your orcs, trolls, undead and demons will do battle with the heroes in gleaming armor and their parties of companions.

Economy

Setting up a basic economy ought to be simple. Just designate a stockpile and a farmplot and watch the goblins plant seeds. Essentially this will be enough to sustain a small population.  If you want your population to grow, raw foods that you recieve from farms won’t be enough. You’ll need to set up workshops to refine your foods into more nutritious types. Also to support other industries you’ll need farmplots for non-food plants, to make cloth and such.

Risks and rewards

The basic idea is that to produce low-grade basic things, such as low-nutrition food, basic weapons and furniture, you’ll need only a few low-risk resources and only 0-1 refinement steps. For example a wooden club would only require you to fell a tree, make some planks and fashion one plank into a club.

Better things would require more resources, higher risk resources and more refinement steps. A stone axe (basically a club with a sharpend rock attached) would require both wood and stone, and stone will be a higher-risk resource than wood. Stone will come from open-pit mines, which may cause underground creatures to attack your settlement from the mine.

A real metal sword will require even more, you’ll need metal ores, which in turn will require a forge to be worked on and so forth.

In a nutshell I want to have a distinct risk-reward system in place, where the more risks you take (and thus the more danger your settlement is in) the better your rewards as well. On the other hand I don’t see a reason not to allow players to have a settlement where the orcs wear wolf-skins and wield clubs, and only have to contend with the local wildlife and assorted lost adventurer.

Management and skilled labour

The economy should work on it’s own, and keep up stocks of all required items. The player’s job should be in setting up the economy and handling special situations that arise.  Special situations might be a plague destroying your crops, or a fire spreading from a forge. Also tweaking the economies efficiency should be possible, at least by specifying which stockpiles accept which goods, and setting up take-from chains to always have relevant products closest to the right workshops.

Orcs will gain skill in whichever job they do, but it won’t be the player’s job to monitor which orc has which skills. Instead, as orcs become proficient in a job, the job manager will begin prioritizing similar skill-set jobs to those orcs. This will mean that if an orc happens to do a few carpentry jobs and become skilled in it, future carpentry jobs will primarily be assigned to that orc. Of course if there is work to be done and no skilled orcs available, any orc will do.

This mechanic ought to give an incentive to the player to defend their workforce properly. If your orcs keep getting killed by wolves that just waltz through your settlement, you’ll always have fresh unskilled orcs doing all the work. An older workforce means a more skilled one, which directly translates to jobs getting done faster and better.

Status effects and Traits

(note that the effects I mention are just examples, not actual effects already implemented)

Status effects are responsible for handling many different things in Goblin Camp. Hunger, thirst and weariness are all status effects that can be removed by eating/drinking/sleeping. Drowsiness also incurs a slight penalty to most of the creatures stats, for example creatures will move slower when drowsy.

Status effects can also appear as a side-effect of an action. As an example, if an orc gets hit especially hard, he may receive the Concussed status effect for a certain period of time, which decreases his stats. Sleeping in a proper bed, on the other hand, could give a Well Rested effect, which would boost the creatures stats.

Magical effects will be status effects as well. A mage might cast Flight on an allied creature, granting it the Flight status effect. Now the creature would be able to fly directly over moats, traps and walls and attack your settlement from an unexpected direction. Another possibility is a Fear spell that inflicts the Panic effect.

Effects can also be received just by being in the vicinity of a creature. A demon might give the Frozen In Fear effect to all creatures nearby, unless they happen to have the “Immune To Fear” trait.

Traits

Traits are essentially a subset of status effects. They are permanent effects that are gained from experience. Instead of having experience points/levels and that kind of things, creatures will gain various traits that differentiate them from others of their kind.

An orc that survives several battles might gain a “Grizzled War Veteran” trait that allows him to shrug off minor wounds completely. Or perhaps an orc that really gets into fighting will gain the ‘Bloodlust’ trait, making him attack harder and faster and cause fear in enemies, at the cost of decreasing his defensive stats.

Traits may also incur effects to others, a “Great Leader” trait could give all nearby allies a “Inspired by leadership” effect that boosts some stats, or grants immunity to fear.

Population growth and migration

Orcs and Goblins

I haven’t decided how I want orcs and goblins to reproduce yet. Simply appearing on the map edge and trickling in is in my mind too mundane. On the other hand, I also don’t really like the idea of them simply reproducing like humans either. What has been suggested on the forums is a spawning pool type idea, wherein you’d create a pool (or similar construction) that you would then feed various things (garbage, food, corpses), and it would in turn spawn orcs and/or goblins. Right now this is the solution I like the most, and what I’ll probably be going with. Obviously what is fed into the pool will affect the outcome, and spawning more creatures than you can support will be a problem.

Having too large a population will of course lead to starvation, and because these are orcs, they should eventually eat each other to survive. Cannibalism ought to be a valid population control method.

Exotic migrants

If your settlement fulfills certain requirements, you’ll attract different kinds of migrants. I want the player to see all kinds of stereotypical evil creatures come and join your settlement as it grows, so that you’ll have ogres and trolls fighting alongside your orcs.

In addition to these fairly straightforward migrants, what I envision is npc’s such as evil human necromancers setting up shop in your camp. You won’t control them directly, and they won’t do normal jobs, but if you supply them with corpses they will raise them as undead minions that will guard your camp. It won’t be all positives though, as recently raised zombies shambling about may cause fear in the orcs, and the rotting flesh will spread filth. Of course, if a zombie “lives” long enough, all the meat will rot away and you’ll have a skeleton instead.

Also these zombies won’t be under your control, but the necromancer’s. This means that if you allow the necromancer to raise an immense army of undead, he might well decide to take complete control of your camp and attempt to kill all your orcs and goblins.

Once again this ties into the risk and reward way of thinking. There shouldn’t be many choices that are clearly the “best” choice. When a game has elements that are superior to all others, most players will tend to play in an identical manner, which makes for a boring game.

Invaders

In the beginning, the player will simply be harassed by roaming packs of hungry wolves and other assorted wildlife. Eventually though, if the camp grows large and starts sending out raiding parties, the nearby “good” civilizations should attack with armies. They should include siege engines to destroy your walls.

The most interesting invaders though will be heroes. They will have various motivations to come and attack your settlement. Perhaps an orc raid you sent out has returned with an ancient artifact stolen from a human caravan. A few months later a party of heroes will arrive at your gates, and invade your camp. They shouldn’t blindly just kill though, they should attempt to grab the artifact and escape intact.

On the other hand, you might encounter heroes that simply believe that your camp represents all the evil in the world and has to be burned to the ground in order to cleanse the lands of evil.

Heroes will always be few in number, but each one will be a formidable foe, easily slaying average orcs left-and-right.

Socketable items

A cool idea that I got from the community was sockets and socketable items. The idea being that each entity would have a set amount of sockets for special items. Constructions would recieve production bonuses, creatures would get stat bonuses and special traits for example. These items would mainly be acquired from sending out raiders and having them return with an artifact. You could then take this artifact and add it to a construction (if it was say, a Legendary Dwarvish Mithril Handsaw you could socket it into a carpenter’s workshop to increase the shops speed and quality of products) or your toughest orc warlord (could be an Amulet of Life Saving, which will save your warlords life once).

I don’t want to have the player fussing over separate parts of equipment, and would rather that armor is just one item for example. So you’d assign a squad leather armor, axes and shields, and you’d produce those three items. Then you could add these socketable items to specific creatures to individualize the more successful warriors.

This would also give the player a good motivation to send out raiding parties. You’d recieve these socketable artifacts which would enhance your production/military power, but also attract mightier heroes and larger armies to attack.