Last week I had coded the generation of the campaign grid, individual maps and their inhabitants. The next step was implementing the various ways in which the creatures interact between maps.

The most obvious is allowing a player-controlled creature to travel around, optionally followed by team of minions. Movement is completely free: you can choose any site on the world map, and the game puts you and your team on the edge of that map. As I explained earlier, at this moment the clock on this map starts ticking, and whichever site you came from is frozen.

If you let go of control of the team, they automatically travel back to your base, and you can continue building. If the creature that you are controlling is killed, you have the option of controlling another minion or letting go of control. You can also switch control to a different team member at any time in control mode.

Your enemies can also attack you, and the timing of the attacks stays the same as in the single map mode. The attacking team is transferred to the edge of your home site and starts doing whatever their AI tells them to (like stealing your gold or eating your orcs). If the attackers decide to flee, they will walk back to the edge of the map and travel to their base. It gets tricky if you aren’t present in your base at the time of the attack. I haven’t coded this yet, but when you come back, you have to deal with the attack before the team you were controlling is placed back on the map. It also seems that you shouldn’t be allowed to leave your map during an ongoing attack.

There are some corner cases showing up, like when a player-controlled creature falls asleep on an enemy site, and gets stuck. I think that in such situations the clock needs to keep ticking, until they wake up and travel back. This will also be needed when an immigrant is spawned or so that a returning team can walk to their beds and heal up.

This all sounds pretty complex, but my aim is that the traveling and clock system is mostly transparent for the player, i.e. you don’t need any understanding of how things are working to play the game. Ideally, the player won’t notice much that the clocks keep getting paused on the various maps.