Heh, you’re probably getting tired of these by now. But, I’ve come up with another idea over the past couple of days. The common theme of (most of) these recent ideas is how the new Alpha 20 features could be tweaked and extended in order to expand the strategy layer. This one is about minion recruiting and ability scaling.
Idea: Minions (beasts, humanoids, undead, and spookies) require their own personal chamber
Basic Rules
- A chamber is defined as a contiguous set of dungeon tiles enclosed by dungeon walls and door tiles.
- Minions are recruited no longer by tile (bed/cage/gravestone/ritual room) but by chamber. For example, if a chamber has a bed in it, then a humanoid can be recruited. Likewise, a cage in a chamber recruits a beast, and so on. If it contains multiple types of recruiting furniture, then the chamber can recruit multiple types of creatures. However, once a chamber is occupied, no other minion can occupy it.
- Because doors are required for this whole thing to work, wooden doors can be constructed from the start of the game. (To balance this, wooden doors are made very weak, and iron and steel doors are unlocked in the library when iron- and steel-working are researched.)
- The sum of floor tiles within a room determines the quality of the room. Better quality floors recruit AND RETAIN better minions. If the floor criteria isn’t met, then the occupying minion will lose morale at a rate based on its over-experience, and eventually leave your dungeon (to be replaced by another minion who is satisfied by the room). He’ll be civil about it and drop all his equipment before he goes, though.
- You can drag and drop minions into different chambers, but make sure that the floor requirements are met or else the minion will lose morale
So far, this doesn’t differ too much from the existing game. It’s a little more interesting to carve out dungeons now, but it’s still mostly busywork. Here’s where the strategic layer comes in:
Rules with major strategic consequences:
- Totemic items are the major determinant of minion ability scaling. These are a special type of item, found in foreign sectors (or crafted from items found in foreign sectors) that can be mounted on walls (like torches). When a minion levels up, his stat boosts or abilities learned will be dependent on whatever totems are installed in his chamber at the time.
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Totems are rather rare, but important items. They often have different effects on different classes of minion.
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When a minion levels up and consumes the totem, the totem is IRREVERSIBLY BOUND to the chamber wall. The only way it can be freed is with a scroll of totem reclamation. If the chamber wall is destroyed, so is the totem.
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If you want to move a minion to a new room, totem requirements must be satisfied along with floor requirements, otherwise the minion loses morale and then leaves.
- Minions that are recruited to chambers with abilities that are satisfied by the totem abilities in the chamber
How to interpret this:
- Your dungeon structure determines rather strictly what kind of minions you get.
- Any sufficiently complicated minion is going to demand that you irreversibly spend resources on floors and totems. But if he’s killed or banished, then you can swap the recruiting furniture for another, which may be a necessary action to take if you have to defeat an enemy tribe against which your existing minion is weak
- Your resources serve as an upper bound on your power. Allocating resources properly, based upon what you scout on the world map will let you make incrementally better decisions
- Conversely, recruitment rate serves as a lower bound on how vulnerable you are. If the game is set so that you recruit 50% of your maximum power every 1000 turns, then you’re rather vulnerable if your forces have totally been wiped. On the other hand, if you recruit everything back after 100 turns, then being wiped doesn’t have much consequence.
- Thus, by fiddling with the amount of usable resources on the map and the recruitment rate of minions, you’re able to balance the game. Earlier this week in my rant, I described a scheme that whereby the power curve could be balanced by tuning the total amount of mana on the map. Essentially, these are two mutually exclusive ways to do the same thing: the mana system is just a little bit tighter (if somewhat less interesting) because mana is only one variable, whereas recruitment rate and a bunch of different resources are many variables
