What we absolutely have no idea about is how building(verb) and the buildings (noun) will work. gpg/ct probably don't know this either, so that is what this thread is for.
TL:DR Combine factories, economy structures, and limited defensive structures into a single monolithic & upgradable structure called, creatively, a village. Village grows in population over time, slightly increasing HP, build rate & resources. Villages can be specialized, further increasing HP, build rate, & resources.
note: While this concept of Villages sound like some 4x game, I prefer that influence to low-camera squad rts/rtt & rpg influences. Villages would also not be the only building. Villages = Factories + walls + econ + upgradeable
Instead of building barracks, walls, castles, etc., as separate structures, entire villages are built as massive structures that gradually improve over time increasing defence, resource generation, and production speed.
i.e. in a typical skirmish game, you might start with a humble village without walls or defences to speak of, modest resource generation, and modest production ability: A basic village to get you started.
This village will slowly increase in population and econ/production/defence will increase with it. You can think of this as a free but slow upgrade from t1 factory to t2, and then to t3. Along with production & health benefits, there is a small econ benefit. A village (t1) turnins into a town (t2) in 7-10 minutes without spending any resources. Similarly, a town (t2) turns into a city in 7-10minutes without spending any resources.
This implies a population within each village, which is best simulated as numbers, For simplicity and for performance reason. Any new village starts at 200 and grows to 5'000 at which point it becomes a town (T2). This takes 7-10 minutes but is free. To get to city (T3) statur requires a population of 20'000 and takes 7-10 minutes. I'd suggest the econ/production/hp benefits scaling linearly with the population of the village, but i'm not sure if the engine is capable of doing that within scripting reason.
This brings an interesting possibility of villages loosing all population before the hitpoints of the town reach 0, which would turn the village into a neutral "ghost town". This can then be captured/repopulated by anyone, much like the wreckage benefit in supcom. With a lot of magic being thrown about near said village, it would be very interesting if such a "ghost town" actually started spawning ghosts and/or zombies. Consider it the detrimental side-effects of too much magical exposure. Like radiation, but more creative, and not always deadly.
Specialization of villages comes in the form of specific upgrades, enhancing its offensive/defensive ability, production, and resource generation.
Hence, you can turn any village into an industrial mining/manufacturing village, or a ridiculously fortified village, fitted with long-rage trebuchets, ballistas, catapults, etc., or a vast training and conscription town.
For the categories "fortification" (HP/weapons), "Economy", and "production" (build rate) each village has three tiers in each category, with a total of 9 upgrades, PLUS its automatic upgrades. Each village upgrade, though, makes the other upgrades more expensive, so while a pure T3 fort village might actually be relatively cheap, a full T3 fort/econ/production village will be more expensive than several t3 fort villages.
This means that the cost of upgrading villages is dynamic and based off what you already have. I.e. say that all t1 upgrades increase the cost of all other upgrades by 20%; all t2 upgrades increase the cost of all other upgrades by 30%; all t3 upgrades increase the cost of all other upgrades by 50%. cumulative effect.
Cost of specialization is the same for village, town, & city. balancing reasons mainly.
As an example:
T1 fort will cost 100% of its original cost. t2 fort will cost 120% of original cost. T3 fort will cost 150% of original cost. If you then want to upgrade the production section, the T1 production will cost 200% of the original, T2 prod 220%, t3 250%. The result is that the last t3 upgrade will cost 350% of its original price, and if each upgrade is 100, a fully upgraded village will cost (100+120+150+200+220+250+300+320+350) = 2010. Expensive, but you have a completely self-sustaining village that can cover its own production, defend itself, and create its own troops.
So what is stopping every village turning into a T3 fort/econ/prod bastard? Resources, mainly. A pure fort village would only cost 370 in the above example, as would any "pure" version. So three separate pure villages would cost 1'110, compared to the 2'010 of sticking them all into the same city. Unless you're on a small map, you can just not get 6 t3 specialized village for the price of a single self-sustaining village.
How do you build new villages? At a cost of 200population from the constructing village plus other resource cost, a special bandwagon of sorts is created which will deploy into the standard 200pop village. It is sort of like a mix between the zerg building system and how you need to upgrade any new factories in supcom as they start at T1.
Building anything other than villages would be done with your standard engineer units. Watchtowers, citadels, forts, castles (all as separate buildings) would be built by this unit. Limited amount of economy structures in the form of mines, mana-harvesters, and whatever resource GPG/CT decides upon.
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Having said all that, I'm not very fond of the idea, and while i have spent time organizing it in a word processor, it still feels clumsy, half-assed, and rather cheesy.|||re1wind
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