God Wars

[jmmp8]

The Story Your god has discovered a new land, and mandate that you claim it for his glory. He has given you supplies and a work force and magically teleported you to the new world. However, a foreign god from another land has blasphemously decided to claim the land rightfully given over to yours. Being the morally superior and justified follower of the RIGHT god, you decide that the invader must be dealt with. However, both of you have forgotten something: the old god whose paradise the both of you have, rather stupidly, decided to desecrate.

The Game The basis of this game is a turn-based survival and fog-of-war game. Player will be battling against each other as well as an environment, with the goal to be the last human player standing. Gameplay is split into a two phases:

• Base construction & Discovery
• Survival

Phase 1: Base Construction The end goal of the game is to protect your base - surrounding an important, useless building - from the environment and enemy attack for as long as possible. To this end, players have the ability to construct their own base, using various tile. Some examples:

• Wall: a basic wall. Weak, but better than nothing.
• Strong wall: wall’s big brother
• Bomb: explodes when triggered, dealing damage to surrounding structures and units a bomb exploding will trigger any adjacent bomb
• Trigger: triggers an attached bomb
• Barracks upgrade: default, each player receives a limited number of barracks, each of which can be individually upgraded to produce a slightly different unit.
• Tower: a tower. Very tall.

Construction of any building takes time and resources, a limited amount of which is allotted to each player at the beginning of the game.

Each player starts with a number of barracks. These each spawn one unit at the end of phase 1 and spawn. Whenever one of your units dies, any barracks may spawn another (player controlled).

However, players are not allowed to focus solely on their own bases. Instead, their allowed build area covers only half of the total base area. At the end of phase 1, each player will receive a mirrored version of their opponents base, with all its architectural genius and design flaws. Barracks are not mirrored

Also Phase 1: Discovery Outside the shelters of your base, the world is dark. However, you can fix that. Each player is allotted a number of explorers, which are able to go outside the base and reveal tiles. The map itself is an n-by-m grid mirrored for both players, and there are initially no obstacles. The map is split so that neither player can encroach on the other’s side. However, as the explorers uncover tiles, they could find: Nothing: nothing Something: also nothing, but the explorer thinks it is something, so he stops to investigate for a turn. Resource pack: additional building materials

• Shrines: A mysterious relic with powers like: -- Tower upgrade v1: Towers you construct and have constructed now heal allies around them -- Tower upgrade v2: Towers you construct are now indestructible -- Tower upgrade v3: Towers you construct now damage allies around them -- Bomb upgrade v1: Bombs you construct and have constructed no longer damage buldings -- Bomb upgrade v2: Bombs you construct and have constructed now trigger a larger area. -- Gg’rot portal: Barracks upgrade. Instead of normal functionality, your barracks not automatically spawns small, distracting units which distract the environment units for a time.
• Sinkhole. Every few turns, any unit in the vicinity will died.
• Portal: a portal to the other player’s side. Automatically discovers the corresponding mirrored portal Relics must be activated after discovery, but it is not given to the player which power it holds
• Wall: a wall (when the explorer tried to move onto and discover this tile, he’ll move back to his original position

Note that, since the map is mirrored, any discovery made by one player is a potential discovery for the other player, if he feels inclined to move an explorer to the corresponding tile.

Phase 2: Survival Now that your base is built, you must do battle against the elements and monsters of the world. The environment will spawn units every turn which will try to destroy your base. You must defend against them with units from your barracks. However, if you or your opponent uncovered a portal, then the option becomes available to invade the enemy as well as defend.

EDIT: The FOW lift after phase 1, so that envirnomental units are always visible to the player. However, any remaining shrines/resources/etc. that were covered in phase 1 and not discovered are removed.

Since there are essentially three players - human 1, human 2, and environment - turn order is somewhat delicate. Instead, of cycling, the environment should have two turns, one for each side of the map. Thus the turn order would be: environment on human 1’s side → human 1 → environment on human 2’s side → human 2.

Win Condition: The last player standing wins. A player dies if their central building is destroyed. If both players die on the same turn count, then the player who discovered more things should win.

Notes: The game lends itself to a large number of strategies. Will a player discover as much as possible as quickly as possible, activating every relic along the way, or only scout for additional resources? How will you build your base, to be as sturdy as possible, or to provide a disability to your opponent? The game also relies on using your opponent and the information they uncover/types of buildings they have in their part of the base. A good strategy will consider what strengths the opponents base has and cover for its weaknesses.

Conversely, a simple strategy is not perfectly acceptable. Surrounding your base with walls and hiding behind them is very viable. But what if your opponent decides to leave an entryway for the environment that your units are ill-prepared to defend? This should allow more versatile and adaptive AIs to triumph over ones which execute only a rigid set of instructions. In this game, the adaptability of an AI to different situations is heavily focused. However, this brings forward an issue: over-complexity.

With a high possibility, the complexity of the game as proposed is too complicated to design and code an AI for in 24hr. The game complexity can be lowered by removing various relic powers, lowering the board size, lowering the amount of fog, removal of portals, etc. Even simplified, the basis of the game is still to act strategically using information given to you about your opponent.

Another feature of the game is limited player interaction with their units. Aside from the portals, there is no time where players’ units fight each other. The emphasis is, again on using information. If greater player interaction is desired, then removing portals and simply allowing players to cross the map at will during survival is an option. Alternatively, adding in features similar to the base mirroring will increase player interaction on a different level. Features like buildings which, when activated, provide an effect for both side. Adding the ability to construct with leftover materials during survival will allow for more counterplay to opposing sabotage strategies.

[JeffreyStrahm]

If you get the third tower upgrade it hurts your units?

[jmmp8]

Yes. Since you don't know what power you're going to get from a relic, its a bit of a gamble whether or not to activate one. Also, the upgrades aren't linear, they're different versions. You could get just v3, or if you get v1 and v3, they would cancel out.

[JeffreyStrahm]

Also, can you build in phase 2? If you can then you can just build nothing to screw over your opponent and build in phase 2, but if you can't then gathering late in phase 1 is useless and you can't repair damage from attacks so resource stockpiles are useless.

[jmmp8]

Building in phase 2 could be a feature, depending on if the added complexity is desired. If it is allowed, it could be balanced with increased build time/cost/etc. If it is not allowed, then resource stocks could become useless, encouraging earlier starts to builds, but with the penalty that the player is not fully aware of everything on the map or what powerups they could still get. This could allow for a more strategic decision of early build start vs late build start.

[HannahStroble]

I really like this game idea. It's very in-depth but also very complicated. Unfortunately it may be a bit to in-depth. D: It's very good though and I really like the story.

[russleyshaw]

Honestly there might be a problem with the theme. I wouldn't want to get too religious on people.

Being the morally superior and justified follower of the RIGHT god, you decide that the invader must be dealt with.

Its almost asking for trouble in my opinion This could be easily resolved by toning down the theme or slightly changing its context.

[JeffreyStrahm]

You could make it so you are dimensional colonists. Still wouldn't explain the sharing half of the base, though.

[MatthewQualls]

What if you're one of the leaders of an adventuring guild, the guild hall of which is under siege by strange, mystical forces, and your rival leader has challenged you to see who can direct their underlings the best and defend the guild hall better?

[JacobFischer]

I wanted to bring up a rather large issue with this idea: randomness

So to be clear, we like randomness that makes game varied (procedurally generated maps), but dislike randomness that could hurt players (dice rolls).

So first, Fog of War. FoW is an interesting mechanic that is very hard to make, not feel random. For example Let's say a player is moving around the environment. They have to choose to move up or down. Because of FoW both choices seem optimal, but in reality up gives a Relic, down is nothing. That means it's up to a coin flip if they will uncover the relic, so we punish those who flip the coin incorrectly, which is bad.

Now let's tackle the phases part. This is basically the same issue when you break it down. If you spawn in NPC units in the FoW, the AI lacks the information on how to build their base to defend. So if there are two equally good placements for a wall, and you again flip a coin on placement, you punish the player that flipped wrong when the monster comes and the wall is no blocking him.

I want to make it clear, hidden information can be good, but ideally you want that hidden information to be what the enemy is doing, not random elements generated by the game. For example in a traditional RTS, FoW may only hide enemy movement. An AI can adapt to that by learning from what the enemy does. We want to best player to win, not the luckiest.

Edit: Also to be clear, we can still work around these issues and make a cool game with this idea.

[JeffreyStrahm]

The FOW is only in phase one, so the enemy is visible in phase two. Also, it seems like you can see everything the enemy can see in phase 1 as well. This doesn't remove the problem of the randomness factor, but at least the coin flips are in exploration.