Big City

And that's almost a month of inactivity. It appears that this blog may have been ineffective. Half of the summer is left, but the amount of free time I have is probably going to take a downwards turn in the near future.

Updating to say that Astoria's already made- Big City (boardgamegeek is down, or I would link to it), or Metropolis (I played the first and found the second looking it up). There are a lot of design choices that they made in Big City that I disagree with:
Parks and factories can be placed anywhere, instead of just land you control. Their primary function appears to be screwing over other people- "oh, you want to build a large business section? Parked!" Factories are worthless except for their blighting effect, which I find a bit offensive.
You have two real resources- your turn, and your plots. Plots are pretty much random- instead of being a game where the primary action is auctions and trading, the primary action is just the placement of buildings and the race to place special features. Anyone can spend their turn to place city hall, which benefits all the buildings around it- but there's only one. Anyone can start the streetcar line, which benefits all buildings connected to it- but there's only one, and further streetcars have to be adjacent. Anyone can place unplaced neighborhoods- but there are only 2-3.

So, to get a good score you need to have plans that span several turns- but no real way to pull them off, except for luck.

The primary thing that Big City did well was neighborhoods- you place down 2x4 lots or 3x3 lots and get a city center/outskirts, which will change when more neighborhoods are added.

Buildings, cont.

So, let's come up with some numbers:

Residential
1x1: $100 to build, $10 rent, +$2 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building. -$2 rent for each adjacent industrial building.
1x1, high rise: $250 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 1x1.
1x2: $200 to build, $25 rent, +$5 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building. -$2 rent for each adjacent industrial building.
1x2, high rise: $500 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 1x2.
2x2: $400 to build, $75 rent, +$15 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building. -$2 rent for each adjacent industrial building.
2x2, high rise: $1000 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 2x2.

Commercial
1x1: $100 to build, $15 rent, +$1 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building.
1x1, high rise: $250 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 1x1.
1x2: $200 to build, $40 rent, +$2 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building.
1x2, high rise: $500 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 1x2.
2x2: $400 to build, $120 rent, +$5 rent for each adjacent residential or commercial building.
2x2, high rise: $1000 to build, double the rent and rent synergies of a normal 2x2.


Industrial
1x1: $100 to build, $20 rent, if there are more industrial buildings than residential buildings, -$3 for each extra industrial building.
1x2: $200 to build, $50 rent, if there are more industrial buildings than residential buildings, -$6 for each extra industrial building. Counts as 2 industrial buildings.
2x2: $400 to build, $150 rent, if there are more industrial buildings than residential buildings, -$12 for each extra industrial building. Counts as 4 industrial buildings.

Parks
1x1: $20 to build, $0 rent. Each residential and commercial building within two lots gets +$5 rent, and each adjacent residential or commercial building gets an additional +$5 rent.
1x2: $40 to build, $0 rent. Each residential and commercial building within two lots gets +$12 rent, and each adjacent residential or commercial building gets an additional +$12 rent.
2x2:$80 to build, $0 rent. Each residential and commercial building within two lots gets +$30 rent, and each adjacent residential or commercial building gets an additional +$30 rent.

Each 1x2 building should count as two buildings for synergies, and each 2x2 building should count as four buildings for synergies.

Right now these numbers are rough, so that I can just test something and see how it goes- I don't know how much more a larger building should return until I know how difficult it is to get a full lot. I don't know how well the synergies will work out- currently, a residential building has to be over half surrounded to be as valuable as an industrial building (ignoring the industrial building's need for workers)- that sounds like a problem, but we'll see how it develops with actual play.

Buildings

Let's talk about a building list.

But to talk about a building list, we have to talk about victory conditions. How long should the game last? If it's only ten turns, then buildings that return 10% interest will have only pay themselves back by the time the game ends if you build them at the start.

A turn will have a rent collection period (give it a minute, maybe), an auction period (depends on the number of lots that are for sale, but we'll guess five minutes), and a building period (two-three minutes, probably). That estimate seems high- almost ten minutes per turn? But it's probably better to overestimate and then lengthen the game (or just keep it short) than it is to underestimate and have to cut a game short. So, if we want to cap game time at around 2 hours (anything longer for something that needs to be playtested quite a bit is probably a bad idea), we're looking at a game running between 12 and 15 turns.

So what makes for a good stopping point? It seems that one of the more convenient places to end the game would be when there aren't any more lots to be auctioned. If we're auctioning n lots a turn (where n is the number of players- this would probably make the game take roughly the same amount of real-time regardless of the number of players, but make the game-time fluctuate wildly), then there should be at least 40-60 lots- a 6x8 grid would work out well.

I'm not sure that I like that you could end up with a critical lot on the last turn, just because that's where it was on the stack. But I think I'm happier with lots going up randomly than I am having people just choose which lots to auction off- it seems like the middle road is adding, later on, a way to buy/put up for auction the lot that you want and then reshuffle the remaining deeds.

So, let's talk a bit about what types of buildings there should be:

• Residential- start off low-rent, but have high synergies with other building types (both positive and negative).
• Commercial- start off medium-rent, have decent synergies with each other and residential.
• Industrial- start off medium-rent, few synergies.
• Government- things like a courthouse, decent synergies with surrounding commercial/residences.
• Parks / Open space- no rent, but high synergies with nearby buildings.

There should be differently sized buildings- ones that go on 1 lot, 2 adjacent lots, and a square of 4 lots, with higher rates for the larger lots. There also might be a height or capacity- you should be able to decide whether a residential building is a group of townhomes or a high-rise, but whether it's a tenement or Trump Tower will be determined by the location.

Numbers will come soon, and hopefully I'll get a playtest in sometime in the near future.

Astoria

It's been what, almost two weeks? I've been a little busy, if you can call it that (my fortress is going spectacularly, I've started Baldur's Gate again...). The RPG's not abandoned yet.

But I've been thinking about a board game, prompted by this. Monopoly's a horrible game for a number of reasons, but here are the things I dislike about it most:

1. Players get knocked out of play. Eurogames tend to have everyone still playing until the end- they might not have much of a chance of winning, but the point of the game isn't to give other people nothing to do.
2. The actions the player takes are almost entirely determined by chance. There are very, very few strategic decisions- do I buy this property or let it go up for auction? Do I accept a trade?
   

I feel bad making a list with only two items, but they're both pretty big ones.

Anyway, there are things to like about Monopoly- the post I linked to is another forumite discussing how they would like to improve it to make it a better game. I'm not a fan of his approach- I'd rather wipe the slate clean and start afresh than deal with legacy elements that might not add to the game.

So, what's the flavor I want? I'm not that interested in the "monopoly" aspect of the game, and I'm not that interested in the cutthroat "one-man-standing" victory condition. Having the real estate barons physically move around the map sounds like a bad idea (although maybe it could grant minor modifiers?). I do like building a real estate empire.

So, I'm thinking a game where you develop a city (not a novel idea, by any means)- named, for the moment, Astoria, after the man who enlarged his fortune developing New York City. But there's already a board game called Astoria out there, about something entirely different. So the name probably won't last.

The map will be a grid of streets, and then the actual buildable area will be divided into lots. You can build any number of buildings (that will fit and have road access) on a lot, or a building on any number of lots- all that matters is that you own the land that you put a building on.

The turn structure will be along the lines of: collect rent, buy lots, build buildings, repeat.

Rent will be impacted by the surroundings of the building- people will pay more to be on the waterfront, houses will pay more to be by a park, houses will pay less if they're by a factory, etc. If you own a large block of land and develop it the right way, you're looking at a solid fortress of wealth. There will probably also be a lot of effects to encourage diversity (or, at least, reward the sole owner of something)- the law office closest to the courthouse gets a rent bonus, lowering the benefit for building a second courthouse.

Lots will almost definitely be bought by auction. The question just becomes what order to put them up for auction- it seems like a good plan to just shuffle deed cards and then bid on five or so every turn.

There are three ways to go about buildings- the Sim City method, where each player can build whatever they want, the Puerto Rico method, where there's a low number of buildings of each type, but you can still select whatever you want from the building pool, and the San Juan method, where which buildings you can build are randomly determined (i.e. cards in your hand). I'm partial to the Sim City method; I think the San Juan method leaves too much up to chance, but the Puerto Rico method has its charms. I think I'd rather allow people to overproduce a certain type of building, and have that hurt everyone with those buildings, rather than saying "sorry, only two small markets."

I want lots and buildings to be easily tradeable between players- which means I'll have to be careful about how lots and buildings interact.

I think I'm also going to add governmental meddling and the bribes associated with it- the government decides to build a courthouse, and so all the property-owners scramble to try and get it where it will get them the most profit. There could be zoning restrictions- once I've built three office buildings, I bribe the government to prevent more from being built throughout the city- keeping my rents high and thwarting my rival's plans. Until they give the government a better offer, that is. There could also be condemning a building unfit for human habitation- that's what you get for slapping a factory in my upscale neighborhood!

More Progress

The days sort of blur together over the summer without something to keep them separate; hopefully when classes start for me in a week that'll help.

I added an Effect class. Right now it's only set up to modify the basic statistics; while I might want to get something fancier later, most of the things I can think of (buffs, debuffs, poisons, heal over times, etc) will be covered by this.

Effect is a class with ints for duration, ATK, DEF, AP, HP, mHP, MP, mMP, resP, resF, resE, and resC. The Person class now has an array of Effects called Effs that is all the Effects on it; there's also a function for cATK (and all the other variables) that goes through each effect and adds their modifier to the base value.

The primary thing missing now are multipliers. I'm not sure I'll want them, and if I do it would be relatively easy to code (essentially, I would also have it add up a temporary multiplier as well as a temporary base, and then multiply them at the end before returning). I almost want to code it now in case, but it seems silly to put in possibly pointless code.

I've been putting off the battle interface. That won't be possible for too much longer :P

Coming Soon

I like to keep a sort of mental to-do list of the next steps I should take. I rarely make this into an actual list or flesh it out fully- knowing that the next steps are "make a simple battle map system," "come up with basic abilities," and "come up with actual numbers for the classes" is helpful but knowing "wow, there's fifteen different things that need to happen for this to work" isn't. It is helpful on some levels- and if there were more people involved, it would be critical to make sure tasks are split and people are working on what's most important.

One other thing I should mention is modular programming. Essentially, you design everything so that it doesn't need everything else functional for it to function- it makes it so you can test, say, an inventory-management program before items are fully done, or make sure that items work properly before making a battle system that can use them. The question, though, becomes how much I should try and keep the sophistication of each component at the same level- should I finish coding the classes before I move on to abilities, or should I code enough for the classes to be able to reasonably test other things, and then come back to improve them once I have a basic program running?

If I had done more planning, the "finish each component" method might work- but it's not really an option when I'm still musing over other critical things. Should movement be just speed plus a single action, or an action points system where you can attack multiple times if you don't move? Should units move in some initiative order, or should a player's entire party move together?

Minor progress!

The Person class is made, and I've got child classes for the different character classes.

I decided to go with Person because it's synonymous enough and there are already enough 'Character's floating around in C# for me to be sure I wasn't treading on anything, and this'll prevent mistakes in the future.

I've also got the Ability class made- right now its key feature is the effect method, which is overloaded for three inputs:
effect(Person user)
effect(Person user, Person targ)
effect(Person user, List targs)

For all abilities, the two wrong methods will pass back an error (with the ability name in it- always try to make your code easier to debug), and the other one will do what the ability is supposed to. I don't know how abilities will be aimed yet, but the abilities already have range and aoe variables to tell the aiming interface what it should tell the user to pick. The function returns a string- an output of either "This method shouldn't have been called!" "[name] doesn't have the MP to use this ability!" or "This ability did X!"

Mad screenshot action!