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View Full Version : Advancement/Evolution idea



Keuran
07-17-2009, 03:16 AM
I'm not sure if this would be possible for coding, but i have a suggestion: a technological advancement system - creature groups left to prosper will slowly become more advanced and powerful. There are different portions of this:

Town Advancement and Monster Raids
At the start of the game most towns could start out small, and slowly increase in size. As they increase in size, more people appear and more buildings are built. Of course there's a limit based on the size of the town. These building will mostly be homes, but each one built has a chance of becoming a special building, like a forge or a shop (due to the viability of trade close to competition, a town can't have more than one of a given type of shop). Every once in a while, a monster group (wolf/jackal packs, goblin patrols, etc.) may attack a town, killing people and setting the growth process back a bit for each death, though the player can aid the town by killing the monsters. If the player successfully defends the town, they could get 'honour points' or something along those lines from the town. If the player gets enough honour points for a town, they can ask for favours from the townspeople, such as having specific buildings constructed or demolished, getting shop discounts, recruiting people as helpers for dungeons etc. If a town's population gets small enough, the town is abandoned and will soon disappear, or if its population gets big enough, people will start founding more towns surrounding it. Also, adventurer-type creatures in dungeons very close to towns should be very likely to be neutral to a player with a strong relation to nearby towns.

Monster Advancement
Likewise to townspeople, certain groups of monsters, if they have enough intelligence (like orcs and goblins, maybe dragons, but not likely because of their isolationist tendancies and lack of necessity for weapons and cooperation), may start advancing too. Perhaps each day (ingame time) each of these races has a chance of some sort of breakthrough, such as better quality weapons, and the chance is increased a bit each day, but reduced a bit if you kill enough of them. As they advance, certain races may become more civilized and start building their own towns and fortresses, and through certain actions, large groups of them may be pacified, upon which they may help the player, and each race may have a specialty, which effects the services they can provide, but also what the player must do to to befriend them (orcs could provide powerful combat asssistance but the player will have to prove themself by delivering a very large number of corpses or weapons to the village without killing very many orcs to gain their respect).

Evolution
This part is already sort of in ADOM to a level, but perhaps an advancement would be that instead of just getting generically stronger every time you kill a monster, it only applies to monsters not applicable for advancement, and it runs on a chance, where every time you kill a number of a monster type, its chance for evolution goes up a little bit, then it slowly drops as the monster repopulates, though it never reaches 0. Then each day (ingame time) the monster group, if it meets the evolution check, will gain certain attributes, such as a small-to-medium increase in speed/DV/to-hit (monster becomes more nimble), a medium increase in damage/PV but a small drop in speed/DV/to-hit (monster increases in size), certain resistances, but only if the monsters have been exposed to those elements before, or Improved player detection (monsters develop improved sight/hearing). The monster description could incllude a message
'You have noted n mutatins in this species' where n = the number of times they've evolved.

Also, mindless(golems, for example), undead, and heavily magic-based or otherwise ethereal creatures (demons, molochs) should be exempt from all of this, for reasons which should be obvious to most people

This could possibly add a new level of possibility and interation to the game, though it could have major flaws too, so it could use a lot of tweaking and balancing.

pblack
07-17-2009, 05:39 AM
While I LOVE the idea, I guess it would just require way too much work. It would be like merging dwarf fortress into adom. And it would probably make the game 237.45% more interesting.

But i guess JADE is complex enough. It would be a blessing if it ever reaches anything beyond early beta stages in the current project. An idea like yours would most likely require a whole heap of *new* code (although jade is in java so even the parts of ADOM that will remain the same will have to be translated) so its pretty abitious.

But i do LOVE the ideas and i'm all for it. If TB ever gets behind it i would support it all the way.

If he doesnt...well...you could always spend some years studying programming and come back in a decade with the most awesome roguelike ever....lol.