Realmspark

[Ruairi101]

(first post here, I've tried looking at other posts in this board to check how I should post a thread but if I've done anything stupid, I'm sorry!)

Realmspark

I've been working on this for the past few weeks seeing as I'm between school and university now and needed something to keep me occupied. I've tried to make a strategy game in the same vein as Age of Empires and The Settlers but with the combat side removed and this is the result.

The main goal is to collect as many resources as possible; a player's score is the sum of all resources collected (excluding traded resources, of course). Players start off with a small realm with a handful of workers and basic buildings and can expand with further construction, hiring and researching technologies. As they progress through the game, they gain access to better buildings, trading and an increase in the rate of collection of each resource, consequently increasing their score. There's a leaderboard so players are competing, but can't affect other players' realms e.g. they can't attack or steal resources.

The basic mechanic is the 'Update' button on the Manage page, which is where the magic happens and your resources are collected. Players are limited by how often they can update. They receive 5 updates per day and can store up to 50 at once, but there is no limit to how many can be used per day. There's a few features to keep the game fresh, notably the system of seasons. The worldwide season changes once every two days and brings with it different rarities of each resource, giving them different values each season when trading, which I hope adds a 'stock market' element to the game.

It's not finished yet (hence the Beta in the header) and I'm not sure how much more work I'll do on it. I'm mainly interested in what people actually think of it and I'd appreciate opinions regarding whether it's worth spending time and money on or whether it's just rubbish. (Don't worry, it's essentially a PHP/MySQL exercise that grew legs so I'm not going to be crushed if people don't like it. )

Anyway, if you missed the link at the top of the page, here it is again. And I do hope you enjoy it.

Thanks!

[Chris]

A bit off topic: this does not sound very playable or refined or exciting but... strangely, the description made me want to play it It is my kind of game. I got so tired of all these "attack and steal from another player" games that when I read you can't do it in that one it made me surprisingly interested

The crucial question, how do you get land?

[Ruairi101]

A bit off topic: this does not sound very playable or refined or exciting but... strangely, the description made me want to play it It is my kind of game. I got so tired of all these "attack and steal from another player" games that when I read you can't do it in that one it made me surprisingly interested

The crucial question, how do you get land?

Haha, that choice came form personal experience with another game where I was saving resources to buy something expensive, logged in later and found someone had attacked me and stolen the lot, and I couldn't help but feel a little cheated. Also since I'm trying to integrate the 'stock market' element in the game, it would rather ruin it if you could lose all your cleverly earned resources through no fault of your own.

The land issue is something I need to look at, you can do it via trading, but of course that can only be unlocked by building a market, and of course if you don't have enough land to build a market, you're stuck with what land you have left, which, obviously, is rubbish. I think I'll remove land from the trading system and have it so it can only be bought with gold, removing this issue.

[Chris]

Yeah, me too. I'm too poor & too lazy player to protect myself successfully, so I leave these games after first attack (or I simply get a message "your kingdom got annihilated" the second time I login ). As a player I hate that BBGs world is polluted by these ancient zero-sum wargames and the only eurogames are overly simplistic and filled with psyhological addiction tricks (like Farmville) so heavily that it makes me puke. I'm definitely overlooked by game devs as a target player

But eradicating combat completely is bad, and probably not needed. It makes games dry and predictable. Just a kind of combat that not make you lose stuff, a one that make you gain stuff (somehow I awalys prefered to get things from combat than lose these, maybe I'm weird :-)).

The most reasonable system I invented so far is: You have separate land and frontier (acres). You get +X frontier each hour, you can attack other players and steal their frontier (but never land). If you manage to protect your frontier it gets converted to land at the end of hour. This way your land and buildings can never be lost but your combat performance affects how much land you will get.