Transport Tycoon Forums

Sooo many of us like to use games and so few are able & willing to write them,I know.

I've been watching the Mashinky videos Jan Zeleny has linked to from Twitter to Youtube...and while doing such,been distracted by Crusader Kings 2 videos,having been intrigued by a 2012 review of that game despite my adherence to an open-source-free-software-only policy on what I use.(I did buy Transport Tycoon in 1995 but that's before I switched from NovellDOS to FreeBSD).
Paradox designs CK2 to be played from 1066 to 1453 only,with expansion packs to bring the start date back as far as 769,or allow conversion into their game Europa Universalis 4 that plays from 1444 to 1821 (they have other games that cover 1836-1936 and World War II).There are various mods that depend on the commercial product (one extends the EU timeline to cover the years 2-9999,BUT it limits various countries' playability to fixed periods no matter what historical alterations you make).EU guts the dynastic system that attracted me to CK,as well.
Just as Civilization spawned Freeciv,is there any developer appetite for creating a dynastic grand strategy game that sweeps from antiquity to future-tech,using historical earth or loaded or custom-generated maps,with copious AIs and cultural options?
I'm bursting with ideas,but can't program worth beans.

You have multi-million dollar projects that don't do this because it's too difficult.
And yet expect that some open-source project gets there?

I'm not saying it can't be done in theory. But I'm very dubious about whether it reasonably be done. CK2 is already a huge abstraction with mechanics that especially towards the beginning and the end of the era, plus in certain regions that aren't quit feudal Europe, stretches what the system can do. EU is even more abstract and only works for a certain time period and again, it doesn't make sense everywhere equally. Vicky II was pretty good for the Victorian era, but it's completely different from CK and EU. And HoI covers basically WWII only (although WWI is kinda doable) and is again completely different, and I have no clue how such a game would look in the Cold War or modern era and still make sense.

It kinda works for games like Civ (or Empire Earth or whatever ) because they come with abstract systems like "epochs", they aren't particularly historic and their scope is such that the gameplay is vaguely representative of what's going on. But drastically changing the rules and gameplay systems and so on in the middle of the game, gradually, for every country individually, and with some historical accuracy? Plus, although the Paradox Games aren't meant to be perfectly historical, they are meant to be at least kinda based in history, and if you start 780 CK games, history will already develop totally differently from the historic outcome. It's 700+ years to the reformation from there! So stuff you might like because they are historical - like the Holy Roman Empire and 30 Years War - can't easily be done anymore, as there's no way to predict how a game will go.

So if such a project were to be attempted, I'd say it would have to be some fantasy scenario. That could be constrained by some fantasy rules to nudge it along a certain path that limits scope to something that maybe can be handled in some way.

I have a buttload of ideas, but no motivation or belief that they're worth anything to code them, and i don't want to spend lots of time effort and potentially money to make something that might get used by say ten people.

Anyway, to your (apparent) point. You can with only moderate difficulty create something that attempts to emulate a natural course of evolution in terms of gameplay AI. However, the realisticness of its opinion of natural evolution will get less and less realistic with each generation, as you move further away from the known (or likely) courses and it has to make things up more and more to get there.

The difficulty is moderate, but the math and bias in the math to create the realistic chances of each generation would be somewhat tedious, at best.

Ive often thought about games like this but ultimately reach the same conclusion, it feels like itd be the perfect historical strategy game, but in reality, if it played out to follow history exactly, what you actually have is a movie, not a game.

Give munies and I'm down for it.

I can give you €5 and an alcoholic, or non-alcoholic, beverage of your choice.

Chrill wrote:I can give you €5 and an alcoholic, or non-alcoholic, beverage of your choice.

I'm afraid that magnitude of this donation is insufficient to progress with the work to a significant degree. I'll take it tho. You want my paypal?

I'll happily provide 5 euros of code in return.

Give me 5€ and I'll put horses and robots in Grand Stratospheric, no alcoholic beverage required.

Leanden wrote:Ive often thought about games like this but ultimately reach the same conclusion, it feels like itd be the perfect historical strategy game, but in reality, if it played out to follow history exactly, what you actually have is a movie, not a game.

A concept I've had in mind for literally decades now is called "Britannia"...set in Britain with the player starting out as a knight accompanying William the Conqueror and continuing as successive heirs for a thousand years if the family lasts that long...and capable of tracking them through ANY strata of society from sinking to street beggars to rising to take the throne.How influential you become determines how much you can alter the course of history.

But the broader idea should allow you (if not playing in a custom-generated world to begin with) to start at any point or place in history and diverge from history to any extent that becomes possible.

Baldy's Boss wrote:

Leanden wrote:Ive often thought about games like this but ultimately reach the same conclusion, it feels like itd be the perfect historical strategy game, but in reality, if it played out to follow history exactly, what you actually have is a movie, not a game.

A concept I've had in mind for literally decades now is called "Britannia"...set in Britain with the player starting out as a knight accompanying William the Conqueror and continuing as successive heirs for a thousand years if the family lasts that long...and capable of tracking them through ANY strata of society from sinking to street beggars to rising to take the throne.How influential you become determines how much you can alter the course of history.

But the broader idea should allow you (if not playing in a custom-generated world to begin with) to start at any point or place in history and diverge from history to any extent that becomes possible.

Sounds a bit like Fable, albeit a more limited scope.

That's an interesting idea. I hope it spawns something in the future, you never know.

Baldy's Boss wrote:

Leanden wrote:Ive often thought about games like this but ultimately reach the same conclusion, it feels like itd be the perfect historical strategy game, but in reality, if it played out to follow history exactly, what you actually have is a movie, not a game.

A concept I've had in mind for literally decades now is called "Britannia"...set in Britain with the player starting out as a knight accompanying William the Conqueror and continuing as successive heirs for a thousand years if the family lasts that long...and capable of tracking them through ANY strata of society from sinking to street beggars to rising to take the throne.How influential you become determines how much you can alter the course of history.

But the broader idea should allow you (if not playing in a custom-generated world to begin with) to start at any point or place in history and diverge from history to any extent that becomes possible.

That is definitely possible, but as mentioned before in my previous post. Very tedious to get it all right with all the potential paths the game could go in, and faithfully recreate the units, buildings, events based upon the diverged timeline.

I expect with the march of technology it should get easier with time.

No. You will always need to manually input and bias the maths for each potential alteration in the timeline, bias that against other options, create the correct units for each bias in the timeline etc.

It'll always be tedious to do.

Maybe a coordinated crowd-coding project...

and crowdfunding

My main "if I could make it" wish has always been an RCT/TTD style Airport Tycoon game, isometric and the like.

And now two Prison Architect style ones have come along at the same time, which is good enough!

Redirect Left wrote:and crowdfunding

If the crowd-coders aren't volunteers...