   Good and Evil in a TBS
  I thought of a system for TBS games that involves Good and Evil, but I just have a few questions:There are three main factors: resources, and happiness, and allignment. 1: Resources - There are workers who work for you. You can change how hard they work, directly altering happiness. The harder they work, the lower the happiness, but the more resources.2: Happiness - If your workers work hard, the happiness will become low. If the happiness becomes too low, you need soldiers to guard them, else they will go away and be of no use anymore. The happiness on its turn affects alligment slowly.3: Alignment - The alignment (good or evil) will slowly change depending on the happiness. Going from neutral to food or evil will be faster than going from evil or good back to neutral. This is to make it harder to change alignment afterwards.What is the effect of allignment:Good:1. Your territory will become bright green and colorfull.2. Research is fast, depending on the amount of goodness you put into your people.3. Because of the good research, you are able to build very good armies (they will not become more expensive), but you cannot build many, because of the not so hard working workers.4. If you the goodness is more than 75%, you will become able to make heroes. The amount of heroes is limited, and they are more expensive, but their performance outweights the costs.Evil:1. Your territory will become dark red and black.2. Research goes ever slower depending on the intensity of your evillness.3. Because of the hard working workers (call them slaves in this case) you can build quite massive armies, but - because of the lacking reasearch - not with very high quality.4. If the evil alignment is more than 75%,you will be able to saccrifice a certain amount of soldiers (or servants, better said), to get a very strong evil creature that is stronger than the combined force of the saccrificed units. The amount of saccrifices is limited.Neutral:1. Your territory will not change. If you capture Good or Evil territory, it will change /very/ slow to normal.2. There is a small amount of research, by far less than good, but still more than evil.3. You cannot build large armies, and you cannot build advanced armies.4. You get no special units.The idea is copyrighted 2003 by Sijmen Mulder (sijmen UNDERSCORE mulder AT hotmail DOT com)How do you like this idea? Is the ballance between good and evil good enough? Is there enough reason NOT to stay neutral?Thank you for your comments!   -CL Game Studios. Probably. 
  Most of those ideas, previously © Lionhead Studios.This sounds about as well balanced as ten fire-ants playing on a see-saw with this girl. There us absoutly no incentive to be either neutral or evil. You'll always be whomped by the good guy. I mean, an large evil low quality army versus a smaller better equiped one? And since when are people who are geniuses at research poor workers? Bit of a contradiction there...BTW, since when has remaining neutral been a bad thing? What if the player doesn't want to get involved in conflicts between two highly stereotyped communities?All in all, needs a lot more work.   [edited by - doodle_sketch on February 5, 2004 6:08:38 AM];quote:Original post by Sijmen  2. Research goes ever slower depending on the intensity of your evillness.i don''t like this.  i had an idea for a system of good and evil that incorporated negative numbers.  postive numbers were good, or moral, and negative numbers were evil, or immoral.  this information was contained within their soul attributes (out of mind, body, spirit, and psyche).  as a player moved out from 0 in either direction their soul became more powerful.  thus good and evil did not imply strength and weakness. ;quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster  quote:Original post by Sijmen   2. Research goes ever slower depending on the intensity of your evillness.i don''t like this.  i had an idea for a system of good and evil that incorporated negative numbers.  postive numbers were good, or moral, and negative numbers were evil, or immoral.  this information was contained within their spirit attributes (out of mind, body, spirit, and psyche).  as a player moved out from 0 in either direction their soul became more powerful.  thus good and evil did not imply strength and weakness.   ;  I want not to have neutral, since it must be a battle between good and evil. And steriotyped, yes it is. Thats the fun And what is wrong with quantity vs quality? ;  Get five martial arts experts to come at you and fifteen of your drunken mates and fight them.If you survive, we''ll talk then...   SketchSoft OFFLINE | SketchNews OFFLINE | NewKlear Studios;  Hmm, I agree that maybe the idea needs a little work, but then all ideas do and this is yours in the end.What if the differences between good and evil were of a different sort than simply strength and numbers? Too often has a game portrayed good as your run-of-the-mill army and evil as either a few massive units or as hundreds of weak, simple-minded units. What if instead it was their methods of warfare that set them apart? That would seem more likely to me. Maybe "Evil" would poison or disease water wells and your higher units are constantly changing due to assassinations within the ranks? Or perhaps "Good" has religious zealots as its driving political and war-making force, which lend it more divine and aspects as opposed to evil''s technological emphasis. There are so many routes you can take. ;  Unlike the rest, I agree with the massive evil armies deal; I think it is cool.The one problem is: exactly how massive are the bad armies and how much more powerful are the good armies? I think they should (if you factor in) be about the same strength - quote:original post by doodle_sketch  Get five martial arts experts to come at you and fifteen of your drunken mates and fight them.If you survive, we''ll talk then... Well, instead of that, make it 20 drunks and 5 yellow belts. Anyway, it should balance out, so that both sides have equal chance to win, but better chance than neutral sides.As for the "big stupid hoards"? They can be more effective - instead of forcing you to place all of your assets in one place, more people are more fit to launch flanking maneuvers than a smaller host; while the smaller army is more suited to hit-and-run attacks.Whatever. I think it''s a good idea. Yes... VB6 is here to steal your minds. Very slowly. ;  I like the idea, especially the quality/quantity dichotomy.  Of course it''s not completely new.  Your three "factions" could be renamed Zerg (evil) Protoss (good) and Terran (neutral).But I have to say that I''m totally in favor of the shining hero facing down a horde of imps.  My favorite event in Majesty was when a lvl 15+ paladin would be faced with dozens of little monsters.  Boo-ya.It would also do well with espousing a connection to good characters.  Your five heroes would have histories and scars, while the fifty imps they fight would be just hatched and void of personality.  "Good" would retreat when things got ugly, while "evil" would be more expendable.  Always a good time. ;  You could also go a cynical route - the good armies are huge but sort of stupid and close-minded (e.g. "we''re right, you must join us") and the evil army is smaller but much more devious and skilled at administering death.  I think you''ve got a pretty good game in there somewhere either way.  Anyhow, I am going to have to use the phrase "administer death" more often 