Yer you know it. Feel free to start another fan club. I know what you’re like …
Funeral pyres are awesome, but cemiteries or mausoleums would also be nice, as props options.
Crazy thought, I know but what if…
As we are going be unlocking Alternate Planes, no doubt…
Our slain citizens can be found again on another plane? Either to be returned to us, or as a hardened foe to ahmper our progress for letting them die!
You’re too late @Pendryn
My thorough reading of the entire forums has failed me… Alas. I will sit in the corner of shame.
Don’t forgot your shame hat.
Oh, no, I usually just leave it on at this point.
consider yourself among the lucky @Pendryn … @Geoffers747 usually just openly ridicules me… of course, its an improvement over the other tactics he used to employ…
shudders
Get back in your hole!
If you want to rise the dead you. This is what I think you’ll need to make it happen. Someone like a Necromancer that can rise your dead to protect your town. But after a few days they will turn on you and you will have to kill them.
Here’s how I want to see death and the other topics handled in the game:
- No dying of old age. The only way to keep that from being frustrating is to make it take so long that most players won’t even see it happen, which defeats the purpose of it being in the game.
- I’d love to see new workers come out as kids (remember, the devs like the idea of “buying” a new worker with food resources) and take a little while to grow into adults. Since there should be no dying of old age, workers also shouldn’t become elderly.
- Bodies shouldn’t just disappear anticlimactically. I’ve grown attached to them and I don’t want to wonder “what happened to Mer Burlyhands on that last battle?” But I don’t want to have to micromanage corpses either. I’d really love it if the AI handled a memorial all on their own. Imagine seeing a couple of guys carrying one of your favorite warriors back to your town, digging a grave, and building a tombstone for him all on their own. I’m pretty sure that would make me cry every time.
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when villagers die their souls can be added to a soul tree for the town. Then that soul tree will give off bonuses based on how long it has been there or how many of your villagers souls are powering the tree.
This makes me think of some interesting ideas. For example turning all the females into baby factories and then killing off most of the babies for bonuses, and that would happen at least once just from someone, heck you’d probably have people trying to find the optimal age to kill them off at to maximise returns. That’s not even including the already given possibility of training up a guy to have optimal fathering stats and using that as the father of everyone, there’s some dodgy things when you start to treat it as numbers.
The 3 key things about old age are realism, population control, skill limitations. Population wise death by old age accounts for at least 30-50% in most countries with medieval eras having it higher, that suggest that you should have at bare minimum for a peaceful civ 40-50% more pop. growth with out it, lower for a warring civ but it’s still significant. The easiest way to implement it is to have something vaguely similar to real life, higher age decreases physical abilities and both increases risk of disease and decreases resistance to it. This could easily have certain factors to counter it, so like an elderly warrior will be stronger and more disease resistant than an elderly mage or crafter, then what you do is allow healing to cure disease. That is the key. What it means is that with enough skilled healers you could have units theoretically live forever and just heal them whenever they get sick or have them heal/fortify themselves, the catch is that as you get more and more elderly it would need more and more healers and medicine but it works great. We’re getting close to that point with modern medicine as is, magic just makes it easier.
Finally to the people who say them dying would be frustrating say why. You’ll know they’re getting old long before they die so you’ll be able to start training up another unit to replace them, you’ll be expecting them to get old from the start so it’s not like it’s suddenly going to pop up saying Person X Y is now old. Furthermore can you demonstrate any games where it is bad? because I can point to things like Virtual Villagers where it works, you develop a person to be good at something and eventually they’ll probably have kids that get a head start at it, but then they die but you move on, you have other people that can do the same thing and you shouldn’t be relying on only one person for pretty much anything anyway with the more important tasks having multiple people anyway.
1 Like
I love the idea of having your worker villagers drag and then bury the bodies of your dead villagers in graves.
Considering now that it is a real possibility for us to reach 600,000, and adding three base kingdoms, wouldn’t be easier for each to represent a sort of religion? Northmen’s Alliancek = Scandinavian Norse Mithology (Funeral Pyres, boats for the dead), The Ascendancy = Monotheistic religion types of buildings (cemiteries, cathedrals, etc), while the Raya’s Children something a little more xintoistic?
Just a though.
Personally I like the idea of Inheritance/Death. Of course it would need to be lightened up a tad (say when someone dies, a grave stone/skeleton appears and you just have to move it. Or there could be the option to build a crypt, and the dead are automatically brought there by someone who works at the crypt/graveyard).
Simply put though it would be more of a case of just being there for the sake of adding the element of there being a conclusion.
TBH I don’t like the idea of sending 50 soldiers of to fight a rival faction, have them all killed and then utterly forget about it and send in an extra 50. My villagers and soldiers need to be a valued asset in an RTS/City builder. If a hero dies, I at least want to be able to have some form of monument/grave to put them in, perhaps something that highlights what that hero achieved, and how they died, it adds CONTEXT to your cities story, it adds a History to it. When you browse past a graveyard containing so many dead troopers or a character, you will remember exactly which event they were lost in, and it adds history as you will remember that point in your game and how that leads to where you are now.
There can even be added purposes; perhaps there is a festival of the dead ( a common theme in most real world civilisations that can go from quite morbid to very colourful) which if you screw up, your dead citizens return to haunt you and your people for a night. Or perhaps a Local necromancer wishes to use the dead in your local crypt and you need to stop him before an outbreak of zombies occur.
As for inheritance, I quite like the idea of doing it, with children taking up all or a majority of their parents skills, again adding context and history. It wouldn’t mean you have to micromanage anything, it just means that a few days worth of game play into your settlement, you get a footnote saying so and so has died, and now his son/daughter is taking over the business. If you want more of that particular skill set ofc you’d still need to train them.
I don’t think it would be wise to allow players to kill off their own people. I think most likely the villagers will only die in battle and during natural disasters. I doubt there will be a mechanic that will allow players to kill off their entire population with a click of a button.
how the hell is this thread still going???
It wouldn’t be smart under pretty much any set of conditions but there should be more ways then that to have your villagers die, things like starvation or fires so that you need food supplies and you don’t do things like put the forge in a wooden house. Either way though there shouldn’t be a suicide button but if people leave out a bunch of kids when goblins come for instance the kids should die or if someone gets trapped in a cave they should starve eventually.
Part of my argument against villager death (from old age) is that it’s clear your population pool is pretty limited (per some of the live steams); a large-ish town will have upwards of a hundred people, but it’s probably not hundreds or thousands. Now take a look at the example class tree; it’s got 14 classes on it; with 5 unique branches. Let’s simplify things and assume that your city needs 1 of each ‘basic’ class to survive and 1 villager somewhere in the ‘level up’ classes to thrive; if we have one kid in training, one middle age villager mastering the class and one elder master who’s going to croak soon, that means that you have something like 30 folks tied up in maintaining those classes. Considering this only a small part of the class tree you see the problem; you often won’t have nearly enough people to start branching out into all of the different classes and instead you’ll be sitting there churning through the same set of class trees again and again to keep the city alive. Once I’ve gotten a master whatever I don’t want to come back in 20 minutes and go through the process of making another one, and in more 20 minutes to do another one; that’s just a form of grinding and is fundamentally un-fun to my mind.
As for the ‘realism’ argument, in a realistic medieval environment 9 out 10 of your villagers would be farmers or herders and dead by 45, leaving the remaining 10% of your population for everything else. Given again that we’re likely managing upwards of a hundred villagers for a large civ that is going to seriously undermine the ability of a player to explore the class and tree and be able to set up his in-game economy.
-Will