[Feature Idea] Multiple Village Idea (Extensive) - Alpha 14 Updated

Multiple Village Idea

So first of i should say that i love Stonehearth and that this is my first post so please dont destroy me with negative comments pls. :smile:

Anything that is bold has been added after the alpha 14 release.

Ok so onto the main point of this topic. Recently while playing stonehearth i was wondering on how they would do multiple villages and came up with this idea.

Parts of the multiple Villages idea:

Village Sizes:

After starting a new game and placing the banner, you could get the option to choose the size of your village. Depending on what you choose it would limit the amount of people could be in your village/city/fort. So for example a village could only allow 25 people, a city could have 50 people and a fort could have 10 - 20 people. This would mean there would be more strategy on who you make a warrior, a carpenter or a farmer as you would only have certain people per village.

Selecting Villages:

So with their being multiple villages it would be hard to tell who is from what village, So using a new menu on the town ui, it would list all the towns that you possess and have met thus allowing you to efficiently switch between villages that you own or have met. After selecting which village you want to switch to, you will be taken to the towns mayor.

How this would affect Classes:

So with the idea of village sizes you could limit the available classes in a village/city/fort depending on your kingdom and size of village. For example, if you picked Raya’s Children and a village, you wouldnt be allowed to promote anyone to a carpenter but if you picked the Ascendancy and a village, you wouldnt be able to promote someone to a potter and forts wont be able to promote anyone to a class that crafts stuff. A city might not be able to have trappers and potentially farmers as they are considered “peasent” jobs.
This then stops small villages being the center of trade and makes citys the center of attention for trading and resource trading. Another feature could be that classes can only level to a certain point depending on the size of the town that they live in. This would mean that carpenters cannot craft fancy beds if they live in on of the really poor villages.

Village Zones:

This would be what you would use to stop multiple villages overlapping. It would be a zone around your banner at first that defines the village. Buildings would also produce a area around them that would extend the Village zone. Stockpiles would only affect the village of the zone that they were placed in, crafting benches would only be used by the craftsmen of the village they were placed in and so would farm zones. If two zones were to overlap the zone that was there first would take precedent and the other would mould round it. Things that would be affected are Stockpiles, Farmland, Shephard Zones (Cant remember their name) and trapping zones. After alpha 14 we gain the safe point flag, which allowed us to designate certain areas that were safe for our halflings. With the Village Zones, you would be limited to where you could place it. For example you wouldnt be able to place it in the deepest part of your mine.

How crafters and workers would be affected:

The way crafters would work wouldnt change that much except the fact that they would only take from stockpiles from inside their Village zone. Workers would first work on things that are in their zone such as building or placing objects. However with things like woodcutting or mining you could select which village you want to perform this task unless you only have one or you could make it so that the closest village to the task does it.

Campaign:

Certain events in the campaign would be per village while goblin camps and wolves would still spawn but attack the closest village. Zombie spawns would be done per village but something like a zombie invasion would be the entire world.

Combat:

When creating partys the people in the party have to be from the same village so when creating a party you would need to select a village. Combat would still work the same as all the villagers would be seen as allies and all the goblins would be classed as enemies.

Village Trade (As requested of @jomaxro):

So with this i though that you could add a new class called the caravaner or something :)… Basically this good ol’ chap would build storage carts and a workstation that you could set trade’s and set trade routes. This would allow you to send weapons and armor to you warriors in your forts and meat and food from your villages to your city. You could also set a party that defended your caravan from those green devils and wolves.

Mayors:

Mayors are a new class that manage your village while you are offline or editing another village. However they would not build new buildings, create new stockpiles or accept new villagers. When one of the previously said situations pop-up they will ask you to decide for them. However they will set the town to defence mode, manage what things are being traded from their village so that they dont starve or become unequip to fight threats. This class will only become acceptable for promotion to after the village is not your active village. So for example once you finish designing a small border village to trade with a friendly nation, the village mayor would decide what to sell so that the village can still survive.

Alliancing between kingdoms (Requested by @AWSturdy) :

So this wasnt my idea but i though it through. This would probably only come to play in multiplayer but who knows. You could make it so that village_1 is allied with say Jomaxro’s village and village_2 is allied with AWSturdy’s village. So when in combat the people from village_1 would attack AWSturdys village and people from village_2 would attack Jomaxro’s village.With trading this could make it so that you have to be allied with them to trade with them but to send them aid in the form of weapons, armor or food you can be neutral or friendly.

Creating new villages (As requested by @jomaxro) :

So for new villages my idea was that with collaborative work from the capenter and weaver one could create a village banner that is given an id of 0. When placed the dialogue to create a new village (like at the start of the game) is started. This banner could not be placed within lets say 100 blocks of another village zone. This then means that villages arent close and trading is a little more realistic. Each village would get its own workers, stats and inventory and to open the current screen that shows these stats you would have to click on the banner itself. The id is so that even if the banner is moved or deleted all the things in the village zone have the id of that banner and make programming and moding easier. The worker that places the village will be the first to enter it and then a dialogue will come up asking you to select the villagers that you want to move over to the new village from your entire population. A feature could be used to stop certain villagers appearing in the list.

Transfering Villagers between villages (As requested of @jomaxro) :

This would probably be upto the dev team on how they handled this as it could be seen as a way of getting really high stats people to certain places and low stat people to lower villages. so i dont have many comments on this.

New daily report (As requested of @jomaxro) :

For the current daily reports, A villager will be given for each village depending on its stats and if it has reached its maximum number of villagers. Once a village has reached its max then no more villagers will enter the village but if someone dies then more can come from a daily report.Mayors will ask you what to do when a new daily report comes up.

Upgrading village banners (As requested by @Audaxx):

This is an idea that i didnt think of at first but as i though it through it made me think that it could really work with the idea of multiple villages. So when a village gets max villagers there could be a upgrade in the stats screen that allows you to upgrade to the next tier of village (Village, Town, City, Capital, etc). This could then increase your maximum villagers and the area around your village. Another feature could be that to start another village you have to have a Town. So for example is that a Town allows you to build say 3 villages, but to build any more villages you have to build another town. Upgrading a town to a city allows you to build another 3 towns and so on and so forth until a capital which allows unlimited cities.

Choosing your village size (As requested of @Gayou):

This is something i personally wouldnt want as it means you could have a village with 100 people and a city with 10 people but maybe this could be an option in the gameplay settings. This means that you can choose what number of villagers each tier of village, city, town etc can have.

Forts:

So through out this post i have talked about villages, cities, towns and forts, but where do forts fit into this. Well forts would firstly get their own banner which starts of as a camp. This can then be upgraded to a fort then castle maybe. These would be to patrol your lands and villages that cant defend themselves. They could be used to gain a foothold in an enemys territory as it could be possible to claim the banner that creates the fort or just kill all the inhabitants.

Kingdoms:

Well with the release of Rayya’s Children, many of us have been playing them to check them out, but how would this mix with the multiple village idea. Well firstly your villages would all be from the same kingdom but if there is going to be multiplayer then there is no reason why other people cant choose another kingdom. Next this would then allow AI to choose the other kingdom and either play against you or join you as either a Vassal or and alliance to kill the pesky goblins that attack us every new game.

Vassal’s:

Well this could be used as a source of hard to get resources such as if you played Ascendancy and your vassal was Rayya’s Children you could get decorative Teapots and stuff from them. obviously they would ask you for support from time to time with things such as goblins or food.

Biomes:

With having both kingdoms on the same map this would allow for the merging of biomes and a much bigger map to pillage, loot, build and explore.

RPS (Peacefull Resolution):

So with alpha 16, appareantly having a RPS (Rock, Paper Scissors) “mini-game” for encounters. I thought this would make peacefull encounters much more interesting between villages, kingdoms or citys. So for example if a player wanted to claim a piece of land or village from another but was peaceful, he could declare a game of RPS or some other minigame in Stonehearth. There would be a written treaty that would appear on the screen which both parties would have to sign “if” they accepted. This would stop hostile battles against friends and wouldnt cause neutrals to have to go to war. Ofcourse the defending party would gain something if they won, maybe land, gold, soldiers or something else of value.

Thats all ive come up with so far. Thanks for reading this mess of words. If there are spelling mistakes done hesitate to tell me and if you have any questions please share. Please like if you think this is a good idea. Also if you have any ideas that could be added dont hesitate to message me on here or on my profile and id add it.

I am well aware that this most likely not make it into the game but I am doing this to support the continued development of the amazing game Stonehearth.

Kind regards

Steelmark

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Hey there @Steelmark, great post, and some great ideas!

What are you thoughts on inter-village trade? If you plan to restrict crafting within a fort (for example), how would one get better armor/weapons. At the same time, if you cannot trap in a city, how would those high-class-citizens get their fancy food, which requires meat for some recipes?

Overall, this sounds like a great way to add additional challenge into the game.

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Hi @jomaxro You just reminded me of that and i did think of. ill update it :slight_smile:

1 Like

Villages could also alliance with each other, included with the combat and trade, either making it a requirement before you can trade or an extension with trading.

Could work with combat were villages alliance with each other to have mutual strength

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Hey just added the things @jomaxro and @AWSturdy just told me. Thanks for the ideas and hope you like my idea.

Regards

Steelmark

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Sounds good. Have +1 Cookie(s)!

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@Pacmainia9 Yay i love cookies thanks :smile:

Regards

Steelmark

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Horray! Have another Cookie! +1 Cookie(s)!

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@jomaxro just going to say thanks for being nice on my first day i really appreciate it.
:smile:

Regards

Steelmark

@Steelmark, of course! Discourse is supposed to be a friendly and fun place for people to have discussions, as well as serving as the games support system (crash, performance, and bug reports). If you notice anyone not being nice, or being disrespectful/rude, especially towards new users please flag the post so the mods can be alerted. We do our best (there’s only 5 of us) to keep this nice, but sometimes we may miss something.

Enjoy your time with Stonehearth, and please don’t be a stranger here on the Discourse.

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I wont be a stranger. If i come up with any ideas ill post them.

Regards

Steelmark

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@jomaxro Just wondering if there are any other kinks in this idea you came across or if that is as explained as it comes.
Any help would be appreciated.

Alright, just re-read the post, I have one more curiousity. It has been discussed before, but I would like to hear your thoughts on how one would make new villages/cities? How would one make a new flag? Would you need a certain number of Hearthlings to travel with the flag? Can Hearthlings “transfer” villages, and how would new Hearthlings work (per village, pick where to send them, more than one per daily report)?

Ah i didnt post that sorry.

Ill update the post.

There @jomaxro i think i answered your questions. Hope i explained them enough.

Regards

Steelmark

Hello there

@Steelmark, you 've got interresting ideas

About the max population size : what if we manually set it when creating the new village.
And what about we can change it ?

So probably there will be different banners for the various settlement sizes. For game control both clientside and playerside maybe it would be an idea to assign settlers to a banner (as planned with personalized beds), so that they stick around and do not wander off and get lost in the wilderness or end up in a different settlement. Limited citizen size could still be applied to those banners, as I think the idea does add some spice to planning and strategy as said in the previous posts.

Oh yes, and +1 cookie of course. No need to fear retaliation, we’re a very friendly and respectful community… :wink:

Possibility to upgrade the banner up for the case of you want to make a town out of your village ?

Hey @Gayou and @Audaxx Thanks for posting.

Upgrading the banner seems like it could work really well and I think I already explained that villagers were per village and only did jobs that were related to their village but I could be wrong.

As with editing village size I thought it would add more strategy to the game as you would really have to think about what resources you could spare from your other villages and how many warriors you would need to defend the village out of your possible villagers.

I cant add your ideas to the topic as I’m at school but ill do it when I get home so these questions aren’t asked at a later date.

Regards

Steelmark

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@coasterspaul Hi thanks for liking the topic. but i havent seen you post anything. Does this mean you have no queries to this feature idea?

Regards

Steelmark