Mod Idea: Town Story

Short introduction:
The point of this mod is both to expand an allready existing town, and to gather wealth and materials for yourself, wich can be used to buy things that will make you more powerfull and produce more materials.


Please read through this post and come up with ideas to improve this idea!
Also, feel free to comment on how to structure this post better, i feel its kinda messy.
I will try my best to keep this post updated.

Story Plot:
"A group of settlers has founded a new town in a new found land. You, the disgraced son of a rich upper-class businessman have come to this newly created town to make a living for yourself, with a small amount of money which your father gave you just to survive."

-krikler7



When you start a new map your start next to a town. They Major off the town speaks to you, and offers you to buy a plot in the nerby area where your workers can live and you can build. You will also be able to buy a miningplot much further away, or if you take a different aproach, you can instead of a miningplot buy a farmingplot. You will start with enough money to buy a main plot and a mining/farming plot of small size.

Plots

Different types of plots allowes you to do different types of actions, and will gain different types of materials.
Types of plots:

-Main: This is where you build your "home". This is where your workers comes to rest, sleep, eat etc. This is also where your stockpile(s) is, and where you refine materials colleced and smith.
-You can not mine on this plot, only flatten your terrain to make building on it easier.
-This plot allowes buildings of height type tall.
-The first plot you buy of this plot is small, but you can expand it.
-This type of plot is close to the main town, but not too close, since you shall be able to expand it.
-Can only have one of this plot.

-Mining: This plot is where you mine for materials like stone and ore. Every miningplot will have a road connected to it, allowing materials to easy be transported from the miningplot to your main plot.
-You can have as many of this type of plot as you rank allows you to.
-This plot allowes buildings of height type small.
-This plot can not be expanded.
-This plot is available in many sizes. Some of the bigger sizes requires a spesific rank tobuy.
-This plot type is far away from the main town, wich means transporting materials to and from a miningplot takes time
-This plot type will be depleted, and therfore you will probably sell it.

-Farming: This plot is where you grow plants for food and/or have animals. Food is an important resource, without it your workers, and the inhabitats of the main town will die.
-You can not mine on this plot, only flatten your terrain to make building on it easier.
-This plot allowes buildings of height type small.
-This plot is available in many sizes. Some of the bigger sized requires a spesific rank tobuy.
-This plot can sometimes be expanded, depending if there is free space around it. Plots closes to the town usually do not have free space.
-This plot type is medium distance from the town.

-Woodcutting: This plot is where you gather wood from, and replant trees to make wood a renewable resource.
-You can have as many of this type of plot as you rank allows you to.
-This plot allowes buildings of height type small.
-This plot is available in many sizes. Some of the bigger sizes requires a spesific rank tobuy.
-This plot can be expanded.
-This plot type is has a variable distance from the town, depending on where there are forests on the map.


Different types of plots are also sorted into categories, wich is as follows:
-Tier 1: Farming plots, Mining plots
-Tier 2: Woodcuting plot
-more to come as more ideas comes in


Ranks
When selling materials or resources to the main town, you will gain better ranks. With better ranks you will unlock better trades, more and better plots, and the ability to own more plots at the same time.
When trading with the main town you will get a special type of points, and each new rank requies a spesific amount of points.

Types of ranks (This is just examples, since i have no idea on how the balance will be):
-Rank 1:
- You start at this rank
-Tier 1 plots: 3
-Rank 2:
- 2500 points
-Can buy iron tools
-Tier 1 plots: 5
-Rank 3:
- 15 000 points
-Tier 1 plots: 8
-Unlock Tier 2 plots
-Tier 2 plots: 2
- Can buy size 2 plots of type Tier 1
-Can buy steel tools

-Feel free to come with sugestions

Items
You will be able to buy or make equipment for your workers or your operations in general. Here are some ideas for this:

Equipment:
-Axe(woodcuting tool)
-Pickaxe(mining tool)
-Shovel(dirt digging tool)
-Hammer(smithing tool)

Equipment have different tiers, based on the materials they are made of:
-Tier 1: Stone(you start with this)
-Tier 2: Iron
-Tier 3:Steel
-Ideas here


Objects:
-Anvil(required for smithing)
-Furnance(makes ingots from ore, requires wood to operate)

Animals:
Animals can be breeded to make more animals(need atleast 2). Animals needs food to survive. There is a cooldown in a couple who breeded a new animal before they can breed again. New born animals starts as babies and needs to grow up before producing any resources.

-Cow: Produces milk and leather+meat if killed
-Sheep: Produces wool and meat if killed
-Chicken: Produces eggs and meat if killed

Plants:
-Wheat
-ideas needed

Misc:
-Wheel: Component for creating horse wagon. Can be made of different materials for better speed.(wood, wood with iron circle)
-Wagon: Can be made in different sized, where huge ones needs 2 or more horses to pull it.
-Horse wagon: Requires a wagon and wheels. Amount of wheels requierd depends on the size of the wagon(4,6,8). Horse wagon is a way to transport large amounts of materials over big distances fast, but takes some time to load and unload.
-Crane: Allowes for easier building, and building places the brickmatrons dont actualy reach.


Roads:

There are different types of roads, with different properties, and different costs. The main town will automaticly build better roads in a radius of its center, depending of thesize of the town.

Types of roads:
-Mud road: Slow movement speed, "free" to build(only need workers to work on it to build it)
-Gravel road: Medium movement speed, buildt with gravel.
-Cobblestone road: Fast movement speed, build with stoneblocks.

Technology:
There are a technology tree you can unlock things in. To climb it, you need two things; Workers researching and crystals. Workers researching uses up the crystals you have given to research.

Technologies:
-The wheel: Allowes for building of wheels.
-Iron smithing: Allowes for iron tools to be smithed
-Steel smithing: Allowes for steel tools ot be smithed
-Crane: Allowes for cranes to be build
-need ideas


Main Town:
Selling materials to the main city allowes it to grow, build more builings and so on. The town has its own plots producing the materials it needs for slow growth and to keep its inhabitants alive. But for bigger growth trading is needed. If you over a longer period keep selling amounts of a speciffic material to the town, the town starts relying on you to sell them that specific material of that amount, and will expand accordingly. If you suddenly stop selling them that material, the town might get in trouble.
The point of growing the main town it that it becomes stronger(usefull for multiplayer), gets better technology, offers you better items, gain a bigger area to sell you plots in etc.


Multiplayer:

In multiplayer there will also be other main towns, and each main town will only be able to have x players living/working for them. Towns may start wars against each other.

-need ideas for how townwars will work


Thanks for reading, and dont forget to come with new ideas! This post will be updates every now and then

Ah, your mod idea, I really liked it when I read it over at the other thread got me thinking of a cross between The Sims, Harvest Moon and The Guild 2 but as I continued to read I realised that multiplayer is going to be a problem(Just for sake of argument say this is something that is really going to happen and not just a maybe), how do you deal with the cities war?

* Do the players poor units into a pool and then town auto battles with those units?
* Turned base player controller?
* The players battles in real time? If so, how do you deal with people logging off? Or what if they attack the other town when no one from that town is online?

To be honest i havent really thought much about that at all.. So i am hoping people will be comming up with good ideas.

But I have so ideas. Towns will have really strong defence by itself, and it will kinda be based on the size of the town. I speak of defence so strong that i might take days to break through. How that will be done on the other hand, i dont really know. But maybe if during wars, players have to donate large amount of resources to the town to let it keep producing armies, and the towns will automaticly raid each other at given times... Because you are right, player controlled realtime battles cant be done, not in this type of gameplay...
And the way players directly can contribute to the war(other than attacking the enemy town, since its way to good defended) will be to attack and take down outposts, wich lowers the towns defence...

But as i said, i havent thought much about this yet, so i need som good ideas from people on how this should work

I wouldn't call it impossible the guys over at extra credits(http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-mmorts) touched upon it in a much more cohesive rant then mine but leaving that aside I would like to touch upon some RPG elements, mainly some sort of plot. Having a mandatory plot a la Skyrim which you can do whenever you want to doesn't seem like the way to go about it. Instead it would be more interesting if it was something that's a lot more subtle, a plot that doesn't necessary got you in the centre of it and if you choose to not get involved or doesn't pick up on some of the plot points it will still continues and have some impact on the town in the end(having the town burn to the ground or similar situations would most likely not work because then you more or less forces the player to get involved just so he can continue to play afterwards).

For the plot of the mod, you could go with something along the lines of colonial North America or Australia.

"A group of settlers has founded a new town in a new found land. You, the disgraced son of a rich upper-class businessman (this could easily be changed if needed) have come to this newly created town to make a living for yourself, with a small amount of money which your father gave you just to survive."

Obviously this is just an idea, so any changes are welcome. This plot basis would allow people to get actively involved in the town, creating a large business which provides a great profit. Or you could 'go it alone', just using the town for trade and as a basis for your new life.


On another note, the fourth tier tools could be something like composite tools, a mixture of all of stone, iron and steel. In order to make this, you would need to research something like Scientific Method. This may be getting a bit out of context for the time period however.

Again, this is all ideas, just throwing them in to see what happens. Hope it helps.

Okay nice post there, but it would be good if you put this into the mod compilation thread.

Posting in big obnoxious font make you look quite douchy fyi. But point taken.

Well, yeah, i havent thought much about multiplayer, or atleast pvp... Maybe multiplayer should be more of a coop, working together to build up the main town, and competing on beeing the wealtiest etc..

I kinda pictures more of a big open landscape, not different islands. But i guess that can be a world type option when making a new game.

Also, the part about monsters attacking... Not sure if thats a good idea.. Picture a player playing for many hours builing up on everything exept combat, and suddenly a monsterwave comes and ruins everything he/her has worked on. :/ Combat like that fits the main gameplay of castlestory better i think.

So, each island is big enough to have a town, some players, space for lots of plots? Wow, that would be a really REALLY big map..
But i like the idea!
You think its like you can buy the right to buy plots in other towns, and towns closer to the centre is bigger and will trade more and better items/materials etc?

Really like the idea... What if also there were better minerals to be mined, and better soil that provided better growth for plants, trees and animals the closer to the center you got? Because in the center you have this "Mother of all crystals" or something?