Land from the beginning has had little purpose, now that it's completely
removed from the
rest of the game it has no purpose at all. There's always been a kind of "if
we build it, a
purpose will show up" but so far - nope - currencies have in fact become less
useful, not
more (e.g. Paper). So I'd like to throw out a kind-of-different idea, I won't
be able to work on
it closely until ~Sept myself, but I wanted to plant the seed if anyone wants
to run with it in
the meantime or at least bat it about a bit.
Land right now strongly reminds me of the 8-bit cult classic M.U.L.E., a worker
placement
game with a fantastic auction mechanic. One of the unique things is that it
combined an
individual win condition with a group win condition. The setting was a colony
planet and
you produced and traded/auctioned multiple commodities. The unique thing was
that, at
the end, the players were ranked 1..4 based on their wealth, but the whole
colony was also
ranked based on its collective wealth. If you were collectively poor, the
result would be that
you lived in "mud huts" and if you were all rich, you lived in "palatial
estates" (there were
levels in between). The design was such that if you played cutthroat and
didn't trade,
you'd end up on the bottom of the scale - and believe me taking 1st place while
living in
mud huts was a bit of a hollow victory.
So my thought is to design the land-based win condition not just on reaching an
individual
goal, but on how well spread land or other measured of collective wealth are
when you win.
I was thinking that a win would, in addition to granting champion, would grant
a ranked
patent title similar to the old Cups in the current Scroll. Keeping with the
landed theme,
maybe noble theme - if you win while everyone is poor, you get the title Baron
or Earl,
but if everyone's rich you would forevermore have a title like Duke or Prince.
It would take a bunch of rebalancing to favor trade - even with the cut-down
refineries one
person with lots of land can play solo, so it's not just slapping a win
condition on top of the
current production scheme. It would basically daylight some of the current
behind-the-
scenes auction dealings by encouraging deals to keep prices down. If it could
be done
with a system in which trade enriches everyone above solo play it would be
something
fairly unique that we haven't done before to my knowledge.
Anyway, just wanted to leave something to ponder for now!
-G.
