Originally Posted by screwtype
I said I was going to post something about the elements of Lords of the Realm 2 that I would like to see adopted by CA for its TW series.
First though, I'd just like to emphasize that I'm not advocating the inclusion holus-bolus of the LOTR 2 campaign system into TW. Rather, I'm advocating the adoption of certain principles, which I will explain below.
LOTR 2, TW, and Malthusian limits.
Every game has limits on the player at the low end of the scale. For example, when you first start in almost any sort of computer strategy game, you have very little in the way of resources, of manpower, of money etc and you have to build everything up and gradually increase your strength in order to win. That is basically what 99% of computer strategy games are about.
For many such games though, there is no corresponding difficulty at the opposite end. You just go on accumulating more and more stuff, more and more power, until you eventually overwhelm the enemy with enormous resources. This is the usual paradigm for run-of-the-mill, mediocre strategy games. (Unfortunately, the TW series fits into this category). The good strategy games incorporate some sort of upper limit on the player, as well as a lower limit. The original version of RTW made an attempt at this with the squalor factor, but it was very crudely implemented and soon effectively abandoned by CA in later revisions.
In my experience, the game that best incorporated the principle of upper limits was the old Impressions game Lords of the Realm 2. LOTR 2 designed a game that incorporated an essentially Malthusian principle on virtually every possible aspect of expansion that forced the player to strike a careful balance between the two extreme ends of the scale. In other words, there was an optimum level of expansion the player could reach, beyond which his kingdom would implode rapidly back to the starting point. Furthermore, this optimum level was not easily discovered except by trial-and-error and by mastering a set of management skills. The optimum level was also somewhat malleable depending on the player's skill level. In my opinion, this sort of design philosophy presents the ideal challenge for a strategy gamer.
To give some examples - obviously, you can always have too few of anything. But in LOTR 2, there was almost no element you could not also have too much of (with the possible exception of money and food reserves). For example, too little happiness in a province would cause catastrophic rebellion. But too much happiness would cause mass immigration from the surrounding provinces, causing a population explosion and rapid meltdown of the province as it rapidly exhausted its food reserves. You also wanted your population to be healthy, but not too healthy, because that would cause a baby boom and again, the danger of population explosion. You wanted plenty of sheep, cattle and grain to feed your people, but too many sheep and cattle and your flocks would grow diseased, too much grain and you would exhaust the soil, again leading to mass starvation.
You could create an army, but armies had to live off the land too, so you couldn't afford to create too large an army or again, it would starve the province. Likewise, if an enemy army invaded a province of yours, you had to defeat it quickly before it ate all the food reserve and caused mass starvation, and even if you won you had to get your own army out of there pronto to stop it doing the same!
This system not only created a constant challenge and plenty of excitement, but it also happened to simulate very well the actual problems facing a medieval kingdom. Warfare in the medieval age was, of course, devastating to the land and to the populace that depended on it, particularly if the warfare was prolonged.
Now I'm not suggesting TW should adopt the LOTR 2 system chapter and verse. I certainly don't think there's a need for replicating the complex agricultural system, whereby the player has to manage sheep and cattle and grain and the labour allocated to them each season and so on. But the underlying principle of some sort of upper limit on growth, manageable by a skilled player - that is something that in my opinion the TW series needs desperately. And the economic devastation and vulnerability of the populace to warfare - once again, avoidable by the skilled player - is something else I think the game needs. The campaign in general needs a whole lot more excitement, more thrills and spills, more sense of engagement with a living, breathing world. Right now, it's little more than a one-dimensional, one-way march to total domination - a game of arithmetic, characterized by steady accumulation.
In other words, the strategy side of TW is by and large a yawn. And just fiddling on the edges with "unit pools" is not going to fix it - any more than will merchant units, religious leaders, princesses, assassination videos, V&V's or any of the other chrome that CA tosses our way as a substitute for gameplay.
