First of all, let me show you a little something.
Yes! Lightning has released this video of some gameplay elements. He's been working pretty darn hard lately, and this is the result - the ability to create your character, log in, move around aimlessly and bump into things. Players who are logged out are shown as asleep - allowing for nefarious acts of injustice - or a good laugh to find an unconscious at the local tavern.
I know it might not seem much, but a lot of effort has gone into this programming the last few weeks, and Lightning has really outdone himself, considering he is also juggling a university project.
Meanwhile, I recently had the sparkle of a thought in mind of making the world more interesting. Whilst we're both agreed on the fact that players could possibly become part of the Senate, and therefore effecting the city/nation's growth and well-being, I came across the idea of making it so that they have a role in the urban development of the city itself.
Furthermore, if they did, what would be the point if the city was already designed, walled and suited ready for thousands of people? It's not really much of a development, from there-on, and if anything, completely overwhelming.
So I had the thought of, rather than the world starting with sprawling cities, at first void of players for the most part, why not make it so that the cities start out as small palisaded towns with stone houses - if not of lesser construction?
Not only that, but the city would also then be in relative power to the players. A problem beforehand was that a player would need to amass an army of NPCs and players to siege a town after months of gameplay. With this idea though, the city would be under constant threat of a possible siege.
However, this clashes with the prior ideals of The Ancients being a historically-accurate game - although, that's slowly been losing premise as more and more fun features have been brought up - and even now, the idea of the game being set in 200BCE has been an issue, because the game's year date would need to be in effective stasis.
Therefore, after speaking with a group of people who have been following the game for some time and know of its development history for the most part, I decided to go with a mixture of responses, by keeping it small and relative to the player to allow for mass sandbox effect for alpha testing and then seeing how it plays out.
My original questioning of this whole idea was when my city was turning out to be a grey wasteland, and when you saw the size of it as it was being developed, you could easily see how players might only cross paths once in a while - I had planned the city to support hundreds living there, but the game will probably have less than that by far in the future, considering that players will be living all over the country anyway!
So my plan of action is to do some pixeling of smaller and cheaper housing and to draw out a smaller settlement for Rome to be. Then the Senate can choose how much of their funds they want to put toward the development of housing - larger, richer houses costing more - during gameplay, once we have that feature in at a later date.
Oh, also, something very important I nearly forgot! Our domain name, www.project-terra.net, will be expiring soon. However, I have already paid for the new web domain and it is currently up and not-ready-for-use at www.the-ancients.net.
I hope to overhaul the information on the site and to get it all up to date, relevant, and ultimately a shorter and more informative read at a future date.
I do not like it, I mean it sounds sort of good but I would rather not have some idiots make a failure and actually have Rome.
I like the idea of it being a 'semi-alternate history' in that the world has all of the historical names elements etc. but with all of the great people removed the world as we know it could be entirely different based on the roles played by the 'new' world population and it falls to real people to try and rival the achievements of great people of antiquity and the world and it's nations rising or falling on the strength of it's new population. Can modern thinking out do the ancients?
Isn't the point of playing historical games to start at a relatively accurate state and rewrite history as you play?
Well, the big "good thing" about having a small Rome to start with, is that players actually have a chance with it and against it. For example, players won't have to amass 150+ NPCs/players to stand a chance against Rome's army.
The problem with having a historically-correct game is that there are "rules" players would have to follow. The city has to have X available, it has to have a population support of X, it has to have an army of X, it has to have... so forth. The city would have to be huge to fully support 200BCE's original Rome. As a result of that, having a player base of <100 roaming around the ancient world means that you'll be lucky to have maybe five people in Rome at any one time - and even with larger counts, I reckon that more people will be out in the wilderness doing their own thing rather than living in the city.
By having a smaller Rome, players will be more likely to bump into each other and interact.
With a smaller Rome, the game can have a more sandbox approach for the players, giving them a clean slate to start with - rather than tossing them into a huge sprawling city with ties already generated in a Golden Orb Web spider fashion.
All of the above arguements have their pros and cons, and ultimately, it comes down to a Black and White decision dependent on the audience's taste... It's really quite a difficult position to be in. :(