This file contains ideas to "enhance" the original Age of Kings gameplay. Don't worry, vanilla mode will always be available.
- Change view distance (Line of sight / Fog of War)
- Fog, rain, winter, summer
- Unit slowdowns (depending on terrain)
- Can be predicted by tech
- Can be modified globally or locally (by voodoo priests)
- Buildings made out of wood and other flammable material can be lit.
- Fire departments in the city can extinguish those fires (Stronghold anybody?).
- Sneaky spies could burn your city down
- At night: View distance reduced, everything darker.
- Villagers need sleep, otherwise they die at work.
- Chemistry industry: Caffeine, Penicillin, ...?
- A single villager can hide (per some tile area) in the forest for sneak attacks. Maybe can only visible to a certain type of unit. But invisible to other villagers (until they pop out and start building stuff)
- Villagers can dig down, can discover natural resources.
- Dirt, stone, etc are new resources, can be placed elsewhere
- (add any minecraft/terraria-like stuff here)
- Maps with infinite size! (Your PC is the limit!)
- Spherical/Toroidal/Cylindrical surfaces would be possible, too.
- Only newly-built units receive the bonus when units are upgraded
- Already-built units need to be "overhauled" for a cost back at the barracks. (reminder: just an idea, there will be vanilla mode)
- Research should be placed in creating order, like in WarCraft. It's too annoying to click on building again after each research
The map has a bunch of zombie spawners; after an initial build-up phase, they start producing waves zombie hordes, fast zombies, tanks, petard zombies; the zombie AI tries to get to your villagers (magic pathfinding); killed units turn into zombies as well. spawners can be destroyed, but the closer or the more powerful you get, the more zombies will spawn. To win, survive for a specified period of time, build a wonder, or destroy the spawners (or something...).
Similar to "Regicide", but with a building. Players have some time to fortify their castle. A player loses if the castle falls.
An asymmetric game mode where 1 or 2 technologically advanced players compete against 3 - 6 "barbarians". The barbarians start in Dark Age with a few extra villagers, but have to build up their economy from the ground up. The "civilized" players start in Castle Age with a large amount of villagers, a decent economy and some defensive buildings. For barbarian players, the goal is to destroy a wonder in the civilized players' cities before a time limit is reached. The civilized players have to build defenses and try to protect against the hordes that are pressing at their gates.
A mode similar to Trouble in Terrorist Town and Secret Hitler. The game starts with all 8 players being neutral or allied. Their goal is to find 2 "phantoms" and eliminate them. The 2 phantoms are allied from the start and know about each other, while every other player is clueless whether other players are friendly or phantoms. Phantom players have to manipulate the others into distrusting their friends. Gameplay could be spiced up with feature like purchasing units which don't have player colours from a town in the middle of the map, sabotage units and limiting the allied line of sight gained from researching cartography.
No buildings, just units. The game generates a map and players can choose a starting position. Then they have a few minutes and a set amount of resources to select an army composition and some techs. After the first phase is over they place their units on the battlefield and have to use what they assembled to destroy their opponent. Utilizing height advantages, microing and tactical positioning contrast the strategic decisions of creating the army. The player who destroys his opponent, inflicts the most resource damage to others or holds strategic positions wins the battle.
- Manually coloring units (e.g. for teammates)
- "Mobile ping": designated unit pings its position periodically
- Implicit group definitions/reselections (double-click?)
- Move groups as group, or each unit with its own movement speed
- Auto-resolution of blocking situations
- Individual path searching cost for tiles
- Allow user to mark parts of the map as more expensive
- Auto-set a higher path cost for tiles in the firing range of an enemy castle
- Allow setting any number of waypoints (basically an extension of the 'patrol' mechanic)
- Formations:
- Attack/defense bonuses for some unit formations.
- Dependent on minimum amount of units in this formation.
- New marching formation with speed bonus but defense malus.
- Cavalry flanking
- Restrictions for action areas (don't do anything here)
- Wood chopping
- Castle rampages
- Avoid hazardous areas during pathfinding (via a cost modifier)
- Automatically for stationary hazards (castles, towers, ...)
- Manually "painted" areas
- Emergency evacuation points
- Formations and movement when attacking
- Dynamic hardlocking on target units when attacking
- Don't lock on unreachable current target
- Attack the blocking units first
- Aggressive stance for monks (auto-convert)
- Auto-flee stance (especially for monks): Auto-task "flee" action as soon as an enemy unit comes near
- Non-coward stance for villagers
- Allow selecting the default stance
- Most of the above should be available as lobby settings
- Boosts/handicaps such as resource multipliers for players
- Forced no-rush (timelimit or score limit until attacks are possible)
- Some kind of "official" account on servers for everybody
- Automatic skill groups to create balanced matches
- Scale wonder cost to max pop and number of players (make wonders great again)
- We can show the world that competitive games can be free open source!
- Better team interaction
- Work/resource sharing
- Unit sharing (transport boats)
- Give resources of resigning players to allies
- Color markings
- Create signs
- Paint on map
- Create arrows
Play on one single map with 9001 players. Dynamically extend the map.
Massively slow down the game speed, and you get a "browser game"-like experience.
- Ability to build bridges in water
- Blocks ships, allows land units to walk
- Forgotten Empires might already have wooden bridge textures
- Destructible, repairable, ...
- Long build time
- Forest regeneration or seeding
- Mills can produce sheep, cows, turkeys, etc.
Stone cost for all buildings, rebalance stone amount per pile. Maybe new deep stone mines for later ages.
- Big fat damage numbers!!!1
- Friendly-fire toggle!!111