Administrators THQN Brad Posted August 2, 2021 Administrators Share Posted August 2, 2021 Ave! Welcome to DevDiary #5, where we take our first detailed look at some of the metagame features of Expeditions: Rome! In our previous DevDiary, we made a brief expedition into the world of art direction to show you how we’ve approached the challenges of bringing the ancient world of Rome to life in a way that feels authentic, yet vibrant and exciting. Today we’ll return to the world of gameplay and system design as we delve into the meta systems of Expeditions: Rome and explore how we’re selling the fantasy of being a Roman legatus on a campaign of war. This time we’re dealing with some systems that are still very much under development, so buckle up for some serious inside baseball. Our 2nd DevDiary, which focused on our core combat design, should have made it clear that while significant improvements – as well as some clever and risky innovations – have been made in the core combat, our focus there has always been to deliver a solid, challenging, and satisfying take on traditional turn-based combat. By contrast, the meta gameplay has always been the area where we’ve pushed ourselves to think differently and try crazy new things to separate the Expeditions series from other RPG and strategy games. Expeditions: Rome continues this philosophy. Let’s start by defining what we mean when we say meta. The meta is the game systems that track your overall progression and allow you to interact with it. Our core game loops such as combat or dialogue are self-contained bubbles of content that begin and end discretely, whereas the meta spans the whole game and ties all the content together. Every core game loop always interacts with the meta in many ways, but in game development it’s useful to think of them separately. (Side note: Although the overall story and the personal development of each character spans the whole game and ties together all the dialogue, in this diary we’re purely interested in game mechanics.) The meta of Expeditions: Rome can be roughly divided into two parts: the character systems, and the worldmap systems. Both aspects of the meta are quite different than previous instalments, but the worldmap systems are what really sets Expeditions: Rome apart from other games. As we showed in our story diary, Expeditions: Rome casts you – the player – as the legatus of a legion of Rome. Our foremost priority in designing the campaigns of Rome was to make you feel like you have an army at your fingertips, and to make that army feel useful and necessary. When we set out, we immediately ran into a certain important tension: as the game is fundamentally a party-based RPG, most of the gameplay will revolve around your own group of a dozen Romans meeting new people, engaging in diplomatic talks or investigating plot points, and getting into skirmishes on that small-party scale. A lot of the worldmap gameplay of previous Expeditions games has centered around resource management and survival mechanics, but when you have a legion of 6000 men at your beck and call, what difficulty is there in feeding and otherwise supplying a dozen more people? To solve this, we have redesigned the survival aspects of Expeditions: Rome dramatically. When you return to the worldmap, you will see not just your own party represented by your character on horseback, but also your legion – typically garrisoned at a fortified camp. You can and will often visit this camp to manage the affairs of the legion as well as the status of your own party. It is here you can recruit new praetorians for your group, treat those who have been injured in combat, craft new equipment for yourself and your praetorians, and even leave behind a praetorian to rest and recuperate at the baths if their morale has fallen too low. Our aim has been for the camp to feel like a place of resources and opportunities, where you visit when you want to do something, not a chore that you have to perform at regular intervals just to survive the game. All facilities of the legion camp can be upgraded, which changes the appearance of buildings or entire sections of the command area, but to do that you must secure the necessary resources. Fortunately, unlike previous Expeditions games, the legion is not just a narrative element in Expeditions: Rome. This time around, you can deploy it to missions all across the parts of the worldmap under your control. The worldmap of each campaign is divided into regions. When you control a region, you unlock the ability to build farms, tanneries, iron mines, or lumber yards, which grant you resources needed to upgrade your legion’s camp. We are not building a 4X game here, so the underlying mechanics are straight-forward and easy to understand: Sending your legion on a mission takes a certain amount of in-game time, and has a cost, for example in denarii (salary) or manpower (casualties). Missions also have a difficulty rating that results in a success probability based on the current strength of your legion. If a mission is succeeded, you gain the resources you were promised. Capturing a new region is where things get a little more complex. You deploy your legion to capture an enemy outpost just as you would send it to perform any other task – however, when the legion reaches its destination, a battle begins. First, you must select which centurion should lead this battle – your legion can have up to 4 centurions which are recruited from the same pool as your personal praetorian guard. The character class of each centurion, as well as any perks they might have to improve their suitability to command, determines the likely outcome: the probability of success, the expected loss of manpower, how much loot you can expect to get out of it, and the probability that the centurion himself will survive the battle. Next, you select what formation your legion should deploy in. Formations are a type of stratagem, which are randomly made available to you from your strategic pool to represent the unpredictable nature of war. Once you’ve decided how to deploy the legion, the battle is on, and you can follow along as the armies are arrayed against each other and clash. At certain intervals, new decisions pop up, asking you to choose new stratagems for the different phases of battle. If you find yourself unhappy with your options, next time you’re visiting your legion’s camp, you can build a workshop and develop new stratagems to add to your pool. As the game progresses and your workshop is upgraded, you will even be able to upgrade your existing stratagems with better outcomes. This legion battle system is our way to represent large-scale warfare in a game that is otherwise mainly focused on elite small-unit tactical combat. Our challenge has been to make a simple system with enough depth to stay fresh and interesting throughout the course of a 40-hour RPG, and which ties into the other systems of the game so it doesn’t feel too isolated from the rest of the experience. This system is one of the areas of the game that we are most focused on expanding and improving as we get closer to finishing Expeditions: Rome. During testing, we have found that there seems to be clear dominant strategies, and that certain choices that do have valid uses don’t feel as useful as they really are – perhaps because their effects are too long-term or too abstract compared to other strategies. Often these problems are easy to solve by adding new mechanics to the system, but the ideal solution would be to address it within the scope of the current feature set, since every new mechanic we add must be supported by UI and tutorialization, which can quickly clutter the interface and overwhelm the player. Another problem we’re working to solve is how to give the player more ways to affect a battle ahead of time. Going up against a much stronger army can feel like a slog right now, as you throw your legion against them, suffering repeated defeats to whittle down their strength. Though this is in many ways accurate to the Roman republic’s historical approach to warfare (refuse all offers of peace, and instead keep throwing lives at a problem until the enemy is worn out), it isn’t a particularly fun way to win. We want you to have many options to improve your success chance or reduce the enemy strength before you even begin the battle. We’d love to hear what you think we should do to solve this in the comments of this DevDiary – as mentioned, this area of the game is getting a lot of attention right now, and we can always draw inspiration from your suggestions and requests! Winning a legion battle isn’t the end of conquering a territory. There are always loose ends to tie up – pockets of resistance to exterminate; local aristocrats, tribes, or clans with whom to forge new alliances; or prisoners of war to rescue. Sometimes you can send your legion to handle these things, other times you must send one of your companions in charge of your praetorian guard. A conquered region is pacified only once the loose ends have been dealt with, and then you can safely redeploy your legion to another region without losing control again. Despite this already being our longest DevDiary yet, we have barely touched on most of the meta systems of Expeditions: Rome. The triage system from previous games makes a return, although field triage is no longer as punishing as it used to be given the existence of the infirmary tent in your legion’s camp, where injured praetorians can be treated for free. The crafting system is a complex and rewarding system in its own right, and new features for it will be unlocked by outpost upgrades all the way up to around the half-way of the game. Praetorians can mutiny if their approval of your choices becomes low enough, and the way they leave will be determined by their personality traits – but fear not, you can upgrade your legion’s barracks to increase the level range of new recruits available to replace them. As you can hopefully tell, Expeditions: Rome is a sprawling and complex game with many interconnected systems, but we are working hard to make sure it is accessible and that every individual system is fun to play around with. We hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the innards of our worldmap systems, why they are being designed the way they are, and what we’re doing to improve them and ensure they remain fun throughout the course of the game. Hopefully this diary has raised as many questions as it has answered! Please post all your questions as comments here, and we will do our best to address them on this week’s DevStream on Wednesday August 4th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. This time, Senior Producer Brad Logston will once again be joined by Creative Director Jonas Wæver to delve further into the design of the meta of Expeditions: Rome. Until then, Valete! 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vanny Posted August 3, 2021 Share Posted August 3, 2021 The mechanics of controlling the legion sounds and looks really interesting! I hope the narratives and missions that are tied into it feel similarly deep and worthwhile compared to the quests and writing in the rest of the game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Somns Posted August 3, 2021 Share Posted August 3, 2021 Thank you, Brad, for the DevDiary! I can't wait for this game, but for now, a couple of questions: How involved is the Legion in the narrative? For example, imagine if I wanted to intimidate a tribe leader to do what I want through dialogue, the Legion being the modifier, requiring X amount of soldiers, and the option to use that line will only be available/appear if I my value of X is equal or higher than required. Will the Legion have those kinds of interactions with the narrative? Can we use it to further Rome's goals? Or perhaps, OUR goals? Does our Legion gain experience over time? If yes, how so? Do they level up? Do they perform better in combat? Access to better equipment? Are our Legion's accomplishments sometimes discussed in the narrative? If they're successful, the people back home will praise our army, but if it's the other way around, they'll shame it and the legatus for the poor performance in the campaign... In general I would just like to know how deep the Legion goes with the narrative, but I'm pretty happy with what I've seen so far. Devs and Brad, keep up the good work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KnightofPhoenix Posted August 11, 2021 Share Posted August 11, 2021 That is excellent, I love your approach to legion command and to the strategic and tactical gameplay (deep enough to be engrossing, but simple enough to not detract from the fact that this is an RPG and not a 4X game). In terms of mechanics that would allow us to influence the outcome of battles beforehand, I can suggest a few ideas: - Diplomacy, e.g. trying to get parts of the enemy army to defect or desert. Sow discord within the enemy army. These can be done in-character or you can send centurions on missions to attempt to do this - Assassination/sabotage, e.g. assassinating officers, sabotaging supplies, etc. - Attacking Morale, e.g. having champions duel before the battle (Centurions can again play a role here), deceiving the enemy into thinking you have a larger army/bluffing, place part of your army behind the enemy army and make it look like they are surrounded, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonas Posted August 12, 2021 Share Posted August 12, 2021 Thank you KnightofPhoenix, I have manage to use pretty much all of your ideas already 😄 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorl Posted September 27, 2021 Share Posted September 27, 2021 Looking forward to this game, thanks for making it, and hope it's a great success. Some thoughts.... - Expanding on ideas presented above regarding sabotage. Night missions destroying supplies should be your character and party on a small tactical map where you attack some camp defenders and forge into their camp before being forced to pull back since more and more of their troops are waking up, putting on armor etc (basically "unlimited waves" of enemy troops). So chances of destroying "all" supplies in that part of the camp is slim, but theoretically possible (be it weapons, arrows, food, water containers). Sure unfair but you are attacking a camp of thousands. High probability of injury for those that go on mission. Remaining would be card based vs tactical as above. - Enemy A has allies B and C and neighbors D and E, Using same tactic as used against A vs B or C has a lower success rate or benefit because they learned that's a favorite tactic. Against D and E no penalty unless they're allied with B or C when B or C is attacked. - Scouts quality/numbers vs quality/numbers of enemy scouts (which can only be part of light troops and horsemen) find best place suited for battle giving terrain related bonuses. Terrain where for instance shield walls would be effective. Specialized troops that are light in armor/weapons so not great in combat and can die/be wounded pre-battle, but useful pre-battle. - Horsemen portion of your army acting as harassers of enemy army, success rate based on difference between your army horsemen count/quality vs enemy horsemen count. - Often opposing armies were made up of multiple village bands, so if using horsemen to attack nearby village, it may break off a percentage of the army as they decide to go and defend their home. Alternate tactic to above where opposite force has higher number of horse, but it may backfire leaving you with limited horse if the enemy horse does not choose to rush back to defend their homes. Attacking a bigger village may pull off bigger enemy portion but will suffer greater attrition as part of the mission. - Ambushes where scouts fail to detect opposing army allowing other army to attack an unprepared long column (which works for/against roman army) - Bribery leading to betrayal of subgroup within the army so it leaves the field just prior to battle - Money sink having a portion of budget attributed to spies/bribes giving you good information on troop movements/village locations, including potentially attacking part of the enemy army before it merges, then fighting a second battle against remaining, not much chance to heal but, a better chance that attacking a combined force - Larger forces take time to gather and merge giving the roman army time to build limited fortifications spikes into the ground, pits, and set up scorpio/ballista to limit cavalry and slowing down infantry - Perhaps give players a choice of cards attack smaller groups with semi-random time between battles depending on distance factors, or dig in and fight the combined force (related to above two points) - Conversely, an action from back home alerts the enemy to your location, or fails to "show up to reinforce" leaving your much smaller army to face a larger opponent leading you to tactical withdrawals. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dylan Posted January 22, 2022 Share Posted January 22, 2022 My question is how do we increase manpower, I'm just getting started in the First act of the game (Asia minor) and my Legionaries keeps getting Whittled away and the military advisor mentioned getting our count up "If I had denaris to spare" so I was wondering if there was a way to buy Legionaries Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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