Frankly this is a suggestion that is probably far too late to implement in the games lifespan.
What I mean by 'Oregon Trail'-like mechanics are events, abilities, and features related to moving your army across the map, which tongue-and-cheek basically boil down to implementing features in line with the classic series of edu-tainment games 'Oregon Trail'. For those outside of the USA, who might not be familiar with Oregon Trail it was a series that concerned the historical western-expansion/settlement of the US, most of the game (depending on the version, it was started in the early 80's) was watching a wagon move across a 2d sidescrolling landscape or a line move across a map with the game pausing and either popping up with an announcement ('family member: [crude joke name here] has died of dysentery!', 'you have reached fort worthless', 'a river blocks your path') with options. it was a fairly linear game that often ended with everyone dying of smallpox, yellow feaver, or freezing to death because you forgot to buy extra clothes and instead just spent all your money on bullets without even buying enough salt to preserve the meat...
anyway.. how would this look in game?
Broadly Speaking These Can Be Ordered into thse catagories
IMMEDIATE ISSUES:
What I mean by 'Oregon Trail'-like mechanics are events, abilities, and features related to moving your army across the map, which tongue-and-cheek basically boil down to implementing features in line with the classic series of edu-tainment games 'Oregon Trail'. For those outside of the USA, who might not be familiar with Oregon Trail it was a series that concerned the historical western-expansion/settlement of the US, most of the game (depending on the version, it was started in the early 80's) was watching a wagon move across a 2d sidescrolling landscape or a line move across a map with the game pausing and either popping up with an announcement ('family member: [crude joke name here] has died of dysentery!', 'you have reached fort worthless', 'a river blocks your path') with options. it was a fairly linear game that often ended with everyone dying of smallpox, yellow feaver, or freezing to death because you forgot to buy extra clothes and instead just spent all your money on bullets without even buying enough salt to preserve the meat...
anyway.. how would this look in game?
Broadly Speaking These Can Be Ordered into thse catagories
- Roads and Wagons
- Wagons/Carts, Wagon/Cart Trains, Wagon/Cart Acessories: Wagons like donkeys allow you to pull more cargo, allow you to move more guys around, faster, etc.
- Roads allow you to move faster with more weight/goods.
- roads vary in quality; from the paved roads of the Imperial heartlands to the roadless wastes of the desert and steppe, to the forest trails of the highlands.
- roads would be implemented by having an option in a menu or in menu-bar to "snap to road" that would, if there was a road in the general direction you wanted to move your party, and your party was near enough the road, would have your party use that road.
- Rivers and Bridges.
- Rivers and bridges need to be catagorized, for bridges this is simple but for rivers this means you're going to need to allow for a series of different spans that show different, and maybe seasonal depth, width, current, and avg temperature. (IE: is there ice on the surface in winter and how thick is the ice)
- similarly bridges should have various stats and variables that allow for things like "this old, poorly maintained bridge your tier 4+ army was marching 4 abreast over finally decided to collapse, injuring w and killing x of your troops and causing the loss of Y horses and Y items",
- option to prompt you for bridge crossing options.
- Food, Thirst, Disease and Health.
- implement "set up camp"; "send troops to forage",
- Have a "pace" or "cadence" for your party, that can hurt your morale and general party health, but also allow you to march straight through the night or sprint to catch up with bandits. Perhaps have an entire tab/window dedicated to travel where many of decisions/options can be checked
- Have regional diseases and regional hazards befall your troops or maybe even heroes as you move through the world.
- most importantly: have NPC caravans, and lords actually stop and camp in the evening,
- have your companions (optionally) interrupt and take you aside to ask you to slow down or set up camp.. heck take it further and have them be able to lead a mutiny and set up a camp where you'll be held prisoner until they can come to consensus about what to do with you. (granted you'll need to have been leading them on one hell of a moral-draining disaster for them to simply not desert)
IMMEDIATE ISSUES:
- Map redesign: The Current map is poorly scaled for this, as is the currently implemented passage of time.
- Roads would change the map design significantly, probably at a coding level.. which frankly they need to be anyway, if these were to be implemented, perhaps implement them alongside boats.
- Time redesign as well if youre going to be implementing that
- please just implement a 364 day, 12 month year, makes it much easier to estimate where things are, how things are scaling;
- Yes I know.. I know "Dynasty", "my kid takes forever to age up", etc. etc.. it's a badly implemented feature that frankly would benefit from having a map redesign as well; with the opportunity for more cultures, kingdoms, and factions to be added in vanilla... add a x5 or x8 speed to fast-foward
- yes this would also probably require more than a couple changes to the diplomacy, kingdom, and clan relations systems; all of which could use a good dusting already.
- please just implement a 364 day, 12 month year, makes it much easier to estimate where things are, how things are scaling;
- Complications to AI world pathfinding and routes.
- AI caravans would need to be able to tell if they're stopped/blocked; where they're being stopped/blocked; and come up with alternative routes that aren't necessarily "bee-line to target".
- AI pathfinding algorithm would need to be able to not only find the shortest route, but take other factors such as speed, safety, etc.
- building/paving new roads would also need to be factored into this .(assuming this is something a player could do for their fief)
- roads being washed out due to seaonsal rain turning the dirt road into mud would also need to be factored
- large camps would require changes in AI, sometimes requiring them to go around said route.
- issues similar to those seen in seiges where AI attacker/beseiger refuses to break before a far superior relief force
- allowing for AI stupidity/indifference where desireable for character-traits; (IE: arrogant and incompetent leaders leading under-equipped armies into disasters that claim them before the enemy does, or doing things inefficiently depending on the difficulty scaling).
