Hi there!
I know the basic idea of adding new skills and NPC bots itself is not new, but I try to give it the shape of an elaborated suggestion. So let's start:
1. Add the follwing skills:- trade
- looting
- engineer
- tactics
- trainer
- leadership
2. Add Charisma and Intelligence attributes, but put them on 39 by default. (This is because the skills they provide are still subpar)
3. Add a Tavern on the website, where you can hire hundreds of different mercenaries
4. Add a party screen on the website, where you can organzie your little warband
The whole things works this way:
Intelligence skills:- Trade: each skill point allows you to increase your income per tick by 5%/2.5 gold per multiplier tick.
- Looting: every point looting reduces your upkeep chance by a certain percentage, just like high WPF for weapons. It also reduces wages by 5%.
- Engineer: every point reduces your calculated equipment value by 5%. So with 10 engineer you pay only 50% upkeep. It also improves the equipment of your mercenaries.
Charisma skills:- Leadership: you can lead one NPC into battle per point.
- Trainer: this skill increases the experience and skills of the bots you can lead
- Tactics: you can lead one additional type of NPC into battle per two tactics points. (This is to prevent players of too easily using nasty combinations like shielders in the front, archers in the middle and pikemen in the back)
Mercenaries:Mercenaries will work similar like items. Like the marketplace there will be a "Tavern" tab, and like the different item classes there will be different mercenary classes to click on. You just need to create a vast selection of different mercenaries with different skills, euipment and themes, like Vikings, Knights, Arabs and so on, to satisfy everyone's taste. Each mercenary has a few additional values, next to his equipment and skills listed:
- Recruitment cost: the price you pay for hiring a mercenary. It's like buying an item.
- Wages: the wages you have to pay for using him EVERY ROUND. There is not a chance he will claim his wages, he just always does, even if he dies.
- Type: this is the type of mercenary. You can only lead one type of mercenaries, unless you raise your tactics skill. Types are for example "Viking spearman" "Arab horse archer" or "Mailed hoplite infantry". Basically a type can consist of several different mercenaries, which will mostly differ in their experience (e.g. "Recruit Arab horse archer" "Regular Arab horse archer" "Experienced Arab horse archer" and "Veteran Arab horse archer"), but sometimes also in their euipment ("Experienced European plated glaiveman" and "Recruit European plated halberdier" will both be "European plated polearm shocktroops")
- Requirements: depending on their skill level and their equipment, leading a mercenary on the battlefield needs both skills: engineer and trainer. If you don't meet the requirements, you can hire a mercenary, and he will stay in your party screen (without claiming wages, he doesn't fight!), but you can't assign him to an army setup in the party screen.
The party screen:It basically looks similar to the quipment screen. But instead of nine you have ten boxes, and there is a dropdown menu above with 1 to 10. Perhaps you could rename the different points, if possible.
It's actually very easy: you can put your warband together there, and you can have ten versions of it, so you can switch in battle. If you could rename your setups you wouldn't have to keep in mind which setup stands for what.
Just click on the boxes like equipping yourself, and the mercenaries you can lead will appear there.
Next to every box there will be another dropdown menu with F1-F12, assigning the man to a certain group to lead ingame.
You can switch your setup ingame via escape menu, or simply "unequip" all mercenaries, if you are losing too much money.
SummaryThat's it, basically. Yes, people would be allowed to wear better euipment with these changes, but they would have to sacrifice skill points on it. You can reduce your upkeep by 50% and put ten points in lowering the breaking chance by another 50% perhaps, but you would have to pay this with 20 skill points!
Depending on how well you can exploit the "economic" skills it would be worth reconsidering their percentage values, or even lowering the intelligence attribute start value, for example put it to 15 or even to 3. It's a matter of calculations and balancing, so I am in no way fixed on the values I suggested, they are first, rough orientation values.
I think having bots on the field could make the game more interesting again. You could have blocks of pikemen, shield walls, lines of archers or even complete charges of heavy cavalry!
Each bot that kills someone adds a kill point to your score, but so does every bot you kill, which is why bots, once discovered as NPC, will be the main target of kill hungry players. I don't think they will have a big impact on the game, and most players won't have more than one or two NPCs follwing and supporting them, but if someone decides to go full leadership/trader, he can lead a small army of ten armoured knights at the cost of himself being as dangerous as a peasant. It would even be fun to equip yourself like your mercenaries and hide between them. So players approaching the line of bots won't know which one of them will suddenly jump out of the formation and offer a proper fight
Tell me what you think about this not so serious suggestion, which is more like "wouldn't it be nice, if we had...?"
