The TurnEngine Blog

The aim is to restrict the players from holding a full rank in both trees. There will perhaps be allowances for all ranks in the “Casual” game, however in the “Dedicated” game it is likely only one tree can be traversed to divide players.

The rankings provide benefits, but do not prevent Military players building trading structures, and do not prevent Merchant players building military ships. They simply give a player an edge in one area over other players.

Have no fear, all players can build military ships - its a war game after all!

Its a very standard feature of games these days - mostly called the ‘black market’. You sell the resources for less than their market worth, and pay more than their market worth to buy them!

Thats the basics, obviously I’ll look to beef it up with some interesting extras, perhaps make the market faction based and vary the market worth based on supply and demand (always a nice way to do things).

Buying ships will be more expensive than if you were to buy their equivalent in resources from the market (probably at least twice), to take into account the fact you get them immediately.

In order to build battleships, you must be a General. Therefore those that choose the trader path are limited in their combat ability. Interesting, but I’m not sure many people will be willing to go the entire round without battleships.

Also, what is meant by the word “purchase” a rank? Are we talking actually cash money here, or some sort of in-game credit system?

Actually the rankings just allow ‘purchase’ through the trading market. Everyone can build all ships if they choose to do so. Otherwise i believe like you say that most would want to build battleships and hence not go the other route. That said, exclusive trees that prevent you ever getting one unit or another may be used - we’ll see how it goes

It is a good idea to provide more incentive for people to focus on one tree or another, other thoughts are for military have an assault shuttle that can attack trading vessels in a fleet, stealing their contents (rather than watching it all destroyed), and improved output from the trading posts for the merchant tree.

the ideal solution, imho, is one where the benifits are large if you are the only player choosing that option, but they become less lucrative as more people choose it. Then don’t bother trying to balance them.

So if everyone becomes a war general, they all have amazing ships which are unbeatable, but it’s not really that much of an advantage anymore because everynoe else has them too… (extreme case where even with some kind of implicit self-balancing leads to everyone choosing one route)

maybe a better example would be if there was a pirate/scavenger rank, where a new ship type became available which harested resources from destroyed ships.(so you send you fleet to a battle but not to fight just to watch other and collect the debris)

if everyone chooses this rank then they are splitting a limited resource (the number of ships being destroyed) among a large number of player. Thus this new ship type is less useful. If only one player chooses this rank he gets large amounts of resource for every battle which he sends his/her scavenger too… (a third rank system adds to the complexity, and may be unneeded, i only mentioned it because i couldn’t think of a good example using your current ranks off the top of my head…)