The Bleeding Years

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Background:

The Doom now rules in Valyria, leaving the once great Freehold in chaos as the newly styled Free Cities hungrily eye their neighbors for conquest.

The Westerosi continue their divisive warfare with no side gaining any permanent advantage over the other. In the Narrow Sea, Aegon Targaryen gathers his strength, and Dragons, on the island of Dragonstone.

Meanwhile, the Ghiscari cities of Slaver's Bay are eager to retake their position as the greatest empire in the world.

Set hundreds of years before the events of Game of Thrones, lead your House (or City) to victory on land and sea in Westeros, Essos, and Slaver's Bay during the turbulent Bleeding Years.

Map Specs:

• Players: 7
  
• Tileset: Jungle
  
• Genre: Diplomacy
  
• Map Dimensions: 256x256
  

Map Features:

• Best Enjoyed with full house.
  
• 4 Unique Unit Sets: The North, Westerosi, Essosi, Ghiscari
  
• Army Compositions of Foot, Archers, Light Cavalry, Heavy Cavalry
  
• Choose from 23 different Houses and Cities
  
• Dragons!
  
• Over 200 Towns
  
• Napoleon Total War style city capture
  
• Research System: Purchase or Kill
  
• Specials
  
• Game Modes: Westeros Only, World Games, and more...
  

Unit Specials:
Westeros

• Warrior's Sons
  
• Silent Sisters
  
• Green Men
  
• Pyromancers
  
• Seige Engineers
  

The North

• Giants
  
• Wildlings
  
• Ice Dragon (single unit)
  

Essos

• Second Sons
  
• Windblown
  
• Dohraki Screamers
  
• Bearded Priests
  

Slaver's Bay

• Unsullied
  
• Dragon Slayer
  

Nation Specials:
Westeros

• Stark- Core provinces rebel against invaders
  
• Bolton- Cash for kills (by player)
  
• Arryn- Free Heavy Cav + higher Heavy Cav limit
  
• Lannister- Cash for deaths
  
• Durrandon- Free Foot
  
• Gardener- Free Light Cav + higher Light Cav limit
  
• Hoare- Hero Wraiths
  
• Yronwood- Free Archers
  
• Martell- Free Wraiths
  
• Targaryen- TBD
  

Essos

• Braavos- Economic Sanctions
  
• Lorath- +1 HP on ship starting HP
  
• Pentos- Peace Dividend
  
• Qohor- Level 4 Protoss Armor
  
• Volantis- +10% Heavy Cav HP
  
• Lys- Lyseni Sell Sails, +100 per trade lane
  
• Tyrosh- Research through kills, +50% faster
  
• Myr- TBD
  
• Norvos- TBD
  

Slaver's Bay

• Mantarys- +2 Ultralisk Armor
  
• Astapor- Cash for kills (by any player)
  
• Mereen- TBD
  
• Yunkai- TBD
  

Status: Currently working on finishing nation specials for TBD nations and balancing the specials.

Attachments:

Post has been edited 33 time(s), last time on Jul 17 2015, 5:11 pm by sigsaucy.

Next map night - this is mandatory!

Sounds great !

Hehe, alright ! Never played diplo maps but I'll definitely try it (the terrain looks pretty good too, judging from your screen)

Played this one yesterday. It's pretty nice. Sometimes units go dizzy because of tile terrain but it's controllable. There was a major bug concerned with alliance status: you can prevent player from capturing cities declaring him your ally (defenders don't spawn then). My experience shows nothing can encourage players for conflicts like there is no cure against stupidity. It has become an implied behaviour of all "diplo" maps to declare NAPs and alliances at start of the game and then sit to the end. Just submit, there is no cure.

The trick isn't to force war on people (they'll just ally up), it's to reward aggression. Give them something tangible for taking a city from another player on any turn. RISK does this by giving minerals for aggression at the end of every turn, which further promotes more aggression. A lot of people sit on their asses regardless, but they're quickly wiped out for this reason.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 22 2014, 2:12 pm by lil-Inferno.

There's actually a way to force someone to unally you, if you build a medic at your barracks (mid right) you force all players to unally you, letting you take their cities.

It's a pretty crude solution but with the location limit i wasn't able to implement a fancy alliance system you see in most diplo maps.

OK, what you should do is to take into account the alliance status of the attacker but not the defender. For instance, the fix might look like:



This uses a death counter "Unit" to send a "spawn message" to the player who controls the town. I suggest you to fix the trigger that releases defender marines using the same technique on your own.

Aggression definitely needs to be promoted, otherwise people will just stare at each other and gang up on the first person who is aggressive. People generally rage if attacked early at the start of the game but this is the best time for aggression, since everyone is usually to occupied with playing against the computer.

Also, please add a defeat/victory trigger. I think if someone loses all their holdings, they should be forced to leave the game, or at least an option to kick them as observer.

There is also a major glitch with the holdings triggers. Essentially some of your numbers don't add up and certain towns will give players permanent holdings which they accumulate over time. I played a game once, took all of my enemy's holdings, and he still had 16 holdings. But he had no cities, depots, etc. in the entire map.

Add garrisons to Queen's nests as well. Perhaps add a defensive structure that has to be killed to take the occupied port e.g. a spore colony. The colony respawns to the player who took over the port. Naval powers are actually quite worthless once the game gets under way, as it's impossible to hold more than 2 seaports when everyone is zipping around with wraiths or building their own fleet. Of course, if nobody cares to take seaports then naval powers are still good.

The terrain is very narrow and favors trench style warfare. The Westeros nations are the best defensively because of their ghosts, which have the longest range. Additionally, their heavy cavalry is the best too, because of its armor type and its physical size. I have never won using Essosi or Ghiscari or Northern troops, only with Westerosi soldiers have I been able to win games.

Northern nations will almost always lose to Westeros if they get rushed. A ghost mass with a few hydras or zlots will destroy Northern troops. I've rushed Stark/Bolton countless times, even playing as Hoare and unless someone allies Stark/Bolton cannot even hold the Moat for long. Once the Moat goes it's usually over.

Change the selection method. Use mind control instead. That way you don't need to recycle those locations.

Reduce the number of expos to get back locations. Some of the island expos are very annoying and actually never worth it unless you aren't in a war. Reducing number of expos might also encourage people to fight each other more.

Reduce the damage on the Harrenhal trap. What people do is, is abuse the ally glitch. So when you are about to take Harrenhal after losing a few dozen men, the player immediately allies you. Then you build medic and the turret starts killing your units. This process can repeat indefinitely even if you spam medics from the barracks. 300 damage is too much, or at least make it killable.

thanks all for your feedback

sethmachine, do you remember what region the player who had the 16 holdings bug was in? It'll be hard to track down the bug without having a rough idea of which city it is.

ive been busy lately but im planning a future update

Planned Changes

-Dramatically redo units

-fix city capturing triggers and trade lanes so allying abuse cant occur

-add in rewards for aggression

this last idea is the trickiest, i don't just want to implement a "you take this city or region and you get a permenant special" type reward.

I was thinking something along the lines that there would be a score that kept track of the number of enemy players units you've killed and you get rewards based on that, these rewards would depend on your location



Special Examples

-Unit upgrades are gained by kills

North
-Wildlings
-ice dragon(!!!!)

South
-Military Orders of the Seven

Essos
-The Iron Bank, allows you to manipulate other players economies somehow
-Found a Sellsword company

Slavers bay
-Unsullied

and hopefully more. As i said before I don't want these specials to be something where you get x amount of kills and you get a special forever, but something more dynamic, where the special can change hands. I also dont want something where people say "oh lets war each other for 5 minutes so we can get specials then ally"




My Questions to You

-How do you feel about the foot, archers, heavy cav, light cav unit types? Is having light and heavy cav redundant?

-Are unit upgrades are gained by kills a good idea?

-Is Slavers Bay worth it? am i better off just getting rid of it and letting the players focus on two continents?

Any suggestions on what other specials to add and how to implement them are appreciated.

Post has been edited 14 time(s), last time on May 7 2014, 8:52 am by sigsaucy.

I like the idea of upgrades for kills. But won't kills be difficult to implement? I would use number of captured cities from human players instead.

It sounds easy to do in my head, just a matter of using a "kills to cash" kill score converter.

To make sure players dont get kills from computer garrisons I can set garrison kill scores to 0, unfortunately that means they wouldn't get points from killing enemy players garrisons either.

I could add a capturing town score bonus but that would probably lead to some severe abuse with two players constantly trading cities for mass points.

The only complication would be when 20 units are dieing at a time but I can't imagine that causing too many problems aside from a few lost points.

The problem with "kills to cash" is that different units give different amount score when killed. This implies that fighting some nations will be more profitable than others so their neighbours are receiving a major bonus. Not fair. System with kills may be abused in the same way, isn't it? (As far as I remember players don't get kills score for killing allied units, but they still can play at giveaway in turns.) Also you can't certanly tell if a player killed 2 marines (100 kills score) or 1 zealot (200 kills score). If you're going to make it just like: "if current player kills score is at least 1 then give 1 custom score (or whatever counter you use) and clear current player kills" then it's pretty vague estimation of real number of kills.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 7 2014, 9:15 pm by Wormer.

new version uploaded, includes

-alliance system (took minimal locations!)

this was done using only 1-2 locations via a system of the form

center location A on unit x
check if player y has any of unit z at location A
if so set player y as enemy

this required somewhere around 40 extra triggers per player, so far it hasn't seemed to cause any map lag, but is there a point at which i should worry about "too many triggers"?

-bend the knee system

a player can bend the knee to an enemy (if the enemy accepts it) this makes the player
-unable to declare war on their lord
-mineral storage caped at 5k, any excess sent to overlord (ill switch this to percent of income based taxation system later on)
-player has ability to revolt against their overlord once they get 75 kills

- updated ocean terrain, kept "bright on minimap" water tile on borders of land but used regular water on interior, this has benefits of making land sea contrast each other on mini map but still using aesthetically pleasing regular water on open ocean.



Updates to come and thoughts

-I am thinking of implementing a system where you need to force everyone on your respective continent to bend the knee to you before you can attack another continent.
Hopefully the negatives of being a vassal encourage people to fight for the being the overlord, this is to help deal with the west vs east continent stagnation that this map falls into sometimes and to force infighting.

-With the kill based exp system implemented and the last major area to update is specials and units.

Is there an area where you send units to choose your alliance status? With this this system you probably constantly spam ally or enemy triggers that isn't good.

You can do it without any "input area" for players. It is possible to detect the alliance status directly with the condition: "Foes/Non Allied Victory Players/Allies bring at least 1 any 'Specific Unit' to location". For this I'm usually using terran addons preplaced over unbuildable terrain. So you can utilize 2 locations as well: One "static" location where you have let's say machine shops placed for each player. Then you have the second "temporary" location (that you can also utilize for other systems). The idea is to move temporary location on machine shop for a specific player and check if "Foes" or "Allies" have at least 1 machine shop there. Let's say we're using death counters DC1, DC2, ... to hold the alliance status of current player against players 1, 2, ... respectively. Then triggers may look like this:



The problem with previous triggers is that players can acutally have 3 possbile relations: enemy, ally, allied victory. This projects to bring condition groups as follows: 1) Foes are everyone who are enemies, 2) non allied victory players are enemies or allies, and 3) allies are allied victory players. Then there is a restriction: all allied players are either allies or allied victory players. It can't be so that Player 2 is your non allied victory ally and Player 3 is your allied victory ally. The status of your allies is determined by allied victory flag in the menu. What happens when you forcefully (via action "Set player to ally.") make a player your non allied victory ally while already having allied victory allies? The answer is that all your existing allied victory allies are immediatelly converted to non allied victory allies. The same works the other way around.

The following triggers take this into account. They don't deal with non allied victory allies that are immediatelly converted to allied victory allies.



I recommend you to do it this way. I'm using this system in map Galaxia to send alliance proposals and war notifications to other players: when a player makes you his ally you receive a notification message, it sends the response when you make him your ally in reply. When mutual alliance is broken the system automatically breaks it for the other part so that your units won't die in vain for an unexpected attack (this was critisized by some people but I like this behaviour). I'm also utilizing the third possibility of a non allied victory ally to disable capturing "towns" for non allied victory allies, while allied victory allies can capture spots at presence of each other military units nearby.

Fourty triggers is nothing. As long as you don't repeatedly and extensively transfer units from one player to another or make units, you shouldn't really worry until 2000 triggers or so.

I'm not sure if bend the knee system is really needed. Isn't is simplier just to kill your enemy? But probably it may be a nice RP element for the game.

I'm also not sure this is a good idea. How are you going to forbid intercontinental wars? This makes things more and more complicated for new players.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 11 2014, 2:35 pm by Wormer.

if im undersating your system right its

- you ally a player

-system checks if "allied" player owns a unit at a location, if so set DC to something

- you unally a player

-system checks if "enemy" player owns a unit at a location, if so set DC to something

then you have a system that checks the death counts of other players checking to see if they are allied with your ot not, i.e.

-check does player x have DCme set to war?

set to enemy




I just spent all day yesterday fixing al the bugs in my system, but I just realized it probably still doesn't protect against the abuse of someone allying an enemy to prevent them from taking a city. (just fixed it so it does)Does your system protect against this?

I thought about a way to implement your fix to this abuse using the "check the attacking players status not city owners" but couldnt figure out a simple way.


I guess my question is, if i have a working system, whats the advantage of your alliance system?


As far as intercontinental warfare was concerned it would be something like

condition
- check if player owns essosi or ghiscari type village
- check, has westeros been united?

action
-if not, give back control essosi or ghiscari type vilage

You could still "war" enemy players from different continents, you just wouldn't be able to hold any of the cities.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 11 2014, 9:03 pm by sigsaucy.

Yeah, in nutshell that's the main idea, but implementation is a bit more tricky as always.



Okay, actually I initially thought you need a system for detection of alliance status. Now as I think of it, you don't really need this subsystem for capturing triggers. For capturing it's enough to just use the ideas from my first post about "checking the attacking players status not city owners".

I'll elaborate more on the problem with capturing. The difficulty arises because some conditions must be checked for one player (the attacker) but actions must be performed for the other player (the defender). There might be different approaches, but one may suggest the following.

The idea is to check conditions for the attacker and then set DC for the defender to perform actions on his side. In the attacker trigger we don't know who is the defender, so we set deaths for all enemies. Players one by one check conditions and clean up their DC if the town is not of their concern. Eventually triggers execution comes upon the defender player that performs his actions: he spawns town guards and marks the town being under siege.

Capturing may be done differently. It's possible to utilize the same technique to send a "message" to the defender, but the problem is the defender doesn't know who should take the town. I suggest to split capture into 2 separate events: abandon city (give to player 12) and capture city (it's also what Azrael written here). That way capturing only happens from player 12 when there are no enemy units around. This also helps to clean up against players that leave the game: all their units are automatically given to player 12 so all towns will be automatically abandoned.

Abandoning is easy and can be done solely on the defender part: if the town is under siege and there are no player's units around then abandon city (decrease custom score, give supply dopot to player 12 and other actions).

I think the most complex part about siege is to decide when to release the milita and return the town to it's civil state. This can't be done only on the defender side, because we don't trust his alliance relations. We should somehow ask all other players if they have got an eye on the town under question. I'm afraid we must start a new DC per town, let's call it CDC (challengers DC). If you have overall 214 towns then you would need to use 27 unkillable units for these DCs: 27 [units] * 8 [players] = 216 [variables] would be enough. However it is possible to use only 1 or several (to speed up the process) DCs and cycle through towns (without units transfer) using a separate "pointer" DC that tells number of the current town (or several "pointer" DCs in the second case). Let's assume for simplicity you have a separate CDC-T for each town T. Player (repeatedly) adds 1 to CDC-T when T is controlled by the enemy (Foes bring at least 1 supply depot to T-location) and there are his military units around (Current player bring at least 1 men to T-location). The owner of T (repeatedly) clears CDC-T, but just before clearing there is a trigger that checks if the militia should be released: if CDC-T is exactly 0 and town T is under siege then remove all the militia and return town to civil state.

Once again, it's possible to much less than 27 units for this and I can explain the idea if needed. This is perfect but complex solution, you would definetly need a trigger replicator of some kind to assist you with this task. If I was doing triggers then I would do it this way. Probably it's possible to make the last part much simpler without greatly losing the accuracy, but I can't think of it yet.

Then if you decide to make all these CDC-T counters then it's probably possible to redo some first triggers to make a good use of CDC-T. It's also possible to use CDC-T to allow your allies prevent your towns from abandoning with their units nearby.


What is the idea behind your solution?

Okay, I see, you didn't change capture triggers, but did all the alliance control via separate area on the map. It's not that bad as I think of it now, because the alternative is very complex, but constantly removing a flag on the beacon and constant setting players to allies or enemies isn't good in terms of lag. Also when you constantly set alliance status to ally it's impossible to attack units of your allies, that is probably a good side effect.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 12 2014, 11:12 am by Wormer.

the alliance subroutine definitely introduced some lag into the map, but i managed to get around it by using a DC timer to only "refresh alliances" every 16 death counts which cut out all the lag.


I wonder, why do alliance triggers introduce so much lag compared to others? Is it because alliances are "global" actions or something?


The alliance subroutine goes like

- are you at war with a player or is that player at war with you? if not, ally

- have you declared war or have they declared war on you, are they not your vassal or lord? Set as enemy

in addition to this i set all the "city" type triggers onto the same timer and below the alliance triggers, so even if a player allies someone who is attacking them, their alliance status gets refreshed to the correct state before any "city" triggers run.

P.S. I've been uploading new versions pretty often, so check to make sure you have the most current one if you run it. I kept thinking i had uploaded a stable version but I kept catching bugs.

I'll post a new ver in a few mins, this is the version that is completely fixed (i hope) and shouldnt change for a while

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on May 12 2014, 7:52 pm by sigsaucy.

Okay, it's pretty late on my side. I haven't investigated into your alliance system thoroughly yet, but what I've seen was constant removing flags from beacons (which may introduce some lag) and constant allying. I think constatly allying is a source of lag because it terminates all units attacks. You need only to remove flag once when they spawn at beacon: I don't remember by heart but somewhere there was an exact timing on that event. Will check tomorrow. Have a nice day!

uploaded new version, update includes

-Specials!

I struggled with this for a long time, i knew i wanted to avoid the "if u pick country x u get special y" scenario. My system is that upon getting 25 player kills a player can choose a "special" unit (no take backs), that is built at a barracks, separate from the main army units which are built at gateways. These units are meant as a supplement to your main army, to enforce this a unit cap is used. List of specials is in original post.

-Ghiscari cities changed from 3 to 2 holdings.


With this my last major chunk of work on this map is done. All the remains is to balance units and find even more ways to encourage fair conflict.

Unit Balance

The intention of this map is to force players to have "realistic" unit compositions, but while players always mass foot and archers, it has been difficult to encourage appropriate cavalry use. Since all the main army units share the same production facility if cav aren't good enough, people ignore them, if they're too good they only make them.

I was thinking a good way to address this would be to substantially buff cavalry units, but add in some limiting factor that prevents their exclusive use. Examples would be a upkeep system or unit cap, of the two im leaning towards a unit cap.


Player Conflict

I've introduced a few things to encourage conflict already, allowing research points to be gained through kills, and introducing specials which require 25 player kills to unlock. However a problem the map has is that it often ends up in awkward situations where it's not clear what constitutes a "fair" match up. Also often times match devolve into west vs east matches which get pretty old fast, the reduction of ghiscari income will hopefully help with this. I'd also like to impose victory conditions so that the game isnt so open ended, ideas include

control x cities and you win- problem with this is it becomes a king of the hill situation with everyone ganging up on whoevers in the lead.

force all players to bend the knee- this has some promise, although since i removed any barrier to revolting against your lord i probably need to add something back, ex. need x kills or y money to revolt. This would also have the advantage the constant back stabbing scenario of the previous condition, once you've bent the knee, they're stuck being ur ally for a bit.

timer game- maybe something like, whoever has most kills at end of timer wins? this would probably only work as an optional mode.

intercontinental warfare- first you must force all players on your continent to bend the knee, then you must lead this team against the other continent, this could be enforced by disallowing players from holding cities in opposing continent until they are united.

any other ideas are welcome, thanks.

About cavalry. Make it strong but with a very considerable building time, so that in a long run there is a gain for building this type of unit, but if you need an army fast you would rather build foots.

More ideas for cavalry is to limit their number with a doubled (or trippled, etc.) number of cities you own.

About victory condition. Introduce a new unit - senator, high templar for instance. Player X wins when all three conditions are true: 1) Player X commands at least 3 senators; 2) Player X commands more senators than all his opponents (allies don't count) taken altogether; 3) Player X commands more senators than any other player does (allies included).

Because victory conditions aren't simple, everything must be made very transparent: a leaderboard counter must show how much more senators a player must build to gain a victory. When all 3 conditions are met, it's a good idea to make a broadcast message and start a global timer that will end the game upon the completion.

Several interesting conseqences of these victory conditions:

• Only a single player can eventually be the winner.
  
• It's not enough simply to ally everyone to win the game: everyone allies everyone and everyone are winners - can't happen.
  
• Since senator is a unit, players can hunt for each other senators.
  
• Size of the empire isn't the ultimate goal, in fact small empires have a chance to gain victory.
  
• The game may end early if other players don't bother building their senators.
  
• Diplomacy becomes interesting, because senators of allied players don't count. For instance, suppose 2 players have a large number of senators (let's say 9 each), but all other players taken altogether command only 4. It's for their mutual benefit to ally each other and (peacefully) struggle against each other for having the most senators: allies but rivals. Though the other strategy might be to fight each other trying to kill most of senators.
  
• Bending to knee becomes meaningful. Given there is a period of time during which a player can't declare war on his lord (but the lord must be able to declare war at any time IMO).
  

I love this concept :-) maybe I'll use it in a map of mine some day.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 17 2014, 12:16 pm by Wormer.