Mandate Update Thread

[MoLAoS]

I finally finished up the 5 new GUI panels:
Stats
Items
Storage
Production
Carried Units

Now when you have only one unit selected the selection panel will have 6 icons instead of just the portrait. Clicking on the old portrait icon will clear all the other GUI screens. Clicking on any other icon will set the associated panel to be visible and accept input. I will presumably stick in some hot keys as well at some point. Since my game isn't a micro click fest I personally don't consider them useful but I know I'm a weirdo. Each other button will auto clear all the panels not used by it since there is only space for one panel generally although some method to have them all up could be done with hotkeys or something.

Stats shows the full spectrum of stats probably eventually with icons for each stat. I would like to make a method that allows items to have their own access to extended knowledge, for now its limited to tool tips and if the item doesn't have too much shit it should be fine.

Items is the previously videod and described item panel, minus holding the resource storage section.

Storage holds an icon based display of all resources a unit can store and how many are stored. I might fudge some string conversions to show 10000 or more as the number of thousands with a k and maybe the tool tip shows the precise value.

Production has an icon for each resource item or unit created and one for each process. Tooltips describe the actual timers and amounts.

Finally carried holds a list of all the carried units, those are normal carried units, all garrisoned units, they provide bonuses to stats, and then finally transiting units, those are carried in the faction and can be loaded or unloaded at any unit with the appropriate skill. Currently I'm thinking you can see 24 of each in the panel.

I'll probably have to add some panels later for units where you can control their level ups but maybe I'll have a better GUI by then.

[MoLAoS]

As part of the discussion I linked to in my other thread I talked about drastically increasing the effect of environment on gameplay.

As part of that idea I am going to attempt to add biome information to tiles that can change over time in the game. This will probably also require some sort of modification of the map editor and tile sets again. Currently maps don't support multiple tilesets or very many map objects. Larger maps might also be helpful. My computer is a laptop with intel core 2 duo and gets whiny at about medium sized maps, 128 * 128. I'll have to figure out why that is. I'd like to be able to play at least 256 * 256 sized maps on my computer without noticeable lag. And a serious gaming computer should be able to do 1024 * 1024 or larger.

I'd like to be able to have about 20 unique map objects per tileset plus trees and stones and mountains as basic ones. I probably want a single tile set to support up to 8 biomes and have some way of visually representing changes that gameplay can make. I'd like to maybe have some sort of heat haze or cold fog or something but that might be difficult graphically. And for deserts some kind of sand haze and what not.

You could still make a regular tileset by just not filling in as many objects as would be possible.

Having some sort of environment data opens up a lot of options for gameplay and narrative and its something I really like as a way of letting the faction play be modified by what environment resources are accessible. So I really hope I can get this whole thing figured out. The biome stuff could also just be a graphical thing if you didn't purposefully attach any game play to it. So more deserty deserts and what not.

[MoLAoS]

After my absence playing CK2 I decided to implement a bit of their Character development, and that of KoDP into my current project. Higher class citizens as well as heroes and special player controlled units will be used to fill various niches in society and as such will have individual talents and traits. They will be able to increase these stats and gain new traits from both standard game interaction and special events. Further, KoDP style events will now cause various affects in the game including alliances with special non map based societies/organizations, discoveries of magical structures and new resources and so forth. Various powers might bless heroes or the player's special personal units. Buildings might be given special upgrades in events as well such as the ability to produce new items, create better goods, and orders will gain possible new skills/spells/units. Various pre-designated non player societies on the map will interact differently based on what orders and buildings you have as well as other factors.

There will also be an overworld map whereby you can play different cities in the same world and they will run concurrently to some degree. This will be simulated more by a series of data points whereby other cities can send or request various goods or units from you. But this will be derived from the actual map of an area after you have played on it.

[MoLAoS]

This particular aspect of the code has been completed. You can now set any number of included factions in a faction. You can then access those faction type's units from the faction build menu or designate units of that faction to be built from your main faction starting units menu. On game start only the top level faction type will supply starting units or resources. Lower level faction type starting unit and resource lists will be ignored.

As I was working on support for neutral structures, although you can add non-neutral ones in the new map editor, I decided that a rework of the concept of faction types was in order.

Faction Types will still be static, and the const keyword can still be applied to them in source. But there will be a bit of a change. Each FactionType can hold a vector of names of other faction types which are included by default in them. I know in most traditional cases this is not strictly necessary. But some games involve a set of common structures. WBC3 has mines for instance. This will now be possible with the new system.

A single faction can now use units from multiple faction types. There will be a default neutral faction, sort of like Gaia is currently. This will also enable the capturing mechanic I did a lot of work on to become more powerful. Previously you were only able to capture buildings from another player with the same faction type, I think you may get a crash trying to convert other faction type's units, although I didn't actually test it. There is very little source code bloat or memory bloat here. FactionTypes are just a pointer, so another pointer is added.

There are a couple applications here, even if I'm the only one who makes games weird enough to use them. For those of us who are lazy about modelling you can layer faction types. So I can use the same model for multiple worker units or barracks or other generic buildings.

So neutral faction. Then a basic faction on top of the neutral one. Then 2 or more factions on top of the basic one. But sharing the same XML and textures and model files. Saving up on that memory and what not. Saving me the trouble of changing multiple XMLs and so forth.

I can use layering for other stuff, too. Maybe I have a 3rd layer in common. So neutral, basic, city-building, then a faction with fire mages. And then another faction on top of that. The fire mage faction would be the AI, but as a player I could get extra stuff. And you don't have to tell the AI not to build it because they can't use it at all. There was other stuff but I can't remember at the moment.

[MoLAoS]

I believe this issue is now resolved. I have not been able to duplicate the error.

It appears that there is a slight error in the unit description. The getFactionString function derives the faction type name from the faction class, whereas units from other types are not from that faction type. I shall have to fiddle around. The function takes Faction as an argument, maybe I can make it take FactionType instead.

[MoLAoS]

Turns out that resolving the lag issue enables release version videos to be recorded. So possibly a new video will come out this week.

I will demonstrate the new multi panel unit menu and perhaps some other things. There won't be a demonstration of the map editor for a while. Still has some kinks to work out.

I will demonstrate how a single FactionType can load other FactionTypes and how you can use the build menu to create them in game. This is only partially implemented. Or rather I only have a single unit in the game due to XML updating. I will add the units for my actual project once the XML pattern is organized. I will attempt to add voice and maybe quiet sound in this video so its less disturbing.

I may also demonstrate some other stuff and explain some things that are not new features.

[MoLAoS]

This is an idea I thought up while playing CK2. It fits into my plans to have varying levels of RPG spread among my classes of units, classes being worker, guard, military, hero, overseer, leader, and so forth. This is distinct from UnitType. I suppose I should do some details of this before I get to traits and events.

Actually this post became too large, so I'll drop traits and events to the next one:

Worker is the general unit type. These can involve resource gatherers, units you garrison to buildings that gather resources, units that transport resources around, units that go out to buy resources such as raw materials and processed ones from other buildings/groups, builder units, tax collectors, and other such things.

Guard involves mostly what it says, guards of buildings. Guilds, Orders, Manors, and Palaces all have these units, or rather you can decided to recruit them. They mostly protect their home structure and buildings associated with their organization, their may be special abilities to call all guards to defend the settlement though. They are AI units, like heroes, and some Workers.

Military is the directly player controlled RTS style combat units. So as described elsewhere the city guards/archers that you control like an RTS unit with micro. You can garrison them in guard towers and such for more arrow attack speed and such. This is a minor class in the current game I am working on.

Hero is the traditional Majesty unit, recruited from a guild, or in my case Order, controlled by AI, has levels multiple skills, gains stat boosts and buys items. May also have other personality traits that cause other actions.

Overseers are special economic units that act to provide buffs to structures and groups. An Overseer might provide gathering and movement speed buffs to gatherers, or be assigned to a building to produce production/processing/crafting boosts and may even increase the quality of the goods or produce goods itself that are special. My current project involves garrisoning units in buildings to create production rather than a building doing the work at a static value like most games. Even citybuilders don't tend to do this.

Leaders are units that work like overseers but with heroes and possibly guards. In other games they may lead military units, but you shouldn't have enough of those in this game for that to be necessary. Each order produces its own unique leaders, especially the preceptor of the order who controls the motherhouse. These are the most powerful example. Most Orders have normal heroes, champions which are less numerous but stronger, and a preceptor. Some Orders have special other units, like the Bannerman of the Defenders who has leadership powers. They provide buffs in an area like the preceptor, but they also cause other units to follow their lead. This is one of the ways of forming "parties" for adventurers. There will be cross Order parties though.

Guard leaders are just slightly more powerful versions of a the guard that can provide buffs and direct troops. Basically they can lead any number of guards in an organized way. They won't be too common since you shouldn't have a lot of guards working for one group, although the total number may be high.

The player also controls a special sovereign unit. His Order is the castle and it has various facilities and upgrades that give him new powers. He can be assigned to work as an overseer, a researcher, a leader of troops and such. Pretty much any leadership position. He may gather a party of adventurers to follow him, but not a game breakingly large one and they still do their own thing, they just follow and support him.

[MoLAoS]

Here we actually get to the traits and events systems. These two systems can be separated from the Characters aspect described above. But they do contain some aspects that only work with that.

Traits are sort of like modifications, but they are earned in another way. You can set a series of requirements, which once met either give the trait directly, or give a chance for an event to confer the trait. In some cases a series of events or actions may increase a progress stat which upon reach 100 will confer the trait. You could also lose a trait if you did the wrong things. This aspect is less of a Majesty thing, but the trait system is broad and generic because its an engine rather than a game feature.

Traits may confer the following benefits:
a bonus to statistics, the GAE EnhancementType class type stuff, as well as to resistances and damage bonuses.
a bonus to your equipment slots for items
an effect, the GAE EffectType class kind

Traits are generally thematic, sort of an upgrade for a single unit, but earned in a different manner

There are some special traits, almost always conferred by an event or even chain that may confer a tag and possibly some associated skills as well. For instance the hypothetical trait Dragon Friend may confer, in addition to fire resistance or some other regular trait benefit, a skill to temporarily summon a dragon, or dragons, to fight on the units side.

Events are the next thing I want to discuss. Events can do many thing. They are sort of like the various events you can create with scenario scripting. However they are not intended to be part of a larger scripted story, but merely one or a chain of generic semi-random events that can mix and match in a non-scenario game. You can assign a chance to ever world tick occur as well as either triggers or modifiers of that chance. Events can give a resource bonus, confer traits, spawn allied or enemy or neutral units, cause new map objects to appear with or without buildings on them, confer upgrades, confer effects, grant modifications to a unit or units, such as a god granting poison to all your heroes' weapons and other similar things. Events can be triggered or have their chance to trigger modified by various things such as traits on units, numbers of units of a type, the level of a unit, resource stores, one or more various buildings made, building buildings on certain map objects or even previous events or series of events.

Events can also trigger some of the weather and map effects I am working on adding to the game such as droughts and storms and so forth. They can even deal damage to player or enemy units and structures.

[MoLAoS]

Skill costs are now enabled. You can charge hp or ep or even Mandate's sp value for skills. Presumably you could do some sort of stamina cost as well. And of course the previously added cooldown system functions.

There is also the possibility of charging a resource or even item cost for skills.

In the future skills can be allowed based even on map objects or buildings. For instance being near a volcano could allow fire type units to cast extra abilities, or any heat source really. Same for water and ice mages and rivers and so forth.

There will also be a pet sacrifice option or even a unit sacrifice option. Suicide spells are of course easy to do with just the regular hp cost option.

I've also been looking at ways to link up units and skills. For instance drawing mana to cast a spell from a mana potion. Or even having spells that consume mana from nearby other units, possibly with some sort of skill interaction where the power of the spell is better if multiple strong units are involved.

I recall making some posts about this in some of my earlier game designs but those are probably deleted.

[MoLAoS]

I am going to do a rundown of game features/mechanics here. Mainly for myself but read it if you like. I'll start with the player's main character.

Sovereign(Player Character):
This is the character you have the most power over, aside from the city guard. He can train and work in all spheres of the game including economic, technical, magical, and military. He has several buildings associated with him, primarily the castle. I have decided that you are limited to only one castle.

At the start of the game the sovereign goes through a character creation process similar to the kind found in RPGs. You will select a focus for him from among the spheres of play although this doesn't prevent him from working in other spheres, it simply the one he will be better at progressing in and his base skills.
Diplomacy allows him to deal with other sovereigns, lords, and even traders.
Military allows him to fight better, have some leadership skills, and other such things.
Economics allows him to produce goods, increase the production of others, collect taxes and so forth.
Magic allows him to cast better spells, research new spells, and help other major characters do these things.
Historian/Linguist allows him to get a small general bonus to research, speak other languages for diplo value and events and other things.

The capabilities of your sovereign influence both the events you get and what options you have, to some degree.

The Sovereign can be used to run production, lead guards, assist hero parties, do research, explore, fight, cast magic, interact with lords, and do diplomacy with other nations.

[MoLAoS]

System of Lords:
Lords are characters you assign land to. Their main building is the Manor. Tax collectors spawn from the manor. Lords do various things based on their personality. They might collect a library, which your Sovereign or possibly other characters can learn from. Some lords will field a lot of city guard to protect their lands. Lords may donate money to local Orders as well.

Lords will often provide you with services, as their ruler. They may deploy guards to protect your personal lands, or send you money, or give other items to you. Land within a lords demesne provides taxes to them, but a % of those taxes reaches you based on the taxes you set. Tax collectors do not have to collect from lords, the money is put in your treasury automagically. Lords may also exist off of the map, depending on if I get the cross map interaction working.

Lords may make requests of you, to defend their city or kill monsters or other such things. If they really dislike you they may rebel or merely defect.

Other existing lords or sovereigns may exist on your current map or other maps, or imaginary maps that don't actually exist but are merely collections of characters with some resources and troops.

[MoLAoS]

Books/Research are a new addition of mine to technology like systems. Basically your sovereign and/or possibly other special characters have libraries which allow them to learn new things by reading them over a period of time. This is a significant investment but its generally worth it. Lords can own and read books which will allow them to have some diversity of technology which may be useful and determine who you place.

Books can be gained by events, from lords and sovereigns, sometimes from Order leaders, and also from Sorcerers, basically individual renegade wizards.

They can teach you all sorts of things, from new city guard options, to new buildings, to being able to create non Order mages, though they would obviously be weaker. Your sovereign can learn spells and magic and new buildings and units and bonuses to his RPGish stuff like production and diplomacy. He gets some books in the library for his focus as well.

I'm still thinking about whether I can slot books into the existing research system or if I should add a new class.

[MoLAoS]

Guilds are the economic organizations that you deal with in the game. Guilds harvest, produce, and process resources, as well as turning resources into items. Guilds are run by a guild master at the main branch. It has guards, haulers and quarter masters. Haulers move resources in between guild structures for free, quartermasters purchase items and resources from other guilds, and from orders, and from other places for gold defined in the faction xml. Guards will protect only the main structure and possibly its associated structures and not the other structures in the settlement.

Guilds possess their own treasury and use it to buy required stuff as well as pay for units, items, upgrades, and so forth. They sell their production for money as well. Guilds are given half their cost in gold when you found them, from your treasury. Afterwards you may tax them at any rate, but be careful you don't prevent them from having enough money to buy materials and improve.

Guilds mainly produce items, facilities being the name, to improve their production and storage and number of units. However they can also produce other buildings to aid in production or move goods across long distances. They may also hire heroes to transport valuable goods.

Guild masters control the guild and your relationship can get you quite a lot such as discounts on what they produce and possibly rare items including books.

[MoLAoS]

Houses are the basis of your income to some degree. At least its the most reliable. Houses produce a basic amount of taxes but to do well you need to do better than that. Each house desires a certain number of goods of several types. As many food items as possible, various types of clothing, and other things such as books, although not Books.

Much like an Impressions game having their needs met involves an increase in housing level. However its not quite the same. Early levels increase somewhat in population, only a factor of 2, that is from about 5 people to 10. These are only working class citizens. After you have certain upgrades and knowledge you gain the ability to do other things.

The first other kind of house is the apartment. These are low level with few requirements. Mainly they house urban worker classes. They are relatively cheap and weak structures. They can house up to 100 people but are only 4x as large as houses footprint wise. These people are mainly good for craft and labor jobs. Only regular citizens may live here.

The second and quite important kind of house is that of the educated classes. These houses produce fewer people and they do not gain more as they improve. They can hold 1-5 people. These people are required to take the best jobs. This housing should generally be put up near libraries or universities or some of the guilds like mages guilds.

Educated citizens may also end up having stats sort of like lords and sovereigns. Not sure.

[MoLAoS]

Markets are the linchpin in the economics of the game. They are a sort of middleman between guilds and houses. Markets buy resources and possible items that are sold to houses. Markets have quartermasters who go out and buy things and the householder of the house comes to the market to buy anything he needs that he can afford.

Markets have quartermasters which you may need to purchase to increase the speed of gathering. They also have to buy stalls which is what sell goods. Markets sell goods slightly higher than the cost they buy them for which is what allows them to purchase new things.

Distribution of markets is quite important. You need one at most settlements and you may need a few depending. Markets need to be near supply if possible so that quartermasters don't need to move too far thus not insuring good supply. I might work in some stuff involving a higher level market called a bazaar that brings in trade and rare items and resources.

[MoLAoS]

Metals are one of the classes of resources in the game. Different metals have different strengths and rarities. The main value of metals is used in production of tools, weapons, and armor. Metals can also be used to reinforce buildings.

Metals have various properties in other processes. Each metal has a unique magical profile that makes it required for certain magic goods.

Crystals are another resource, they are primarily if not entirely used for the purposes of magic. Each type has different uses or qualities. Crystals can be used in things like scrying, storing large quantities of magic, and being transformers in mechanisms.

Herbs are the third important resource. Herbs are primarily used in potions of varying powers and effects which can be bought and consumed by heroes. High level items or more advanced processes might also require potions and alchemical concoctions of some kind.

Various guilds would gather and process these resources and sell them to end creators and from there to end users.

Many resources can be produced by buildings. But these cannot. Maintaining a supply of these resources is critical to success. Especially if you start to rely on them and then lose them. It could cause economic chaos.

[MoLAoS]

Yes, you read that right. You can now put totally new skills/commands onto units using upgrades, items, modifications, or basically any mechanic that derives from the CreatableType class.

I am currently working to refine this. For instance linking, if you want to, new commands to already existing skills, currently Commands want to have a skill that is on the same creatable type object.

[MoLAoS]

I've separated the skill and command system from creatable type, previously from unit type, to the Actions class. This allows for my skill/command addition and subtraction system to work much better and apply to things that don't need the full creatable type class.

I'm gonna set up Actions to all the relevant classes so that they can all carry skills/commands around and then try and see if I can get it to accept a command only that hooks to a previous skill to try and cut down on space usage.

I think I will probably try and set up the default skill/command loader too since I'm in the area. There is really no reason that you need to define a stop and be_built and move skill for every unit. Having a basic move skill would be good to make formations work better later as well. Having a skill to give to all units to make them move the same speed would be really helpful imo.

[MoLAoS]

This video isn't super exciting and honestly isn't even worth showing to people who don't use Glest. But it does demonstrate some of the new capabilities I've added and if you play GAE/MG its possible to tell the difference:


The video is now uploaded fully to youtube. For the 50 total views it will get.

[MoLAoS]

While I am waiting for my video to upload, 35 more minutes, I am in the process of designing the Sovereign Creator. Since Heroes have a different meaning in my engine I have to decided to use this word. And it fits the first game, you actually are a sovereign. A Sovereign is a top level character, all the options for units/heroes/mages/leaders/sovereigns are available for them. Once I get this done there may be in-game editors for all of those things as well. Or perhaps the unit editor will be all the same screen and you can turn off the additional classes(in the C++ sense) that you don't need, all the way down to a basic unit.

Currently I am getting the bare bones menu up, but I expect to finish the whole thing some time this week. You will be able to design a fully functional Sovereign, possibly minus traits, but once the rest of it is up that will be trivial to add once the traits and events systems are fully done.

These characters will be stored in a standard unit file, not sure if in the faction or in the tech tree. So its perfectly possible to use direct XML editing as well.

[MoLAoS]

When I started working on the unit editor I realized I was missing significant aspects of the Hero/Leader/Sovereign classes. Sovereigns were intended to be played many ways but most of them included skills with levels. And skills don't have levels. You can upgrade a unit's base damage but you can't upgrade just a skill. So I may have to delay working on the editor for a few hours. Plus a couple days to finish the other aspects of the class.

Skills with levels will be accessible to even the regular units, but some functions probably won't.

After about 2 hours of work I got skills with levels to work, although gonna need to redo some XML. Blah.
You can define multiple levels of a skill, not additive, you need to put the exact stats for each level, is more flexible anyways.
I was thinking it might be better just to role the entirety of attacks into the effect_type class. Might eventually go that way.

Trying to think about what I need to implement next. The larger systems are so much harder to conceptualize in totality.

[MoLAoS]

You can now find an update version of the provisional release at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mandateengine/files/

This will be the final version of the Provisional Release. It contains the majority of the GAE relevant features. The Alpha Release will be a while out as I clean up new features and add in some others.

I'll be working on updating the XML now. Hopefully I can get it all done today or tomorrow.

I changed the location to download to my SourceForge page since I might get into trouble with my website people for too much up and down loading.

[GunChleoc]

I gave it a whirl on Windows 7 (64 bit).

First it complains that glew32.dll is missing, so I copied it into my GAE installation.

When I start the engine, it crashes. I started it again from a cmd window to see if I can get any output, but that is now stuck as well. Is this a Linux build only and no Windows build yet available?

[MoLAoS]

I only compiled from my personal laptop, it has 32bit Windows 7. I am not able to compile it for other configurations. However the current source as well as gamedata is at my GitHub repo so you can compile it yourself for your setup. It shouldn't be too confusing but I can probably help you if you have trouble.

I redownloaded the zip archive from my site, although I recommend you use the SourceForge page from now on, and I ran the game with no problems. I'll try to find a way to compile for other Windows versions and for Linux in the future but I probably won't be too successful since I have minimal Linux experience.

[MoLAoS]

I am slowly chugging away at the character creation screen. I've added a new folder to techs to hold specialization files. It will probably contain several other files as well. I'm am debating moving this to the faction folder but I am not sure.

I am going to post something I posted to rpg codex here to describe sovereign creation more in depth:
So I'm currently working on the character creator for my project. The game isn't a straight RPG, its more of an RTS/citybuilder with a simulation of important characters used by you to run a fantasy society. You can only directly create your Sovereign, the other characters with individual skills are randomly generated from your educated populace.

I want to divide the game into 5 spheres:
Magic
Military
Economics
History/Linguist/Research
Diplomacy

Currently I plan to set it up this way:
You choose a specialization in one of the 5 spheres, this gives you a significant boost to the skills and abilities and stats of that sphere upon game start.

H/L/R gives a boost to research speed. Researching is done using books gathered by various means. History allows you to find more books generally, linguist allows you to recognize what these books are for, and research allows you to turn their knowledge into knowledge you can use. You will have more options and better ability to make use of them with this specialization.

Diplomacy is pretty much what it says and it applies to be inter and intra society interactions. It lets you make better deals and pacts with other societies. It lets you do better with major characters in your own society as well. They might take pay cuts, offer you books, agree to work together better with other major characters and you, and do various other such things. This is important because you can't do everything yourself. You can't lead all the armies, in so far as armies can be led at all given that most military characters are agents in and of themselves. You cannot organize all the economic stuff yourself. You can't do all the research yourself and so forth.

Economics is concerned with trade and production. As a citybuilder type game you have to gather and process a lot of materials to produce a wide variety of goods both to placate the citizens and raise their education and economic level and to give to heroes and soldiers to defend the kingdom. These are mostly buffs to production rate and various other things.

Military is pretty obvious. Leadership of guards and the ability to lead a group of the AI heroes or at least possibly convince some to follow you. It also gives bonuses to your personal combat skills and stats.

Magic is perhaps more complex. It ties in to several areas. Magic has some bonuses to research. Magic has skills that influence the economy, magical production and also products that are more magical. There is a bit of a trade here as well. You can focus on magical goods or magical power. Basically if you invest in magic and economics properly you can mass produce all sorts of low level magical enchanted military equipment and production facilities. If you focus on magic and H/L/R you can get magical spells for casters that are more powerful and buff magical research in general to be faster and also be able to hold more spells at once and so forth.

Then we get to what I'll call the free allocation. Basically you have a number of points you can assign anywhere, with some prerequisites but those are mostly general. 1 Point in some broad skill compared to having 8 points in specific ones like floggoflopr and 4 in schtupersnock.

I will probably make certain skills only available in the specialization or perhaps it can just be that if you get 10 points in bladesmithing from economics and 5 from military than economics is necessary to max blade smithing and military is better than the other 3 but only second best.

Aside from that you will be able to allocate points in any skills you like, either focusing on your specialization or going down the economics route so that your magic specialization is used for magitech production and not mastery of arcane knowledge.

I'm trying to think of the best way to organize points to meet these goals. For instance if I don't cap the points you can add to a skill in free allocation, and I don't make the number quite small, you could subvert the Specialization to the point of being useless. I'd think its better to cap single skill allocation so that I can still have a ton of points to assign to make really specialized builds. You can of course level your Sovereign's skills during the actual game, possibly even above specialization, presuming you get the proper books and items and choose the right answer in events. But I feel some options should only be viable or available if you specialized right.

I also need to deal with the event system. Different non-default options are available based on your character. I don't want to use % chance too much. I think it just leads to save scumming. I would rather assign static values and then display the choices you qualify for with a 100% chance. Is this a good idea? Your choice in a few events won't decide the outcome of your game, so if I went random you wouldn't lose to a dice roll. But it might be pretty disappointing to see an amazing option and miss it because you got unlucky with a 90% chance.

Part of free allocation is spells/classes. I am wondering how much control to give the player. Should they be able to select individual spells? Should they only be able to spell schools?

So many decisions...

Anyways I am planning to have a text box where you choose a specialization and it displays what you get for that, maybe in a tool tip, not sure. Then you will move on to the free allocation. I decided to go ahead with schools of magic/spells/skills that you can select from. Then you will be able to pick some traits that give unique bonuses. Traits cost more points and may not be exactly as you like them, but you get a lot from a trait so you need to decide if the bonuses are worth it, especially since some may be unique. Then you can add points to various skills/stats individually. I hope to make many many possible combinations viable. We will see how that goes. Personally my first character is going to max out on languages, history, and research stats plus magic and then dump the rest into economics for magitech purposes. I'm probably going to totally ignore military and diplomacy.

Ever since my first academagia character specializing in history and language turned out to be useless cause those skills were only good for later game years I have wanted to be a magical linguist/historian.

Anyways I expect to have some good work done by the end of the weekend, possibly all the engine stuff will be done and only the XML to define the specialization will be left, to be completed later when I move from engine to game work.