New unit training mechanics for Alpha 8

I’ve almost rigged new unit training mechanics in Knights Province this weekend!

Cottages will generate new unit type over time called, (for lack of better title) – Blank.
Training citizen in School costs 1 Blank unit (no gold required yet?).
Blanks, Serfs and Builders occupy space in Cottages, so over time you need to build more of them.

Barracks train units as usual, but take Blanks instead of Recruits.
Recruits are removed from the game.
Towers will take an archer or melee warrior into them (each providing own bonus to tower strength).
Oh, I got an idea, I can reuse Recruits model for Blanks now )

At the moment, it’s 20 slots per cottage.
I’d say a typical town would need 5-7 of them. It all should be (and will be) balanced later on.
Building Cottages near School means Blanks will walk into School sooner and train faster.

Camp houses some units too, so that player could train citizens before building 1st Cottage.

So, you end up with Blanks not working but eating food unless you balance the number of cottages.
And if you want to grow fast you just build some Cottages and have to wait for blanks to appear? A bit less control over population growth.

Also now you can stack training orders in School, ordering up to 10 units of same kind in one training request.

I think Blanks can appear from cottages faster when cottage is near-empty.
That would be good. It would also help with recovering from your village being attacked.
So building one Cottage will generate 1 Blank per 15 sec, then after 10 Blanks it slows down to 1 per 30sec maybe.
However it’s getting complicated when unit is killed – which Cottage to take him out from – one with most or fewest habitants?

I’m also removing SheepFarm/Clothmakers/Cloth from the game, they did not fit in well.

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24 Responses to New unit training mechanics for Alpha 8

  1. Mivec says:

    Do not stop there. Thank you for your work. I look forward to though, would be some political new Alpha. Thanks again!!!

  2. keebo says:

    Great job! 😉
    I think it would be better to take killed unit out from a house with fewest habitants.
    Attention will focus on one house instead of several))

  3. Esthlos says:

    Blanks could be children or teens, which after all are the ones who usually get education.
    Obviously invading a town will involve killing lots of them – but war IS ugly.
    Or are we going to pretend that in KaM instead all the children are evacuated whenever you destroy a town, just because you can’t see them?

    Cottages should generate faster or slower in a linear way imho… example: let’s say that generating 1 blank requires 300 tokens.
    Each cottage could generate (MaxSpace-OccupiedSlots) tokens every second: this would mean it needs 15 seconds when the cottage is empty, 30s when at half capacity, and full stop at full occupation.

    Killed units could free space from the cottage that generated them (it’d be just one more property for the Unit object, wouldn’t it?) – with the scaling I suggested, this wouldn’t impact the total training rate.
    (Example: you have 2 cottages, one full and one empty. 10 units are killed.
    If they are removed from the full cottage, we then have 2 cottages producing 10 tokens per second: total 20/s, which translates to 2 blanks every 30 seconds.
    If instead they are removed from the empty cottage we have 1 empty and 1 full: total 20 tokens per second, or 1 blank per 15 seconds – which is essentially the same as 2 every 30s).

    • Esthlos says:

      “Example: you have 2 cottages, one full and one empty.”
      Sorry, I obviously meant 1 full and one half-empty.

    • Esthlos says:

      (That last example goes straight out of the window if we are talking about a small number of losses with a high number of cottages, however; example, 10 lost units and 10 cottages.
      Removing 1 from every cottage means you’ll have all back in 300s, removing them all from the same cottage means you need 879s for full recovery)

  4. Sorrow says:

    Blanks will go to school, so maybe call them students.

    • Krom says:

      It would be best to pick some medieval term. Did we have students in 13th century? Also Cottages could be renamed too, to match the units they spawn. E.g. Students – Dormitory ))

      • Anonymous says:

        Squires?

      • Sorrow says:

        Yes, we had students in 13th century and much earlier. I think you still can call them students in english, because there can be no other word. And Cottages can be just Houses, because students must’ve live somewhere in the past.

        You can also name them “Townsmen from houses”. It will be medieval accurate too.

  5. Ray says:

    Peeps. Just call blanks peeps. Or sheeples.

  6. Galenus says:

    Idea for removing Blanks from cottages: When Blank are spawned, a number will be asigned to them, each cottage will have list of Blanks “living” in it. When unit or Blank dies the number is removed from register so emptying space for another and solving in which cottage sould new Blank spawn.

  7. Lewin says:

    Another question to answer is what happens when cottages are destroyed? If you no longer have enough cottages for your serfs do they keep working while homeless and then take the next available slot when a new cottage is built?

  8. Lewin says:

    Name ideas: peasant, commoner, villager, novice, pupil.

    I agree that something a bit more mediaeval would be better.

  9. Mirathrim says:

    Serfs can work as a name too.

    • Mirathrim says:

      “Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord’s fields, but also his mines, forests and roads.”

    • Krom says:

      Then we need a new name for “Deliverer” unit, which is named “Serf” now

  10. Shawn Reichert says:

    Am I the only one who loved the cloth idea? I thought gold would then be needed to train recruits into different types of soldiers…

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