3d Reus

This is a plan for a 3d reus.

Reus Analysis

An analysis of Reus. So that we can learn from it’s mechanics.

Tiles

The core layout is of the game world is 2d tiles on a circular planet (and hence the tiles form a continuous loop).

A tile may be wet or dry. Depending on terraforming a tile it has a biome: barren (the default, dry), forest (wet), swamp (wet), desert (dry), ocean (depression), mountain (elevated).

A tile may have one improvement, improvements fall into 4 categories: plant, animal, mineral, and human (villages or developments). Only villages create developments, and developments are the only thing they can create.

Edit To other:

Improvements can effect each other with global, village, range or adjacency conditions.

Villages

When your prosperity reaches certain predefined milestones (non-linear progression) a new villager appears.

A villager will find the location on the map with the highest potential prosperity that has 4 adjacent tiles (on which to place the village).

It will then settle there and create a new village. Villages change their appearance depending on the biome they appear on. Villages can only settle on forest, desert, and swamp biomes.

When a village first settles it has a border width of 8 tiles, centered on the village (which takes up 4 tiles). As the village‘s prosperity increases it’s border gets wider, any tile can be in the border of a village, but each tile may only be within the border of one village.

Prosperity and Resources

There are 3 resources:

• Food: aligned with forest villages, primarily provided by plants and animals.
• Wealth: aligned with desert villages, primarily provided by animals and minerals.
• Technology: aligned with swamp villages, primarily provided by minerals and plants.

Prosperity is the core point system. It is the total of the prosperity of all the villages. A village‘s prosperity is the total of all of it’s resources.

Improvements: Sources

Player created improvements come in 3 varieties and are typically called sources. Each source will provide some amount of resources to the tiles it effects (typically only the tile it is on, except for animals and plant‘s natura):

• Plants: generally provides food and/or technology. Creates natura.
• Animals: generally provides food and/or wealth. Creates danger. Effects a range of tiles centered on it’s position (typically radius 2 plus the center tile).
• Minerals: generally provide wealth and/or technology. Slightly affiliated with awe.

All three source types can create awe. The specific type of a source differs based on the biome it was created in. Each source type can be created two ways, one for each resource type favored by the source type (e.g. plants can be created as favoring food xor technology).

Each source will have different base resource values and symbiosis effects depending on what biome it was created in and the transmutations it has undergone. Sources come in 3 different levels when first created: normal, great, and superior, depending on the level of the ability that created it.

Plants created on deserts must be transmuted before they provide most mechanical effects (resources, natura, symbiosis). Oceans can only have animals created on them. Sources cannot be created on barren. Attempting to create sources on tiles they can’t be created on only provides a small lasting visual effect.

Aspects

Aspects are improvements that can be added to a source. Each aspect only works on one variety of source. Each variety of source has 4 aspect types, two increasing one resource output type and two increasing the other. Two aspects (one for each resource) will behave in one way, while the other two behave in another, the specifics depend on the variety of the source:

• Plants
  • Behavior A: Increase resource (e.g. food or technology) and natura.
  • Behavior B: Increase resource (for slightly more than behavior A), bonus increase to resource if natura is over a threshold.
• Animals:
  • Behavior A: Increase resource, bonus increase to resource if natura is over a threshold.
  • Behavior B: Increase resource (same as A) and danger, bonus increase to resource (again same as A) and danger if natura is over a threshold (same threshold as A).
• Minerals:
  • Behavior A: Increase resource, bonus increase to resource if natura is over a threshold.
  • Behavior B: Increase resource (much less than A) and awe, bonus increase to resource (slightly less than A) and awe if natura is over a threshold (same threshold as A).

Depending on the level of the ability aspects can be created at one of 4 levels: lesser, potent, greater, sublime. There is a random chance (1 in 3) that an aspect will be higher than the current level. As there are only 3 levels to aspect abilities this makes getting sublimes difficult (requiring the use of other abilities).

A source generally starts with space for one aspect per level (e.g. a great source starts with room for two aspects). Each transmutation adds room for one extra aspect. Aspects can not be replaced, the whole source must be replaced.

Transmutation

Symbiosis

Developments

Giants and Abilities

Greed, War, and Rebellious

Natura, Danger, and Awe

Game Design Ideas

Here we posit new ideas for the design of the game, often referencing and changing the design from Reus.

Some immediate thoughts, absolute givens:

• Hex Based.

Dynamically sized Villages

Villages/cities that slowly spread. This can be from more fine grained developments or actually based off of population, or a mix between the two.

Similarities:

• In Civ 5 developments can be made around a city, like roads and farms.
• In Endless Legends the city actually expands over new tiles.

Magic

Maybe include some sort of elemental magic system. Sort of like Natura but for each of a couple of elements.

This would allow for elemental affined art, or special elementally based tiles.

We could do a classic elemental circle (air, earth, fire, water). Maybe with a mixed in other elements (holy/good/light, unholy/evil/dark, lightning, metal, ice, void).

Multifaceted Tiles

Maybe have tiles that have more than just one development in them or like complex biomes.

Maybe a slot each for animal, mineral, plant, development.

Or maybe a couple of generic slots. Human development would slowly consume more slots forcing out the other sources (plants first, then animals, then minerals).

Either way this would allow for complex biome rules, allowing internal interactions.

This may make removing tiles more difficult. Where a reverse process, or conflicting process must be employed to clear a slot.

This could also allow a slight rework of transmutation to involve combining two slots, or requiring other slots in the same region. We may have to reduce the role of aspects or rework it.

Multiple Intelligent Races

We could also have multiple intelligent races that could move in. Partially based on climate, magic and other things.

For example: Undead, fey/elves, kobolds/dragons, trolls/orcs, goblins, gnomes/dwarves.

Multi-monitor UI

Breaking out the projected UI and making it multi-monitor/device. So the selected tile is on the secondary screen (or device, like a tablet) and the overworld map is on the first.

Occulus rift could place them in space, an outstretched globe for the overworld map, and looking down (or up) would display the details.

Also with projected UI we can do user custom menu layouts. Along with detailed in depth UI helpers (known upgrade paths, projected values, etc).

More Giants, Customization?

We will definitely have more giants and biomes. Maybe a sort of CoD style load out of a number of giants. The number giants could be a factor in primary game setup (along side the length of the game).

Advanced Planning

Instead of having to manually direct giants there could be a planning system involved. Where the intent is set at each point (maybe with conditionals?) and a planner actually moves the giants around (when they are idle with regards direct orders).

At the very least it needs shift queuing.

Multiplayer

Co-op

We could do co-op control of the game. Multiple people setting goals for the giants and laying out strategies, co-operative control, where one person may be using two, while the other uses the other two, and the third could bounce between them.

Competitive

We could also have competitive games where sources, or cities, get tagged with whose points they are.

Or maybe just an overall score goal calculated from direct actions.

Or perhaps having separate achievements each person is trying to compete for (kinda like kill streaks?).