Random Terrain Allocation - Gameplay Suggestion

Issue #136 open
Bogdan Mariesan created an issue

As we have a "Risk" kind of game I strongly believe we should add a very important random factor as I will detail below:

  1. For e.g. in Medieval Europe we have 288 regions divided across
  2. We have 5 terrain types (snow, mountains, desert, forest, plains)
  3. Each country should have a small bias towards a specific terrain type which cannot exceed 50% of it's surface
  4. As in Risk/Catan at the start of each age the game "rolls the dices" and divides the terrains randomly across countries.
  5. Country bonuses and terrains are hidden to the players until they join a country and hit the blue rank
  6. Certain could/should be slightly biased towards certain terrain type

Let's see how a dice roll would play for a specific country, for e.g. Sweden which is biased at snow:

  • Rolling dice for terrain type SNOW
  • Computing minimum terrain slots due to bias. Formula to calculate country main terrain is TotalRegions/5<K<TotalRegions/2. Where K is a randomly generated integer number between the specified values, and TotalRegions represents the number of initial regions a country has. For Sweden it would calculate as 2.4 <= K <= 6 since Sweden has 12 initial regions it cannot have more or equal to 2.4 snow regions, lesser or equal to 6. We roll the dices and get 4.
  • We take next terrain type to allocate to Sweden, which is randomly selected from remaining terrain types as PLAINS. For all remaining territories we apply the following formula 0<= K <= RemainingRegions
  • In our case we have 8 free regions slots and we compute a random number between 0 and 8. Our random number generator comes with value 6.
  • We take the next terrain type to allocate to Sweden , which is randomly selected from remaining terrain types as DESERT.
  • In our case we have 12-4-6=2 so 2 remaining free regions. Our random number generator comes with value of 2.
  • If we have more regions available we select another terrain type from the remaining, if not we proceed to the next country

You can find a working JSFiddle with the above algorithm at the link below:

Possible algorithm made kind of hasty in the night

And a possible Map setup for 3 countries would be:

Country Poland with base terrain Forest and total region count 12
Poland biased terrain is Forest and computed region number is 6
Rolled terrain type Desert with value of 2
Rolled terrain type Snow with value of 2
Rolled terrain type Mountains with value of 1
Rolled terrain type Plains with value of 1

Country Papal States with base terrain Mountains and total region count 6
Papal States biased terrain is Mountains and computed region number is 3
Rolled terrain type Snow with value of 1
Rolled terrain type Forest with value of 1
Rolled terrain type Desert with value of 0
Rolled terrain type Plains with value of 1

Country Berber with base terrain Desert and total region count 16
Berber biased terrain is Desert and computed region number is 4
Rolled terrain type Plains with value of 1
Rolled terrain type Snow with value of 2
Rolled terrain type Forest with value of 4
Rolled terrain type Mountains with value of 5

Based on the above number we can also compute the country bonuses automatically:

  • we leave it as it is for missing terrain at -4
  • for existing terrain we split based on the proportions, if we have a maximum of 10 as terrain bonus it would even out based on the number computed in the section above.

This is just an idea that I believe will make the game feel different in every age. It will add a grain of salt to the game which will surely improve the overall gameplay.

A reason to implement this is because we have certain countries that are favored by experience players and some countries that are rendered null very fast at the begining of each age. The above changes will add more dynamics to the current gameplay making it a true "Risk" game.

Comments (4)

  1. Bogdan Mariesan reporter

    To make things a bit more realistic we could add 1 bias and 1 exclusion to each country. So for e.g. Sweden will always have SNOW but never have DESERT

  2. Nuvelle
    • changed status to open

    We are looking at totally overhauling terrain as part of the new game, however we are not sure what we are going to do at this stage, so it is open to discussion.

  3. Xandra

    Every age the same top countries are on top (more or less) and the countries that are out first are often the same. Mostly cause of the very good terrain/unit bonus.

    I suggest to give those countries ending last (5 or so) some extra terrain bonus (+1%) on one of the terrains and (-1%) for the countries ending on top ( top 5 or so). This would balance the chances a country have more

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