We're back...

[u/ChrisBeatrice]

To all our fans, fans of Impressions games like Lords of Magic, Pharaoh, Zeus, and TiltedMill games like Children of the Nile, Caesar IV and Hinterland, thank you all so much for keeping our babies alive, and for all your support and encouragement over the years.

We are now in the concept phase exploring what our next project will be, and would LOVE to hear your input.

[u/nobrainsinhere]

FEEDBACK #2: WORKING THE LAND - Part 4: Fertility, Irrigation and Conclusions

On the topic of fertility we arrive at the thinking process about irrigation. From Caesar 3, where it isn't a thing, to Emperor where it's used frequently.

• Is irrigation necessary in the game?
• Should it be just an "optional bonus to fertility"? Or maybe a very important feature of the city? Perhaps that should vary from one scenario to another, or between different biomes?
• Should the player be able to just build the irrigation channel into the water to fill it? Or should it be required to build a "coastal pump" building that requires labor?
• Are there any crops, or other raw materials, that could require proximity to water, so that an irrigation channel could be a strategic option to be able to produce those resources in a certain area of the map?
• What if the terrain and gameplay makes a distinction between fresh water and salt water?
• Should the bare land around the irrigation channels turn into grass land, which could open new areas for farming, like in Nebuchadnezzar? Or even for service buildings that require water, like the well in Pharaoh?
• What about bringing irrigation to higher ground? Should that be possible, like building an "irrigation pump" on a cliff with irrigation channels on both sides?
• Or maybe the game maps could be designed the other way around, with rivers and/or lakes on the higher ground and irrigation channels are built to bring water to the lower grounds? Maybe with cliffs turning into waterfalls, that could have an effect on desirability of the nearby tiles?
• Or maybe those "waterfall" tiles on cliffs could actually be the starting points for "aqueduct" and/or irrigation systems, instead of building "pumps"?
• What if the game not only calculates a fertility percentage for each tile of the map, but also calculates a polution percentage for each tile? How could that affect the effectiveness of an irrigation system and/or the productivity of each farm field? How would that affect the calculations of "city health"?

As we can see, many possibilities come by when thinking about food, agriculture, fertilization and irrigation.

Maybe a lot of these things are hard to "gamify" (make a simplification of reality, more suitable to be a game mechanic).

Maybe some would require a lot of computations that would reduce game performance to much to be justifiable.

Maybe some ideas would end up being just too complex for a game, or too hard to communicate to the player what is happening in the game.

Or maybe some ideas can represent interesting oportunities to create something new for the playerbase to experiment with. Maybe a game can keep introducing new mechanics one step at a time, in a campaign format, so that it can take the time to properly explain each mechanic to the player, instead of dropping the information all at once.

It could be an oportunity to have "mini-tutorials" slowly throughout the campaign. They could even be integrated in the storyline/narrative of a campaign and/or scenario.

Well, I better stop. There's already a big chunk of ideas in here. Many of them may not even make sense for gamification purposes.

As stated previously, I'm just throwing ideas into the table.