.

Will it be possible to build forts or castles that are seperate from cities at areas that you want to beef up defence? i.e a montain pass slap a castle down prior to an invading army reaching your cities

I could live with any of the road-building options I saw above.  But its not the end of the world if we have engineers build roads like MOM or AOW:SM.

Like thebattle options below, don't scrap them...

"Battle Options:

1. Instant Resolve (army 1 and army 2 meet, one is destroyed instantly).

2. Auto-resolve. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and plays out automatically).

3. Player resolved. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and players can give orders. At any time they can have the computer take over to resolve it)."

... except that I would rather the loser have some chance of some units retreating alive.

yea, the enemy shouldn't have to be completely destroyed imo ... it'd also be cool if there was a "prison capture" ability for some large percentage of people killed in close melee, at least if said unit is routing.

decisions to deal with prisoners (and possibly what to do with the dead bodies) can hold diplomatic consequences as well as possible character traits for generals/family members.

I think I like the ability to draw roads on the map as well, and I agree there should be some maintenance associated with them.  Not much certainly, but some.  Having these be improved as caravans travel them is a very interesting idea.  I think I kinda like it.

I don't like the idea that a town sends out a settler to a designated location.  If I'm spending essence somewhere to build a city to claim a resource I want to get it now, especially if it's somewhat far away from my regular territory.

I thought about the idea of having mines independent of a city and while it is common in games that doesn't happen in the real world.  Primitive (non mechanized) mining is a very labor intensive process and requires lots and lots of people, those people need places to live, eat, and spend their money.  In short, they need a town.  Typically towns do spring up around.  I think it makes perfect sense to require a mine to be part of a town for that reason.

Battle Options:

1. Instant Resolve (army 1 and army 2 meet, one is destroyed instantly).

2. Auto-resolve. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and plays out automatically).

3. Player resolved. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and players can give orders. At any time they can have the computer take over to resolve it).

I'm curious about the auto-resolve option.  Generally I want to either instantly resolve it - if one force is much stronger and the battle isn't interesting - or play it through.  Any reason I'd want to zoom in and just watch it?  Can you switch between watching and playing at will?  It makes more sense to me if battles are similar to Sins of a Solar Empire, where they all play out in real-time.

I definitely would like to avoid "worker" units, and also avoid the situation where every tile turns into a road. This would point to auto-building trade networks, but there's still the issue of a player wanting to build a road to a strategic point manually. Maybe the manual case should require a soldier unit to do the work.

I'm still not convinced your resource model will work, but I'm certainly willing to try it out once there's a beta release that's semi-stable on my machine.

Everything else sounds great!

I have to disagree, I don't see any downside to making auto-resolve as player friendly and intelligent as possible. No one should need to micromanage their battles if they don't want to; there are people who are just going to be more into the economic side of things, and if they prefer to leave command of their armies to a subordinate (i.e. the AI) I don't see anything wrong with that. There are still players - myself included - who will love micromanaging every single battle no matter how good the auto-resolve is - and that should be the only reason you'd want to manage a battle yourself, because you enjoy doing so, if you don't enjoy it you should have the option to let the AI manage it (ideally) as well as you could have.

What I'm getting at is having a great auto-resolve doesn't force players to use it (I still probably won't), it just gives players another option which is almost always a good thing. It increases the enjoyment of players that prefer not to micromanage battes, players that enjoy other aspects of the game - and those other aspects of the game should certainly have enough depth to keep those players happy without any tactical battles - without detracting at all from the enjoyment of players that prefer never to use the auto-resolve, those who love micromanaging every single soldier's movement instead.

I think roads are too important for the computer to use some algorithm to place them.  I think a good way to do it would be for the player to use some road tiles or a drawing tool to plot the path of the road.  Resources (ie workers) could be assinged to building the road and it could automatically built from there.  That way we can place roads in strategic locations or route them away from danger zones.

I'm also a fan of being able to assing troops to guard a road or caravan to protect them from raids.  I wouldn't want to have to manually maneuver a bunch of armies to do it, but I think assinging some militia to caravan protection would be good.

With Instant-Resolve and Auto-Resolve, it would be nice if you could have "standing orders" or some sort of sanctioned tactics for your armies (military manual of some sort) where the player can set a couple of scripts as to how aggressive on the attack etc. and can see these play out in auto-resolve.  That way, a good instant-resolve doesn't make the player a godly general, but instead can be a reflection of the choice of tactics and troops.

Some way to route roads around trouble zones is key, perhaps the ability for soldiers to establish "watchtowers" which can act as nodes for the road?

Way to auto-build roads: Use the AI caravans would use to pathe from city A to B. That way if another road pre-exists, the new road will move towards it and hook up rather than run parallel.

This should look pretty natural after a time, because this is exactly how medieval roads began - as cart tracks made by people passing through from A to B.

Not needing to build "Worker" or "engineer" units to make roads: Excellent, I often didn't bother in MoM in the mundane plane cos roads only gave a small bonus anyway.

Tactical options: Once again I need new pants

Exactly my feelings.  If my TBS friends know that a battle can last up to an hour, and, they can pause all they want, I think they might just go for that. Great!

Two possibilities for battles and reloading.  Being able to reload a game usually make autoresolve very solo friendly.  You have some people that just reload over and over till the battle goes their way.  Not so in multi of course.  So, how about two possible options:  "Time Jump" an extremely high level spell that lets you replay a battle, once.  And an "Iron man" difficulty setting for solo play in which the game saves automatically after each battle .  Now THAT would make most battles intence to me, and the kind of diifficulty I'd use for sure once I got good. 

You could have a "Settler" unit that could construct roads And a few other things on the map. Maybe give it the ability to build outposts on land that has been reclaimed by your Sovereign's magic.

In Mid to Late game you could maybe make roads by magic?

Strictly for late game, why have roads at all? You're a All Powerful Sovereign...why not make a magical portal that can transfer goods from one city to another. Maybe it can transfer population or troops from one city to another as well if a portal is built at both ends.

Also late game, a Flying Wagon or Cart that delivers goods to all your cities.

As for the rest of the post, that sounds Awesome Frogboy. Keep up the great work   I can't wait to dive into extensively testing the battles.

Or you could add special locations like fortresses or mage tower or things like that to be able to be connected to the network (their names would appear on the "town list").

If roads have a strategic importance liked described I definitely do not want them to be auto-built over time.  I'm not in the current round of beta so not sure what the current procedure is, but...

1. Select City

2. Click "build road" button

3. Select target city/location/etc.

4. Road gradually appears over next few turns, longer if target is farther away.  Smart pathfinding so that if your target is near an existing road a T is created.

There, no workers and I still have control over what has priority to get connected.  Probably need some cost associated with road-building - resources or maybe population for the road crew or somesuch - to prevent spamming.

Regarding auto-resolve: I am one of those who never touches it in the Total War series.  Why?  Because I consider the computer's results wholly unsatisfactory.  If it's an even battle or I have the advantage I can come out of it with way more surviving units.  If I'm at a disadvantage I can either still win or wreak enough damage to make things easy for my next army.  I suppose it's unrealistic for an auto-resolve calculator to account for a player's superior skill in battlefield tactics, but something more than just the relative strength of the armies should be factored in please.

What exactly is the behavior we're looking for in the roads?

Perhaps we do something kind of like what we have now (although a more attractive UI for it) but with the ability to modify the intended direction.

Choose build roads from a city, choose the destination city and a proposed path is displayed,this path can be bent and stretched to how we  would like.

Although not knowing exactly what the concern is with the roads, nor the intent for the roads I have no idea if that's a solution to the problem.

That's exactly how it works now. Not a bad guess for someone who isn't in the beta yet. Well done.

Good! But please make sure that:

- unlike CivIV and its forerunners, accessing one "resource" should not give you an "unlimited supply" for your entire kingdom. If my Iron Mine produces X amount of iron per turn, why should all of my connected cities automatically get 1.0 unit of Iron, no matter how many cities I have? Resources should produce a finite, quantifiable amount of resources, that might be able to  be split evenly amongst cities -- e.g., if you can currently reap 10 units of resource Q from a tile, and have 5 cities, then perhaps each city could automatically get 1, since (10/5)/2=1, leaving 5 left over to be transported by caravans -- or any other meaningful system which will not make resources like those horrible infinite CivIV ones.

- these default settings can be changed in game setup

Frogboy - don't know if anyone's asked yet, but why don't you like how roads are built?

is it because it's currently a click and forget action or that there's no control of the path the road takes?

It won't be easy to balance "instant resolve", but hopefully it will be decent enough.

On roads, I agree the current system does not contribute to the fun.  There's a watershed question in figuring how to change them: Do you want road building to be an active, concious player decision with tradeoffs, or do you want it to be an essentially passive mechanic with significant impact but little/no player involvement?

Both could be fun.  The strongest argument for the former is that automatic road pathing may result in hard-to-defend points of the road system when a better option was available (or territory changes and the road is suddenly running through enemy territory).  I prefer the latter option, and would do something like this horribly thrown together psuedocode:

void CheckForNewAutoConnectRoadBuilding()
{
    foreach(city)
    {
        if(city.AutoConnectToRoadNetwork)
        {
            foreach(otherCity)
            {
                if(otherCity.OwnedBy(city))
                {
                    if(!city.ConnectedByRoadOrQueuedRoadTo(otherCity))
                    {
                        if(!city.SeparatedByImpassableTerrainFrom(otherCity))
                        {
                            if(CanPathThroughFriendlyTerritory(city,OtherCity))
                            {
                                Path newRoadPath = 
                                    FindPathThroughFriendlyTerritory(city,OtherCity);
                                QueueRoadConstructionOnPath(newRoadPath);
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

class City
{
    bool AutoConnectToRoadNetwork {get; set;}
    Player OwningPlayer {get; set;}
    bool OwnedBy(City otherCity) 
        { return this.OwningPlayer.Equals(otherCity.OwningPlayer); }
    Point MapCoordinates {get; set;}
    
    private List<City> _citiesConnectedByRoadOrQueuedRoad;
    bool ConnectedByRoadOrQueuedRoadTo(City otherCity)
    {
        if(_citiesConnectedByRoadOrQueuedRoad.Contains(otherCity)) 
            return true;
        else
        {
            bool roadConnectionFound = CanPathOverRoadOrQueuedRoad(this,otherCity);
            if(roadConnectionFound) _citiesConnectedByRoadOrQueuedRoad.Add(otherCity);
            return roadConnectionFound;
        }
    }
    
    private List<City> _citiesSeparatedByImpassableTerrain;
    bool SeparatedByImpassableTerrainFrom(City otherCity)
    {
        if(_citiesSeparatedByImpassableTerrain.Contains(otherCity)) 
            return true;
        else
        {
            bool pathFound = CanPathAtAll(this,otherCity);
            if(!pathFound) _citiesSeparatedByImpassableTerrain.Add(otherCity);
            return pathFound;
        }
    }    
}

bool CanPathThroughFriendlyTerritory(City city1, City city2)
{
    return (FindPathThroughFriendlyTerritory(city1,city2) != null);
}

List<Point> FindPathThroughFriendlyTerritory(City city1, City city2)
{
    // run A-star path:
    // starting node: city1.MapCoordinates
    // goal node: city2.MapCoordinates
    // traversal cost: 1 for friendly territory, infinite for non-friendly territory
    // return path if found, null otherwise
}

void QueueRoadConstructionOnPath(List<Point> path)
{
    foreach(Point pathStep in path)
    {
        if(!Map.GetTileAt(pathStep).HasRoad)
            // queue road on the tile
    }
}

bool CanPathOverRoadOrQueuedRoad(City city1, City city2)
{
    // run A-star path:
    // starting node: city1.MapCoordinates
    // goal node: city2.MapCoordinates
    // traversal cost: 1 for road or queued road, infinite for anything else
    // return true if found, false otherwise
}

bool CanPathAtAll(City city1, City city2)
{
    // run A-star path:
    // starting node: city1.MapCoordinates
    // goal node: city2.MapCoordinates
    // traversal cost: normal for non-flying/non-swimming unit
    // return true if found, false otherwise
}
 

Why  not do both? You can have basic roads that are developped organically with basic trade routes between the cities, and artificial routes like the ones developped by the Romans (serving the purpore of highways) that you artificially create.

Basic routes would develop along trade routes. When a trade route between you city A and B is set, it's inneficient at first. But you might want to set a small amount each gameyear to develop that road, so it's becoming more efficient over time. Same thing to trade with foreign cities.

When you have city C, and you want to link-up A and B to C, well the "fastest" route to use initially would maybe be trough the very road you have developped. So the merchants would us the non-direct route, and eventually a road would be developped to connect the established road with the new city. You just create a trade center at the crossroad. Maybe you'd like to have some constructions there?

Eventually, when you have a lot of ressources, you might want to have your armies create straight roads that link X to Y. It'd be a good way to ease travel of your armies, and to favour a specific, less risky, trade route between X and Y for your mechants.

Then again, why having your armies creating that? You might simply set your city to produce improvement on the map. Do you think it'd be possible to have a city to directly create external contructions?

Yes, manual road-placing would be necessary to be able to build a highway into Mordor, for example.  And if there's going to be a manual system may as well just make the players use that instead of some auto system that may not do what they want.

I thought of a simple solution : waypoints. You create waypoint with some proper UI (you click somewhere, add a name) and that waypoint would appear in the list of places where the road can end (and not just cities).

And +1 for "intelligent" roads, that will search for nearby roads before starting building.

I don't see what's wrong with clicking and dragging roads. The build time for the road is influenced by how far away it is from a city... maybe you can have little caravans drop off the road building supplies or something.