Technical bits about the "automated NPCs"

Mister Stranger_9 (If that is your real name),
I have to say I disagree with you. I think the idea of players taking command of the game world and playing the part of leaders instead of peons an intriguing one.
The problem with your post is that you seem to assume that this idea is one to simply dump into an existing game as an after thought or an "amazing new feature!" If you were to take WoW (for example) and stick in an automated NPC system like this it certainly would distabalise the economy (Although considering the state of WoW's economy it may actually do some good:/). However, if a new game were to be created with automated NPC's as an intergral part of the design then there is no way it could impact in a negative way on the game economy because it would be a central part of it.

Conquering and "managing" a territory would mean being able to spawn NPCs

To me, the implication of this quote is that the peons wouldn't simply be something you buy or churn out like in any old RTS, but rather something you have to earn through other means.
I personally think this is a good idea. Players would need to control a mine to be able to spawn NPCs to work in that mine, players would need to control land to build a factory and thus spawn NPCs to work in the factory. These NPCs would be tied to this particular territory and there would be a limit to the amount you can have.
As far as guards for carravans go, maybe you could hire them from the local tavern, or better yet, hired goons may be offered by a player that runs a barracks, thus centralising the economy on the players rather than on the game.

Game idea...
You begin the game as the leader of a village. Maybe you were the heir, maybe you conquered it, it doesn't matter for the sake of this article how you became the boss.
Essentially, the idea is to expand, to grow. With your village you can create a few basic things, recruit a few basic soldiers. Essentially, what you can do with your villiage is only enough to get you started. Now, to expand and grow, you need to take land. Essentially, there are two ways to do this: Battle, and Politics.
You can choose to lead your small band of men into battle yourself, bringing in the classic RPG aspect of the game, in which you skill up and fight; Or, you can use political means to take land, be it through negotiations or even simply the influence of being 'great'. Lets say you conquer the nearby forrest. This provides you with a resource that can be used for constructing buildings, or even creating weapons such as bows. With the conquest of the forrest comes the experience of a few woodsmen that lived within the forrest - their skills allow you to harvest the wood.
Okay, now here's the tricky bit. Preventing it from toppling over into a RTS. To do this, you need to put barriers in place preventing people from simply controlling every type of resource and being able to make everything in the game. To do this you could introduce elements like influence, questing, item drops, etc etc.
Influence would be a sphere of loyalty that radiates from your central village. The further out you get, the less loyal your subjects are, and thus the less productive they can be. So to keep things running at an optimum rate, you would be concentrating on the land surrounding your village rather than simply taking everything you can and creating a monopoly on everything (Although here is where guilds, or alliances, would come in handy). To expand your influence you can do things like keeping your subjects happy by keeping taxes low, not over-working them, slaying mighty dragons, conquering new land etc etc. But then, in order to balance the game for as many players as possible, you would make expanding your influence an incredibly time-consuming task.
Questing and item drops could make your subjects happier, put you in higher regard by NPC cities and villages, and even get you some rare ingredients for items.
Basically, the game could be played out as an RPG, or as an RTS. It would be up to the player how they do things. if a player would prefer to concentrate on the management side of things, he could leave battle and questing to his NPC General and then do a far greater job at creating items and managing his own economy. On the other hand, if the player wanted to play the RPG side of things and quest and kill, then he could put an Overseer in charge of crafting and management and thus do a better job at questing and adventuring.
Anyway... Enough of my rant!

I have to say I disagree with you. I think the idea of players taking command of the game world and playing the part of leaders instead of peons an intriguing one.
The problem with your post is that you seem to assume that this idea is one to simply dump into an existing game as an after thought or an "amazing new feature!" If you were to take WoW (for example) and stick in an automated NPC system like this it certainly would distabalise the economy (Although considering the state of WoW's economy it may actually do some good:/). However, if a new game were to be created with automated NPC's as an intergral part of the design then there is no way it could impact in a negative way on the game economy because it would be a central part of it.

Yes, pretty much.

I still have to make a choice about crafting and the economy because there are things that I don't completely convince me and need to be rethought.

As it is right now the players cannot craft what they use on a personal level. All the equipment in the form of weapons armor and magic items is driven through PvE (if you look at the tripartite model this would be the second level).

When you think to the resource system and the NPCs used as "bots" stop to think about the current mmorpgs. These NPCs DO NOT GENERATE GOLD.

All the features I described on this level are solely about the "strategic layer". The conquest system that ties the regions together in an empire. So think to it as one of the strategic games out there. Not as a mmorpg.

The "peons" that go to the mine for the gold don't do this for the single player, but to pay the upkeep costs required to maintain the control on that region and keep all the structures operative (ever played "The Settlers"?). Even in Warcraft as you start the game you produce peons that then will start to generate gold till the end of the match. Here it's pretty much the same, with the difference that everything happens on a realistic level, so it's all much slowed down. You don't see these "peons" running back and forth every 30 seconds, but maybe every two hours.

Gathering and storing resources takes time, with the added risk that these resources are PHYSICAL ENTITIES in the 3D world, so the enemy players can invade your region and take away your reserves.

All this level, again, is EXTERNAL to the single player. It's not as if everyone in the game can spawn personal NPCs. This is tied to the conquest system, that consequently is driven through players-guild. So these are COMMUNAL tools, not personal. The "bots" serve the community and the strategic meta-game, not the personal interest (if not in special occassions).

For the battles you'll need to spend an incredible amount of resources. Wars are extremely expensive. You need to spawn NPCs, equip them, keep them well fed. All this has a cost, so, on the level of this economy, what the NPCs produce 24h a day is going out through these costs. Exactly as in a wargame. But this economy only exists (at this moment) on the communal level. (more infos on the economic layer)

There are player-related parts. For example to build carts, get horses etc... And to successfully conquer a region you'll need to use siege engines. Again all these are partly usable by the players and partly "communal" (since you aren't going to conquer regions in solo, I guess). The construction of the siege engines, to make an example, can be automated and produced through NPCs. But again there are both costs in resources AND in time. You cannot build a catapult in two minutes, all the craftables have realistic building times. Of course you don't have to remain logged in for three days staring at a progress bar. But these things will be built by the NPCs on the background.

There is a real effort to bring the players together and participate together in PvP. There is the possibility for a player to just log-in and join a quick skirmish, but all the strategic level is there to motivate the guilds and give them a strong role in the game.

If you HAVE to think of something think to Eve-Online, it's the game that went closer to my idea. Just don't think of WoW because my ideas are based on different principles.

P.S.
By the way, I don't like "politics" becoming an embedded mini-game. Politics is a matter of the players. You provide a context for it and it will exist. So I don't expect to transform it into a game-rule. It's just between the players and they shape it the way they like.

So I wouldn't want in-game support for it.

When you think to the resource system and the NPCs used as "bots" stop to think about the current mmorpgs. These NPCs DO NOT GENERATE GOLD.

All the features I described on this level are solely about the "strategic layer". The conquest system that ties the regions together in an empire. So think to it as one of the strategic games out there. Not as a mmorpg.

The "peons" that go to the mine for the gold don't do this for the single player, but to pay the upkeep costs required to maintain the control on that region and keep all the structures operative (ever played "The Settlers"?). Even in Warcraft as you start the game you produce peons that then will start to generate gold till the end of the match.

compare it to the original post:

If there's something boring in the game but that still needs to be done to make the game "work", why not pass the burden on the NPCs and automate the process while the players can engage in something more fun? Crafting, gathering resources, patrol zones, transport goods etc... All these activities could be easily unloaded on the NPCs. The players colud still do everything by themselves. They could still organize a convoy to transport some resources to a different zone, go patrol a territory on their own. But only if they choose so.

What you do have here _is_ single player in charge of automated task force, which is supposed to save this player from the "boring" activites -- "crafting, gathering resources, patrol zones, transport goods etc..." ... the catch is, these "boring activities" are way to generate game "wealth" i.e. resources used to fuel the "fun" parts _on personal level_. Like in case of EVE which you used, the boring mining and NPC hunting is used to directly generate ISK and resources which can be either used to build structure or to sell for further ISK generation... but don't have to, because they can be used for hundred other things, instead.

Note: these resources are part of _single economy system_. If i spend my personal ISK to build a starbase in EVE (investment, opportunity cost, return rates, yay) ... then it's used to generate ISK that goes _in my own wallet_ and which i can spend on anything i like. Be it military conquest of nearby system, wreaking economic havoc, paying someone to do the boring work for me (like hiring NPCs, just with more advanced AI that might even try to screw me over) brand new "look how big my e-peen is" ship, or even a party with dozen Minmatar hookers. My original investment doesn't limit me into generation of some sort of symbolic "realm points" or "world renown" that i'd then spend on building more starbases or NPCs to gain more of these fake wealth points but for which i have otherwise no use (your distaste for 'playing systems of coloured bars detached from what they try to simulate' should be kicking in about now)

So pretty much, you either separate the "territory conquest" resources from "personal use" resources (gold for building castles is some different sort from gold used to buy Sword of Pwnage +3) or you wind up with system where the NPCs _do_ produce personal wealth for the player commanding them, on the scale that couldn't be matched by personally whacking the xp bags, to boot. But such sort of artificial separation is on the other hand quite a bit of immersion breaker -- it forces the cohesion of game world to be torn, in order to make place for some extra bit of simulation... except this very bit of simulation can already be part of game without any of this artificial separation. With the drawback of some players not finding this low-level sphere of mundane activities fun, of course. Horses for courses.

Can it be worth the price? in some games, for sure. As long as one is aware of existence of this price in the first place.

What you do have here _is_ single player in charge of automated task force, which is supposed to save this player from the "boring" activites -- "crafting, gathering resources, patrol zones, transport goods etc..." ... the catch is, these "boring activities" are way to generate game "wealth"

For fucks sake, THERE IS NO WEALTH. Stop thinking of this model slapped on a mmorpg. And if you need to, think to Eve.

With the difference that in my idea there is no wealth (go read the economic scheme, at least). The single player could have a shitton of in-game currency and have absolutely NOTHING to buy. You need PEOPLE to build stuff and to have people you need food. You cannot feed them money.

You aren't hauling resurces between the regions to generate wealth. You are doing this as part of the conquest game. EVERYTHING I described applies to this level. No NPC can generate wealth for a player, it's not that I hope it doesn't happen, it's just NOT POSSIBLE.

Player's money and this automated NPC system operate on two SEPARATE levels. Detached. They have nothing to share.

In Eve, of course, this wouldn't be the case. In fact (and I thought I had written it on the original post, but I was wrong) the NPCs you use are supposed to have costs. A miner NPC of course wouldn't be able to eternally mine stuff, there are boundaries and, still, it wouldn't be as efficient as a player.

So pretty much, you either separate the "territory conquest" resources from "personal use" resources

This is exactly what happens.

Crafting, gathering resources, patrol zones, transport goods etc...

These are activities that have a meaning only on the emergent level of the conquest system. Crafting is used to produce and transform resources and to craft siege weapons and other "objects" that must, always (by "design"), have a "communal" use. The resources gathered are part of the RTS level. The gold you get from a mine doesn't translate into player-currency. Why not? Because it IS consistent and realistic.

In a world with an extreme abundancy of gold NOONE would have used gold as a currency. The value of something depends on its scarcity and the "resources" entities are supposed to be something completely different from player-currency.

The secret is that in this game you cannot "win" through money. But trough the cooperation of all the players.

I hate the "monetization" of the gameplay. I always hated it.

The resources gathered are part of the RTS level. The gold you get from a mine doesn't translate into player-currency. Why not? Because it IS consistent and realistic.

In a world with an extreme abundancy of gold NOONE would have used gold as a currency. The value of something depends on its scarcity and the "resources" entities are supposed to be something completely different from player-currency.

Realistic? Come on, this is anything (that anything can also include "fun") _but_.

There is no magical kind of separation between "country building money" and "personal wealth money" in our world. The very same currency goes to fund the country's latest wing of fighter jets and to pay for the president's lunch. The difference is merely in the amounts (not even in the source, since both the president's salary and the military fund comes from the same taxes)

Not to mention just because countries can pay billions for keeping their military toys in shape doesn't mean every single of their citizen is swimming in dollars, to the point where there's serious plans to switch to platinum just to keep the economy anywhere near stable.

This applies to the game economy, too. You begin to separate the 'rts level' from 'personal level' and you quickly reach the level of complete nonsense -- e.g. your NPC peons gather wood and metal ore, which is then processed and used to produce swords and armour for NPC guards. But can a player take some of these NPC weapons for personal use? No, because then they could simply sell them at a store, generating personal wealth from 'rts level' resources, which they are not supposed to. Please tell me how _this_ is "consistent and realistic" too.

The secret is that in this game you cannot "win" through money. But trough the cooperation of all the players.

Except at which point does this need for cooperation come, exactly?

From what you wrote so far, it appears you can set up completely automated resource gathering system (because harvesting is boring) You can have NPCs produce military gear (because production is boring) to arm other NPCs who then partrol and defend the territory you own (because patrolling and defending is also boring) So about the only thing that's left up to cooperating players is, they can bunch up and go to the other player's territory and chop heads off their automated guards in attempt to conquer it, or just to be asshats. I guess because this isn't boring. or just excluded because otherwise you'd have 95% effective RTS version of Progress Quest at your hands, so we'll just ignore the strange contradiction that it's perfectly fine in this game to have automated defenders to deal with someone attacking you, but for attacking someone else you actually need player-peons, presumably with personal gear they acquired in complete separation from the war machine that's otherwise running to keep the NPC guards well fed and equipped...

This applies to the game economy, too. You begin to separate the 'rts level' from 'personal level' and you quickly reach the level of complete nonsense -- e.g. your NPC peons gather wood and metal ore, which is then processed and used to produce swords and armour for NPC guards. But can a player take some of these NPC weapons for personal use? No, because then they could simply sell them at a store, generating personal wealth from 'rts level' resources, which they are not supposed to. Please tell me how _this_ is "consistent and realistic" too.

Sure you can use NPC equipment for yourself. But the players are expected to be equipped much better already. And who said that there are NPCs vendors that push out money as you feed them junk?

Producing swords just to sell them (to the same NPCs that built them, I suppose?) isn't going to be convenient. You have a shop in real life and selling things to yourself? I think it makes sense that you are going to sell things that: 1) others don't have 2) others need.

The NPCs don't need anything themselves, because the NPCs are spawned by the players.

You CAN specialize in the production of resources to sell them to *other players*, though. Hell, you can even sell to the enemy faction in some cases.

This setting was always intended to be founded more on the barter than the monetization. Money brings you nowhere. Solid goods and resources do. It's the solid meat that you need. Not the money. It's again a game not founded on a modern economic system. How hard it is to understand this point?

--
About the realism: of course there are trade-offs, as there are in 100% of the games out there. You always make a choice between what you simulate and what you bend in the name of the "fun". This choice is what makes a game good or bad. The mechanics on which you decide to focus the game and those you decide to leave out.

You cannot program bots to play the whole game but not because it's ProgressQuest, it would become instead just a normal RTS where you build armies and control them. But this is a mmorpg with an emergent RTS layer. At the center there isn't one player, but groups of players (since it's "massively"). So I want the gameplay to open up for them, while offering the possibility to automate some background processes that trigger the "context" of the war.

The point is rather simple: it's an attempt to tie the single battles together into something more meaningful and complex. Which brings to the goal of giving the players more options and different ways to approach the game.

The "realism" is a mean to reach those goals, and it is dropped when it goes in the way of the fun.

A game borrows from the reality (or from the symbolic reality of a myth) the elements that are considered interesting. It isn't an exact copy.

player-peons, presumably with personal gear they acquired in complete separation from the war machine that's otherwise running to keep the NPC guards well fed and equipped...

Yes, now leave this website and go rant somewhere else about DAoC, EverQuest, WoW and all the other games where the NPCs aren't equipped with artifacts and magic items as every other player.

I have to say I disagree with you. I think the idea of players taking command of the game world and playing the part of leaders instead of peons an intriguing one.

Except it's nothing intriguing nor new -- it's been done by about every single RTS up to date. And as far as MMOs go, to bring EVE again, the game allows you already to be either leader or the peon. It all depends on your actual leadership skills, dedication and charisma (and we are talking real skills here, not coloured bar on the attributes sheet of your character)

Compared to this? the whole automated NPC-based conquest stuff is step backward. Limitation of choices. A crutch for people who want to play world leaders but don't have what it takes to become one without the game handing it to them on the silver platter. ("what it takes" including the persistence of getting through the "peon work" stage)

"Wah wah, gathering wood is boring, can i already be a great leader commanding my grand army to world domination"? Sure you can. Oh wait, but so is the other 5k people playing in the same game world. That's a shitload of wanna-be world leaders squabbling over 16 rl square miles worth of terrain...

Compared to this? the whole automated NPC-based conquest stuff is step backward.

And where exactly I wrote that NPCs can be sent to conquer regions on their own?

The NPCs are used to automate that "work" that need to be done in Eve to access the more complex level of territory management in 0.0 space. To automate that boring tasks that support and trigger the emergent level.

For a single player there could be, maybe, the possibility to *pay* NPCs to delivery some items to another system. Without the need to perform the task by yourself.

Notice that (I think) there's already a level of automation in the player-created stations, since I believe they continue to mine the moons endlessly.

"Wah wah, gathering wood is boring, can i already be a great leader commanding my grand army to world domination"? Sure you can. Oh wait, but so is the other 5k people playing in the same game world. That's a shitload of wanna-be world leaders squabbling over 16 rl square miles worth of terrain...

And so? What exactly are you proving here?

You aren't going to conquer anything by yourself. The conquest game is intended to be a collaborative effort, rewarding those who work together to reach a shared objective.

You do not win through money. This is not what people expect and search in a fantasy game.

It's not a capitalistic simulation. It's a fucking fantasy game. Not Sim Beru.

You aren't going to conquer anything by yourself. The conquest game is intended to be a collaborative effort, rewarding those who work together to reach a shared objective.

And why the hell can't i conquer anything by myself? What if i find need to herd a bunch of whiny Leeroy Jenkins over Teamspeak as frustrating as playing whack-a-mole in the gear production mini-game? More importantly, if i need collaborative effort to conquer anything, is there actually anything in this game for me to do, if i happen to be a solo player?

You do not win through money. This is not what people expect and search in a fantasy game.

It's not a capitalistic simulation. It's a fucking fantasy game. Not Sim Beru.

And that's why we have writing schedules for NPC errands as part of it, down to some kind of simplified programming language and general use scripts. Right. That's _exactly_ the idea i had while reading Tolkien.

If you want it to be a "fucking fantasy game" instad of simulator, don't put the detailed simulation into it. And if you do bother to put one for some odd reason then don't get all upset when someone wants it to actually make some sort of sense and points out when it doesn't. "it's fantasy game" works as justification only this far, especially when you want this fantasy game to be a sandbox and world simulation for individual player at the same time...

And why the hell can't i conquer anything by myself?

I don't know. I'd suggest to try this in real life to see if it works.

is there actually anything in this game for me to do, if i happen to be a solo player?

As any other PvP game you can ambush other players alone, or annoy the convoys or whatever you find interesting.

The PvE is fully accessible in solo (the triparite model, part 2).

No, the conquest system and territory managment is not open to solo players.

And that's why we have writing schedules for NPC errands as part of it, down to some kind of simplified programming language and general use scripts. Right. That's _exactly_ the idea i had while reading Tolkien.

It's exactly what you would do in a similar situation.

Put down a map on a table and start to plot the course, evaluating the risks and giving orders to those that will be involved. In Tolkien's books this actually happens rather often (the council of Elrond is a notable example).

Of course you aren't going to have NPCs responding to voice commands. That's the best I could do with the current technology.

The scripted language could be easily masked and dressed to sound exactly like normal written plan.

Time based experience gain in this sort of game would be ideal. Because the whole idea is about automating things, it can be assumed that those little NPCs (which would essentially make up a good chunk of your 'skills') are just grinding away like a hardcore nerd 24/7.

My game is based on a skill system. Once you are "done" with the PvE portion your character will be already well-equipped and efficient. Ready for PvP.

The power differential between the players is relatively flat. So there is really no need to "catch up". There aren't gaps to fill.

The NPCs are there for the strategic level and to automate the boring parts of it. Not to "grind" skills, levels or gold for the players.

I've been thinking about this concept for a while, and I believe you've overlooked one point that should be addressed: If these NPCs are only spawned by POIs (points of interest, such as a town or a castle that might be captured by a guild), then only a very select few - the guild masters - will ever get to participate in this interesting subgame.

Not explicitly. There's the possibility for the guilds with owenership rights to offer services to the players (in their guild or to everyone). For hire, for example.

How deep is this part is still to define and never will be. To figure out the details it would be necessary to list precisely every kind of services and duties that the NPCs are enabled to perform. And this cannot be done on a imaginary game. It needs concrete playtesting.

That said, I don't want the game world to turn into a NPCs world. If every player can spawn NPCs at will, the game will be just chaos and it won't make any sense. The NPCs duties ARE restricted to the higher level of the strategic game. The rest is concrete PvP and a wide range of activities that you play directly. The NPCs are the context, not the heart. They make things work, but they aren't what the game is about. They are a mechanic, a mean. Not an end.

So the system is a bit of both. Essentially it is controlled only and completely by the guilds that control the territory. Then, within this bigger set, the system is fragmented in smaller parts that can be offered to other players.

To an extent, the game includes personal houses. So even the possibility to spawn NPCs in your house to perform simple duties.

An NPC is always linked to a precise duty. The point is to not let the duties overlap with the "active" game.

Also consider that the NPCs on a duty don't respawn if not actively summoned again. The NPCs guards defending the outposts respawn on very long cycles.

What I mean is: think to the whole NPCs system as a finited one. Spawning NPCs costs resources, it's an economic system on its own, with its own balance.