I'm getting to the place with my two large mods that I can move on to a new large mod. I've been bouncing around two separate ideas. The first being a updated followers framework to allow npcs to be recruited and follow you around like in skyrim; this thread is not about that one.
The second idea I have been having is a city building and managing mod. The purpose of this thread is to compile and list of both my ideas and the community's for a citing building mod and its possible features.
MOD Concept
One of the more interesting aspects of Daggerfall for me from my first time playing it to now is the city system. It on face value is a pretty simple system, in that it has preset cities with prepopulated npc lists, and those cities are part of territories that keep track of you and your criminal record.
While being straight forward, it is actually a very large and complex system that, if developed, could be turned into a whole side game for Daggerfall. What I mean is cities could be turned into living, expanding, shrinking, changing cities, where a player could become some high level government representative/City planner/Thane. Once the player achieved this through possibly skill increases, roll checks for diplomacy, and maybe even quests, he would gain access to a planner tool that would give the player the ability to enter a top-down view (like in my minimap mod). From here, the player could see all the city stats and get access to differing options to dynamically alter the city.
This is where I need ideas from the community. What things should the player possibly have access to and what draw backs and benefits can the player get from managing a city well or not?
Specific City Planning Features/Mechanics
- Top-down city developer view (Would use what I learned making the minimap mod to create a unique top down view with a city planner GUI and controls)
- City resource system: start very basic with no resources being connected to the DFU terrain, but instead would be created by dropping some form of resource creation points or buildings. Would be amazing to get it tied to terrain tiles/generation so certain tiles and flats provide resources, but this would be an end goal feature.
Possible Resource Types:- Wood (Mill building and possibly counts and considers number of tree billboards in the cell)
- All the metal ores in game (Mining building and possibly requires rock terrain tiles too)
- Stone (Query building and possibly rock terrain tiles)
- Clay (Query building and possibly certain sand type tiles)
- Food (Farms and animal flats and possibly certain types of edible billboard plants)
- Fresh Water (Some form of wells or possibly look for water tiles).
- Can change city population limits using the built in npc generation lists and streaming world object, which will affect the city functioning and resources. Need enough food and resources to support your citizens, and you need enough working citizens to keep those resources coming in.
- Building manipulation: Using what I learned in the minimap, I would like to see if I could allow players to select and delete buildings and place new ones then be able to save that back to the block for future block creation. This of course would need allot of checks for things like quest buildings or essential npc locations (can't have players removing needed stuff for quest lines).
Possible Building Types:- All the basic buildings that are already in the game
- Resource buildings: Add a building for harvesting differing resources using the existing building meshes available and then assigning a unique identifier to them.
- Offense buildings: Guard barracks/towers to increase the guard/army presence in the city at a resource cost.
- Defense buildings: Some form of defense type buildings. Maybe walls, towers with archers on the roof, ect.
- Plan City Defenses and Offenses: As a later feature, it would be amazing if the city system could them hook into a dynamic war system. Once a city is claimed by the player for building, it gets added to a war list, and it can be attacked. if the player loses, he loses control of the city and must retake it in some form.