Construction
After the menu of cults and the discoveries menu, it would be obvious to talk about the menu of construction... but we don't have it. Instead, we decided to make a new construction system, which will comply with the following criteria:
- To be more diverse in comparison to Predynastic Egypt;
- To be historically correct.
As much as we wish to make our games more diverse, we still can't do it at the cost of its historical accuracy. We're trying to keep this balance in every system of the game. New construction system is based on the geography of Memphis area, on several types of buildings and its materials. s we mentioned before in the second issue, Memphis is divided into 51 area. Each area has one of six types of landscape: semi-desert, river, wadi, shore, floodplains, and hills. The type of constructed facility will depend on the type of landscape. It's a simple connection! Because you wouldn't build a house on a floodplain, would you? Or to grow grains in the desert. It's all the same in our system - you can build houses in every area with a suitable landscape. On the screenshot below, you can see buildings are located on a hill, and fields are below on a floodplain.
The process of constructions goes from simple to complex. Egyptians in the game came to a new land, and as they explore it, they constantly meet different obstacles, which can disrupt construction. For example, wild animals, there will be quite a lot of them. The player will have to decide how to deal with them - tame them, pray to them or exterminate them. Each action will have different consequences and bonuses. If there are no wild animals in the area, there can be bushes or swamps, and those need to be exterminated or drained before the construction. On the screenshot below, you can see several icons. Two icons below represent bonuses of the area. The upper row of icons represent tasks available for the player. Tree means fertile lands, cabin - abandoned village, white stones - flints, a useful mineral. At last, a hammer represents improvements which player can do in this area. Here nothing endanger the construction, so we can just go ahead and build whatever we want. Be there lions of crocodiles, we would have to deal with them first; otherwise, our construction workers could be killed.
On the floodplains, you can build a vegetable garden or a pasture. Vegetable gardens can be upgraded to the grain field or a flax field. On the hills, you can build houses. Houses can be upgraded to workshops or barracks. The last level of the upgrade is temples and palaces. Graveyards can be built on the hills or in semi-deserts. In the rest of areas, players can hunt, gather berries or fruits or do a stockbreeding.
Upgrades are available as soon as the player will have all necessary knowledge and sources. By "knowledge», we mean the discovery of certain technologies. While it's not enough, the icon of the upgrade is visible but inactive. By clicking on it the player can find out what else he needs to upgrade the area. The price of the upgrade will rise with each upgrade, besides player will have to keep in mind that there will be maintenance fee for each building. However, not everything is so expensive; bonuses will also rise and sum up with each new upgrade.
Talking about the appearance of the buildings, we have to go back in a virtual history classroom and let you know that there is not much information left about the appearance of Memphis buildings. Unfortunately, it was built on a very unstable land and eventually all the buildings were destroyed or flooded. Memphis in our game is some kind of interpolation. For a reference, we used Hierakonpolis buildings, some buildings from the later historical period and the drawings of Memphis buildings that were found inside of tombs and pyramids. Basing on these things, we made a suggestion about Memphis buildings look, and this is what you will see in the game.
Oh, but what about pyramids, right? We didn't mention anything about pyramids construction! Right. Of course, pyramids are very important. So much that we will make a separate issue about them because we prepared a great surprise for our player regarding pyramids and we really hope you'll like it.
Besides pyramids, we also didn't mention anything about construction on the bigger map, the map of Egypt. Here we also added several new features, enough to make another issue. So please, stay with us and discover more about the game!