Seeing the Enemy's Gold

[Dave]

I am considering implementing a feature that enables a player to gain access to a table that'd show the gold, villages, units, and income of each side.

This means that the player would get to see how much gold each enemy has. Do people think this is a good idea. The way I see it, there a pros and cons:

pros:
- it'd allow a little more strategizing according to which enemy has how much gold etc
- it'd make the game system more clearly transperant to the player. Players might otherwise think that the AI doesn't need gold to recruit units, and just magically 'gets' them.


cons:
- it'd make the scenarios seem a little less 'mysterious' in a sense.
- it's kinda unrealistic that the player would know how much gold their enemy has.

The number of units, income, and number of villages is already accessible, you'd just have to count them all up. (Actually, it'd be hard to tell how many units they have in some cases, since there's no way to determine which side a unit is on, just if it's an ally or an enemy). The gold is also fairly easy to guess, since uhh...if the AI is hiring units, it has gold, but if it's hiring few or not units, it doesn't have any gold left....same way as most human players play!

Thoughts?

David

[fmunoz]

No gold knowledge..

If not player will notice the huge starting gold in some levels that the AI get

[Dave]

Well don't you think they should get some warning if the AI is going to be really powerful?

Anyhow the AI doesn't get a 'huge' amount of gold in any current scenarios - no more than the player might have kept from previous scenarios. In some ways I'd like to show the player that the AI doesn't really get 'that' much gold, rather than players thinking that "I have to have gold to purchase units, while the AI can just get them whenever it wants!"

David

[miyo]

With random income villages thrown in the game there could be table showing how many villages each enemy has and what are the boundaries of total income (min - max). Maybe also showing how many units enemy has. But, then you don't have to "browse" around and check the enemy lines so carefully, now you sometimes miss to notice some enemy some.

It would make playing easier and faster... and possibly less fun. Keep the enemies mysterious. You don't know what unit belongs to what leader... that makes it sometimes harder to track leaders to deal first.

- Miyo

[ettin]

It would make playing easier and faster... and possibly less fun. Keep the enemies mysterious.

I agree. I prefer to not know the enemies gold.

[miyo]

Three against one.

Dave takes a hit, Dave takes a hit, Dave takes a hit, Dave dies.

Sorry Dave, you can not always win *grin*

- Miyo

ps. Just joking.

[zas]

And enforce it in multiplayer mode, so if a player has "i don't want to see enemy's gold.' option, all others players have it. Or something of that taste.

[Dave]

With random income villages thrown in the game

Ermm....I never said there were going to be random income villages! I said that I think that having 'towns' or such which give more gold than villages (but you can clearly see are towns). I am not in favor of having random income villages.

It would make playing easier and faster... and possibly less fun. Keep the enemies mysterious. You don't know what unit belongs to what leader... that makes it sometimes harder to track leaders to deal first.

Okay, this appears to be the popular opinion. I will concede.

I'm not sure if I want to implement multiplayer now, with the potential for everyone to gang up on me there too *grin*

David