Suggestion: Natural Growth [of Building LOS]

I see a lot of suggestions in this section, so here’s a personal favorite of mine. This feature isn’t meant to be too meta-changing, just fun, although it probably has occasional uses.

In some other genres of games, such as civilization (turn-based strategy), over time a city’s borders grow because of culture. I think we should try this for buildings in Age! We could make it so that after a building is constructed, its LOS grows very gradually, say 0.1 tile per minute, so that after 20 minutes the building has 2 more tiles of LOS. The LOS will be rounded to the nearest number of tiles. (In other words, we could just call it 1 additional tile after 5 minutes, and then another tile every 10 minutes after that.) Converted and damaged buildings do not lose LOS; it’s just the time since construction that matters.

This won’t necessarily hurt strategies like sneaky forwards or tower rushes because those strategies are designed so that you are revealed as soon as you finish the tower, or training the army and attack with it, which usually only takes a few minutes (over which a building only gains a fraction of a tile in LOS). It does mean that in late imperial age, houses from early-game have huge LOS’s, and it feels like a natural effect.

The reasoning behind this is, as the years pass, 1) people living in and manning the buildings explore more of their surroundings, and 2) people are able to travel around faster (explore more of their surroundings) because of better technology.

I imagine this could make for interesting strategy changes, too. One difference it makes is that houses and outposts you plop down early on can have a large LOS late game, which could make for an interesting choice in strategy for getting vision around your opponent, neutral golds, or relics — too many people build houses only around their base as a wall, and this might encourage more distant house building.

Iirc the max line of sight is hard capped at 21 or somthing like that. So basically people wouldn’t wait and just use outposts.

Wouldn’t this kind of stuff be represented by conversion? Of course it’s in a really different way but still.

I don’t like house walls either but let’s be real, saving your villagers early is way better than maybe having free town patrol on some random houses late-game.

and thats pseudo represented in aoe as you build your base out and can see more of the map.

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Of course; it’s not supposed to replace scouting or outpost building, just a mechanic that changes LOS slowly so that over time, maybe that patch behind the forest or behind the lake in the corner gets revealed. Black patches on the map are a pet peeve of mine, even when playing ranked team games :slight_smile:
My goal is not to significantly change any meta, but maybe just have a slight change to building LOS that feels nice. I understand a lot of things are already represented in game (e.g. better LOS technologies via town watch/patrol, building more houses naturally as a city’s population grows), but this can also be a nice extra mechanic.

I don’t get it. Buildings LOS already grows as you age up, and as the game progresses you gain access to techs that enhance you LOS. This paired with the growth in building and population numbers already depicts the expansion and evolution of your civilization through ages.

Do you think that implementing LOS gain less abruptly would make it for more immersion?

If that what you propose were a feture I can only picture games being a “wall minefield”, everyone would just spam walls through the map early on to have global vision later, and that seems pretty ugly.

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Do you think that implementing LOS gain less abruptly would make it for more immersion?

I simply think it would be more fun, and make things a bit less predictable and uniform. It would be cool to see houses or other buildings in my base all have different LOS, based on their construction time. It’ll also make it slightly harder to predict exactly where to be to hide units or buildings out of sight in the late game, which could also be fun.

Along this note, perhaps this feature could be randomized, where every minute there’s a 5-10% chance the LOS increases by 1 on each building. It’ll make it actually hard to predict what someone’s LOS around a building is, similar to how monk conversions, arrow shot accuracy, and trebuchet shots are randomized right now.

If that what you propose were a feture I can only picture games being a “wall minefield”, everyone would just spam walls through the map early on to have global vision later, and that seems pretty ugly.

I don’t think people will do this overwhelmingly more than before, as like you said, town watch and town patrol already increase LOS, and people don’t spam walls around the map after getting town patrol. This change would only add +3 LOS in 30 minutes. If that’s too much, we can make this even slower; the point is to have a slow natural growth.

I guess the solution to the wall problem is easy: just make it not affect them at all and it will be fine.

In Civilization the “culture expansion” mechanic serves a purpose, by making you able to eventually convert neighbouring towns and boosting your empire’s stats or something iirc. But introducing a change that is unnoticeable (as your first buildings will have to be close from your starting point, you can’t just waste villager time for more LoS in imp) doesn’t sounds like something really needed. As other said, Town patrol and Town watch represent the sentries of your civilization becoming more efficient at monitoring your surroundings and thus make them effectively yours, as you can now effectively spot and punish trespassers.

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