Magnate: The Officers

I've spent the last few days trying to figure out what I wanted to dive into and it's taken me this long to realize that I should just talk about what I'm working on. And that has been the officers of Magnate. As this is a strategy game, you'll be commanding a number of officers around towns and resources on the world map.

At first, we thought it would be most beneficial to limit the amount of officers a player can have in order to control the pacing of the game and to help predict progression to facilitate the story. And story is what really makes this title a challenge to design. Most turn-based strategy games have very little story, other than the typical "conquer the world" fanfare. But we wanted to tell an epic tale and inject RPG elements we thought would greatly improve the fabric of turn-based strategy games. So, in order to limit rapid world domination, we created two types of officers: Generals and Town Wardens.

Generals were officers who could leave the confines of the kingdom's borders and capture territories. Town Wardens had to stay within the owned land and protect the towns from rebels and bandits.

Originally, the plan was to make the main story cast take up the General's mantle and have miscellaneous recruited officers be Town Wardens. This was and still could work, but as I created the list of Town Wardens, it dawned on me. I'm about to create a large number of characters that the players will never really have a reason to connect to. And, we're forcing the player to use predetermined characters with their classes firmly embedded into their profile as their forward army. The more I thought about it, the more it irked me.

So, in a brilliant stroke of 5AM with too much caffeine in my blood, I figured out how I could turn the tables on this little predicament. Instead of limiting who can be a General by assigning a specific cast for the job, we'll add a stat in the game that will limit the amount of Generals our main protagonist can lead. There are only two exceptions to this though and that is Kira and Caitlyn. So, at the start of the game, Aiden will be able to have two Generals under his command and it'll be his sister and best friend. As the game progresses and his General command stat increases, he'll be able to promote a cast member of the story or a Town Warden he's hired to be a General in his army. This way, we still control the flow of the game for the story, but we allow the player to choose his forces. So, a gamer that prefers to have a lot of ranged damage in his army can do so or if someone is more defensive and likes a lot of tanks, that's also possible!

Town Wardens are defined by their personality traits and class. There are twelve personalities in total, each with their strengths and weaknesses as an officer. Officer stats help determine how well they can perform various duties within towns and their military training capabilities. There are a total of 96 Town Wardens, 8 per personality, that Aiden can recruit. More on officer statistics at a later time. :)

As for classes, there are a total of 21 classes in the game within 3 types and 4 tiers. Here is a table which explains it a lot better:

Progression through each tier is done through the Ability Trees.

Next week, we'll dive into the Ability Trees and their structure, something I'm currently finalizing! :D