A while ago I made an Oregon Trail-esque game in TI-Basic in which you would go through the campaign of the first crusade, conquering cities and supplying their armies. I eventually scrapped the project due to poor initial planning which resulted in a chaotic mess. I've restarted the project in ICE and although I'm using the same concept, the game will have many new features. I'm trying to focus on adding more complex interactions between different features in the game.



The gif shows the main menu that you will interact with when not fighting battles. So far, that's what I've spent most of my time on.

Done:
-Inventory (supplies)
-Market (almost done)
-Map (not cities)
-Army status

To-do:
-Campaign map
-Fighting battles
-City data

This seems to be really neat and looks shiny! I'd love to see this finished!

Of course the ICE creator wants to see it done...

I'm interested too! Seems like fun...

Before I start with the progress that's been made, my main point of this post is a question: How should I handle the battles?

In the previous BASIC version, the soldiers on each side would decrease with each loop during a battle depending on factors like shields and swords and the last army standing won. This time, I want there to be options to retreat and the battles will last for a limited number of ticks instead of continuing until one side was destroyed.

Progress update: Added a lot of cities onto the map, finished up the market tab (so all your army tabs are done), added the city scouting tab. At this point fighting is the only major game mechanic to add (of course, that is still no minor task). I want to improve the main map screen because it looks pretty bad. I was messing around with different colors for the cities, but instead I may change the icon for them to see if that improves anything. I also need to work on the data for cities, which is very generic right now (notice how all the prices are the same in the gif).

A progress update, since I haven't given one in a while.

I've been working on battles, and I am near completion on it. It's not the most interesting system but I'm relatively pleased about it and I think that for now it will do. I will be finishing it soon and once I do I will post full screenshots.

The map needs to be changed so that all the cities aren't in 50*50 box on the screen. I should "zoom in" on it to spread things out more. I probably will do that, but I like the fact that you can see and recognize Europe as it is now. (Maybe I will add a zoom feature to get the best of both worlds? Probably not. That's a lot of work.)

Cities currently have only filler data. I am really dreading writing out the data for all of them (how many of each item are in the shops and what the prices are. There are 8 cities currently in the game (will be 10 at completion). 10*(6 items + 6 prices) = a lot of numbers to decide on and make sure are balanced) . Maybe once I finish everything else someone would be willing to help me with balancing city data?

To-do:
-Finish battle system
-Progression through campaign + retreating back
-Mutinies if you attack a friendly city or have too low morale
-Random events as you travel (might not add this, haven't decided)
-Winning and losing

Oh boy does this look amazing!!! I say that especially because I had a lot of fun with the TI-Basic version, although I was wishing there was more! So I’m looking forward to seeing this ICE version completed

I am so excited for this!!! I am so into war strategy games (such as AOE) and I am excited to see another one being developed for the TI84+CE! Keep up the good work!

I need some help. In ICE, you can't have floats. I need to take a percentage of a number, but I can't seem to do it without using decimals. Maybe I'm overthinking this. Can someone assist me?

This is basically what I'm looking to do (A and B are variables):

A/(A+B)*200

You could multiply everything by 100 then divide by 100 when needed. That gives you two 'decimal places'.

Ah. Okay. So what I should do is A*100/(A+B)*2. I've done similar things before in ICE, I don't know why I couldn't think of that. Thank you.

Minor note: you'll retain more precision by ordering the expression as A*200/(A+B). And if you want the result to be rounded rather than floored, use (A*401+B)/((A+B)*2).

Okay, so I didn't get as far as I'd like to with the battle screen but I'm posting this now because I'll be gone for a while and wanted to give an update. The main thing I still need to do is combine friendly and enemy soldiers, defense, attack, and fervor to determine how many soldiers are lost by each side every battle tick (Right now, I just have the enemy soldiers ticking down 5 to show off the battle screen). You can see that what I did accomplish is the bar that shows what percent of the battlefield is your soldiers and sprites that show whether you're on the attack or defense.

Right now, you can retreat and don't lose any more soldiers. However, eventually I want you to lose soldiers in a retreat, and have a chance that the enemy follows you as you retreat, therefore starting a new battle at the city you retreated to.

There will be loot once you win a battle, but winning is not yet implemented. When you are winning, the enemy may surrender (the more you are winning, the higher chance they have of surrendering).

And the gifs:


Second one is a bit corrupted, by I didn't feel like rerecording it

*bump* are you back from your trip or whatever yet? Have you made any progress on this?

Decided to show the cool gif first to catch your attention and show off the biggest update that I made. I basically finished the battle mechanics and added/cleaned up a bunch of features that I had planned out earlier but never implemented. This includes retreating, looting, cities becoming subdued or friendly, and actually being able to advance to new cities (now that you can actually fight your enemies).

Decided to dump everything that’s on my mind below. Sorry for how long it is.

What’s new:
-The battle mechanic is in a workable state. For now, this is how it works (it definitely still needs improvement): The amount of soldiers lost by each side each battle tick is calculated as such;

Code:

The way it is set up right now, battles take into account number of forces, offense, and defense for both sides. I still need to incorporate fervor
-After the battle, you are shown what loot you pillaged and what gear was broken. Along with loot, your soldiers' Morale is increased/decreased by how you did in the battle. You will also be joined by local forces that were held hostage once you defeat the enemy
-You can see from the gif that the ending is really quick. This is more to do with how the percent bar is displayed than anything. I’ll change it at some point.

Tweaks:
-After a battle, food equal to 5% of your rations*soldiers is subtracted from your overall food. If you don’t have enough food, your hunger bar is reduced by 20% of your soldiers
-After a battle, between 0-50% of each defense or offense item (bows, swords, shields, helmets) breaks
-If you win a battle, the city randomly becomes friendly or subdued. I need to change this so that the farther along in the campaign you get, the higher chance the city becomes subdued instead of friendly
-A random percent of your forces from 0-10% join the enemy side if you try to attack a friendly city. This number will be affected by your Morale once I implement it fully
-You lose a random percent of your forces (0-5%) when retreating. It would make more sense to have some aspect of this based on the enemy’s strength, so I may amend this later
-After a battle, if you lost more than 50% of your soldiers, your army loses Morale (which is taken away based a random number that is influenced by the amount of soldiers you lost). If you lost less than 50% of your soldiers, you gain Morale in the same method that you lose it (but opposite). This is implemented but not confirmed working
-You cannot rest if vigor is at 100%
-Resting consumes food. The amount of food consumed is based on your army size and rations. The amount of vigor restored is proportionate to the amount of food you consume.
-Added an error system so that keeps count of how long errors have been on the screen and displays the error message that the game throws
-Error if you try to rest without enough food
-Battle screen doesn’t automatically exit once one side has 0 soldiers but instead shows loot screen
-Slowed down all battle screen speeds by 4x

Still in progress:
-The loot pillaged/soldiers gained after a battle is not dependent on what city you have conquered. Obviously this will need to be changed
-The marketplaces of cities all have the same amount of goods with all the same prices. I didn’t feel like changing them earlier
-A way to “win” (once you finish the campaign. That reminds me, I never added Jerusalem)
-Make the map not look like trash
-Integrate Morale and rum
-Integrate Fervor and Vigor
-Desertion (when Morale is low)
-Friendly cities give better deals in the market than subdued cities
-The ability to attack a subdued city (which will turn it into a destroyed city)
-Updating cities after battles
-Cities surrendering during battles

I started to implement saving today. Your progress is saved in an appvar. Right now there is only one save slot, but once I finish the saving I plan on having 2 saves that you can choose from. When you hit clear to exit the program now, it asks you if you want to save your progress. The save slots are identified on the slot selection screen by slot number, location your army is at, and (not implemented yet) the amount of time you've played the save for so far.

I have not finished saving. Right now the game saves your inventory, (i.e items, morale/hunger, soldiers, location) but not city data. It should be pretty easy to implement city saving.

The gif below shows that when I buy helmets, the new number was saved after reloading the program.



As a side note, my hard release date is October 12th. The game will be pretty polished by then but I'm still releasing it as a beta to see what people think about the balancing.

Man, the crusades sure were a fun time to be alive! Not as good as these days, but still fun nonetheless. /s

Anyway keep up the great work!

How is this game going? Any progress since last month?

For now, I've been working on fixing up everything that's in the game (a lot to do with battles and saving those battles). As far as visible changes go, I implemented the timer that shows how long you've been playing on a slot. I'm really pleased with it because I think it's a cool idea to take something like that that you see on a real video game and put it into a calculator game. Saving to appvars is completed (even city data saves now), however I have a bug where if you quit during a fight the game does weird things and breaks. For now I have fixed it by not allowing you to save during fights. Other than that, there really is nothing I need to troubleshoot. I just need to fix problems that I know the cause of. I will try to spend a lot of time on it this weekend and will hopefully have a big update then.



To-Do List:
-Fix up battles a little bit
-Integrate morale and its effects (desertion)
-Balance cities and marketplaces (this will take forever)
-A lot of the small things I have listed on previous posts that I don't feel like typing again

Any progress since two months ago?
This looks like an exciting game.

How about real time Total-War battles?
/me hides
A simplified version of the total-war battle system would be possible though, although it would kinda slow and AI would be a problem >_>

Keep up the good work nevertheless