[glob2-devel] Revive the market

[Bradley Arsenault]

I read on stephanes neew gameplay idea, and noted that near the end
everyone wanted to "revive the market." The market is ofcoarse a dead
building. Its quite useless. I propose we fix that, and I have a
simple way to do it. I say we implement resource sharing between
markets. Meaning markets will become one global resevoir for
recources. They can be used, for example, to harvest wheat in one
area, and use it in another. I can't think of something simpler to
implement, all it is is a few wavefront changes, a couple of added
variables to the Team class, and a change in the gui. Thats
practically it. Better yet, the usage of the new market still revolves
around the name "market", and so the graphics for the market are also
still going to work.

This would add a simple, but entirely new element to the gameplay. You
could have all of your resources harvested in one area, and then used
in another, but then your using twice as many workers to carry the
same amount of resource, and if your enemy decides to attack your
market, one building can cause the destruction of a great deal,
everything that depends on that market will soon run out of resources.
So its not just a cheap way to gain an advantage, certainly using
markets in this manner come with ups and downs.

As well, the idea is wide open to be expanded upon later, but it
doesn't all have to be done at th same time for the market to make
sense. For example, in the future, it should be possible to select
what kinds of resources are incoming and outgoing on a particular
market, so that if there is lots of wood in one area dn lots of wheat
in another, both of them can thrive easily, rather than having global
a incoming/outgoing. As well, it may be made so that the global
maximum that can be stored in the markets increases as you own more
markets. From this idea, we can grow into upgrading: Higher level
markets allow for more amount of global resource stoarge. Obvioussly,
at the beggining, the global resource stoarge should be very low,
perhaps 10 or 5 per resource, so that it requires constant input in
order to be usefull. It would not be fun if your opponent builds one
market, you go and destroy it, but it takes the next half hour for you
to see the effects, and by then he has probably rebuilt his market.

The idea has merit. It could be easily implemented, and to the best of
my knowledge, do able in a weekend. Meaning we could do it soon, and
have it well tested for 1.0, so that we don't go into 1.0 with a
pretty much useless building.