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Defense Mechanic

The primary gameplay element is defending your town from roving bands of pillagers that seek to destroy it. This is accomplished through the construction of defenses that serve to, ultimately, destroy the approaching army. The tough part is for the user to decide exactly what to build and where to put it to net the greatest benefit out of the structures.

Types of Defenses

There are several loose groupings that can be made to give the user certain ways to think about the town defense.

Stationary Defense

This category of units consists of things such as walls, moats, bridges, and similar things that are designed to slow an approaching army. They do not have any offensive capability themselves and are more designed to help herd the approaching pillagers into set paths to maximize the destruction.

Stationary Offense

Grouped in this category will be such things as catapults, arrow towers, machine gun emplacements, and other such things. Some offenses will be able to shoot over stationary defenses (mortars, arrows) while others will not (cannons, etc).

Military

The user can recruit peasants into the military. Effectively this functions as taking some number of peasants and arming them. The downside to these units is that you take away from your peasant population permanently, although they do provide their own advantages that could turn out to be a potent combination.

Building Defenses

The interface for building defenses should be quite simple. Allow the user to select what they want to build from a control panel, then place it on the ground. Arcs/circles should be shown to demonstrate the area of effect this unit has. In the case of walls or other tall defenses, any units that get blocked should be highlighted to advise the user of certain potentially adverse reactions.

The actual construction of the defense will then take some time. A peasant must be dispatched from the city. The construction will then take some period of time based on the particular defense being constructed. Pillagers should not attack units under construction.

Upgrading Defenses

Select the unit to upgrade and choose the upgrade menu option. Feedback should be given about what this upgrade will accomplish. Would be nice to have upgrades that do more than just "speed increased" or "damage increased".

Upgrades function like builds: a peasant must travel to the unit and begin the process of upgrading it. (Although now that I think about it, I don't want to deal with having peasants running around. I could just put a timer on it - "upgrading: 10 seconds left"... keeps it simple.)

Controlling Defenses

Short answer: you don't.

Long answer: certain defenses will have parameters you can set about what kind of enemies to target. This should be kept simple but flexible to enable interesting gameplay. Variable targeting parameters could range from the health of the unit to how close it is to the town.

Outside of adjusting those parameters, you can't direct the defense of your town. You're the architect/dictator, let your defenses do the actual work!