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Town Mechanic
The purpose of the town is to create resources and provide something for you to defend. That's it. Since "provide something for you to defend" does not need any description, we are going to talk about resource creation.
Resource Creation
There are four main resources. This forces the user to have some sort of strategy as they build, and allows us to balance the defensive units being created.
Of the gatherable resources, the user is given the ability to set a priority on them. This can be represented simply as a numeric scale, with -5 being "gather little of this" and +5 being "get as much as you can".
This will be used to calculate how much relative priority to give something. So, if you set everything to +5, it's the same as setting everything to 0 or -5 (i.e., gather in equal quantities). (Maybe we want to allow setting lots of things to + and give bonuses to all gathering but penalize peasant creation?)
Wood
Trees are harvested and wood is created. For simplicity we just assume that the town has a ready supply of trees and can harvest them when they're not otherwise occupied. Wood should be relatively plentiful and used in the creation of most things early on, less so later in the game.
Stone
Simple stone. Gotten from a quarry. As above - simple formula over time. Used in the early to middle portions of the game, especially for walls and things like catapults. (Ammo!)
Ore
Again, we just assume that we have mines that peasants can dig in. Ore is not very important to the early game, but will come into play later as the user upgrades their defenses to use more metal.
Peasants
Peasants perform two functions in a town:
- Construction (build, repair, tear down)
- Resource gathering (as above + peasants)
For simplicity, all peasants that are not occupied with #1 above are active in #2. Resource creation is then allowed to be a very simple formula.
If pillagers get into your town they start to massacre your peasants and plunder your resources. If you reach 0 peasants you lose the game.
The number of peasants you have increases over time based on how many peasants are not busy with construction. Peasants will always be reproducing, but how much they do so is influenced by how busy they are. This ends up being a compound interest sort of equation, as the more peasants you keep free earlier the more you will have in total later.
This gives the user a reason to try to build as little as possible and enables us to set the later levels to appear so difficult that the user has no way to beat them. They are forced to play the early waves with such a tight first on defenses just so they can survive the later waves. (At least, in the harder difficulties of the game!)
Peasants suffer from decay to simulate death from old age, accidents, etc. This means that if you are using all of your peasants in emergency construction, you will see their number going down. This should be some percentage formula which causes the player more harm the more peasants they have. Additionally, the percentage should be influenced by how many peasants are working. Overworking your peasants will lead to an early demise.