First, I am not a graphic designer by any stretch. I can probably figure this out on my own, though it's going to take time. I'm certainly not opposed to any graphics assistance if someone would like to work with me. Also, I'm pretty busy with work and family, so if this idea catches on, development is going to be somewhat slow.
General Concept:
I'm trying to capture the spirit of the Settlers of Catan game, much the way the Chess map works. The pieces from the board game are already in place and provide bonuses in a similar manner to what the board game gives. I want someone that is familiar with the Catan game to look at the map and be able to anticipate how the bonuses might work once they have the general idea. Conversely, to someone that has never played Catan, this might be a pretty complex map, but I don't want it to be too much more so than say "Age of Merchants"
All caveats aside, here's a very rough sketch of what I'm thinking about:
- Click image to enlarge.
- Yellow hexagons are wheat fields, Dark green ones are forests, light green ones are sheep pastures, brown ones are clay pits, and grey ones are stone quarries. The pinkish hexagon is the desert.
- The small house-looking structures are farms (equivalent to the Catan "settlements"), and the castle-looking structures are villages (think "cities" from the Catan games).
- The colored lines along the edges of some of the hexagons are roads. The small white circles are the territories, and the territory connections are along all the edges of the inner hexagons.
- The large circles at the edges are markets (Catan "ports") that offer bonuses. The markets are not separate territories but are accessed by controlling the connected farm. The white markets are general markets, and the colored ones only trade in the resource of the matching color.
Bonuses:
- Farms autodeploy 1 per turn (or give +1 bonus?)
- Villages autodeploy 2 per turn (or give +2 bonus?)
- If you control the entire length of 5 consecutive road segments, all of the same color, you get +2 bonus.
- Resource bonuses: Each farm collects 1 resource unit from each of the 1-3 resource types surrounding them. Villages collect two of each of the surrounding resource units. For every 4 of a single resource type, you get a +1 bonus. For example, the red regions collects 6 clay resources per turn (2 villages on clay pits collect 2 each and 2 farms collect 1 each for a total of 6). That gives a +1 bonus.
(Aside: It might be nice to be able to roll extra resources from one round to the next, but I'm not sure if that's possible. I have an idea of how it might work using hidden territories, but I'm not sure if even that is possible. Point for future thought though.) - If you control a general market, the resource bonus is +1 for every 3 of a given resource collected each turn (instead of every 4). In the example given above, whoever controlled the red farms and villages would receive +2 armies each turn.
- The resource-specific markets give a +1 bonus for every 2 of a given resource collected each turn. (This replaces the 1/4 normal bonus and the 1/3 general market bonus.) As an example, if you control all the orange farms and villages, you collect 5 stone per turn, and the stone port gives you a +2 bonus.
- Possibly farms and villages on the desert receive a -1. I can use this to balance things if any single color is receiving significantly higher bonuses than the others.
Note that the territories that don't contain a road, farm, or village, are not part of any bonus. On the other hand, the farm and village territories are generally part of a variety of bonuses at the same time.
Gameplay Ideas:
I was thinking about using the 16 farms as starting points. Each player would receive two farms as his only starting territories.
To win the game, you have to control all farms, villages, and road segments (both ends) of any single color.
Additional thoughts:
- It may be necessary to specify that markets only work for the corresponding color. For example, if you grab the orange-colored stone port, you can't increase the bonus by grabbing up the green, blue, and red farms and villages surrounding the quarries. It would allow that one bonus to be as high as +7 per turn in addition to all the other small bonuses.
- I'm also considering not giving a territory bonus since there are so many bonuses already present on the map. That may make things difficult to start the game, but it would be easier if the initial deploy was 5 in each farm or something.
- Since the empty territories aren't worth anything, it might be best to start them all with 1 neutral. Road segments (without farms or villages) would have 3 neutrals. Farms not initially controlled by a player would start with 5 neutrals, and villages would start with 8.
- I'll need to tweak the layout some. I tried to set it up so that two people couldn't win at the same time. As it currently stands, someone could control all the red territories, and another person could control all the blue territories without interfering with each other. I also want to try to make sure no single color will naturally get larger bonuses than the others. I haven't added everything up to make sure it's properly balanced yet.
