Tower defense and resource allocation game. Rather than having just one tower, you have a castle. It has gates and walls and towers.

Then, you have a certain number of things inside the wall, and people attack the castle from all around. It's your job to get wood to the fletchers, arrows to the archers, soldiers to the gates, masons to the walls, etc.

Perhaps from time to time you'll run out of wood so you'll need to send lumberjacks out to the woods with some number of soldiers, and they'll need to fight their way out and back.

And not just distribution, but redistribution.

Sometimes the siege will start from the front, but then more people will come from another side and you'll have to choose to split your forces or take care of the front first, or whatever.

Sometimes you just can't hold the outer walls any longer, and you'll have to retreat back to the inner walls. It'd be good, in that case, to try to get as many of your resources back out of the depot there and into the back before retreating.

Sometimes the soldiers need to defend a broken gate until the builders can get the gate fixed, then they'll need to rush over to the east wall where the archers have been doing well, but not well enough to stop the siege ladders from going up. In that case you'll want to pull your archers out, since they'll get slaughtered up there, and get your soldiers over to kill the people rushing up the walls and destroy the ladder.

That kind of thing.

Brainstorming

Ok, so, have a series of things, like towers and walls, and gates.

Each one has some number of slots, and each slot has a unit type.

So, for example, a tower might have 4 archer slots. A wall might have 6 archer or tar slots, and 6 soldier slots. A gate might have 2 archer or tar slots, and 4 soldier slots.

So, unit types:

• Archers shoot arrows at long and medium range.
• They can hit close range, but they're less effective there.
• Soldiers attack enemies they are next to.
• Tarslingers attack enemies at close range for great damage.
• Workers can fill any slot and while there they repair whichever structure they're attached to

Then, the way the game works is that there are locations and you move units from location to location. Resources work almost the same way, but we'll get to that in a bit.

So, the first location is the pool. This is where all the untrained labour sits.

Then there is the archery range. It has a certain number of slots, that when filled by someone they become an archer, after a brief time.

So, say it has 8 slots. That means that there can be 8 archers either in training, or trained and unassigned. To train more, you grab 8 units from the pool, and move them into the archery range. They sit there for a bit as unassigned, but after a while they become archers, still in the slot. Then, you can move 4 archers from the range out to the Western Wall. They first reserve the slots on the wall, then vacate the slots in the range, then walk to the wall.

There'd also be a place to create soldiers and tarslingers.

Any unit can be moved back to the pool to be stripped of their training and become another unit waiting for further instruction.

Training a unit consumes time, but also some amount of resources. For example, training an archer might cost a bit of wood, whereas training a soldier might take a bit of iron.

Other potential units:

• Wizard:
• Wherever the wizard is stationed is considered to have inifinite resource.
• You can put them wherever you need them the most.
• If they're placed on the wood pile, then you have infinite wood.
• If they're placed on the wall, then you have infinite arrows, tar, stone, food, whatever.
• On the wall, they consume a slot.
• The wood pile doesn't have slots, though, so they just hang out there.
• Medic:
• The medic consumes a slot, but heals the other units in that location.

Resources

I'm thinking that one unit is "mover" or something. They have a wheelbarrow. So, each resource has its own stockpile. Each consuming area also has one. So, if one takes a wheelbarrow unit and moves him to one stock pile he will load up on that resource, then you tell him where to put it.

For example, each wall or tower or gate with archers needs arrows. You need to tell the wheelbarrow guys to fetch arrows from the fletcher and move them to the walls. The fletcher, though, needs wood to make arrows. You need to then also fetch wood from the wood pile and drop it off at the fletcher.

Depending on how I wanted to do it, I could also require all units to be fed, and have food as a resource.

Tar is itself a resource, and without it Tarslingers can't fire, just like archers.

Soldiers don't need anything, I don't think.

Builders may or may not need stone...

At the beginning of the game, while I'm easing people into it, I'm thinking that resources will be infinite. Then, one by one, as they progress I will make things harder by making them have to do more.

So, in the beginning, each archer will have an infinite number of arrows and everything will be fine. Later, though, they'll have to move arrows from the fletcher to the wall, but the fletcher will have infinite arrows. Later still they'll have to move wood to the fletcher to get arrows, which they then have to move to the wall. But there will be infinite wood. For a while...

Gathering Resources

At some point they'll need to gather wood, and will run out of wood inside the castle. They'll have to venture outside the castle walls to the forests out there.

While you can set your mover to take his wheelbarrow out to the woods, and he'll run through the gate and grab wood and come back to put it in the wood pile, that's not a great idea. The movers are not combat unit, and chances are if you need wood it's because things are not safe outside the castle walls.

So, sometimes it might be the case that you're being sieged from the west and there's a forest to the east, and you can just have your movers fetch it safely. Othertimes, though, it might not be so easy.

In those cases you can build a caravan which has slots. Then you can fill the caravan's slots with some movers, some archers, and some soldiers, for example.

The more military units you put into a caravan, the safer it will be. It will not carry as many resources, though, as one that had more movers and fewer guards. That's the tradeoff. So, once the caravan is loaded to your satisfaction, you can send it like it was a mover. It's much harder to attack, though.

I'm thinking later in the game you might have two castles under siege, one that has all of some resource, and another that has another. Then you need to use caravans to move resources between the two castles in order to keep up both of their defenses.

Damage and Enemy Units

The enemy has a lot of units you don't, and vice-versa.

They have soldiers and archers, like you do, but they also have siege machines like trebuchets, and battering rams.

• An archer's job is to take enemy units off the walls, like archers and tarslingers.
• A soldier's job is to attack any units they encounter beyond the wall, to attack the gate to try to break it down.
• If there are any siege ladders active, they will try to climb up them.
• A catapult is used to attack gates, towers, and walls
• I'm not really sure how to defend against these.
• I'm thinking we could build trebuchets inside the castle to take these out...
• Or maybe we can't defend against those, it just makes the level harder because you have to do whatever while still repairing the walls
• A battering ram's job is to breach the gates
• A siege ladder is run to the wall, and if it makes it then it's set up
• Once it's set up, enemy soldiers may pass through the wall as if it had been destroyed
• Enemy soldiers on the wall will be stopped by your own soldiers posted to the wall so long as there are some
• Your soldiers and tarslingers, and to a lesser extent archers, will destroy any ladders on the wall they're stationed at

The way the enemy wins is to get their soldiers into your castle.

Any entrance (walls with ladders, destroyed walls, open gates, destroyed gates) is a way a soldier can get into your castle. Any time a soldier gets to your pool they kill some number of members of it. When you run out of units, you loose, so that's bad since it's much easier for soldiers to kill untrained peasants than soldiers or whatever.

The enemies at an entrance must fight any units at that entrance before they can enter the castle. So, as long as there's some soldiers there, it's not truely open. That can sometimes give you just enough time to get a builder out to repair the gate, or give your soldiers time to destroy the ladders.

I think each unit has a preference for who they try to kill first.

• Archers first try to kill other Archers, then Tarslingers, then Soldiers
• Soldiers first try to kill other Soldiers, then Tarslingers, then Archers
• Tarslingers first try to kill Soliers, then other Tarslingers, then Archers.

This means that if your wall has 3 Soldiers and 6 Archers and enemy Soldiers are coming up the ladder, they will not attack the Archers until you don't have any more Soldiers.

This will also need to extend to all enemy units. For example, the Tarslingers should be much more interested in destroying the Battering Ram than the Soldier attacking the gate.

Cool.