Ways of History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Various topics about the game, the website, or anything else Freeciv related that doesn't fit elsewhere.
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Ignatus
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Ways of History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Post by Ignatus »

Ways of History (rus. Пути истории) is one of the most successful efforts to make Civilization a multiplayer game with concurrent actions. This browser game appeared in 2009 and became rather popular in Russian-speaking Internet in 2011. Differences from Freeciv:
  • Full real time game, no turns. Units have speed in tiles per hour, cities collect resources each hour etc.
    • That means, being online more time gives considerable advantage.
    • One can join the game a while after it has started, but first days are very important and your development will be considerably back.
  • Sad but can't omit it, donate. For roubles (converted into "coins of fortune") one can enhanse some city outputs on 20-30%, or have better interface.
  • Tribes lead by individual players can join into countries. Embassy is a player-unique building that allows one to found a country and to have diplomacy points that are needed to accept new players into it.
    • Country launches a common spaceship that is mandatoey to win the game.
    • Joining one country is the only way to share techs. (In the process of joining, some beakers (known as "bulbs" in Freeciv) are spent on aligning the tech levels).
    • Adding a player to a country that already has N players costs 10*N*N diplo points. Diplo points are sum of embassy levels of the players, maximal upkeep free embassy level is 4 and maximal at all is 20. If a country loses diplo points beneath its existenve level, it has no science progress.
    • Country has government that consists of head of the country (the founder) and some other duties assigned by him and responsible for certain aspects of the country's life (mainly science direction, treasury and war)
    • Treasury keeper sets taxes on population and/or different types of operations (but players may smuggle things...)
  • Each player selects one of four races, each one has its favourite food resource and other bonuses.
  • Buildings have levels that contribute to their upkeep cost and effect.
  • A city has finite number of slots where buildings can be put. (There are water, lowlands and highlands slots, depending on local and adjacent terrain, some of them require payment.) Most buildings can be built in several slots of the same city.
  • Wonders are not globally unique but have a map radius in which they must be unique (not dependent on if in the same player/country's or foreign cities); some of their effects also have some radius. Each city may have 1 wonder at maximum.
  • There is no distributing workers by tiles. Each city has three sliders of what to occupy its population with that go from 20% to 60%. The sliders are Wisemen/Farmers/Workers before you know "Money" tech and Science/Finances/Production after (yup, you have no gold before you know how to use it). Also, it can be controlled if a resource is consumed or accumulated (or sent away by trade means). Mainly city collects resources from its own tile, but also may take resources from bonus deposits opened in 2 tiles radius; irrigating neighbour tile gives +1% growth. Number of resources that a city may use grows with its population (~proportional to square root). Growth is mostly not proportional to population but collecting resources is. Food and Wood are harvested by each city, Marble is harvested by all hill cities but better goes from deposits, totally there is 21 resources 13 of which can be found only in deposits.
  • To see a resource deposit, you (for most types of them) must know a corresponding tech; before it the tile is marked to have "unknown" deposit. To open it, you must spend a number of workers equal to squared number of cities of the player. Cities can't be founded on deposits.
  • The land terrain has separate climatic zone (snow, grassland, steppe or desert) and relief (plains or hills, mountains are hardly passable and can't have cities or roads). Probability to have some deposit depends on both.
  • To explore terrain, you send intelligence units to a non-city tile (number of units depends on distance, the units are spent but the vision is permanent). In 20 tiles radius, attack on non-barbarian city explores the map (to the degender always, to the attacker if somebody survived), also, map is shared to a city in this radius where you send over 200 (250 in other games) resource. A country shares maps in city vision radii (they are expanded by many inventions).
  • Most buildings that produce some useful things slow down city growth.
    • So military-producing cities have maximal growth and small size with minimum of buildings not needed for troops while science-producing ones have large size and small growth.
  • City can't grow more than its culture that is enhanced by special buildings and wonders.
  • Units are not locatable when not resting in cities, they are just sent on missions that consume some time (distance/roads dependent).
  • Battles (that all are city attacks) are not random. All troops attack simultaneously, but are assigned to different tactical roles (melee, bombarders, flank defense...) that influence who fights whom. If defenders lose, the remaining attacking troops rob the city and bring loot and information to their departure city. War machines can destroy cities but not conquer.
    • If defenders resist 8 rounds (first 4 rounds are different due to bonuses and functions of different tactical roles, later ones are uniform) but some attackers survive, then the battle is drown, the city is looted and observed but the population and buildings are intact.
    • Aviation strike happens in a single round. Not all units can strike the aviation back, and not all units of the attacking aviation can damage land or sea units. Defending aviation (in the city or in other cities of the country within its operating radius) strikes the attacking one without reciprocal damage. If the attackers win, they destroy buildings.
    • If land attackers win, they destroy all aviation in the city, as well as all aviation sent out of the city 3 hours before or later.
    • Beakers not yet commited to scientific progress can be also looted. "Cache" building does not hand them, and commiting not full science bar needs a manual action.
    • Each land war unit and some small boats have "capacity" of how many loot they can carry.
    • "Population killer" and "building destroyer" are features of unit types that have an effect if the army wins. "Wall destroyers" strike each next round of the battle.
  • Investigating a city is a battle between intelligence units of the city and a party coming (the defenders don't die or inform their owner on the fact).
  • Cities have passive defenses (trap pits kill a specific number of land troops, helioconcentrator and air defenses do the same to ships and aviation, cache reduces loot if defenders lose).
  • Producing a unit require a number of population and some other resources. Units are upkept with certain resources permanently.
  • City buildings have finite capacity of resources. If you collect more and don't spend immediately, they are lost.
  • Roads require a specific number of workers and spending some resources to be built (type of road dependent). Most roads and opening deposits consume the workers involved.
  • Resource exchange between cities require building traders and consumes "pack animals" resource (one animal transports up to 50 of other resources).
  • Instead of huts, early game bonuses are given by "hermit's quests", the old man asks the player to do things like build some building or found second city.
  • "Barbarians" are cities that lost their owner (account blocked or on deletion list, player idled for a time depending on his population, city is destroyed by war machines). The cities lose their wonder and deposits (but still produces usual resources), their population gradually reduces until they disappear. They don't attack, mainly you rob them (but they may have garrison, e.g. reinforcements sent to another cities that auromatically come back when the city goes barbarian).
Last edited by Ignatus on Mon Dec 28, 2020 6:11 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Corbeau
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Re: Ways of the History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Post by Corbeau »

Any screenshots available?
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Ignatus
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Re: Ways of the History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Post by Ignatus »

Corbeau wrote:Any screenshots available?
Look on their Wikia: https://wofh.fandom.com/ru/wiki/%D0%A1% ... 0%B8%D1%8F
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Re: Ways of History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Post by Ignatus »

Things I found out when I joined the game (Int14 world):
  • The thing about science progress is scientific distribution between cities due to their rating within a country (or an unjoined player) by their bulbs. The bulbs a city actually contributes are multiplied on a coefficiency that has a formula including an arctangent and some unexplained coefficiencies. Certain sciences ("meta-sciences" like Writing, Arithmetics etc.) change this coefficiencies: without any of them your 1st city contributes exctly the bulbs it can produce, the second city gives little over 1/8 of its bulbs and the rest give virtually nothing; as the situation improves, more cities give you over 60% of their bulbs, but beyound the 3rd science (that gives ~123% of bulbs to pos. 1) your "scientific capital" loses its value.
  • Corruption formula (applied to all produced resources) is min(20% * (num_player_cities -1) / city_courthouse_eft, 90%), where the courthouse effect is 1.3 for level 1 courthouse and 11.9 for level 20 (but the courthouse slows down population growth on 3...60 units per day respectively, and since level 4 requires increasingly big upkeep in money). There are production bonuses from sciences but they are applied after the corruption.
  • Increased number of workers in buildings also reduces city productivity ("effectivity") in the power of -0.12. And most more novel production buildings improve their effect by mere increasing allowed number of workers, when productivity per one worker goes down (e.g. Hunter's House has basic efficiency 5 meat/worker*h but allows max 40 workers, while Animal Farm has basic efficiency 4 meat/worker*h but can recruit 48 workers at level 2 and 2442 at level 20).
  • You waste a lot, compared to Freeciv. When you build a building or train a pack of units of the same type, you invest all resources in lump sum. If you cancel the production, they all are lost. Workers sent to improve terrain never come back. If you dismantle a building due to no area for building another one, or lower its level since you can't pay the upkeep of higher one, all invested resources are lost. Only if you rebuild a building from one obsoleted by it, you get some percents of discount for the first level of the new building, no difference if the old one was L1 or L20 (buildings are obsoleted by buildings, not techs, so it's probably advantageous to build one level of Moat before you start Palisade).
    • Btw, if you build a building obsoleting another one (e.g. House insto Tipi) ond you have several instances of the obsoleted building in a city, you must upgrade them all in time or dismantle some before.
    • You can build only one building at time and queue (with immediate investment of resources) only one or two (with premium account) next ones.
    • You can train any number of units of the same type in time in one building if only you have enough resources. Each building has its own training queue but it also can handle only two groups. You can take out immediately units from the city groups in training at the percentage they have already trained before the rest of them, but you don't want because units consume pretty much upkeep since they are out.
    • So some buildings are not available to you because of low capacity of your storage. As well as producing a huge group of settlers (remember, 50*num_player_cities^2 in Int14 game) in one time, and they eat a lot.
  • Also, your science query consists of 4 techs max. There is tech leakage but the bonuses are applied after you learn a tech, so jumping several techs at time before yoou find one expensive enough is not uncommon, so you may jump to an automatically selected one that you maybe don't want much. Another bonus is that you have 25% of produced bulbs doubled and distributed towards the progress of currently researchable advancesother than current one.
  • Important thing about deposits I learned on my own errors:
    • A city may use at maximum one at time.
    • Using one slows the growth on 15%.
    • You can't grow some food resources without deposits - specifically, ones that Indians, Europeans and Asians have 130% bonus on (Africans have 108% bonus for Fruits that are found everywhere).
    • Unknown deposits are displayed as random landmarks. There is no correlation between the landark and the type of the deposit. Some of them are just obstacles that will never give something useful.
What I don't like in this game is the game philosophy that is probably common for MMORTS but I'm not a fan of them:
  • While some micromanagement is neatly reduced compared to other Civ-games (some sliders insto clicking tiles, virtually impossible to build over 10 cities per player, units are distributed into battle formations since some tech but that is far less work than 2D warfare etc.), the game requires to spend lots of time in it to not fall out of course. It's definitely not for me, I need sometimes to sleep, to eat, to walk or even to work. Heck, even if you queued last two levels of a wonder for a night, in the morning you need to log in and click the hecked "Activate wonder" button! Maybe they think, more time=more player's attraction=more donate, but I think it's a wrong and maybe even unethical way.
  • Poor and vague help provided. In Freeciv it's also crippled but at least I can see the code. They say, it's part of the game to investigate the rules, but I think the gae is the playing and the rules just make it possible; it's up to you to read them attentively and make right conclusions but to hide them is a false difficulcy. The biggest shame: the combat stats are not on unit's pages, you can know them only by clicing a unit in combat view or siulation, and the formulae are hidden (they say, to avoid rock-paper-scissors strategy victory mechanism, but we somehow tend to have fun with more comfortable ingame wiki).
  • YOU CANT ROB THE CARAVANS!!!
If you want to know more, there is a paper in English (for a beginner but who already runs a country): Country in a nutshell
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Re: Ways of History - a Civ-like MMORTS game

Post by Ignatus »

A pair more things I have not mentioned:
  • Roads work rather different from Civ: firstly, they make percentage acceleration insto some constant move rate, secondly, they are not abstractly "paved on a tile" but connect a specific pair of adjacent tiles. Also, need to mention that diagonal moves cost 1.5x.
  • As in world Int14, they diverged from three-slider city manager to as many sliders as many resources you can produce (including money and bulbs), and it seems to me you can't steal bulbs any more. Also, embassy now bring several points per level, it's enough one not too high embassy for a country of 3.
  • Did I mention the simple but realistic market the game has? You can trade with barter or with money, to export resources you need to have enough merchants and probaby to give them speed-up resources, you can make proposals in specific range and to wait for a response on them you need large enough depots, a good position allows you resell goods and have profit from marketplace alone... Of course you need at least a hundred or two players to make it running.
  • While "human" units need special resources only to build them and only few food to upkeep, technical units tend to consume loads of fuel, metal and other valuable things any hour.
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