There will be different means of transportation. Some of them are more or less a commodity for the player where others are critcial to advancing in the world. The different transportation options allow access to areas not reachable otherwise and are an essential item for exploring the game world.

Travelling by foot

Travelling by foot is possible but rather slow. Water can’t be crossed on foot. Some types of terrain take more time. Some types take a greater toll of your stamina. Roads and bridges provide the easiest travel. More time is needed to pick your way through forests and across glaciers -the treacherous marshes take the most time of all. The drain on your energy ranges from roads up through plains, forests, deserts and glaciers to those treacherous marshes again. Mountains and rivers simply cannot be crossed without other means of transporation. The going is slower after dark, and when your party members are tired. It is impossible when they are exhausted. Transports is also needed to increase carring capacity. They can be stolen though, or if it is an animal die from thirst. Last but not least it is easiert to discover a party if they use a caravan. But it also may be easier to flee an encounter if the party is mounted and the other side on foot.

Features

• Faster Movement
• Movement depending on wind/currents
• Access to other areas
  • Can cross water
  • Can fly over mountains
  • Can cross swamp/lava without taking harm
• Provides storage capacity
  • For persons
  • For items
• Has means of self defense
  • Harpoons on a ship
  • Fire breathing animals
• Instant Movement to other places

Types

1. Balloon
   • Can cross everything except high mountains
   • Can and will fly in the direction of the winds
2. Caravan
   • Provide a lot of storage capacity
   • Can only travel on roads
3. Flying Carpet
4. Galley
   • Some of the towns on the water have ships for hire, which will transport you to other port cities, saving you the walking time.
   • Only operate seaside and rivers
   • Can’t be operated by the party alone.
5. Mount: Birdlike
   • Can fly
6. Mount: Frog
   • Can travel swamps safely
7. Mount: Horse
   • faster movement
8. Sailboat
   • Only useable on sahllow & medium deep water in the open sea
   • Either needs a sailing crew or some people in the party with sailing experience
9. Skiff
   • Portable to some degree
   • Can navigate only shallow water
10. Submarine
    • Can travel underwater

Properties

• Cost
• Agent capacity
• Storage capacity
• Movement speed
• Movement type
• Owner
• Position (?)
• Upkeep

Questions

Settlement

Enter while using transport

For every type of transport a parking position exists, player spawns next to this location

USE transport in settlement

If the player is the owner of the transport and uses it she immediatly leaves the settlement using this transport. If not, a pop up dialogue appears which asks if the player wants to steal it.

Buy transport

Transport spawns at the parking position. If the parking position is occupied the player can’t buy this transport.

Sell transport

Transport which the player wants to sell must be in parking position in the settlement. When sold, it disappears.

Leaving settlement without using transport

Message appears which says that transport will be seized by the authorities

Worldmap

Attacked while in tranpsort

Simply enter combat with the party unmounted. Depending on the transport, the combat map depends on the transport (e.g. balloon, galley).

Unmounting transportation

• Abandoning transportation
• Ships can only be unboarded when next to land

Open questions

General

Should a list of bought transports be saved?

Worldmap

USE on Worldmap

• Exit transport -> what happens then? Should it be possible?
• How to mount transport?
• How to Access storage?

Additions in future versions

• Some types of terrain take more time
• Some types take a greater toll of your stamina
• The going is slower after dark, and when your party members are tired
• It is impossible when they are exhausted
• They can be stolen though
• Animals must be feeded
• Last but not least it is easier to discover a party if they use a caravan.
• But it also may be easier to flee an encounter if the party is mounted and the other side on foot.
• Different factions are not allowing every kind of transport (e.g. frogs are not used by imperials)
• The embargo when leaving tranpsortation behind could change to be time dependend
• When flying on the worldmap party can only be attacked by flying enemies or those with ranged weapons
• When exiting transport on worldmap the transport doesn’t get deleted -> but what else?

Declined Features

Teleportation

There are some teleporters in every imperial settlement: ##LINK## Portal of Defenders of Civilisation (Podoc) Besides that there should not be a way to teleport on the worldmap. For convenience reasons there exists a ##Link Quicktravel option.

“It’s also kind of lame that the Orb works in the middle of combat, enabling instant escape–directly to Lord British’s throne room for healing, if you want–when things get tough. I certainly don’t mind cutting down on travel time, but I think the Avatar should have to visit the stone circles associated with each destination before the Orb will take him there.”

The party can rest on the Worldmap and on the Settlement Maps. Resting doesn’t restore and heal everything. This ensures that time spend travelling and battling wears the PCs down. They need a certain amount of efficency to survive. Only when they are in settlements they can fully regain their power, as resting in the wilderness always poses the risk of a random encounter.

Effects:

• Cures Bleary-eyed (more than 8h)
• Restores Stamina (10% per hour)
• Restores Morale
• Restores 1 point of health and if somene is attending you 3 points

Modifiers:

• Resting at night
• Without Food
• Without Water

Pray: Priests can pray to their gods

Resting on the Worldmap

If the party rests on the worldmap it is builidng a camp. Setting the camp up needs some time and equipment. If some equipment is missing, or the weather is too bad, the positive effect of resting will be smaller. The party also needs food to rest, otherwise the resting effects are minimal.

Attending a companion: Helps the companion to heal faster.

Conserving food: Meat or other food rots, so it has to be conserved if the meat should be added to the food reserves.

Equipment: Sleeping Roll

Encounters: Party may encounter NPCs during rest. If so, some members of the party will enter the encounter with their condition listed as asleep.

Fireplace: Making a fire restores stamina faster and food and water is used more efficiently. A fire draws more encounters, because it can be seen for a long distance. It also cures the conditions cold.

Hunting for Food: Some campsites are better suited for hunting than others. Forests are good. Icefields, deserts and highways are bad. The Player has to decide who goes hunting. During the hunt these agents could encounter some wild animals, etc. Also enemy NPCs could wait with raiding the camp until some PCs are gone for hunting, thus reducing the amount of defenders.

Scout: Is a scout in the party the player gets feedback, if e.g. lighting a fire makes an encounter more likely or not. He also gives an overall assesment of the situation: Which dangers are about, wild animals, etc.

Party size: The bigger the party the higher the chance of an encounter

Resting in Settlements

Resting in an settlement usually requires the party to pay for in an inn, unless they have the invitation to do so in someones house. They could also scout for empty houses and rest there, but they could be discovered by the local guard or maybe attract local thieves.

Encounters: Party may encounter thieves during rest. If so, some members of the party will enter the encounter with their condition listed as asleep.

Inn Quality: The better the Inn the faster the party recovers. A higher price of a musn’t reflect in a better quality. The inn costs per party member. The cheapest one carry a risk of disease and theft.

ToDo

• Implement UI
• Implement mechanics

CRPG Addicts influence:

Read more about his influence or visit his blog.

It’s system of resting and restoration is, at first glance, drawn from Might & Magic. The party can rest for 8 hours at almost any location, and 8 hours of rest fully restores hit points and spell points. That makes it sound a little too easy, just as Might & Magic noften was, but you have a supply of food that continually depletes as you move and rest, and you can’t rest if it’s gone. nMight & Magic had that, too, but the difference here is that food is rare and expensive. You can find some in the wilderness and buy it in town, but a few days’ supply costs a couple hundred gold pieces, and at the beginning, at least, finances are tight. This means that you can’t abuse the rest system, and the game manages to find that nice balance between individual combat difficulty and accumulation-of-combats difficulty that characterize Might & Magic and Wizardry, respectively.

A few more thoughts on the resting issue: Might & Magic II could have ramped up the tactical level by including more serious consequences to resting too often. Right now, there are only four, and none of them are consequential enough to worry about:

1. You risk getting attacked in your sleep. Easily countered with the “Instant Keep” spell, and random attacks aren’t that common anyway.
2. You use a unit of food. But food is cheap and you can carry 40 units. If you could only carry five or six meals, or if each one cost a bundle, it would encourage the player to be a bit more sparing with how often he or she rests.
3. You age a day, and once you hit 75 years of age, there’s a chance your characters might die. My characters are all still 18, though (in contrast to the first game, when they aged four or five years in the first town alone), and I’m sure by the time they’re in their 30s, I’ll have the “Rejuvenate” spell. Making the aging faster, or eliminating the spell, would encourage more care in the passage of time.
4. Your NPCs charge for their services. Right now, I’m paying 40 gold pieces per NPC per day, or about a twelfth of what I find in a typical battle. If NPCs charged more (and they do increase their fees as the levels go up), I guess that would make more of a difference.
5. I would have preferred if the game had really made you stop and think before hitting that “r” button–if it had encouraged to squeeze every step out of each day. Another alternative would have been to only heal half, or a quarter, of your hit points and spell points with each rest.

It only gets better in future games as the number of spells increases and give you more options. Because you can only recover spells by sleeping, and because you can’t go to sleep in most places until you’ve cleared them, the game strikes a good balance between individual-combat difficulty (as in Might & Magic) and accumulation-of-combats difficulty (as in Wizardry).

I was going to comment that the rule that characters only get 1 HP restoration from 24 hours’ rest is kind of stupid. Then I thought about it and realized that resting for 2 months to go from death’s door to perfect health is probably about accurate. In much later AD&D-based games like Baldur’s Gate, one night’s rest restores all hit points, I think.

Rest and HP recovery rules in AD&D tabletop have always been brutal. You recovered 1 HP per day of normal rest, and if you were doing a full-on “stay in bed all day” with someone attending to you, you could recover 3HP per day. It was assumed players would use magical healing to get back into fighting shape faster.