CityStates: Medieval
A quick primer what we have planned going forward.
Why Hexagons?
Fields on the city map, world map and PvP battle map are hexagon shaped to enable more strategic decisions especially in PvP and to have a consistent design between the different areas.
City/Buildings:
Every player gets the same city map to have an even level to start from.
Pre-set are the castle (representing overall level of the player) and housing for the first Villagers. Except for the castle, all buildings can be moved to other positions to be able to protect important buildings behind the castle walls.
There are X kinds of buildings:
- Houses for villagers and Barracks for troops limit the population one city can have at a given time. The player can upgrade or build more of these to increase the limits.
- Gatherer - like the Forester
Continuously gathers wood until local storage is full. Needs to be moved to storage by player with a click/tap. - Producer - like the Farm
Player can select from different crops to produce with different yield and time until production finishes. - Refiner - like the Smelter
Coal is needed to refine iron ore to iron bars. Player can set an amount to refine, set until storage runs out of resources or local storage is full. - Crafter - like the Blacksmith
Iron bars and coal are needed to craft weapons and tools. Higher level items may also require other resources like gold bars for ornaments.
Each building needs Villagers assigned to work in the building. The amount of working spots depends on the level of the building. Similar to regular jobs, Villagers can also be assigned to the military which turns them into Recruits.
- Training - like the Archery
Recruits get trained for a specific troop type. Each type has Weapons/Armor only these troops can equip, custom base stats and specific actions on the battle field. For example: Archer can equip bow, has ranged attack.
Each of the five troop types have their own building for training.
Population Needs and Feels, Building degradation
Naturally, the population (Pops) needs to be fed and kept warm. Pops consume food and wood from the main storage regularly. If needs are not met, their mood decreases, leading to a lower productivity in the buildings they work in. If their mood gets too low, military units will be demoted to regular villagers again and villagers will leave the city.
With the player leveling up and growing his city, villagers as well as higher level troops will demand more or different resources to keep their mood. As long as sufficient housing is available, the player can attract new Villagers by offering Food.
Player vs Player
For now, PvP is limited to rank up in weekly competitions. Players are matched with near same level players and duke it out on a turn based battle map. The visuals will be similar to combat in Civilization.
A troop always consists of several units. When health is reduced, the percentage decrease removes single units of the troop. Equipment of the removed units partially drop directly as loot for the enemy and partially for the winner of the match.
World, Base attacks, Clans, Domination etc
While these and a lot more are part of the concept, we are not actively working on these as of now since we simply don’t have the funds to add at this point. This might change with the upcoming crowdfund sale. Instead of feature creep, we cut down to what we need to get started regardless of external funding.
Blockchain integration
The CityStates concept has been designed with the intention to use blockchain where possible without requiring the player to know anything about it or having to personally create and maintain wallets, register on exchanges etc. Basically blockchain works its magic in the background, open for everyone that wants to see it but not necessary for casual players to understand what exactly is happening in the back.
Part 1 — Stellar Network
The Stellar Network is a distributed ledger but without complex smart contract capabilities. It was mainly designed to process payments, issue and exchange assets. One of its core features is the integrated distributed exchange, path-payments feature and sponsored reserves which we will utilize in ‘CityStates’.
After building the Marketplace in the game, the player will be able to start trading items on the integrated Stellar DEX. To ease the onboarding of casual players, we will sponsor reserves needed to create an account and trustlines on the Stellar Network for every player. As mentioned, this is an automatic process done in the background.
The Marketplace interface is fetching live data directly from the Stellar Network. The player can see the orderbooks and history for each asset and submit his own orders to buy or sell his assets, trading against the in-game currency. For more casual players, there will also be a simple buy/sell interface executing Market instead of Limit orders. Every order, trade and transaction will be forever publicly visible on the Stellar Network and can be analyzed by sophisticated players/developers.
nicetrade.co is one of the existing interfaces to access the Stellar DEX and the developer will be working on the DEX integration at CityStates.
While resources and goods are only tradeable against the in-game currency, the in-game currency itself is tradeable against several cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, XLM etc) and stablecoins (USDC, EURT, CYN etc) and functions as a bridge between game and real world.
Part 2 — ethereum blockchain
While Stellar is the best solution for fungible tokens (like resources etc), Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are better issued on a blockchain that supports smart contracts. Our first choice here is ethereum with option for users to swap their NFTs to other blockchains. Although fees are very high as of now, solutions are to be released soon and hopefully reduce fees to a feasible amount before we publish CityStates. Other options are in place if this is not the case.
NFTs in CityStates will be used to issue Heroes and their equipment. The first Hero to be released as a limited edition is ‘Magnus’:
Magnus can be sent, sold, traded or auctioned between players. Each issue of Magnus can also be tracked on the ethereum blockchain.
There are plans to have more integrations with smart contract platforms like ethereum where players for example can find shards in the game and craft equipment for heroes; procedurally generated according to the stats and compilation of shards they submit to the smart contract.
The Economy
Now this all sounds a little bit like pay 2 win — and to be honest to an extend it is but then again it really isn’t. There hasn’t been anything like this before aa far as I know so it’s hard to make any predictions but this is not an economy where we (the developer) suck out any value provided by players as profit for the company.
Let’s start with HEXA. Our in-game currency is not meant for speculation. It’s an utility token through and through. There is no fixed supply, no moonshots but also no chart depression. Revenue distribution and buy back scheme is designed to let the value of the coin grow over time while simultaneously creating a floor for all HEXA in circulation.
When a player buys 1,000 HEXA from us, we receive $3 (after fees and deductions). We then use 75% of the revenue ($2.25) and automatically open a buy order for the same amount (1,000 HEXA) on the SDEX. This creates a trading range for players by placing buy and sell orders to find the current real in-game value. This set up also guarantees that if literally everyone decides to sell at the same time, they will all get at least 75% of the value that was previously paid back out of the game.
Heroes, weapons, skins and other NFTs as well as quality of life upgrades that are not paid for with in-game currency give additional support to the price with 25% of its value.
Example:
We sold $30,000 worth of in-game currency (10,000,000) at $0.003 and opened a buy back order for 10,000,000 at $0.00225 (75% value $22,500).
Sold: 10,000,000 HEXA at $0.003
Revenue: $30,000
Buy back: 10,000,000 HEXA at $0.00225
We then sell $5,000 worth of other items (NFT and QoL). 25% of the proceeds ($1,250) will be used to support the in-game currency.
The buy back still needs to be 10,000,000 but now we have $23,750 in remaining funds. The buy back order will be adjusted to 10,000,000 at $0.002375. Since the buy back order needs to be just 75% of the sale price, the new sale price will be adjusted to $0.00316667 each.
Sold: 10,000,000 HEXA at $0.003
Revenue: $35,000
Buy back: 10,000,000 HEXA at $0.002375
As outlined above, we take 25% of in-game currency sales and 75% of other items that don’t directly affect the game economy. These funds will be used to finance further development, payments to holders of our governance token, artists royalties, salaries, competitions, marketing etc.
TL;DR: Whales and paying players are not good for the devs only but for the whole economy and thus for everyone playing the game as they buy from other players and raise the value of all resources in the game.
