Dragonshard Designer Diary #5 - The Building Nexus

Developer Diary

The Liquid Entertainment staff reveal the finer points of base building.

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It doesn't seem like you can create a real-time strategy game out of a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing experience, but that's the idea behind Dragonshard, the upcoming game from the folks at Liquid Entertainment. Looking to push the RTS genre in whole new directions, Dragonshard will blend real-time strategy with role-playing to a degree not seen before. This means that you will build bases and create armies on the surface of the game's world and then take those armies and adventure in the game's underworld. The RTS portions of Dragonshard won't follow the traditional formula, either, as the designers are looking to innovate in every direction. In this edition of our designer diaries, Dragonshard designer Charley Price explains the new building system. Dragonshard is scheduled to ship this summer.

The nexus system means that you have to optimize the layout of your base, rather than build one huge base.

The Nexus

In Dragonshard, building construction is a dynamic puzzle that impacts the power and potential of your units rather than merely serving as an arduous real-estate management task. You build bases on a nexus. Each nexus is divided into 16 building placement locations, broken up into four distinct four-building "blocks." Each building produces one unit, and it is here that you can spend experience--accrued in-game by completing quests, killing monsters, and/or killing other players--to level up your units and improve their abilities. The more buildings of the same type that are adjacent to one another, the higher you can level the unit in question. In addition, we are planning on each building providing an additional power that can be researched, which, when acquired, will temporarily grant all units produced from that building type an epic buff or special ability for a brief period of time. Adjacent buildings can collaborate with one another to research the same ability, temporarily preventing them from being able to produce units but substantially decreasing the overall research time.

Because of this functionality, each nexus grid now becomes an interactive puzzle that allows you to establish your building arrangement with a particular strategy in mind and to readily adjust your tactics on the fly to suit your opposition. As such, building time and cost are substantially smaller compared to what you might expect from other RTS games, and similarly much easier to take down.

Given the layered importance of buildings and their inherent vulnerability, we found that this rendered players especially susceptible to rushing tactics. As such, we have introduced city walls--fortified structures around each nexus grid that act as a first line of defense. City walls are broken into sections, which include gates, from which friendly units can enter and exit (and hide behind to heal and buff up during a siege); walls, which simply offer a sturdy boundary; and towers, which are found on the corners of the nexus and automatically fire at incoming opposition. While relatively weak at first, walls can be upgraded as resources permit (going from wood to cobble to stone), increasing their resilience to damage and increasing the damage that the towers deal out. Given how this would seem to reinforce a defensive, "turtling" style of play, it's worth noting that you cannot place towers on individual grid slots, so the towers on your nexus walls are all the defenses you have.

Expansion grids (which consist of one "block" of four building spaces) can be found throughout the single and multiplayer levels, and they let you further specialize in a particular unit type. However, these expansion grids are only protected by low-level walls, leaving them vulnerable and susceptible to attack from other players. As such, these grids can serve a number of purposes. For one, they can be a method of remote deployment, with buildings that match the buildings back at your nexus, thus allowing them to pump out high-level units from one building presumably closer to your enemy. On the other hand, they can be used as a method of proper army expansion, where you can build and level up a whole new unit type that you would not have had room to do on your main nexus grid.

Each base has its own walls and towers, to protect against those dreaded early rush attacks.

As with other real-time strategy games, in Dragonshard there is a population cap that sets a limit on the number of units that you can currently have active at any given time based upon the total number of buildings that you have constructed. However, there is another twist. For every population unit that remains unused, you will gain "taxes" from your population, which amounts to a constant stream of gold flowing into your coffers. While this is by no means the most efficient way of acquiring gold, it provides an additional choice for you, making small, elite forces viable rather than always feeling pressured to fill out the population cap to maximize efficiency. In addition, it provides a little extra boost to players whose forces have just been decimated in combat so that they can start getting back on their feet, and thus encouraging opposing players to keep the pressure on.

Our goal with Dragonshard was to make buildings a cool and interesting element of our game that prompted diverse and interesting choices, rather than serving as a hurdle to overcome. In its current state, the nexus grid offers a variety of unique choices for you to make, in addition to providing an interesting siege/besieged experience that differs from the run-of-the-mill base sieging found in other RTS games.