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ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
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Notes -
I would recommend Minecraft, given what you've described here. The vanilla game has no serious management ecosystem (villagers are useless idiots you stick in boxes), but Minecolonies adds a very robust one that gives a pretty interesting progression loop. Combat can be involved at start, especially before you have armor or a sufficient area cleared to avoid skeletons finding you, but it pretty quickly reaches the point where most monsters are resources to be harvested rather than challenges to be scaled.
These games fit into a rare category. There's a lot of Civ Builders, ranging from classics like Dwarf Fortress to ZorbaTHut's own work in Rimworld, but they're usually treating the player as an eye in the sky rather than part of the world. There's a lot of Harvest Moon (well, Story of Seasons/Rune Factory-likes), but they're usually not about customizing or varying your world that much -- usually you're limited to changing farm plots and the inside of a house, and maybe a story progression marker. Animal Crossing doesn't even really get that. Games focusing on roving bands like Kenshi or Blade And Mount have even less world customization, even if they have the NPC management bit, and tend to be too high-strung on the combat side. Meanwhile, dedicated Base Builders like ARK, Factorio or Planet Explorers leave the world feeling and being very empty.
Some of that's because meaningful pathfinding AI is hard, and widespread 3d customizable worlds is Hard (so hard, in fact, Subnautica built and then stripped out the system), and mixing those things and then adding meaningful NPCs on top of that is even harder. But it also just feels like a really underexplored space.
And that's a pity, because it's a really fun space.
Could this be resolved in part by having the player design routines for the AI? Like a Minecraft/Dwarf-Fortress/Factorio hybrid thing where you have a colony of NPCs and deformable terrain and you map out what paths you want them to take and what areas to go to for each activity and how to get there. Hand hold the NPC through a daily routine, and then let it copy it and/or adapt based on modular subroutines or something. It would be more effort for the player to have to manage a bunch of stuff every time they changed the terrain, but the player designing the area is going to have a better idea of what they intend than the AI is going to, and if the NPC management and automation was a core part of the gameplay experience and well-fleshed out then it wouldn't be pointless hassle for the player.
It's a solution, and not an unpopular one for games with a heavier RTS inspiration. There are tradeoffs -- having to 'program' the NPCs can get unwieldy if either job complexity or NPC count go too high, for one example, and you generally need to cap path complexity or duration -- but they're not entirely unsolvable ones, especially if NPCs have relatively simple 'complete' paths. It can be difficult as a fit thematically, though, unless your NPCs are intentionally robotic or very habitual, or if you have a lot of NPCs.
Minecolonies tries to compromise by considering workstations (or beds, etc) as automatic waypoints while leaving the option of manually-inserting additional user-defined ones, and then doing path-calculation between those nodes (with some range and other considerations). But this does have its own issues. There's still an absolute mess of special-cases that have to be considered even while expecting players to handle most severe breaks, and a number of annoying and subtle problems that can pop up.
((And there's still some bizarre cases that break it.))
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