Official 100% Truthful Roadmap (might be updated in the future)

Alright, so this is the roadmap for the game I'm making. I'll update it as I add in the planned features or otherwise decide not to add some of them. For now, this is what I have in mind:

Please read. This game as written here is no longer being worked on. I started porting the game to an actual game engine and as such many of the features described here no longer work as described. Even then, development is mostly on hiatus and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Pre-Alpha Version 0.1

Naming System Update: Change the naming system so that either character names are separate from username (Character name randomly chosen at the start from a list of somewhat accurate names from the starting region (Frankenhausen in Central Germany, for now)) Alternatively, get rid of usernames altogether and make character name the only name variable for a player.

Friendly NPCs and Enemy NPCs: Add NPCs in towns, with which the player can interact with in order to gain information or trade. Add locations to each town for each special type of NPC (shopkeepers belonging to their shop, like Blacksmiths having a forge, Innkeepers having inns, Bankers having banks, etc.) Enemy NPCs are to appear in less civilized areas (in some cases anywhere) where there is a certain risk for the player to be attacked. For now, add bandits, toll bandits, aggressive beasts and other non-faction related criminal/hostile NPCs. All NPCs, like the player, should be given a random name from the name list, followed by a title so that the player can recognize them. For example, let us imagine a scenario where a player is in a town, and they enter a food store. The player could, once inside, issue the !examine command to look around, and among other things/people, they would be told they find "Friedrich, the shopkeeper" which in this case is the NPCs in charge of selling the goods that the player may want to purchase in the food store. This would be the case for essentially every NPC in the game.

NPC Combat System: Can't have Enemy NPCs without a combat system to engage in physical confrontations with them. For now, there already is a way for players to attack other players, although it works quite simply, as it just reduces the health of the player's target (which necessarily has to be a player, which means the existing system ought to be revamped in order to acknowledge NPCs as targets too.) by a fixed amount. This should change and damage dealt should depend on a multitude of reasons, mostly related to stats. The player begins their journey unarmed, and unarmed/non-lethal combat should (if manageable) work a little differently than armed combat. Unarmed combat should make it harder to kill, and very likely to result in unconsciousness rather than death. Damage dealt by fists and other non-lethal weapons should affect a different value than health, for health reaching 0 means death. Fists should deal an amount of damage related to a potential strength stat/attribute, along with (or not) a unarmed skill value which would increase potential damage as the skill level increases.
Damage dealt however, should not be constant, and potential damage should be a range. Not every attack should deal the same amount of damage, even if using the same means. Thus, potential damage is to be represented by a range, and the final damage should end up being a random number picked from within that range. Different weapons would have different ranges. Likewise, attacking should not be constant either. Spamming attacks should not be possible. The amount of attacks, or rather the time it would take for a combatant to attack should depend on the type of weapon they're wielding. Weapons like daggers and other kinds of shortswords should have a range of smaller numbers for potential damage, but it should be possible to attack multiple times in a lesser amount of time. Meanwhile, a longsword or a two-handed battle-axe would deal a higher amount of damage per attack, but would allow for less attacks to be made in a certain timespan.
Items and Inventory System: Players must be capable of having items that belong to them, in order to give a purpose to shops, among other things. Items can be just about anything that a person could possess or/and wear/wield, ranging from basic supplies like food and drinks, to combat gear like blades (swords, spears, even bows technically employ blades) armors, etc. The uses of each item would vary too, according to the item in question. Basic supplies as mentioned earlier could serve to increase the player's health, effectively being a way to heal the damage taken from battles (unless a hunger and thirst system is developed later, which is unlikely) Armor would either increase the maximum amount of health a player can have at a time or affect an entirely different value altogether (like a separate value for armor that could work like health instead of adding to health itself)
Items can, of course, be obtained in multiple ways. The first to come to mind are through trading with NPCs (as somewhat explained in the "Friendly NPCs and Enemy NPCs" feature) and looting. Looting would entail taking from NPCs that are either unconscious or dead. (Although there being a difference here would imply that damage could be either lethal or non-lethal, which would in turn imply the existence of non-lethal and lethal weapons or other means of dealing different types of damage.)

Items could also exist within the environment itself, and could be taken by players without an NPC intervening like in the past two cases. What kinds of items appear would, in all cases, depend on who or where the item in question is being taken from. For example, in a forge, you could perhaps find different kinds of metallic gear lying around, and the Blacksmith himself could be wielding or wearing items of his own crafting. Obviously, just taking something from the forge without paying for it wouldn't exactly cause a positive reaction from the Blacksmith, so it would result in expected (maybe unexpected?) consequences.

Pre-Alpha Version 0.2

Saving System: It is essential to establish a way to save the details of every player account within the server so that they may be accessed later on, because otherwise the notion of a persisent world is lost and progress would be reset every time a client decides to disconnect from the server. Every stat and variable belonging to a player must be saved, their name, their inventory, their current location, their skills, their current equipment, everything. Without this, it will be impossible to have the game be playable.

First Expansion of the Map/Travel System Update: Once the foundations for Player-Player-Environment interaction have been set, expand the map and add many locations based on the regions where the Bauernkrieg took place. Ensure new towns and other settlements are filled with the essential NPCs, and add hostile NPCs to areas in the surrounding wilderness. If not already implemented, make travelling take time (the farther the distance, the more time it takes to get from your current location to your destination). While travelling, you can be disrupted by hostile NPCs suddenly appearing in the way. Connect Frankenhausen to Goslar via the Northern Road. Create an Eastern Road from Frankenhausen that leads to Leipzig. Create a Western Road from Frankenhausen that leads to Mühlhausen. From Mühlhausen, create a Southern Road to Würzburg (with a possible stop in Hersfeld)
The Roads won't actually be called Roads because they must have their own unique names (or else I would have to have many locations called for example, Southern Road, which would only work if I made them be different from each other by assigning a number to each of them like Southern Road1, Southern Road2, and so on, but that would get confusing). To address this, make the locations in between towns actually have unique names that are related to the wilderness areas in between them. For example, have the area between Mühlhausen and Würzburg be called "Thuringian Forest". Getting out of Mühlhausen would get you to the Thuringian Forest and from there you can go to Hersfeld (then get out of Hersfeld and back to the Thuringian Forest) or directly go to Würzburg, although to make this work there would have to be multiple Thurigian Forest locations (as in, different parts of the Forest, which would be named something like "Northern Thuringian Forest, Central Thuringian Forest, Southern Thuringian Forest, and so on) so that going from Mühlhausen to Würzburg doesn't take the same amount of time as going from Mühlhausen to Hersfeld.

That's just one example, but to give a few more, between Frankenhausen and Leipzig would be the Saale Bridge, a bridge crossing the Saale River, which is effectively between these two locations. Between Frankenhausen and Goslar, you'd find the Harz Highlands, and between Würzburg and Königshofen would be another bridge, this time crossing the Main river, which flows near the outskirts of Würzburg.
War and Factions System: Once the map has been expanded to a degree where it contains most if not all of the places where the Bauernkrieg could ensue, add the two main factions in conflict with each other and make war between them possible. How will war work? I'm still not 100% certain of the way I intend to implement it in the game, but it should work something like this. Every settlement in the map is owned by a faction. Each faction has their own factional ranks, so a local ruler would reign within their jurisdiction but would ultimately respond to another ruler who is higher in the hierarchy than them, until you get to the top (although this conflict saw quite decentralized leadership). Players can belong to either faction or none at all, but joining a faction could get you benefits such as faction gear depending on your factional rank with the downside being that you'll have hostile relations with certain NPCs belonging to the opposing faction. A player fiefdom system may be implemented later because as it is right now due to the nature of the game and my intentions for its future a player managing a fief would be implausible and thus would have to be relayed to something else, but in turn this could get passive income to the player or something. So, the war itself is a conflict between two quite decentralized groups, those being the Swabian League, led by the Reichserbtruchsess(the Imperial Steward) of the Holy Roman Empire, Georg von Waldburg, supported mostly by the higher nobility, and feudal lords among the likes of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, recently converted to Protestantism, sympathetic to Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, and George of Wettin, Duke of Saxony, staunch defender of the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Church. On the other side of the conflict, the peasants, while also having a decentralized leadership (and without a common hierarchy unlike the nobles which are all under the oath of loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor) are led by figures such as Thomas Müntzer, a radical theologian who initially followed the teachings of Martin Luther, but eventually opposed him due to his compromises with the feudal order, with Müntzer now seeking to abolish the feudal system and replace it with the system described in the Bible as "Omnia sunt communia" (for all things to be held in common, and that to each should be distributed according to his need)
Other leaders within the peasant movement are Michael Gaismair, who, like Müntzer, is opposed to the Catholic Church, and wishes to establish a democratic republic within the region of Tyrol, abolishing noble titles for good and nationalizing many productive properties in the region. Finally, there is Florian Geyer, leader of the Schwarze Haufen, a group of remarkably well-trained peasants and knights, which included units of heavy cavalry in its ranks.

That's a somewhat brief description of the situation. Now, how will the outcome of the war be decided? Well effectively to make it be decided by a game system that means I don't have a lot of options, cause it'll have to be set in rather simple and specific conditions. Either I make it so that the war ends when all the leaders of a faction have been defeated (and captured or executed) and the side that remains is the winner, or I make it so that one of the factions has to reach a certain condition to win that doesn't necessarily entail completely decimating the other side, but I wouldn't know what that condition could be. At first I was thinking of having it be to reach a certain number of casualties, but I'm not sure of how that would work. Let's say, for example, the peasants would have a limit of 100 thousand losses (because that's apparently how many men of their side died in real life) and nobles a limit of 8500. The problem with this is that for that to work in game and a noble victory to be feasible (and not only feasible, but also probable since that's how it went in real life) I would have to make a noble capable enough of taking down about 12 peasants on their own, and I don't know how I would go on about doing that. Regardless, I think it's best if I go on about doing it this way: Either when all the leaders of a faction are captured (and unable to escape their captors) or executed, or when it is no longer for them to keep leading the faction because all of their settlements have been captured by the other side, even if the leaders themselves remain alive they would be unable to keep mustering a force capable of continuing the struggle.

So, battles will probably entail having the two sides battle it out at a settlement in order to decide who gets to own it (if the attackers win, they capture the settlement. If the defenders win, they keep the settlement) I imagine the logic behind battles could work something like this; The invading army prepares to attack in a location near the settlement that will be invaded, and the defender army prepares the garrison in order to repel the attack. After some in real life minutes, the invasion begins. If the player decides to visit the battlefield, depending on the faction they belong to, they may get attacked. If they are part of the nobles, the peasants will attack the player. If part of the peasants, the nobles will attack the player instead. If the player doesn't belong to a faction, they may be forced to leave the battlefield instead. After a few real life minutes of the battle having started, the outcome will be decided according to a calculation. It will depend on the amount of forces and quality of forces mustered by each side. Noble armies will usually always be lesser in numbers than peasant armies, but will be of higher quality to compensate for it. Quality of troops should determine how many troops a single troop can take down before being taken down. So for example, let's assume a noble trooper has a quality of 20. Meanwhile, a peasant trooper has a quality of 5. That would mean it would take 4 peasant troopers to take down that one noble trooper. In higher numbers, this would mean a battle between a thousand noble troopers and 5 thousand peasant troopers would end in a victory for the peasants. 5 thousand peasant troopers would muster a strength of 25 thousand, while a thousand noble troopers would muster a strength of 20 thousand, which ultimately means the nobles lose and the peasants win, although the peasants take more casualties, and have only a thousand troops left. The problem this raises is that this means inevitably nobles will lose all battles so long as the peasants have a huge numerical superiority, which they will have because 100 thousand is always more than 8500. To solve this, I thought of morale. For every casualty taken, morale could decrease, which could affect the overall quality of troops making it so that nobles can take down more peasants while the peasants take down less nobles as the war goes on. Morale should however affect units and not the entire faction's army. Evidently not every peasant trooper will have a default quality of 5 and every noble trooper won't have a quality of 20, and also not all armies supporting the peasant faction are fully composed of hastily trained peasants (like the case of Geyer's Schwarze Haufen, which contained actual knights and heavy cavalry within it) and not all noble armies are composed completely of the most professional knights in all of Germany.

In large scale battles, the player doesn't play a very significant role. Whatever amount of troops they manage to take down, whether peasants or nobles, will be accounted into the total casualties of that side after the battle, of course, but this will most likely not affect much at all since the amount of troops a player could take down won't be a significant amount as it is pretty much impossible to do so as one single person. Where the player could come in and have an important role is in leader takedowns. Since leaders are, in fact, individuals, then it would be completely possible for the player to aid the war effort of their chosen faction significantly by attempting to assassinate or abduct one of the leaders of the opposing faction. Not that this would be an easy task, because I would be led to believe leaders would be highly protected most of the time and even then one would have to assume the leaders would be capable enough of putting up some resistance themselves, making it quite a complicated task to try and kill them. You would have to find their location too, which may prove to be quite the uneasy task too as you would have to rely on information and sources being reliable.

Pre-Alpha Version 0.3

Bounty and Notoriety System: So, you want to commit crimes or rather unlawful acts? There will be consequences. Players may acquire bounties by committing a multitude of crimes, which may range from pickpocketing on the streets of a town, to the murder of statesmen. Any action that violates the law will result in the increase of your bounty, with the bounty increasing more or less depending on the severity of your crime. The higher your bounty, the more efforts will be made to capture you and bring you to be punished by the law. People of all kinds will come after you if you obtain a high bounty, hoping to claim the reward for themselves. Whether it be independent bounty hunters, townguards, squads of soldiers, or the leaders themselves, you're sure to get in trouble every now and then if you don't keep yourself bountyless. Keep in mind, bounties are issued by a faction and that means that you won't get chased after by everyone so long as you keep your crimes targeted towards one side and not both. If you're having trouble staying alive because you have noble troopers chasing after you every 5 minutes, maybe try staying at a peasant-occupied town for a while, lay low and go on about your life peacefully, then maybe they'll forget about you and you'll get that bounty of yours taken down. NPCs also can have bounties, but the highest bounties are reserved to enemy leaders, and as such, expect the peasant faction to issue a very high bounty for any of the noble leaders, and expect the nobles to reciprocate in kind. Nobles are propietors after all, so it is very likely that the values of the bounties they issue are more likely to be higher, so do with that what you will.
Story/Lore Expansion: While it's true that the game's events won't be restricted to developing exactly as they did in reality, it will still be necessary to develop on the setting of the game and the environments the player will experience. Some rather unique events from the Bauernkrieg may have unique scripts dedicated to them if some conditions are met and thus some developments could end up being resolved like they were in real life.

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