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Competitive versus Sandbox City-Building

City-building games typically come in two flavors, either as goal-oriented games or as sandboxes.

City-building games typically come in two flavors, either as goal-oriented games or as sandboxes; in the former, you typically share the game-world with one or more opponents who will trade with you or wage war over resources. In the latter, you can build and run your city unopposed, with a focus on maintaining economy, traffic and so on. 

Catering to such gameplay poses no problem for games which are not massively multiplayer (i.e. nearly each currently existing city-building franchise)—but what about a city-building MMO like Coobico? Different types of players will inevitably meet each other in an open world. While this is a great opportunity to play together, it might also lead a clash game-plays (i.e. griefers/killers versus socializers).

We would like to enable both competitive and sandbox-type styles of gameplay in Coobico and let players choose their own experience—but without spoiling the fun for everybody else. We are therefore restricting the level of personal confrontation between players a bit; as an example, it will not be possible to just personally walk into another player’s settlement to wreak havoc there. But apart form that, we are working on ways to compete martially with other competitive-minded players.
It’s a feature we have not yet fully nailed down. I am going to elaborate more on this in the next article about Garrisons and Fortresses in Coobico.

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• Structures: Fortress

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  A fortress is a structure you can upgrade your city-center to, which is going to enable offensive and defensive capabilities of a settlement.

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