Concept-Art

You may have noticed them in our latest bunch of screenshots: Scavengers—a frequent sight on Qubus’ Island. Scavengers are a motley crew of pirates, marauding landsknechts and soldiers of fortune, populating dungeons. Sometimes they also run smallish scavenger-settlements consisting of a stronghold and a rogue-merchant.

We’ve already been pondering about non-player settlements in Coobico, here is how we are currently implementing this feature: there will be a bunch of pirate shanties and bandit hang-outs scattered over the island, called “Strongholds”. Such strongholds will typically be a hideout to Scavengers, a motley crew of pirates, marauding landsknechts and soldiers of fortune (which we will introduce soon)—sometimes a stronghold will just consist of a Fortress with a few accompanying huts, on other occasions it might be girded with additional structures like merchants. This will enable players to take their own decision if they rather want to fight or trade with a scavenger stronghold.

An important issue for any MMO is its endgame component (what you’ll be perpetually busy with after maxing out your stuff). For Coobico, we assume that, while some players will be satisfied to just build and manage their settlement and resolve quests, others will seek to wage wars with their competitors. By any means, we are trying to implement a solution for different players’ preferences to co-exist in Coobico’s world.

Introducing fortresses: a fortress is a structure you can upgrade your city-center to, which is going to enable offensive and defensive capabilities of a settlement. As long as a settlement is not extended by a fortress, it is flagged as peaceful and cannot attack and be attacked by other players. After building a fortress, you loose this protection, even if the fortress is destroyed later on.

A fortress will need a bunch of accompanying structures as prerequisites, to keep players from building empty cities which just consist of a fortress and nothing else (a castle without affiliation to a town would not appear to be realistic anyway). More about this later, after we have implemented this features more thoroughly.

The apothecary is an advanced upgrade for hospitals, which substantially raises a settlement’s medical supplies. What’s more, an apothecary shields a settlement from certain negative events (like Plague), which occur with growing density of population.

A poorhouse is another important upgrade for healers and hospitals, essentially providing better public order and hygiene for a settlement. It also serves as a home for beggars who can be important for various quests.

Next up are the upgrades of healers and hospitals, one of the possible upgrades being a bath. At a bath, you can recruit a barber-surgeon who in turn raises both health and community of a settlement.

Each settlement in Coobico has its own character and style, as a creation of it’s player.
If it’s a town or just a hamlet it’s got to have its own Coat of Arms or badge to add some spice to its identity. Therefor we added a Coat Of Arms editor to the player’s choices while founding a new settlement. With this nifty tool it’s easily possible to create your city’s own Coat of Arms by using a variety of graphical elements. Different backgrounds, shield forms and motives can be combined and altered.
They are inspired by traditional designs as well as by fantasy and funny styles—Enjoy.

Guardtowers act as upgrades for several but not all types of structures (among them being merchants and garrisons). At a guardtower you can hire sentries to raise the general defensive value of your settlement—an important stat for events and interactions with other settlements.

Next we are going to introduce two upgrades for merchants: Warehouses and Guardtowers. A Warehouse is overseen by a Storekeeper and offers additional space to store resources—a simple but important add-on, because larger stock raises the probability of obtaining lower prices at the local merchant. Also, brimful stores with no additional warehouses have a higher chance to loose a part of their stock as the result of negative events (such as theft or fire).

This is our model of a mason’s lodge, which is yet another upgrade for workshops (but only available after you upgraded your workshop to a guildhall). A mason works at such a lodge to produce prefabs, an important resource for building various advanced structures. Masons require miscellaneous goods to be kept happy, especially rocks and tools.