World project

Time

Best time for such a game is time equivalent to technical advatage in XIV - XV century. It was golden age of cavalery, and there was beggining of gunpowder - still with many disfunctions, so not very usefull, but powerfull. It was also time of Swiss pikemen and German Landsknechts. I don't want to place game in real, historical period, but keeping in same technological level will be good.

World

There should more than one possible climats (tilesets and weather conditions). It must kept nearer than in real world to achieve higher level of playability. Possible climats - dessert, ice, European woods, swamps, mediterranean climat. Maybe units colours should be different in different tilesets?
Climats details are placed in Climats docs

Economy

Generally map is divided into areas related to villages. Villages are independent to players - they live their own live. Each player can gain control over village generally by conquering it (military or diplomatic). Villages provides everything that player may need - gold, people, valuable minerals (I don't know exactly what kind and how many of them) and workshops to produce weapons. Player can build military structures such as fortifications (castles and palisades) and military structures such as training ground and garrisons. Player can of course have some influence to villages, but only indirectly - by raising or loweing taxes, by plundering them, founding workshops etc.
What will make this game different from others is feudal structure of commanding - player can give villages to vassals. Vassal will take care of village(s) in exchange of profits from them. Vassal is also obligated to pay taxes and provide army. This army contains well trained nobility, from which player can make better units - such as knights. Number of them should be very restricted, but good use in combat should be essential for victory (explanation: villages under control of vassals gives less profit than normal ones, so there should be profit from keeping good number of vassals). Vassals are partly independent - they can become independent countries or can be bribed by other players etc.

Resources

Because there is need of making few steps of training units (making weapons, gathering people, training soldiers), there should be possibility of atomating this process ie. Player want to make 100 pikemen - he only need to order to train hundred pikemen at training facility - there automaticly should be started making weapons (in way of minimalised time - player should control someway where will be made weapons), gathering people from nearest villages and training them.

Money:

As everybody knows maintaining army costs. So army amount should depend directly on number (and quality) of villages controlled by player.

Transporting resources:

Between villages and castles there are routes (made directly by player or map designer or automaticly - i don't know). Routes can be open or closed (routes are closed when enemy army is somewhere near or player chosed closing route). Army eat food from nearest grannary, so when castle is under siege - there are no possibility (without breaking siege) of providing them food - they'll loose morale and die.

Races

By now I think out three races (maybe more in the future). Each race should have extremly different units and tactics so growing up with it's number wouldn't be easy.

Nomadic people - also known as horse lords. This people came from giant steps of far east. They mistery in horse riding are well known.
Knights - also known as lords of steel. They have two different types of army - very cheep and bed infantry (kept in big amount) and expensive excellent cavalery. They also keeps great attention at fortifications - good stone isn't bad. Social structure is normal feudalism.
Slant-eyed - Race with great technical advantage. My friend obligated himself to prepare this race project.

Outlines about graphics

I saw some games where units were created to be good-looking. I have also seen some games with 3d point of view. I want to avoid both of this misunderstanding of game idea. I (and also many players) don't want to see movie - I want to play. Following to this graphic should be functional - it means small units and functional type of view. Units needn't to be beatifull - they should be easy to tell them apart from others (and also to see what they are doing). After discussion (with examples) I decided to stay in size of man 10x20 (it's one man. Units such as horseman or cannon can be bigger - there is no specified size of unit).

Conclusion

IMPORTANT: This is only outline of world - everything (especially things not mentioned here) are under open discussin - send your ideas to feudal-development@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list - it's open for everyone interested.