WIP: Overworld Map Movement System

In previous versions of the game, movement around the map was fairly loose and free form. We plan on removing this in the next build, and making it so that movement will be based upon location to location points with specific paths set up, enabling you to have defensive choke points, strategic locations, and most importantly, to have variables between how and where you move. Each of these locations are referred too as a 'node' and involves towns and special nodes such as caverns, towers, and special quest locations. Controlling nodes will be how you gather resources and expand your kingdom.

In general, there are several broad forms of movement:

• Firstly, there is Land Based Movement. LBM is metered based on the attributes of the path involved. A road may have been built, or it might be mountainous,a forest, or tundra, each of which would have specific effects depending on who was moving in that region. Some might inflict attrition or slower movement. Others will have faster movement.he idea is to have the different places in the continent of Corona you're working in have different impacts depending on your armies.
• Secondly, you have Maritime Movement. As the name suggests, it is any form of movement over water. Sometimes this will be handled by a ferry. If a ferry is taken, your army will move along a set path and be highly vulnerable to attack by more free moving aquatic armies. For inland movement across water, you may seek to upgrade the territories adjacent to the river node and build a bridge. Finally, you may be using an army composed of aquatic units, meaning that they'll be able to freely move along maritime nodes and paths without issue.
• Thirdly, there is Flight. Flight will be available to armies such as those of the harpies, bypassing all terrain effects and paths to move freely. Something we’d like to do is enable certain units to carry others so that mixed army formations can work more easily. An example of this would be Harpy Princess being able to carry Ser Knight.
• Finally, we want to include Cavern Crawling. The underground is accessible through cave nodes, which will exist simultaneously on the overworld and underworld maps. Once underground, the twisting and dangerous underworld will enable free movement anywhere, but at incredibly high and random attrition for any army not made up of Cavern Crawling Units. Even Cavern Crawling units will move at a snail’s pace. We would like to enable the players, and certain factions, to build ‘Deep Roads’ that would link far off cave nodes or special underground location nodes, but this is something we’re still experimenting with.

While this is not the final form the system might take, it is our goal to try and include as many of the discussed features as possible.

So far a rough system of ‘connections’ has been put in place to represent these movement paths. We’ve been focusing on setting up the framework and making tools to ease content creation. Basic pathing is also functional, with basic conditions set up for an army to know whether it should be able to cross a specific ‘connection’ or not.