Tinkerer, If you are seeing this - I want you to give purpose to the kids like you did with Rosy's kids.
I was thinking of this idea of making a tower defense system like plants v zombies with the gobbos/children substituting the plants, You use them to defend the temple against whoever wants to..... destroy it I guess.
If it really doesn't work for the temple, we could definitely implement it for the goblin clan.
I know the limitations with RPG Maker but it seems somewhat doable as I'm seeing some tutorials floating around(just google/youtube rpg maker plants vs zombies) on the subject.
IMPORTANTLY why do we need a system like this? you might ask. What wrong with the current combat system? As Tinkerer said in his latest post with more children we need more money/resources to feed them and such. Now you see the gameplay loop gets harder and tedious as you have more children and of course we will balance this out by tuning the amount of resource it takes for a child and putting a cap on number of children you can have but it is no fun(ALL WORK AND NO BREEDING MAKES ME A DULL BOY). With the current combat system if you have more than three people with you it gets tedious(click. click. click..).
With the proposed system you can take any number people into battle with you and more will become merrier and It will also be effective to cull(they die in battle) the number of children as we are using them like unit/resource to progress in the game(SO MORE BREEDING BABY...) and having sex will become a more important part of the game.
Here is a basic design of the system for the goblin clan:
This event will automatically trigger at regular interval(7 or 8 days) after player becomes the king of goblins. This would require the goblin's pregnancy cycle to be much faster and would need many goblin breeders. It makes sense since goblins depend on breeding for survival(more gobbos good). The game difficulty will be increased progressively and the number of days takes to trigger next level should decrease to 4 or 5.
The number of enemies will increase for every level and after a certain level new enemy types will be introduced.
Now we need new goblin types to fight this increasing level of threat. So, obviously we need different goblin factions(I remember a game called goblin burrow with various goblin types that are really cool) with their own village which we can invade(which is same as defending gameplay but reversed) and acquire the queen or princess of the clan as our new breeder just like the second goblin girl(don't remember the name).
Invading takes multiple levels to complete and at end of each level cutscene for the backstory and characters of the village will be included(that sweet.. sweet.. lore). the story for particular queen/princess will also continue after acquiring her.
(There is also the option that instead of having various goblin type we could have various monster types altogether but, more work I guess)
Using the queen/princess in battle will be important as increasing their level/xp will increase level of the offspring they create. queen/princess should have more special attacks than the regular units. The enemies could also have special types with special attacks like our queen/princesses.
The gameplay will be really similar to plants v zombies. You create a line up of your best gobbo from all the gobbos you have created and take them into battle. You select them and place them on the grid and they perform their attack(projectiles, meele, area damage, heal, block, etc.) that is specific to their type. You kill all enemy you win. All of your unit gets killed you lose and you either try again with different strategy or make more units or go after a type of gobbo queen/princess that will help you win the battle. The battles should NOT pass the time in game.
This will be quite a lot of work but, I believe it will all be worth it.