Ynglaur

Join Date 05/2006

+11

Gameplay Types

Since some of Elemental seems inspired by The Silmarillion, I think the following two gameplay types (not necessarily mutualy exclusive) could be fun:

1. Diminishment - Game starts with palyers immensely powerful, but they tend to diminish in power over time. This could be accomplished nicely with finite resources, or dwindling resource rates, the permanent expenditure of power, etc.

2. Survival - One or more factions (call them "Great Power(s)") start the game with advantage so overwhelming that the other factions (call them "Lesser Powers") cannot hope to defeat it. Victory could be some combination of "harm done to the Great Power(s)" and "how long did you survive",or just the latter. This could get interesting, as the Lesser Powers could try to band together to increase their overall chance of survival, or push each other under the bus. Maybe the Greater Power gets more points for "harm done to the Lesser Powers by other Lesser Powers".

Imagine Metaverse rankings based on how long you survive against an invincible foe while your power ever diminishes. It could be interesting...

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Ron Lugge
vieuxchat

I really like the diminishment idea !!! It's a bit like the "dawn" idea from Ars Magica. After a certain time or power your channeller starts to lose ageing and losing power.

The second one might be good if well balanced. Maybe with some "destroy that item" system to balance the military fact that you're weaker

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So basically you want to configure the game scenario into a titanic world spanning game of tower defense?

Cause that would be AWESOME!

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Yep after thinking about hge armies roaming a desperate world .. I said to myself "If it it isn't karma generating what would be?"

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Survival => Survival & Goliath mode.

Survival :

Uber threathening Environement, the least civilization to survive win. Would be fun to start with 50-60 of respite before hell running lose.

Goliath:

You are the Uber-Assault Mecha and they are the small-tiny light Mechs. You have the punch but the have the number. As longer the game goes and stronger those puny opponent will get.

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RonLugge

Join Date 05/2004

+50

Quoting vieuxchat,

reply 3

Yep after thinking about hge armies roaming a desperate world .. I said to myself "It it isn't karma generating what is it?"

, definitely!

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Have you guys ever played DotA? Its basically two teams of heroes who fight against each other and against regular spawns of npc monsters. There is a variant where all the players are on the same team and they fight constant ways of monsters while defending thier base. The objective is for heroes to level up and push the enemy back until they can destroy the spawning buildings for those waves and attack the main boss.

If there was a multiplayer version of this in elemental that would be great. Multiple players defending each others backs while fighting off wave after wave of enemies...

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Like the one with one being some big evil power facing several lesser powers who combined might be strong enough to hold the enemy back.. of course, other things might complicate the whole deal

Betrayal and what not.. and who knows, that big alliance might require sacrifices, and along the road might be temptations, temptations of power making you as powerful as the big evil power.. Oh the possiblities ! .. really hope they think about this as a mode..

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On SupCom there's a mod that's called "phantom mod". It's basically an FFA for the firt 10 minutes then a player is randomly chosen as the phantom. The goal of the phantom is to kill everyone. The others are allied.. but they don't know it. So you have to use great diplomacy skills. The phantom also get an economic boost.

Another mod is made from it : "Ninjas vs pirates". Those kinds of gameplay are really entertaining.

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Those have been around for quite a while now. Ive played both many times on starcraft and WC3. User created content is where its at.

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At the least, I think it would be fun to see options of turning off victory objectives as you see fit.

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@Vitruvian_Squid

You can uncheck every condition save conquest (Destruction of Every others players) in Galciv 2 so i guess in Elemantal, it will be the same.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

I still don't have a clear idea whether the devs plan to have a scoring system at all. I got drawn into the GC2 Metaverse a long while after I got obssessed with just playing, and I'm still not always sure I like what thinking about scores did to my playtime (I did learn to get "better" as Mumblefratz uses the word, but what I do in my MV games sometimes seems, well, a bit off on account of my tendency to roleplay the abstract ruler in any 4X game).

I kind of fancy the idea that Elemental might have no scores, and that it won't have "victory conditions" so much as "conclusion points." But that's probably because this launch has gotten me all reminiscent about my round-the-table RPG days, and I was one of the folks who thought the best way to start explaining RPGs to "grownups" & others was by saying that there's no way to win, that's not the point of the game.

I like the basic outlines of both of Ynglaur's OP points because they could be about things quite different from who's on top at a given time. I think my single favorite line from Jackson's LotR films is when Galadriel resists Frodo's offer to give her the Ring and is really happy to 'go into the West and remain Galadriel.' (I'm not good at direct quotes from memory.) It's been too long since my last Tolkien re-read for me to remember if he wrote the lines first.

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Call me lame, but I actually wouldn't mind a capture the flag game type... Like where there would be X magic nodes and if you capture them you can channel their energy to build a new world or something cheesy like that. (I'm tired >.<)

That being said, the other games that come to mind with those mechanics are almost never used (dawn of war) and thats kinda sad.

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I like the diminishing idea. In a normal game it sounds like you have a set amount of mana, and generate more each turn (thus enabling a strategy to "build up a huge well of mana" for those world destroying spells), however with a finite amount you have to decide whether to horde it, enhance your ruler, enhance your heroes or improve your land/armies. In a diminishing game you could start out with that huge well of mana that you could have built up by endgame in a normal game, but never get any more. Once it is gone, it is gone and you are out of luck. So victory goes to the player that uses their well of mana the best.

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It could even work well if it power regenerates over time, but never quite to the level it was before. A Diminishment gameplay style may also need play-balancing around world-altering spells. Methinks Brad doesn't mind the occasional de-stabilizing influence (Random Events in GalCiv2, anyone), so you wouldn't necessarily want it to be "everyone cast a big random spell and see who comes out on top".

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I really like the idea of the massive-world-spanning-game-of-tower-defense, and I hope that at least the moddability will extend to that. Opposing players to provide the normal kind of challenge, plus wave after wave of increasingly strong NPCs (I would probably not go with the diminishing power option, personally, but it sounds worth having), and see how long you can survive.

In many games (4X particularly) I find myself by mid-game or late-game with such a massively effective defensive setup that no enemy on the map could take even one city/planet from me. In games like that I wish I had a button that performed the action "Spawn Enemy Force Capable of Taking Me Down"; not like a 1-million-dragon wave, just something a bit more powerful than me.

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Elemental will have random events, right? I figure, a great way to do diminishment would be to give you a nice, big empire and crank the frequency of bad random events way up through the roof. Maybe they start extremely common, like with at least one guaranteed per empire per turn, and taper off somewhat as the various empires fall to shit from all the plagues, riots, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, "accidents" caused by careless mages, barbarian/demonic invasions, and whatever other nasty stuff you can think of. It would somewhat solve the "hurr screwed by the RNG" problem I normally have with bad random events, since everyone's getting hammered by them.

This could be tied into the survival idea by making one empire immune to these events.

This is always a very good thing to include, because if you're strong and advanced enough to capture enough flags, you're pretty much always the goliath mentioned in the survival idea. So, these victory conditions are a good way to circumvent the whole "okay, you've won, now for the tedious process of actually WINNING" probelm 4x games tend to have.

Stardock somewhat bungled this idea in GC2 with the ascension victory. The problem was that it took too long to gather enough ascaneion points unless you settled a whole bunch of crystals, which made everyone hate you and attack you, which was a problem because ascension starbases are very easily griefed... yet despite these problems, it was still a viable win condition for people who didn't want to destroy everyone or cover most of the map in thier influence.

The current incarnation of Fall from Heaven's tower of mastery victory is a great example of this win condition. For those unfamiliar, there are 5 buildings which are dead easy for a mature empire to build, if you build them you win. In order to be able to build them, you need to acquire at least one source of each mana type (except for ice and metamagic which are wierd oddballs.) It requires a good combo of muscle, emprie size, tech speed and building capability to get these sources. If you have it, you're strong enough to win by domination, but you don't have to go through the trouble of actually doing it.

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