For those of us making Mods based off copyrighted stories we'd have to go get permission to sell them from the copyright holders and they'd want a cut of the money too or they could flat out say "NO". As such the only way for those of us doing Mods based on books is to do them as "Fan Faction" or something which is free. It would be illegal for us to charge for them without the explicit permission of the copyright holders...I think.

Well as you had hinted at, in the past. Create a place for people to come to eat, and then once they are there, give them the option to join the franchise as it were.

In this case.. you've created an incredibly robust game engine, and will be presenting those efforts in the form of Elemental: War of Magic.

That being said.. once people realize the strength of the game engine, and how easy it is to mod in a great number of games, and genre's and the equivalent IP related stuff. Then eventually it'll push the sales heavier in that direction but I also believe it'll open the door to new opportunities for say boardgame companies, to get their hands into the digital arena, without having to fund an entire company as they make the project. Instead now that all the initial hard work has been placed. The rest is just the equivalent of unlocking the door to the new flavors of gameplay.

I could see a partnership between Privateer Press, and their beautiful IP's (Warmachine, Iron Kingdoms, Hordes), going into making a licensed published game using Elemental. Which in turn feeds back into the Elemental machine, in an ongoing recursive loop, as more begin to realize the strengths of such an idea.

Not to mention all those arm chair designers out there who make their own games in the garage. Well now they could make that same game as a mod, or work in partnership with you on it, and see the doors unlock again.

To me I see a lot of great business opportunities for other IP's to grow with Elemental. While also getting to enjoy the purity of the gameplay IN Elemental. While also building my own gameworld into a mod for myself, and eventually others.

The evil capitalist in you is just trying to be rational. Cost vs. Benefit. But let's be honest here.. all those tools in the hands of the modder's. Well that means they'll get seen... but depending on popularity of the mod. Then again with all those assets in place, it'll make it easier to add them into the game over time as well with new expansion packs in many cases.

Another thing to consider is comments about flying ships. And how they won't be in Elemental. Well.. that's cause it's the first blush version of Elemental. Remember you started off this game with a Real time tactical battles. And stripped it out. Now imagine Elemental. But much further in it's gameworld future. Magic isn't as scarce, now there are many more magical beings again.. but all of that.. is what story designers are for. You said it yourself, you've got very little creativity for gameworld imaginings. Enough to be a gamer and enjoy modding stuff, to make it your own.. but there are many others out there who are great at world design and story telling. And the game it creates. Don't just limit yourself so early. I would encourage you to go with the best philosophy of 4th Edition D&D. "Say Yes to the Players."

They encourage it. If it's great for the story, say yes. So in that context, embrace the idea... instead of saying no, to something because it doesn't fit your immediate version of Elemental. Give it some time... sure the modder's will do it most certainly. But maybe in another iteration of Elemental: War of Magic.. it's several hundred years later... and there are Air Ships, and Griffon Cavalry, and it's still a fun RPG style game. There really are some awesome ideas out there.. and now with the game being presented as you have... you'll finally get to see that evolution. (Have another evil capitalist look into this other side.. looking for IP's that are ready to join the digital leagues, with Stardock. And it'll have all been because of Elemental: War of Magic.)

Oh? Morrowind wouldn't have sold as well as it did, for as long as it did with out all those mods. Same with Oblivion. Come to think of it...I'm pretty sure Bethesda's entire business model is centered on the community making their okay games into great ones.

Now this is incredibly exciting. And the direct honesty, is as always refreshing.

The idea that some ideas could be put in the game that were mentioned a while ago! Awesome.

Beta 3A, was different. It really was. But it also felt empty. Which I just attributed to the very nature of it being a beta. But, you're right.. if you watched my video's.. building stuff in towns just became bland. It didn't do anything or feel interesting. And I could only get so excited by the process before I was noting to myself that it was missing a lot of the fun.

So hearing that there are incredible changes, on a gigantic level will be a good thing in my book.

And your right about games ... it's the same way with world creation for campaign settings. People keep looking at the same thing. And then wonder why it doesn't feel organic. And in a lot of cases it goes back to the progenitor. 

Look at Minas Tirith and Os-giliath. Those two massive cities right? Where are the villages? You know to feed them, all. It was like someone just plopped them down, and that was that. No one asked about the empty plains outside of it, or how they were fed. It was just glossed over.

~~~

Medieval towns tended to grow around areas where people could easily meet, such as crossroads or rivers. Towns needed more water than villages, so a nearby water supply was vital. Rivers would provide the water used for washing and drinking and they were used for the disposal of sewage (if it had not been simply thrown into the streets).

Village people came to towns to trade therefore those who were in charge of a town had to do what was needed to ensure that their town was safe. Many towns had large fences built around them and the gates of these fences were locked at night to keep out undesirables. Cities such as York and Canterbury had city walls that served the same purpose - but a town would not have had enough wealth to build such an expensive protection.

A successful town attracted many merchants to it. Many towns were owned by a lord and it was in his interest to ensure that his town was popular with merchants as they paid tax. The more merchants in a town, the more tax a lord could collect. Taxes were collected by a sheriff. As many people could not read or write, the system was open to abuse and corruption. This is why many people in towns wanted to get a charter. 

A charter gave people in a town certain rights that were clearly stated in the charter that town had. Many charters gave towns the right to collect their own taxes thus removing corrupt sheriffs from doing so. It was also common for a town to ask for its own law court so that legal problems could be settled quickly.

~~~

Here is an interesting link that supports Brad's comments about food, as it in this case pertains to civilizations. 

http://www.history.ac.uk/resources/e-seminars/keene-paper

And here is another good link for fantasy lands... especially as it pertains to ideas of civlizations.

http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

That one above there is a great link. 

I guess the one thing is a matter of abstraction, as a key piece to the story. And whether something feels fun to play based upon testing.

So I'm totally looking forward to the changes, and see how everything really begins to feel with this upcoming 3B/4. Myself, I'm particularly happy about resources just needing to be within the influence of the nation. That is a gigantic step in the right direction. And it has taken until 3B for it to get in. But the wait was worth it! So on that note, I'm looking for other things that make us go ... damn... sweet! Cool! (Cartman voice optional!)

?

Even if you do a mod based on your own IP (and with your own art assests and such), does Elemental EULA allow you to sell your mod? I'm not planning on that but your comment made me curious. At best I'd expect Premium Modules or something like that.

Oh, dear Stardock: ancient Greece equipment/buildings, please. I have always wanted some hoplites and that "classical" feeling of the greek temples/cities. (some Roman touch is good too)

Good to hear that I am not the only one who found 3A boring. To me, the system seems too diffused between questing and city building and diplomacy that I barely have an idea what I need to do in order to advance at all. Everything seems promising, but I cannot seem to find out what I need to do.

The game is disappointing so far, but I hope beta 3B will make everything interesting again.

Maybe a crazy idea, but couldn't you include those unused tiles in a random map generator?  Random - Sandbox - Dungeon or Random - Sandbox - Tim the Enchanter or somesuch.  Does that make any sense?  Then it does help with the filthy lucre idea.  Put on the box "Includes 18 trillion maps!"

Oh boy....I can't wait to start modding...

Oh and Frogboy that capitalist part of you shouldn't feel too bad. Just consider that stuff reimbursement. I mean we did pay for a product on good faith, and to basically be testers. consultants and QC.

You do realize that Med2:TW is a seriously Kick Ass game by its-self right? Though I do recommend using the Happiness Mod. What this does is increase base town happiness modifiers so that you can actually conquer the whole map without having to worry about your Empire falling apart because of territories on the out-skirts of your Empire revolting.

Med2:TW is probably my Favorite TW game next to Rome:TW. The only option Med1:TW had that I wish they would have carried over to part 2 was the ability to name your kings heir. They never should have taken that out.

It might help slightly with initial sales but it'll probably be negligible. However, once modders get working and start morphing the game into all the things it could possibly be it starts to appeal to a larger group of possible purchasers. When the first lotr mod comes out, you'll likely see sales from that. When somebody turns it into a psuedo pnp RGP, you'll see some sales from that. With a healthy modding community you'll see extra sales because of the mods that get released that people want to try. Part of the reason I'll buy TES5 is because of modders, the elder scrolls games are mediocre at best, especially oblivion. If you've already got a solid game underneath, powerful modding tools will extend the life (and sales) of the game for a long time (all the way up to the sequel).

A current example of a game that will die off faster because of the exclusion of modding, Bad company 2. The people playing battlefield still, and thus still creating sales for the older games, are all playing mods instead of vanilla. Bad company doesn't even allow for community made maps, much less new assets like vehicles and weaponry being added in. Some people have already migrated back to the games released years ago simply because they like the mods better and are willing to give up the advances in tech since then.

Modding isn't a skill I have, it's definitely something I'd like to try out, especially if this system is new user friendly. But I most definitely enjoy and appreciate the work a good modding community puts in, and how they can make games I enjoy even greater.

I don't think the modding will move units, but the mods created from it will.  FFH2 and Wolfshanze moved units of Civ IV, I am sure.

That said, you are going to make expansions of some sort, so those unused assets can become used.  

I do think eventually you'll have to support mods on the official servers though.

Also robust game engine + lots of mud support= chance for total conversions, which you can later sell as well (see TF2)

While I don't think it will  happen, if you created the HL2 of TBS games, you'll make money.

Yep, 100%.

The longevity can move products.  By the time Demigod figured out what it was, the community was gone and I couldn't get any friends to move into the product.  They kept asking how many people were playing and what the community was like.  With people modding, the community tends to stay a bit longer and hopefully we can pull in stragglers that don't drop during the first few weeks of sales.

Hopefully there is some marketing budget planned for after the first month of sales.

This is obviously troublesome.  Using your mana cap to produce effects in the game will do a few things which I'm sure we'll have to prove through play.  Perhaps after this next beta release, enough of the game will be in to either prove Frogboy is a genius or perhaps sway his intellect to that of the masses.    

I agree with previous posters, a solid modding community should drastically improve the sales in the long run.

I bought the Civ IV complete just to be able to play FFH (which I read about in these forums, thanks for the tip guys.) I own Mount & Blade just to play the mods as well. There's probably more but those are the ones I'm playing right now. Already own TW:Medieval II though, so maybe I'll have to look in on the LOTR-mod.

My guess is that PC-gaming is going towards more modding, something that I don't see the console-market doing yet for a decade or so.

Long live the PC.

Tomas

In general, You want to make something like the D&D RPG, you sell the people core books and then you can add expansion material to extend the core rules.  Modding is OK, as long as it does not hinder the development of the core rules. The core rules cannot be easily modified or extended once the game is released while the modding can be done easily.

You should follow a set of guide lines to make sure you do not over mod the game before it's released.

- Make sure that each elements is modded in an even amount. For example: You could get a situation where there is too much quest and to few different heroes. If you Mod, Mod evenly.

- Make sure that each element bring a new feature so that modders can use these basic data as an example to add some feature of their own. If for example, you have 12 types of quests. Well make 1 or 2 quest of each type so that all types of quest are used. So you want to have fewer elements that use all the features rather than a lot of elements that use little features.

- Make each element creative and unique: Remember that at some point, some mod elements will only be permutation of information would could eventually be possible to randomly generate some quest for example. You do not want to do the job of making all possible combination. You want to select combinations that are more interesting or unique than the generated ones.

One thing I forgot to add, You should include, hidden, in the base game any rejected artwork or other piece of work. The idea is to give modder a larger bank of pictures, tiles and other stuff to play with without having to create these themselves. I would say, even include the sketches, modder might put colors on it.

Still, this rejected material should be placed hidden to the user and only available for modding.

I'm not planning on selling my Mod at all, period. It's a totally free "Fan Work". My personal tribute to the books and characters I grew up loving. My reply was to the person who brought up selling Mods.

As for Roman things. Once we can import models and make them work in Elemental, there are Plenty of games out there that you could "borrow" units and units designs from. That way all you have to do is convert them over to work in the Elemental Engine. As far as I know doing such is perfectly Legal as long as your work is a "Fan Work" and distributed for Free. Once you start charging players for it you enter the realms of IP infringement and then copyright holders start wanting their share of the proceeds. Of course you could also say "All Proceeds go to Charity". Something like the "Buy Wintersong a New PC Charity"

Modding does not bring in short term sales, nor a very large portion of sales overall. Modding is good for game longevity, and once some high-profile/high-quality mods come out some more people may pick up Elemental from the bargain bin (or wait for an Impulse sale), but the vast majority of the full-price sales will have to come from the game built from those tools on release. The majority of people aren't modders, and don't play mods. These people are not going to spend $50 on a modding platform.

Elemental has to be a good *game* first, so it can sell and live long enough for the total conversions and all that to get developed and come out to keep it going. So, modding isn't going to move units up-front. It'll just help make the game live longer and get a little boost to trailing sales, if it's good enough to begin with.

I don't believe you're allowed to actually take models from other games and put them into your mods. They might not come after you if you're not selling it but they're probably well within their rights to do so.

Hell yeah!

True. "Borrow" in this case would more accurately be called "commit a copyright violation."

Unless the assets were put out for public reuse, you can't take them and stick them into your own product. Doesn't matter if it's free or not.

Well in the case of Grecian-Roman 'borrowing' as long you don't lift the textures and models, but instead just look at them for inspiration it is in no way a copyright violation.

Last I heard no one had a copyright on history.

The exmple impresses me.

Being able to use secondary maps will add a lot to the RPG element of the game.

Also, it's an incentive to exploration. If all ruins, dungeons, etc were just a tile in the map that poped up a dialogue or combat, it would become boring faster than the possibility that reaching it could "teleport" us to another map to explore and make combat (as if that map was a zoomed in version of the event tile in the main map).

Just a question: is it only possible to use other maps just for the tactical combat, or can we make an area to be explored?