So basically undo the stretched houses syndrome with auto-roading? I think that's the obvious aesthetic solution. I like the organic growth, sim-city ideas as well. Its a lot less artificial than a purely tile-laying method of city growth. Also agree that growth limited to one building per turn is too artificial, though that's pretty standard for turn-based games. Espcially liking Cuddlelump's ideas.
Good ideas on broad decisions being the meat and potates of a strategy game, though micro-tactical details could be left to the ai as pre-chosen doctrine, much like is done in a tactical RPG (e.g. a script window as in NWN2). The broad decision might be whether or not the spearmen march in front of the musketmen, and whether or not the army entrenches or marches. The micro decisions (as micro abilities in an RTS) might be when the unit's sergeants call for the men to bre
I think "ADVENTURE" is the main element. That and killing things and taking their stuff. That is risk, even mortal, for gain. And probably there should be some "Cliff Hangers" just to make the gamer really question if they haven't taken too much risk, yet a resourceful hero can sometimes overcome anyway. Also the actual dating of members of the opposite sex and producing offspring. E.g. "DYNASTIES", but also importantly, "ROMANCE". That is, one doesn't always just marr
Stockpiling is a great way to manipulate the world market though. And lends itself to random events where your stockpile of magic mushroom goes bad. [e digicons]:D[/e]
I like the Quarter to Three concept which is a lot like the Civ4 concept. However, I'd tweak that to be a bit like the Civ2 concept where each region has natural resources, but there's no need for the micromanagement of say building a mine on the iron node. I'd sum it as, Complexity rocks, but tiles should be looked at and not fiddled with. (edit: basically a tip of the hat to Paradox's Victoria system) Rather it'd be that most mountains have iron, so if y
I think I'd look to the D20 system somewhat---the whole multitude of race and class combos as to tweak the civ's base abilities. But also to the nesting of traits as in D20. E.g. I have to take traits A,B,C to be eligible for trait D, with the constraint that the nesting of traits is very logical. E.g. Have to choose a high combat-related physical traits for the sovereign before taking some other combat related traits. Otherwise, I
Dynamically generated chain quests. E.g. like as a string. A->B->C A has sub-plot quests (X and Y) that help shape how A occurs. Quests generated recursively from a list of possible actions (e.g. the Kill Foozle; interact with tile x,y; yaddah yaddah). A sub-plot quest might detail the parent quest---e.g. it might put a starting constraint on the quest, or might represent a sub-step, or just an optional sub-plot th
My most memorial cities: The goblin free cities of WoW. Basically semi-neutral zones where you can trade the rarest stuff---even stuff that the other sides use that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. A.k.a. a black market whose independence is only guaranteed by its own militia, but could turn into a battleground. The Oblivion capital city. Basically like a very old colony, a New Amsterdam (Long Island) settled on a much older ruin of an ancient city, with
I like the suggestion of a EU3-influenced government system for fine-tuning the nature of a society (i.e. the equivalent of researching "another new national idea") though that'd be easy to just insert into a tech tree and pop out as civ bonuses. I'd like the dictatorship vs. absolute monarchy vs. feudal monarchy vs. oligarchy vs. theocracy (or otherwise rule by any reasonable caste---e.g. magocracy) addressed. Its understandable that some people don't want that stuff. B
[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="3" id="2483956"] You never owned any game. Even when you had a disk. And with impulse you can archive your game on a cd/DVD/whatever. (I don't know for steam or D2D) [/quote] That's true, but what you're missing is that with a disk, you can reinstall at will (till the disk wears out). That's a problem if say you move to an area with poor (overpriced) internet access and say your hard drive crashe
The Guild 2 pretty much comes to my mind when thinking about breeding sucessors to take the lead. Basically, think of phenotypes (e.g. your RPG stats) as complex---i.e. polygenic, rather than the traditional Dominant/Recessive that you see in Mendel's peas. Mating the two parents gives an averaging of the parents' phenotypes, with some randomization allowed. E.g. Parent A has strength 2, parent B has strength 6, so the offspring has strength 4, with some deviations exp
Looking forward to Elemental.
Looks like a good design plan to me. I'd just suggest making as much of it as dynamically generated as possible, to avoid formulaic game play. Kill Foozel is classic formula, and if the same Kill Foozel quest always comes from the same trigger, then that will put a damper on replayability. But make the quests dynamically generated, so that Kill Foozel is a part of a more complex, dynamically generated quest, and I think it'd be a fresher game experience, and more replayable.
Civ4 had upkeep and maintenance costs, and corruption in Civ3. Both help somewhat keep city acquisitions down. But whatever the solution is, it should be fun and risky, rather than calculated. Maybe instead of upkeep costs, there is an increased chance of desertions/revolutions/pretender kings as the player increases the number of cities and increases army size? But yeah, what brenavi said. There's supposed to be widely different specializations
IMHO, the more granularity and nuts and bolts, the better. Too much simplicity leads to balance issues between traits/civics/etc... Make everything nuts and bolts and it's easier to make small adjustments to the game play and achieve a decent game balance. Game balance = replayability = good thing. If the nuts and bolts look ugly to the player, allow them to customize a set of traits/civics into a pretty meta-form. OTOH, like Tamren said, civics might not fit into th
I think an incremental ability customization system is best, like GalCiv2. A more qualitative system might have prettier aesthetics, but a math-scaled system that is bare to the player (e.g. GalCiv2) is just better overall. Maybe a mix where players could use a math-scale to design their own qualitative names (e.g. custom meta-traits) would be nice for aesthetics. On costumization, something like Spore's tribal+ uniform designer would be cool, if on top of that th
I'd think that Stardock's standards would be well above the mediocre MMORPG quest writing of "harvest x of y", and likely no one would aim for such garbage. Presumably the quest victory goal will have a decent story, given that the GalCiv series generally has had one as well. The benefit of a good procedural generation would be to take that story expertise and make it fresh from game to game. To be accurate, most backstories in computer games are "bland mediocricity".&n