I mentioned it briefly elsewhere, but, I really liked MoM's system. It gives you a goal to work towards early on: defeat those Gorgons / Phantom Beast / whatever. I always thought it should be added to by having the node generate an unkeep free magical garrison for you once you've captured it. Or maybe you have to spend mana to get this protection.
Actually I think a lot of the hand drawn maps in Dominions 3 were 3rd party maps for Dominions 2 that the developers adopted into the game. Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember downloading some of them separately.
One thing I am reminded of when reading this thread again is Half-Life, where they used the introduction of HDR to create a sort of strange glow in the sky, which didn't look like any natural colour. I am hopeful that, what with the capabilities of modern graphics technology, plus a bit of artistic creativity, Elemental will show us some things that are really unearthly. I assume most of you here will have seen Demigod, at least some screenshots. Demigod is a beautiful game, it's also
It'd take a bit of digging, but I recall reading that one of the game's choices will be how much effort you want to spend on attracting heros. I assume Stardock have some alternative to MoM's fame system.
Priests of Quicksilver? Blasphemy! The blessed inquisition of Stardock must stamp out this heresy of MOO3. I must say I am rather tired of loads of Japanese stuff turning up in any game that happens to have a sword in it, and rather hope that I will be able to block that stuff from being downloaded into my game. Nonetheless, if there is the degree of customization such that people can make all those I will be very pleased.
Hah, well if I hadn't preordered already then I'd certainly go for a 64-bit Windows 7 / Element al bundle with a small discount. Edit: Bah typos.
If you have a look at Society, Stardock have their own take on persistent multiplay, and one which could be quite interesting. Whereas there are already far too many third person cooperative action RPG stylings and I don't think many people will be worried about the loss of one. Personally, I thought World Eater looked like a really interesting concept, but that stalled in development years ago. I reckon adaptable biological ships which eat each other and eventually munch on planets i
I prefer the fickle, bloodthirsty interpretation of elves. I think that could make for a nice quest, event, or spell (send them to raid enemy lands and steal babies).
I think I'd prefer for there to be scrying magic than bog standard espionage. Although invisible spies could also be cool.
I dunno, I think a lot of the artwork in Dominions 3 is pretty bad. The generated battlefields are pretty sparse, and the units vary from ugly (shambler) to iconically pretty (sea serpent). The sounds are terrible. I cringe any time one of my mages summons a skeleton, which is far too frequently, because the noise sounds like someone blowing a raspberry. There are lots of cool options to draw you in for a while, but somehow it just doesn't come together for me, and I never finish a ga
Total War's unit variation system, which plugs together different bits to keep units from looking homogenous, works very well. Other than that, there are so many similar character customization tools around now, it should be trivial to licence one. And if you're not interested in going through all that fiddling around with cheekbones for every unit, just grab a high rated community character off t'internet and stick your own equipment on it.
I actually think it's quite important that games do copy Spore. I think the technology and ideas are brilliant, and it would be good for the industry if they stick.
There is such a thing as too much complexity: often abstracting stuff out makes for a better game. I think you could be pushing the boundary where it might get too complex to be fun. Caravans can be interesting because they give you a new military target and a reason to raid and patrol. But they could also be annoying and fiddly and distract from bigger issues like flooding the world and crushing your enemies beneath your magically augmented heel. I don't mean to be too critical, I ki
I think an ironman setting should keep a backup a fixed number of turns in the past, which it will let you access in case of save corruption (hopefully a rare occurance, but you can't always account for my accidental kicking of the extension cord). I suppose life magic may have ways to bring your heros back?
I would have thought that they would be more pro-individualism, given that they appear to have a sort of social darwinist vibe going on. As in, you can be individual as long as you're strong enough to make it stick. Whereas the humans are about working together to build stuff. I think drow is quite a nice summation of what we've heard about them before. Hopefully without a Fallen equivalent of (ugh) Drizzt.
HOMM2 I've played quite a lot of, and it's good, but also too difficult in my opinion. HOMM3 I played the demo of and was impressed. HOMM5 I played the demo, but somehow didn't like it - the new storyline and redone factions smelled a bit too Warcrafty for me. King's Bounty I was partway through and enjoying, but it's since taken a back seat to Fallout 3 and a second run through of Mass Effect.
I find that Stars! is really enjoyable when you are customizing your race and deciding on a strategy, or researching up to a new hull. But once you actually get to playing the game it's kind of a letdown.
He means Stars!, not Star!. Suppose each city has is connected only to the nearest city in each direction. Obviously rather difficult to do as an algorithm, sorry Stardock. Now, this should balance all resource out across the empire fairly quickly: For each connected city. If have not sent a caravan to that city in X turns. (Other factors, such as distance and presence of hostile armies?) <span style="white-space:
How bizzare. I just had a look at Wikipedia's list of Square-Enix games, and it doesn't look like they've done anything like Supcom before. Hopefully they won't push for a console version. Anyway, good luck GPG, differentiate the factions more for this one please.
But, but, invisible flying warships... I think a very rudimentary cannon could work, although I'd prefer magical siege equipment. Wouldn't really want to see muskets or pistols.
The opportunity for a gorgeous animated rim-fall is surely too great to pass up?
Civilization 4 was a masterpiece in my opinion, pulling together the best ideas of the series. I've said elsewhere I'd really like the diplomacy system, but honestly just about every mechanic in the game is well thought out and deserves a look for how they create strategic choices. For one little example pulled out of the air: the health system. Gives a good reason for trade goods, allows you to model pollution without having a stupid worker stack to clean everything up, would interact brilli
I would tend to think that necromancy should be an option of chaneller customisation, rather than faction customisation. Still, it would be nice if there were a way to end up with an entirely undead city.
Well, the world has been nuked, but I kind of expect that the developers mean to start us off with a small town, if it's anything like MOM. The developing tribe mechanic is cool and interesting, but perhaps it would steal focus from the epic wizard battle aspect of things. On the other hand, I love the idea of starting off as a shaman or witch or something, and helping your clan take over larger and larger parts of the world with your magic. Again, probably not this game though.
It sounds an awful lot like Dominions' combat system, and most of us on here only know about that game because Frogboy made a post about it once. In that, you give your units a script, and they attempt to act according to it in battle. We''ll see. I prefer slow, pausable real-time for battles, but I guess no-one is interested in making Fantasy: Total War. It seems they'd rather make some Tom Clancy boringness.