lwarmonger

Agreed. Morale for this type of game is crucial. If I'm Joe Snuffy, armed with a pike, and my commander is some jumped up little twerp who tells me to go slay an enourmous dragon who is just minding his own cave, I might make it to the cave along with my buddies... but I'm not going to stick around. With fantastic creatures like dragons, the impact on morale is probably bigger than the (considerable) ability of said dragon to kill things.

"The concept of coverage and high ground and such are all taken into effect as well as the morale of your soldiers." And it is confirmed. Morale. Now the question is, how is it being implemented? Personally, I think this is one of the few things (other than graphics) that the total war series does really well. Breaking your enemies armies, not slaughtering them to a man, is the objective.

I am liking the food based ideas put forth here. Large numbers of small outposts supporting a few big cities makes a lot of sense (you could choose to do a few massive cities with many outposts, or more medium sized cities that can do a bit less... all of which are a good model). It also helps from a role playing perspective (how many small towns are in most fantasy settings... quite a few, and they are usually no less important places for adventure than the big unique cities).&nb

I really like the backstory element that are put into these games, and for elemental it is very important. Glad to see you all think that as well. (edit) Also, "due real soon now"? A week out soon, or sooner? The anticipation begins to mount.

Agreed. Excellent and feasable idea.

LOL... special forces do not a war make. And that friendly fire comment is much, much more likely to happen to the commonwealth than American forces. Taking the best of the commonwealth forces, namely Britain, are still no match in a straight up fight against the American army. The Canadian Army (were it to try) wouldn't even come close, and any sane officer would tell you as such. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for the Canadian (and British) milit

US... 3000 nuclear weapons can do a lot of winning. Not to mention training, experience, complete command of the sea and air. Throw in the best armored forces in the world to boot, and we aren't talking much of a contest here. Also add in the fact that certain nations armed forces are designed to be modular and "slot in" with existing capabilities provided by the US under NATO auspices (looking at you Canada). Pakistan and India would still be pretty distracted by each

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="10" id="2469043"] It seems to me like this one is the hardest for long strategy games to do well in. Most of the games that I've played, the last 10-15 minutes are a foregone conclusion. Last 15 miutes a forgone conclusion, I just finished a Galactic Civ where the last half the game was a forgon conclution, I can't think of many that past the 1/3rd mark there have been 'natural' changes of who's winning (not caused by game

Seven Kingdoms Ancient Adversaries had an awsome espionage system as well.

Personally I think espionage should be character driven as well. That could be a mission that you send characters in your employ on.

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="3" id="2428122"]I would say add Morale and Endurance (especially Morale) but otherwise I refer to my original statement, that any intelligence based attributes/abilities could be goverened by level of essence imo, and this system could enable easier modding to switch from essence to intelligence in an RPG system ... especially since essence governs your amount of mana (from what I hear) [/quote] Seconded! Morale is crucial!

Fortunately, it appears this will be extremely easy to mod! I think both systems have merits, and we will see which one is more fun (since when creating resources for mods we would have to create a "rummage value" this should be about as easy as it gets to mod existing resources).

Conceivably this shouldn't be too difficult for a "total conversion mod" to do.

Sword of the Star's tech system is one of the major reasons why that game is so great. I am very glad to see that you are heading in a similar direction.

If we are defining people by quality, then that becomes a civilian issue as well. With limited numbers of exceptional individuals, you would have to choose between using them in the civilian economy or recruiting them to fight in your military. If exceptional people provided a significant bonus to whatever civilian activity they were providing in your cities then removing them from that role and employing them in the military would remove that bonus. This would provide an "o

[quote]It still doesn't help hinder the road-spam though ... I think there should be some bonuses to letting land stay wild (regenerating lumber, ect?), or sans that (and more importantly) once you start paving/cobbling roads in some way, other than a simple dirt road, there should be some sort of regular maintanence upkeep.[/quote] As a caveat to that... all roads should have a maintanence upkeep. Cobbled roads should improve trade and movement better than dirt roads, but all r

A lot of those calculations that are derived based on city numbers can be influenced by the size of city though. A small cattle farming comunity of 1200 will have a far smaller impact on your overal city count (which shouldn't merely be a base number but an average of sizes, territory covered and buildings created) than a massive metropolis of 100,000... which would enable players to have good reasons to have small farming and mining villages (which also make typical adventuring locatio

Which is why I think food supply is the way to go. A megacity has to have a large number of highly productive agricultural lands feeding it directly to become such because there is no way that a Rome or Constantinople at their ancient peak can survive from local resources. Which is why massive imports of grain are necessary to keep that population hovering around a million.

Which is why I think that there should be only a few "super-cities" per map... however there should be a few. They would have to suck in food from the entire empire via water (like Rome did from Egypt and then Africa and Constantinople did from Egypt... forcing Rome to begin to be supplied from Africa). I'm not saying this type of city should be a common occurance, but a lot of RPG settings are in cities, however most of them require sizeable cities to have good adv

The most recent developer diary mentioned the ability for cities to approach the tens of thousands or more in terms of population if the player wishes it. Personally, I think a few "great" cities should be able to make it to the hundreds of thousands. Some civilization unique buildings (like the palace) combined with access to a river or the sea and some high density tenements (available at the higher housing levels) should enable 2-3 cities per map to attain "super-city" sta

I have to agree with Rishkith. A robust seaborne economy is essential... but possibly not so much focuse on the naval battles (although a naval tactical battle would be great).

Good idea. I hope something like this does make it into the game.

I have to agree. One of the pillars, and often a make or break, for a 4X game is its economic system. If you dumb it down too much you make it superfluous... if you make it too complex (or have an inadequate UI to handle its level of complexity) then you make it frustrating. The key to making a successful local inventory system work isn't to try and have your cake and eat it too (which will simply irritate a lot of players who had supported what, is in my opinion, a fairly w

I must admit... having read and participated in that same economy thread I really don't see how one can say that the simplified economic model won out. Option 3 looked to be by far the most popular. And I've got to agree with most of the other posters here that not having some system of resource storage kind of defeats the purpose of having finite resources to begin with. That being said, I am a huge fan of finite resources... just also a huge fan of being able to store th

I like this quite a bit. The change I would make is the ability to build warehouses to store resources (you choose what your warehouse stores) in case you wish to build up a strategic reserve or drive up the price. That warehouse can be burned, broken into, robbed and stock can also be embezzeled... but from that warehouse comes the ability to trade resources with other nation or store resources against hard times. Other than that small change I think that t