ckessel

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="3" id="2118602"] Answer; of course not one of my biggest problems with TBS games is their static, uninspired, and frankly dull combat when they are on a pure turn based system. War or battle by its vary nature is chaotic and has server time restraints which is more accurately simulated by an RTS. [/quote] Ok, I get it. I think you're completely missing the point of turn based games. This is chess/go/ASL/ on a gran

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="25" id="2118410"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 21Elemental is a turn-based game. Not an RTS. Even the tactical battles are turn-based, they're just continuous turns (ala The Corporate Machine). I just downloaded the political machine and played a few games is that exactly how the tactical combat is going to work in Elemental? It seemed very slow to me, I had hoped for an option for something a bit more dynamic and fast paced. [

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="21" id="2118132"]Elemental is a turn-based game. Not an RTS. Even the tactical battles are turn-based, they're just continuous turns (ala The Corporate Machine).[/quote] Thanks for the clarification. I haven't played The Corporate Machine, so I'm not sure what continuous turn based means. Sort of like the continuous mode in Baldur's Gate 2 where it actually did normal D&D rounds didn't stop between rounds? (well, you could set it to auto-stop betw

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="7" id="2117573"] [quote] Frogboy The idea is that you zoom in to a given battle and you see all your units there. From there, you can set the speed you want the action to take place (from “turns” to real time). [/quote] I personally love a good RTS and would be very happy with some core RTS elements in Elemental. [/quote] Nice that you love RTS. There's freaking hundreds of RTS

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="1" id="2117198"] W[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="1" id="2117198"] ...Stardock is shooting for a hybrid RPG, Strategy/ RTS... [/quote] They're shooting to add RTS to it? That's the first I've heard of that. Instant no-sale if so. Take look at any software store and you probably see 20-30 RTS games on the shelf and maybe 1 TBS and that's only if Civ 4 is in stock... Stardock has a great record and I'll see

Frogboy, Great stuff as usual. One of my concerns though is that new units are all simply going to be "horseguys +2, +3, +4" with the build your own style. One thing that was great in MoM and some other games was a level of uniqueness in the units. You've said fantasy units (Unicorns, etc) are going to be very rare. This leads me to think that army composition is going to be a fairly dull set of Footmen +X, Archers +X, and Cavalry +X. No wolves with high speed, or skeletons th

MoM was good because it was revolutionary. Well, it stole from a bunch of places, but the combination was certainly revolutionary. Race interactions, the spell system, and even the combat system was beyond other 4X games. GalCiv, in many ways, broke some of the mold with individually modelled ships on the entire map. Unlike Moo where ships moved as a big block between arbitrary warp points. I keep seeing you and NTJedi starting to go "Whoa, hold on, just make a better clone of game X"

[quote who="NTJedi" reply="22" id="2079000"] Quoting lwarmonger, reply 20 I am (and I'd say it is reasonable to say that others are as well) curious about foriegn trade. How will that be handled? Will it be done primarily using the same caravan system that characterizes internal trade, or will it be exclusively bilateral party to party trade through negotiation (a la Dominions 3)? Just curious, because while much has been made of domestic tra

One option to killer stacks is some sort of local supply rating, perhaps with buildings/improvements/spells you can use to help that out. A big army takes resources to maintain in the field. You can port all those with you or forage from the surroundings. I can see "porting supplies" in the form of caravans of supplies having to be purchased or some sort of production penalty to nearby towns if you exceed their supply. Which in turn means your inherent supply is better near your

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="22" id="2037584"]OH MAN! somebody said it! SCRUM! I never actually thought I would hear it outside EA or some other big company like that where they have consultants tell project leads how to manage their development processes [/quote] SCRUM, at least in Oregon, seems to be fairly typical at anything other than big companies. Clearly your experience with it is poor, but as something of a semi-expert on soft

That makes sense for small betas. It's akin to the agile coding process SCRUM where you roll out completed features every X weeks (usually 2-6 weeks) and those pieces are fully functional, but the product as a whole isn't. It's turning your beta users into an extension of the QA group, but focused more on usability/fun than whether a feature matches spec. I'm all in favor of it personally. Many rounds of early feedback in small chunks is better than limited rounds of massive feedback

One thing I love about books, something I've never seen a game truly capture, is their ability to tell an epic story where powerful independent kingdoms hold islands of power. Think along the lines of the Elven forests or Dwarven strongholds in LOTR or someone like Tom Bombadil that's almost completely unassailable in his domain. GalCiv II had a few indepenent planets that helped give the universe a "living" feel to it. HoMM and others have lots of guardians, though they rea

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="12" id="1991758"] ... my interest in something like a multigenerational line of heroes is driven by the idea of a 'truly epic' fantasy game. [/quote] King of Dragon's Pass had aging and death. Your council (heroes) were folks elevated from the populace, but they would grow old and resign or could die of various effects. Rather than have heroes been incredibly scarce, you can go the route of a limit of heroes based on various factors (ki

I'm not sure. It seems fiddly, like I'd have to go in an update my builds every time I researched something. That's one thing that was annoying in GalCiv II was every time I researched a better +x weapon I had to go update all my ship designs. The automated ship designer didn't work because it only focused on one strategy. I wanted the best missile ship, the best laser ship, etc as separate designs. Any time I got a better version of one of those I had to go update my designs for all any desi

Weather would be very cool. Well, as long as it has some in game impact. I could see bad weather definitely helping some troops types and hindering others. I can also see using magic to further weather in your favor. I can see cold/hot in particular mattering, but maybe if you're not a kingdom with any airborne creatures then a spell to create rain and fog would be to your benefit. No need to throw in complexity for complexities sake, but if weather matches the flavor of a particular

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="25" id="1976466"] Re hard caps, I dislike them categorically...[/quote] Well, an army has a chain of command and there can only be so many leaders. If you're going to run a small army, it's reasonable to have a cap on the number of leaders that army can have. Given there's 1 leader for generally a bunch of regular troops, it doesn't make sense to have hundreds of leaders unless you have thousands and thousands of troops.

A PBM game I played, Alamaze, had a similar mechanism for army leaders. You could have up to 3 leaders in an army. After every battle the leaders would gain experience and eventually progress (Captain, General, Marshal, Warlord). If you didn't have a full set of 3 leaders, sometimes a new Captain would arise as a result of the battle. I could certainly see a similar mechanism with new heroes arising from the ranks as a result of heroic effort in some battle/adventure.

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="2" id="1974497"]ckessel, is it a fair guess that you've not played Galactic Civilizations II? The campaigns in that game strike me as an unfortunately fine example of what drives pigeonpigen "nuts." [/quote] I've played the Twilight campaign, I have the gold edition (or whatever it's called that has all the expansions). It's campaigns are definitely the start over type, which pigionpigen isn't fond of. However, I prefer that start-over rather than a grow

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="21" id="1974280"]Wouldn't the AI problem there be more about deciding whether the mana cost is worth the benefit of opening a temporary gate to somewhere?[/quote] Yep. You've described a good simple scenario better than my rambling :). Pathfinding is pretty well known. Static gates are just a part of the path, so there's no real AI involved in whether or not to use them. If it shortens the journey, it uses them. You've described the more difficul

One thing I've disliked about HoMM and, to an extent, Age of Wonders is that as a campaign advances your heroes get so powerful that they make regular troops pitiful in comparison. It gets to the point where your one guy, or one elite stack that carries over, just rampages about. You can get to a point in those campaigns where losing a built up hero might as well be a complete loss as you have to start over. Early maps tend to be lots of fun with strategy and battles between non-hero gro

I'd imagine shortest path algorithms are prety well known. I think I remember studying them in college. A gate is fairly likely easy to add at the code level in a way that's simple for the AI to adapt to. Internally it's added as an "adjacent" location to some other location on the map, perhaps several. It's all pointers internally so that each location knows what's considered an adjacent location. Once a gate is established, it's just a link that's traversed in calculating costs to m

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="21" id="1973256"] Well, don't forget things like the nightshade, that couldn't be traded. I agree with you 100% that there should be things that make a place special. I feel that some resources should be tradable, and some shouldn't. I mean logically, I don't know how adamantine would only help at most 1 or 2 cities... [/quote] Very true, which is part of what made me think of "skilled labor" as a poten

[quote who="Darkhour" reply="18" id="1972544"] Someone came up with a script in Civ4 that enabled people to have generated benefits/techs based on stating location. Dynamic starting locations could give a touch of realism to the game by doing so. Seven Kingdoms also had an interesting system of pregenerated cities etc. There is no definte in my opinion. I'm in favour of pregenerated 'realism' to some degree but also high level randomness. In-game options are the key to the pla

[quote who="arstal" reply="15" id="1972163"]This leads to the logical questions- how did those horse archer guys get good if they never had access to mounts? [/quote] Supply? Those nomads just didn't have the herds to support full on armies. Now that they've got someone to supply them with enough horses, their long tradition of training and culture means they can crank out new warriors if they can get enough horses. Those sea side folk were just wasting those horses havin

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="13" id="1971712"] --- I'd love to see some sort of regional variance. If you found a coastal town, or take one over, yea, you can build boats, but are these guys from a long viking warrior tradition or a fishing village tradition? Do they excel in building war boats or in producing food (via fishing) or transports? Do those mountain people excel at tracking in a way that the plains people never could? Read most any fantasy novel with