[quote who="Sarudak" reply="53" id="2902954"]I don't think Abeix is something you're going to be able to deal with in the early game... [/quote] peasant attacks with gnarled club... *miss*.
My first post was so long winded that I actually violated the principle I was trying to put forward, so let me get to the heart of the matter. DLC must either consist of important content, without which the original work must suffer, or it must consist of unimportant content that has little or no value. Therefore it is mutually exclusive with quality art.
[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="2" id="2901491"] Bascially anything that uses a reskinned model went on the block for us to decide if we wanted to make a new model or not. [/quote] Good instincts. My belief is that re-skinning is a tool that designers use to fool themselves that they are adding content. This would be a great trick if the audience were also fooled, but they aren't... ever.
I think that you are making a good case that DLC is almost impossible to pull off in a way that is satisfying to the customer. You can't forget that games are art . Art initiates financial momentum when it honestly and successfully evokes the desired emotional response from an audience. When it fails to do that, it acts as a force against that momentum. The resulting time delay is the reason why bad art can succeed and good art can fail. When people expec
I don't even care about the money. I love PC games enough that I'm nearly price insensitive when it comes to my games, so let me show you an example of how DLC can impact a game even when its free! So I'm playing Civ5 on my first full weekend with it, and I'm having a great time. I'm meeting the new Civs in game and each one is a wonderful surprise. On my third game or so my scouts are walking through the jungle and made contact with a civ I hadn't seen yet. Wow! h
[quote who="nates1984" reply="7" id="2899652"] Quoting Vandenburg, reply 5 That doesn’t mean gimping the base game. You're such an idealist. While I like your sentiment, I don't believe for even a single second that any one of the big publishers and companies involved in games would follow you on that. Gimping the base game to make more money IS a sucessfull business model, as the last few years of DLC have shown.
Chopping your game into little pieces to be sold separately is bad art. Expansions are one thing, DLC is another. It's hard to make good games, and nobody needs to make it even harder on themselves. The crap they are pulling with Civ5 is an outrage. I bought a half empty shell of a game and now they want me to get excited about a new civ every couple of months. I'd pay $100 for a proper Civ game any day, but I don't even want to waste my time on half of one.
Food only comes from food resources now. To use a resource, click on the resource within your borders and select the 'build' option.
Good post. I would like to emphasize the part about 'special' abilities being special. Their best role is to provide small surprises as the player discovers the game. Like... "Whaoh that thing is immune to all my weapons! Run away!".
I want a great single player game. I barely have time for that much less MP these days.
When you say 'dynamic', do you mean that there will be a few basic land types, with many 'environment' types modifying them? In WoM, it seemed that there was some confusion over whether things like desert and swamp should be an environment type or a static terrain type. I hope you guys get it sorted out cleanly this time.
Yay, I was really hoping to see that swamp god in game!
In a normal Windows environment, such tasks are handled by 'modal' dialog boxes. That means when they pop up, they have their own message loops that stop the main UI thread from continuing until the user gives a response. In a game where things need to be animating and so forth behind the dialog box, you either have to all the static UI stuff in its own thread, or you have to use 'modeless' dialog boxes which operate like separate mini-application windows, which unlike modal dialog boxes
All of these suggestions in this thread are nothing less than a major AI project, but that doesn't change the fact that it must be done. If you're going to have tactical battles and have them be fun, then you have to be willing to accept that the battle AI might take twice as many lines of code than what you currently find in the strategic AI.
I would say that one of the main historical reasons for giving troops a variety of training and equipment is to deal with different kinds of terrain. With a battle map that was more than a simple field of squares, you would need to be mindful when designing units what kind of terrain they might face. Heavy armor is great unless you have to cross a bog filled 3 feet of soft mud to attack the enemy. Archers with rock climbing gear could find a nice ledge over a battlefield and fire do
[quote who="Capn Darwin" reply="37" id="2892534"] Is there a way based on map size to set a max limit for shards and/or start locations on the setting page to help folks not kill the program? [/quote] I always hate it as a modder when I'm prevented from breaking the rules. I prefer to let people push the envelope if they so desire.
[quote who="Capn Darwin" reply="35" id="2892468"]@Cephalo, Yep, that is one of the values. I guess I'm asking for a noise modifier (integer 0 to x) that would randomly set the value between Value - noise to value + noise when generating the map. Also, is there any chance to add some code to generate random names for the maps as a default? Be sweet if it could use a modified worldname file like you are doing for the objects (IE point to a given file to use). I'
There's a "MinimumDistanceToSame" tag in the XML. Is that what you mean?
Without resorting to modding, all I can really do is make sure starts are on barren land. I really don't want to resort to putting fertile land where it doesn't belong, as the whole reason for making this map was to place things properly. The problem with placing starts only on barren is that it forces everyone to create worlds with lots of barren land when maybe they don't want to. Can you guys think of any reason why these additional food resources need to be so expensive? Although,
[quote who="Capn Darwin" reply="23" id="2891693"]Cephalo, I'm using ACP 1.3 and I have one minor issue in the way goodie huts spawn. The majority of them are spawning in the woods making them very hard to spot using the cloth map and even in the 3d world in some cases for the smaller tiles. Is there a way to gently force the spawning to clear tiles? Thanks! [/quote] Ok, I think impinc made a new xml file for ACP so that it spawns the custom goodyhuts. Also,
if you also tone down the desert a bit it shouldn't be a huge problem. If you start on the border of the desert you will get fertile land and an oasis, which isn't too bad.
[quote who="JoeTheLoser" reply="19" id="2891409"]Cephalo; Looks great yet again. One question/issue I had is this: About half the "starting" positions are next to "FERTILE LAND" while the other half are next to "OASIS". Because an OASIS requires 50 materials to build upon (vs. 25gold/gildar for FERTILE LAND) you either have to: 1) Be severely crippled for the first ~50 turns or so until you can build up two workshops and gather those mate
[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="40" id="2890242"] Quoting zigzag, reply 36 I may be the only one who believes this, but I wish Elemental's backstory were less intrusive and that the factions were good and evil simpliciter. I enjoy fantasy games because they provide an escape from the rationalizing that accompanies everyday decisions. Destroy the magical item or take it for yourself? Do it for the sake of being good/evil. So you w
[quote who="Capn Darwin" reply="15" id="2890504"]Played my first new map last night and hit one minor snag. A NPC spawned in the side of a mountain/hill (impassable terrain near a shard). NOt a game killer by any means. The NPC can't move. I can still probably snag them by getting close and using imbue/return. Other then that the maps look very good. A great program. Thanks for sharing! [/quote] Yeah, stuff like that is going to happen. Unfortunately when the game spawns items it
[quote who="RogueCaptain" reply="29" id="2889651"]It's mostly due to visual presentation that players come to the conclusion of good vs evil. Why not change the ashy dark land to a different color like a yellow plain? It's all so cliche. [/quote] I think this is an important point. The terrain changes very much imply that tolkeinesque "good vs. irretrievably and forever evil" dynamic that is very popular in the fantasy genre. People do love that stuff but if