If elemental allows designing map with point to poin movement. Maybe yes If the only maps you can design are square maps like in galciv, forget it. For me, the square map in galciv was illogical and a complete turn off.
Or something similar, the game takes place in a kid rooms. You need to find a way to conquer the bed, protect the closet, etc. Reminds me of an unreal tournament map which had a similar concept.
Awesome I suggest that you play a great old one and that therea are many dimensions you can travel to.
When you have a very complex game with many variable, one of the way you can solve this problem is to have a sentient AI. The concept is simple: The AI takes decisions ( maybe randomly) and keep track of the results in a database. The AI also keep track of the player's behavior. Now when you have enough stats, you can take a decision according to this information. For example: 4 times out of 5, I lost more than 50% of my ship when I used a triangular formation.
Free orion looked interesting, but it currently have the same problem than gal civ: You develop tons of technologies that has meaningless impact on the game. You need to accumulate tons of technoloies before seeing some changes. Also free orion look similar to moo3 for the look. I am not sure what are exactly their objectives: remake moo2, moo3 or a combination of both.
MOO2 was Very Good. Today, it would still needs to be updated. It is not that complicated to learn , but I have to say that my friend tought me how to play. In a few games, I had understood most of the concepts of the game. I remember that near the end of the game, a very large empire was hard to manage, so yes there was a lot of micro management but it took a lot of time before in gets a problem. I am not sure if this is a rumor, but apparently somebody started a game, setup is setti
For the first time this morning, I had a chance to play "Master of Orion 3". I never actually tried the game because everybody else said that the game was bad. Many people said that there was less micromanagement and more macro management. Since, I hate losing time on details and often want to get to the point, I thought that it might not be that bad for me. Also, I am playing more board games right now and due to the limited amount of information it can keep track, it needs to simpli
I think the solution would be to set your ai long term goals or give a price for the whole goal. For example, you want to make a bridge, change the interface so that you could select ever square that you want to raise, total the cost and when you cast the spell the bridge is completely done. Instead of casting multiple times the raise land spell. This could work for other type of spells like enchantments when you could enchant many units or squares with the same spell. <p
It is a nice way to test if both path allows to achieve the same thing.
I have heard some dicussion lately about making the game more strategic. This post is an example of a non-strategic mechanic transformed in a strategic one. I have been working for a long time on a board game remake attempt of master of magic. The example I will use explains a problem I had with expansion and cololonization. What I want to illustrate is that in a game like MOM or elemental, there is a lot of actions that needs to be fulfi
I have seen a lot of thread in the forum taht talked about the lack of strategy and the overflow of micromanagement. I think many people fear that it becomes a game were you work rather than making strategic decisions. I think right now, it is not very clear what should be the strategic decision of the player in the game what ever the level of decision (general or detail). So I thought that mabe we could design decision trees to show what strategic decision do we want to
I did not read all the posts, it's just a quick comment. For building contruction, I personally think that player should only take care about unique buildings. All repetitive buildings, like housing, should be built by themselves (not managed by the player). Else, it will become like sim city. Players will find an optimal combination of residential, industrial and commercial district and keep this strategy all the time. (ex: 2 residential for 1 industrial and 1 commercia
I believe I understand the idea here, but, why would someone, who desires to "win" ever take the "less useful" path regardless of circumstance? There can be various reasons. For example, let say the foresters guild add production from your forest. If you have little forest around your cities, it wont be a good choice. Some other buildings c
Never "FORCE" a player to have to do anything they don't want to. Maybe the term forcing was wrongly used. It should be stated as: Strongly convince that this is a good or bad choice for him. Note that player are not forced to take a path, it's just that some path are less useful than others. But players still have the liberty of taki
I also had this problem in my board game design. Players had access to let say 20 different unique buildings which were each on a card. All the players had the same building list. Player could build any building they wanted. - So the first problem is that players will find the optimal path of building to construct and will do always the same thing. Solution so far, Buildings are acquired randomly from the deck of buildings and players have a bit of control over the luc
I did not read all the post. If you want to make combat management easier and assisted by the AI, you do not want to limit the number of units you control, you want to raise your level of command. Which mean that you want a battle system that is going to ask you to manage the high level aspect of the battle rather then every action done by your units. I have not seen this in a lot of games but for example, R3K6 does that. You give to each of your officers orders like: at
Monster editor idea and animation I know that in the world of 3d animation, you need to give a squeletton to 3d modelsand then animate it. WHich mean that in a monster editor like I expalined above, you would need to select a preset animation model since you do not want player to manage their animation. Here are some example solution: You would have varous tyeps of creatures: Huimanois, Quadruped (dragon), Inverted bipede (T-rex), Inverted quadruped (horse), rampant, floa
Beign able to design spell effect is something that I would never thought beign possible for the user. Designing maps, objects and tiles is a pretty common concept. The only thing left would be to have a monster editor which would allow you to create a creature without beign a 3D modeler. Maybe you can look at "the spores" for inspiration. It might not necesarily need to be as sophisticated, but for example I would like to be able to build a creature like this: 1- Se
So in summary: if A + B > AB then alliances will be worth it. It might actually be the case, since if you conquer an all's empire, in total you would get the same production. But if elemental follow the concept that magic power is not proportional qith empire size, that means that it would still be more useful to have 2 wizard rather than 1 wizard. On in overall, you gain more to have a player has an ally.
I am posting comments without looking at other people's reply since I have no time: Morale : In r3k6 each side had a morale level that is indirectly a timer. If one side reaches 0 before the other, the battle ends. I like having battles with multiple ways to victory. The ones I am thinking right now: - Morale reach 0: The battle dragged too long and a winner needs to be found. - Anhilation: You kill almost everybody in the opposite army and
In know what you are trying to explain, you want to have a game like the sims where the player set up their own goal. The problem is that if you do that, your do not have a video game anymore but rather a video toy since one of the rules for a game to be a game is to have objectives. The sims is a toy, it's in fact a victual doll house.
Well if you want an happy friendly ending, it is still possible and it is as good as killing everybody. This can be easily achieved by giving victory points for everything you can do in the game. A bit like the score at the end of MOM. When the game end, the player with the most points wins. Making treaties and making people happy could give you points that in the end would make you win. But one thing for sure, you need a victory condition else it's not a game any more
I am a very defensive player too. Still, sometimes I like trying to win by conquest. But many times, I always get in a weaker situation than my opponent, especially in MOM because for example, I do not expand very fast. This is where diplomacy is interesting to me. I want to convince my opponent that if he leaves me alive and if we work together, it will be much better for both of us. It reminds me of R3K when I had all my troops at 100% while the computer kept them between 33-50%. Th
Well first just as a reminder, it's not only used for the AI but also for restricting the players. Second, it is true that if you play a game where there can only be 1 winner, it is a bit pointless to have diplomacy since you are going to betray your friend one day or the other. This would mean that the victory conditions should be different or there should be multiple victory path or there should be victory path won by alliances. Now it will make diplomacy more important.
I would be in to make a mom mod. The only problem is that I think That I would change the game too much to my own taste which could make the mod not feel like MOM. I am up for rule/game design and I can edit some XML files. Forget me for graphic design.