larienna

So what’s the problem with that? Plenty. First, it means that the guy who sits on the shards is going to win the game. It really aggravates our biggest pet peeve in these kinds of games – the game being won in the first 10 minutes and then spending the next 2 hours going through the motions. There are many ways to solve this problem. First can the crystal be captured, like nodes in master of magic. If they can, these crystals becomes strategic

I second the idea that questing should be an optional path to victory. A bit like it "settlers of catan" if you have no space for expansion, you will focus more on development cards. Maybe if you have a small empire and cannot expand more, for whatever reason, you are more likely to focus on quest. If you have a large empire and do a lot of conquest, you might do little questing because each little event might be banal to you. If you have a large empire and don't want to bothe

One of the things I did not like in Heroes of might and magic and partially age of wonders is that the object of the game is not to manage an empire but rather walk around the map and collect stuff. Most of the time spent consisted in uncovering and looting the map. Personally, I find this pretty boring. What I am suggesting is that quest should be more than wander around the map and loot stuff. There should be some target or goals that you could decide after a while to assign a

Each spell is part of a magic sphere. This is a type in it self. SO you could easily make immunities and protection vs these sphere of magic rather than doing damage types. Else, special added effect could be the solution: Ex: ice ball can freeze your ennemies if they fail their saves.

I am currently reading "the art of game design" and I can see a lot of similar concepts that were in the book.

Another quik reply My friend designed an RPG system where you pickup character traits and background story events which translate in bonus and malus on stats and skills. But the most interesting part is that the player does not know the effect on the stat of each choice they pick up. So they are more likely to create more living characters rather than stat boosted characters. [edit] Also, the way the system is made, each trait increase at least 2 different things which

Quick Reply I like playing girls and if I was a sovereign I would make sure that my girls would follow the succession. So give the player the options of who is going to succeed without beign forced by the sex of the character.

Then you simply don't understand what a game engine is.. I roughly know what a game engine is, it's just that I do not consider dialogue to be part of a game engine. In my point of view, game engine is everything that could look close to a video game design library: Graphics, Music, Input, Data Storage, tools to interface with these concepts, etc.

As Boogie mentioned, we’re working on the discussion system. Now you might wonder why a strategy game would have such a sophisticated conversation engine under the covers. Well, for one thing, what if 5 years from now some guy wants to make an RPG that uses the Elemental engine? We need to be ready for that. We need to support that. I don't think that it is actually a good idea. Ok modding is cool, but I expect mods to be variation of the same

advisor and heroes should be taking parts of the discussion too.

I know that upkeep/Unrest/Health and food is important if you want to be possible to destabilize your opponent. What I don't like is when you must prevent your self to do certain things in order not to screw yourself over. Another example, in Civ 1, I never built aquaduct. The reason why is because when I get more than 10 people in my cities I start getting unrest which paralyse my city. In order to remove unrest, I need to remove 3 workers, which reduce the food produce and starve th

OK, I don't want to debate Civ IV vs CivRev so I'll make it quick. I know that there is some missing features that I would have liked (ex: unit upgrade, better diplomacy, beign able to produce nothing) and there are even features I would have removed (worker placement). But in general, I prefered the CivRev experience. In overall, it took approximately 8 hours to finish a game of CivRev. While playing Civ 4, in 8 hours, I had the time to build 3 cities. I played on a tiny map and it t

Yesterday, I played civilization revolution for the first time and it is way much better than Civ IV. There is still a few flaws like diplomacy is very limited, but in general, it plays much better. Anyways, what I want to get at is that in CivRev, the way the buildings are designed makes each of them not necessarily essential in each of your city. In Master of magic, constructing buildings takes a lot of time and most of the time, there is no interest in not having them all. Which cr

I like the idea of power comparison. It is an easy way to evaluate the forces of both side without making any probability calculations. I would personally rate the combat on 3 values: Strength: Determined by attack defense values of units and the amount of units. Volatility: The amount of speciall abilities that could have an impact on the battle. Magic: The potential of the ennemy wizard to influence the battle. All these variables are compared separately, so

Yes, it is possible to calculate. You might not be able to calculate the odds of a complete tactical battle but you can do 2 things. 1 Calculate the odds and expected damage of individual attack (advance wars does it). 2. When doing battles in strategic battle mode, since you are not doing all the tactical manuvers, it could be possible to caculate the odds since the battle itself is only resolved by calculation.

I prefer that learning how to evaluate what is a strong vs. weak army come from experience of playing the game, not some little advisor popping up to tell you that you are about to get creamed. Normally, I would say yes. The problem is that there is too much variables that can influence battles and there are many different units. So you have no basic point of comparison. It's not like for example In romance of the 3 kingdoms where I can make solder ratio.

I am currently playing a game of MOM and one of the elements that is worth mentionning is that players should be able to evaluate the odds of a combat. Which is currently not the case in MOM. The goal is to allow the players to evaluate if they have good chances of winning. For example, if I say: 9 dragon turtles VS 1 death knight, who wins? The answer is death knight. But the only way to know that is to engage in battle, get anhilated and reload the game. Unfo

I know that the game will be very modable and that many players will try to mod various elements of the game that they don`t like. But what for example if I like 2 different mods and I would like to play with both of them. Would it be possible without creating a new mod. Of course, sometime mods changes can overlap. I am not sure how this could be dealed with. Maybe have a moding priority. All this mod modularity reminds me of "Mutators" in Unreal Tournament. I remember always

I have read the book that inspired Magic the gathering. It is called "Authentic Thaumaturgy". Some sort of magic RPG system based on esoteric magic. By checking back at the colors and elements, I used for my game a 5 element system a la magic but white was replaced for yellow. So it made: Yellow = Science: TIme travel, teleportation, golems, machinery, alchemy Red= Chaos: Impossible mixture of stuff: Living walls, Chimeras, stone skin, Blue = Ether: Control of

Ok, here are my thought about a diplomacy and espionage system that I had for my game and some other board game variants. The council : First, players would have to create the wizard councils before beign able to do any diplomacy at all. Or maby only limited diplomacy is allowed. A council can be formed when each player can create a chain of communication. Ex: Player A Knows player B which knows player C. C and A does not know each other but they can still form the cou

This post comments the 1st post, I read half of the of the thread and got tired or it. I realised at the end, people where now talking about diplomacy. So I think I am going to make another diplomacy thread. Anyways, here what I think of the development and technology system. Development : This system is pretty nice. I have not analysed the math formulas, but what I like about it is that you cannot easily re-adjust yourself if something bad happens. So it is possible t

One of the thing that annoyed me in Civ and MOM, is the idea where you must not make your cities to close to each other and you don't want to waste space by making them too far from each other. At least in MOM, there is a 3 square limit between each city, but in civ, sometimes the computer build 2 cities really close to each other which makes them eat eachother's ressources and you end up with an over population problems where you lack of food.

It reminds me on Super mario bros 2 where when you paused the game, you only heard the bass and drums. So you could have a situation where when you click a city, some instrument fade out or changes. Since you are still playing on he the world map, no need to change the whole song. It could also be possible to make a song less annoying by selecting randomly a variation each time the song loop. That could be indeed pretty neat.

I have the most recent version, but for some odd reason, now it works correctly. It's is probably due the the magical wonders of computer technology.

I was not thinking about detailing the whole familly tree like in romance of the 3 kingdoms. In that game it is important, but in elemental managing a few heroes and assigning them to job instead of questing could do the job.