The only penalty for failing a quest I support is the loss of any time or resources you already put into them. It wouldn't really make any sense for someone to be punishing you, the Lord of the Land. The example I provided kind of has built in punishment, but no more than any random event. Any negative aspects like that would have to be looked at very carefully.
Savage, the whole point of this system is that it can be added onto forever and that you could essentially exchange any of the parts for a different idea. So yes to everything you mentioned. The quests can be of any length or difficulty and there's not much it can't do.
Let's not forget that though we are a very small minority of players, we're also often the same type that reviews these games and publizes it from early on. I have a lot of friends that like strategy games, but not enough to be in the alpha or beta. If I send out word that the game sucks they're not going to buy it (I trade that for their FPS advice :) ). Another thing, we're the most likely people to be modders so a lot of the questions that have been asked are directly pertine
[quote who="Shurdus" reply="2" id="2322475"]and that it will not get implemented.[/quote] Considering the alpha isn't out and we have very little info on the quest system I don't see why random quests couldn't be in the game. [quote who="Scoutdog" reply="3" id="2322576"]Well, it looks difficult to program[/quote] Well as I said, it's not difficult to program. It's just time consuming making the amount of quest components and testing them. Still, you migh
[quote] I'd advise a system as seen from the original AgeofWonders where you could explore dungeon type sites. In the original AgeofWonders there was only one single level, but for Elemental I would advise many dungeon type sites having multiple levels... 5, 10, and even 20 levels. It's much more intensely scary entering Level 17 of an evil dungeon as compared to Level 2.[/quote] No thanks. I'd rather just play a roguelike or classic RPG if I wanted to do that. Even having two leve
I saw the battlefield screenshot before and it looked like they didn't initially consider height, which might mean it would be a huge pain for the art department to have to make all the transitions look good. My favorite fantasy tactical combat is AoW:SM, and that has height working fairly well. I'm not against it being there as it's intuitive, but I wouldn't be too disappointed if it wasn't. How would battlefield height correlate to world map terrain? Would there be some tactics skill that j
Totally agreeing with Ron here. You might not also know that they decided to use a int vs long vs double. It also takes nearly no effort or space including that one descriptive character there.
When you've got a chance to try something this unique you've got to take a chance. Not many developers are this free of publishers prodding you to release. Go for the longer development cycle. The only thing I would suggest as far as the schedule is concerned is to keep the release date the same, but decrease the time between all of the initial phases. The hardest problems to fix with games aren't usually with the individual components (world map, tactical combat), but with how they r
Most games with random quests are just one basic objective and then return to base (if that). If they had just taken a little more time to add in more random branching components to their quests they would increase the longevity and fun of their systems exponentially. Making a system with many different types of objectives that can be interlocked in many fashions would make things a lot more fun, and with not too much extra work. The goal should j
One this you might want to do to save yourself huge amounts of time is to have every function have an explanatory comment section preceeding it that has some string of characters common to all function descriptors. An example of this would be something like: //**WAJFFXCD**Function SpellStoneRain(ply [casting player entity]. bFirstCast [boolean true if never cast before], target [target enemy player entity]) //Casts the spell Stone Rain on target player. //*Expl
I think a better solution than just drawing in all armies within a tile would be to have any movement points not used by army add to it's interception range. Should an enemy come into range you would have an option to intercept them automatically. Any combat within the radius you could optionally join as well. This solves the problem of people trying to out click the other players during simultaneous turns, as well as the problem of not being able to stop other armies that keep moving past yo
/me wishes he knew python instead of Lua. I can't wait for all the syntax specific stuff of both languages to meld together in my mind so I constantly make stupid mistakes.
Having multiple forces present on the battlefield also means that it is necessary to have unit locations relative to where they were on the world map, which is a positive feature. There's no other good way to simulate being surronded than that. NTJedi, out of curiosity, is there a forum you aren't a part of? I've been seeing you fairly frequently for over seven years.
[quote who="alibenbaba" reply="24" id="2314975"]Usually researching 3 items at once will only split the research efforts thin, - researching one at a time would yield the three techs in the same amount of time, but the player benefits from the effects of the technologies earlier. Would 'research without penalty' mean the player has effectively tripled his research output, or is research based on random success rolls, so researching three techs at once increases the chance on a succ
Dominions did a great job with assassinations. They are actual fought out with the person being assassinated and there are many ways to have bodyguards. Not everyone had access to assassinations as well.
I sure hope attacking supply lines is still present in some form. If you want it to still be present and yet be even more mindlessly simple you could do what Empire: Total War does. It makes trade lines from the source to the destination and if an enemy parks an army on it they steal a portion of the goods each turn. I love the idea of permenantly imbuing you essence into something. It makes elemental different than most other magical settings and makes players really think about what
Last time I played Tropico 2 it hard locked and permenantly froze a bunch of pixels on my LCD. I've been too cowardly to try that again. [e digicons]:'([/e]
I understand the difference between things actually learning and the illusion of learning with mini patches. I never had any misconceptions about that I just didn't think anyone would actually read so literally into that one sentence of my post. Since that wasn't actually a main point of my post I just summed up the whole frequent-AI-patching-based-on-player-data as "AI Learning". I would prefer that no actual major AI learning is even attempted. Adding a system where the AI lea
Only hatred I remember was demigod players being mad at getting stuck with them as teammates and opponents when they were looking for humans. No bots checkbox = problem solved. We are so off topic.
Alright, so we've got a reasonable disagreement here on the merits of data collection & analysis that didn't degrade into a steaming pile of junk. That's a pretty amazing feat on the internet. "but what I hope to do is to build a cloud of multiplayer AI players that I can constantly be updating and enhancing in near-real time based on the data I get back from them on how they were beat, what exploits were used against them" Sounds pretty indistinguishable from the bo
The AI in the GC series uses the tactics of the most successful players. It really doesn't matter if you personally aren't giving them information since tons of other people who submit to the metaverse are. Elemental's devs already revealed they'll have AI's that learn from you as you play them. Either way, this is irrelevant as there's nothing stopping them from doing so in Elemental. Even the most privacy concerened player could still excuse them for using information collection if it was o
[quote who="Tridus" reply="8" id="2312856"]The problem with "tough choices" is that they're usually not very tough. One tech will be better then the other inevitably, and people will choose that one. That's the problem with blocking things. If I can only have one or the other, I'll ALWAYS take the one that is better in a majority of cases. You just wind up with tech that never gets reserached at all because doing so locks you out of some other, better tech.[/quote] I'm goin
[quote who="ckessel" reply="16" id="2309810"]Where the f**k are you getting this stuff? I said nothing of the sort. And where do you get MASSIVE amounts of research? Look at any GalCiv or Civ tech before the uber end game stuff and you're talking 5-10 turns typically to research something. Sometimes just a turn or two. How is that massive? Maybe 20-30 turns for a bigger tech. You lose one lab, so what. You lose, say, 20 turns towards one project. Throw in a gameplay mechanic that s
If techs and wonders were the same they'd probably not have different names. Techs are vital to success in just about every game, while wonders are usually optional. Wonders are more likely to be unique to the first faction that builds it as well as being more visible while building. Maybe it wouldn't be a straw man if I was talking about buildings, since you know, wonders are usually buildings, but I didn't. I'm talking about researching. If your looking for "realism" justifi
[quote who="ckessel" reply="11" id="2309577"] *Terrible straw man argument trying to equate technologies to a wonder*[/quote] By the same logic I also hate losing units and buildings I'm producing. When I lose a city it should simply be duplicated and moved to some other location in my empire.