If the GC2 campaign had worked along the lines the OP describes, I'm sure I would have played it through. And if sandbox mode could somehow support a "put me in a bigger world and let me keep going" command, how could that *not* add appeal to the game? I'd probably start all my GC2 games on Tiny maps if that were possible, and I've never made a serious try at any GC2 map smaller than Medium.
[quote who="The Wicked Flea" reply="2" id="1962806"]...I tire of both losing and winning. ...[/quote] This seems to be the core of your post. Much of your surrounding comments are about win-lose mechanics, but I agree that 'next-gen' game AIs should be include story/personality parameters in their decisions as much as possible. I want a single-player TBS game where the computer players are at least as much concerned with building a story line as they are with any given zero-sum game c
[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="3" id="1962609"]. If the devs get one thing out of this thread, that has got to be it. There are plenty of ways to handle retreat well, but it largely depends on how combat is going to work. We are very much in the dark about the combat mechanics, so all of our ideas are almost more speculation than suggestion. But I think that almost regardless of the actual implementation they use, as long as it fulfills that one requirement, I think I'll be h
I think that pigeonpigeon and Zaisha are digging into what might be the question behind the OP's questions: how much 'realism' do you like in your 'fantasy' story? Especially if that story's main purpose is to provide context for a 4X TBS game. At base, the fantasy genre is infinitely flexible--that's why it can yield subgenres like steampunk and extremely esoteric things like Samuel R. Delany's stories set in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Nevèrÿon_(serie
[quote who="landisaurus" reply="11" id="1959588"]@pigeonpigeon > ... A little unrealated, but I think it would add to the feeling of taking wild barren world and trying to re-convert it to something with expansive cities. Naturally nature (wild beasts for example) would have some 'fight back' for the conversion process. I really liked the GalCiv2 features where a random event on planets would occure upon habiting the planet. It made it really feel like you wer
[quote]So whether they call it a day or a turn is irrelevant in my opinion, because whatever they call it the same complaints will still be relevant no matter what. I actually prefer day vs. turn. If it takes me x days to do something, it makes me feel like I'm part of a world. If it takes me x turns to do something, it makes me feel like I'm playing a computer game.[/quote] I have to agree about the general level of complaints probably remaining roughly the same no matter what the UI
[quote who="lwarmonger" reply="4" id="1959484"]How about simply representing the fact that cities can't feed themselves... they rely on the surrounding countryside and imports. Cut a city off from those and eventually you will starve them out.[/quote] That assumes that a shard needs at least a city to contain/control it. bleeba's interesting idea seems to include the notion that shards could be more like the One Ring than they are like Mount Doom. If the given game instance is tuned t
I'd like to see a special category along the lines of Blessed by Devs that would reassure folks who feel very 'conservative' about taking on user-made content. Call it a Platinum Standard to match the Gold Standard of Blessed by Mods, and a couple of more clumsily-named categories to break apart Lots of Folks Like It and Some Folks Like It Lots. Among other things, having a category with a near-guarantee of not 'breaking' the game's look and feel could help draw more single-player, of
[quote who="McFungos" reply="17" id="1958476"]The real question is how much omniscient are each player is on his/her land.[/quote] Maybe not "the" question, but certainly a major basic parameter for how the rest of the stuff might work. Things could be wildly different depending on whether channelers might normally have full knowledge of any land or unit they've imbued with essence or whether the process of that essence transfer leaves no enduring connection. For me, the quest
I like the idea of having the diplo network run on the same 'infrastructure' that moves resources--no need to manually monitor the units, but they are vulnerable on the map, and so should be any papers that are insufficiently enchanted to protect them. [quote who="Rhishisikk" reply="15" id="1958327"]Is anyone else hoping for a 'Don't show me caravans' button so you can see the game without clutter? Actually, NM, they did something similar in GC2. I'd also like to request t
[quote who="lwarmonger" reply="21" id="1959473"]Personally I hope they integrate in a Galciv 2 style of production simulation where gold and production are integrated but not synonomous with one another.[/quote] I think you've convinced me that I'm almost asking for the exact opposite, which might make my last few posts here Never Mind stuff. Unless I really am chewing stupidly on the edges of a decent idea. BC and production are not 'synonoums' in GC2, I agree. My problem the
[quote]Personally I think that a city with a million people should only be possible on a huge map after a loooong time and a lot of effort and planning.[/quote] I definitely agree, perhaps to the point of thinking that megacities have no place in the game anyway. A lot of my response to this sort of stuff will depend on how the game treats time--and if even a fairly long game lasts only a few game years, breeding a million people (or even gathering most of them from the wilderness) sh
IMO, if it is possible to have cities coming anywhere near a million population, the game needs a hierarchy of city types and the biggest ones need to be limited to one per very large chunk of the map. I'm thinking of places like Tenochtitlan before the conquistadores and Rome at the height of the Empire. Or maybe instead of 'classes' for cities, we need a way to have cities share claims on resource tiles so that something like a distant buffalo herd could be exploited first by a pure
[quote]I think to even make any good suggestions we'd need to know more about how the combat system is going to work.[/quote] Pigeons are winged rats with learning disabilities. pigeonpigeon is smart. Silly talk aside, I thought it worth mentioning that this thread caught my attention because I've been thinking about stuff from the More than one Day battle thread. Over there, I remembered how much I'd liked being able to retreat in some games. pigeonpigeo
[quote]experiance and balance (not spellinng)[/quote] Please tell us this part of your otherwise swell followup is humour. I'm Floridian and throw in the UK spelling to note that 'creative' spelling is not the same thing as sloppiness. Even if we're talking about pure shareware and nothing done in hopes of earning money, I'd really be disappointed if a moderator-based system routinely gave top ratings to content with sloppy spelling. Among other things, Elemental already has a multi-l
[quote who="McFungos" reply="11" id="1944845"]...Between faction individual tech tree, SMAC tech tree, Blind Research Applied Research, Random Tech Branched Tree, MoM Rarity Spell research system.... I am greedy, i want all of those system mixed together.[/quote] Well, when you put it that way, why not? Elemental is the work effort successor to GC2 and the engine predecessor to GC3, so who knows how many options we can get out of the devs this round?
Choosing map settings is a fundamental part of every 4(5)X game that I've played. Why shouldn't the mobility of shards be a major setup decision when you start a game? I've found *most* of the scenarios in this thread interesting, so I'd really prefer the released game to enable me to play one game where shards were like oil wells or uranium mines, another where shards were like crown jewels, and another where they were somewhat in the middle, perhaps like an Egyptian obelisk that a l
[quote who="Spartan" reply="21" id="1954418"]I'm shocked CondarF only got 10 karma for this most unique effort. Come on guys, don’t be stingy show some love![/quote] Indeed. Even though I hope CondarF's skills won't help anyone decode spell books in advance once we have the game, I love fictional alphabets and languages and appreciate folks with the skills to reverse-engineer them.
[quote who="Solam" reply="10" id="1958878"]Guys and girls.... does it really matter? I mean, it's a fantasy game. What difference can it possibly do that a wall is erected in 2 days instead of two monts. For all we know it can take 3 weeks 2 days 5 hours. We have to put a measure but it means nothing really if everybody abides by the same scale. if a wall takes 2 days for everybody who cares? Just my opinion. [/quote] I'm sure that many other players agree with Solam here,
[quote who="DC" reply="1" id="1929840"]On cities, I expressed some of my ideas in the Importance of Tradeoffs thread but basically would really enjoy having unique and specialized cities. And not necessarily ones where you simply choose to build all "Factories" vs all "Farms" but ones where what you build excludes other options, forcing you to commit to a path.[/quote] I very much agree that fewer, more individualized cities seem like a great idea. They wou
I don't like to join trash-talking that often, but I tried hard to get into the Sword of Truth and just couldn't stand how much, for me, it read like a bad TV series from the old WB. If you're at all picky about lovely prose, interesting characters, or attempts at novel twists for the fantasy genre, I don't think Eddings should be on your list. Although I suppose I should admit that I put in my painful reading time at the recommendation of a friend who loves a good table-based RPG but also pl
I'm hoping for a full range of transportation magic, with permanent portals being a pretty high end big deal that would only be reasonable on ludicrous-sized maps where you have a war between factions that are months or more apart by normal travel. More common stuff would be for teleports by channelers or sufficiently powerful hero units (or magic items?)--moving a leader and associated units from A to B if the caster knows B well enough (or has some required focus object to help). Fo
[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="3" id="1956448"]...Anyway, the "steal their tresaue" thing is already in ... you can already try to steal ennemy items. Just kill them ...[/quote] That seems to be fundamentally different from what lwarmonger suggested. Given that the current plan is to have resource flows packaged in specific, vulnerable map units, I think it is a swell idea to make your faction's treasury work the same way, and any stash of unassigned magic items you might have. Dependi
Some scraps of the LoTR marathon on TBS this weekend made me want to add an important word to this thread: Ents. We definitely need biggish territory elements on the main map that are the domain of some cool entities with no potential for direct player control but are possible sources of allies by the time we need to do something like take down Eisengard. Such territories certainly don't need to be limited to forests, either. Dread deserts can be ruled by djinns, etc.
[quote who="lwarmonger" reply="18" id="1955565"]I think gross inefficiency would be enough of a handicap, as territories like what you guys described would need to either be small and communally based, or rely on a barter system, which by its nature is inefficient.[/quote] That makes some sense to me, although I think that the larger technical-historical context is the major factor. I'm hoping to heckle the Stardock devs into some startling brilliance that will yield a base set of gam