Organized Brain Gas

Starcraft 2: Multiplayer

2012-01-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Over the past few weeks, I've actually dove into Starcraft 2 multiplayer. I've been trying to play about 1-2 times a day on average, in 1v1 and 2v2. Am a low-medium level bronze at the moment, but have reached a point quickly where I really don't like loosing. for all these games, I've been playing as zerg.

Overall Experience:

I've been having the most trouble in my games with openings, Most losses come from some sort of result of an early attack, and many of the wins come when players don't expand well. Generally, the later the game goes, the better chance it seems I have to win. the lack of expansion may have to do with being at Bronze level.

After a few not so effective attempts at mutalisk harass at some games, I've generally gone for more "big battle" compositions, though am settling into sometimes using zerglings as patrols to check for expansions.

Zerg vs. Zerg:

This is the matchup I've been disliking the most. I've won a few of these, when the other player doesn't expand, but often seem to loose them as well in really annoying ways, where the attacks or scouting I do seems to show up at the wrong time, and the other player somehow ends up with an advantage, which than gets used towards the middle. If the other player doesn't expand, or doesn't play aggressively enough, than I can eventually win, but the opening issues are very, very frustrating.

I generally prefer to get roaches to start, and than go from there.

Zerg vs. Terran

I haven't had too many of these games, and they don't seem to be against very good players, or the style of terran that's easier to use at this level isn't very agressive. The games I've played tend to involve me out-expanding the other player, than overwhelming them with zerglings, infestors, and ultralisks. I'll have to see how future games go for this matchup.

Zerg vs. Protoss

This one seems to have had the most variety. Sometimes I get hit with early attacks, as with zerg vs zerg, but I seem to survive these attacks better against protoss, and can often come back and win. Protoss balls of death I've run into a lot, and these are often really frustrating to deal with.

2 v 2

I'm still in placement matches for these games (I have played 1 game with a teammate, though we seem to have never been on at the same time since, which is too bad, as the first team game went well.) These games do seem a lot more variable than the 1v1 games in some ways, and players leaving has certainly kept things interesting. So far, the strategies seem less important than what teammates I get, and who leaves/who doesn't.

I'm not sure how much I'll be playing the game, since I tend ot get really invested in it and can get quite pissed off at loosing, so it may not be fun enough to continue, but at least I've gotten a few games out of it.

Pharaoh Thoughts

2011-12-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

I had played Pharaoh almost a decade ago, but have recently taken it up again, and as is typical of posts on this blog, these are more recent thoughts:

The Good

1. Lots of different types of cities are possible (Which I appreciate a lot more after playing Children of the Nile). Industrial slums, industrial rich areas, mixed income, luxury estate based cities, etc. are possible to build. (I've tended to drift towards building up housing to high level non-estates and getting rich from trade, but have experimented with other types as well.)

2. After playing through the campaign, monument building is quite a fun part of it. Getting the city designed to the point where it can support monument building makes a nice goal, and monument building usually takes a good amount of time that allows a fully functioning city to run for some time, while also including an end point.

3. Housing blocks are generally fun to design.

The Bad

1. Aging is a somewhat annoying mechanic. In game, immigrants have a different age distribution that a settled population has, with the result that immigrants have a larger fraction of workers. This creates a problem where, as a city ages, the amount of workers can shrink significantly, with the result that a city can go from low unemployment, or approximately correct employment, to severe worker shortages. This can make city planning much more difficult over the longer term, since too high unemployment lowers mood, while worker shortages hurt a lot of services and industry. I do know how to work around this, but it is annoying.

2. Due to the fixed prices, where raw materials are often significantly cheaper than finished products, it can be hard to design varied city economies, compared to the other diversity cities can have. Usually city trade and industry boils down to either exporting a finished commodity that a city an produce from raw materials, inporting a raw material and exporting a product, or importing a raw material for a product to be consumed. No export of raw materials usually makes sense.

Guild Wars 2: Mesmer Thoughts

2011-12-15T18:32:00.000-08:00

Mesmer for Guild Wars 2 was officially released a day ago, to the shock and surprise of everyone following the profession releases in detail*. As the title suggests, these are my thoughts.

Special Mechanics

Illusions and clones as minion bombers are an odd mechanic to wrap my head around. They do seem somewhat weaker, in a sense, since many apparently get dispelled easily, and it is hard to tell how strong they will be in raw damage compared to, say, exploding necromancer minions. On they other hand, it does seem illusions and associated skills will get a range of "soft" advantages that, if balanced well, will make them powerful as a profession specific mechanic.

Another concern I have is the illusion generating skills may not be a natural part of some play styles, and thus might not be as easily used as other profession mechanics are.

Illusions working like hexes is something I'd guessed (among several other people). I do wonder whether the problem with hexes (lots of different effects to memorize.) will come back to a lesser extent with illusions, though perhaps they were weak enough to not be too much of an issue.

Illusions, immersion wise, do fit quite well with how I'd imagine a mesmer would work, and the animations, sounds, and description fits quite well in the small details.

Weapons

Though the mesmer does generally fit my predictions (though I guessed it would have daggers, and would not have pistols or a greatsword), the actual choices feel somewhat like a random weapons grab bag, without a strong theme. Some other classes (necromancer, ranger), feel this way as well, but not quite as much. The pistol, in particular, seems a strange one, it doesn't seem to "fit" well with the illusion based, somewhat subtle, mesmer. This is a pretty minor issue, though, and I'll probably experiment with all weapons if I get the game, as with other classes.

As always, I'll be curious what the specific skills and weapon roles are. I'm somewhat curious to see if some of the direct damage spells are called things like "mind blast", "mind shock", and such, associated with direct psychic attacks.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics shown so far work well, fitting with the Original Guild wars mesmer, and how I'd expect this one to work.

The sound for some of the attack skills is more grating than the loud sounds for other classes, am wondering how this will work out in game.

Blizzcon starcraft information, thoughts

2011-10-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

These are some thoughts on the starcraft panels this weekend.

Multiplayer

I don't like the battle hellion transformation from a setting/immersion point of view, since hellions seem in setting to be a cheap, easy to build vehicle, not something expensive enough to justify a complex transformation system. Perhaps a simpler transformation that just shrinks the unit and adds armor (visually) would fit better. Gameplay wise, it seems a very useful change.

The warhound does resemble Goliaths a lot, though does look cool in its own right. It does seem to look the part of an anti-air unit better than the Thor. (Back in original starcraft 2, I was somewhat surprised by the attempts to play around with the Thor rather than going with something else.) The high ground damage vs. mechanical is a good addition. Against protoss, this would allow it to compete with marine/marauder as a main unit against the heavily mechanical protoss. Against Terran it seems useful against tanks, as demonstrated in the panel.

The Shredder, as mentioned in one of the questions towards the end of the multiplayer panel, does seem like a unit that will get removed thanks to its ability to very quickly destroy workers. It looks cool though.

Vipers seem to have strong potential to be overpowered, though the types of abilities they have are the sorts of things the zerg would find useful. I see this lasting toward the release of the game, but with somewhat less strong abilities.

Swarm hosts don't seem that strong at the moment, but their ability does seem potentially useful. I see these units lasting to release, but with increased spawn rates and/or stronger spawns.

I'm not sure how often Tempests will be used, though they seem to do the job they are intended for well.

Oracles are a nice take on the harassment role, although I wonder how often they'll actually be used, given that they only have one role and don't seem to transition well between harassment and full combat. (Unlikely, say, medivacs/marines or mutalisks.)

Replicants are a strange unit. I don't have much to say beyond the balance and gameplay possibilities and issues mentioned in the panel. In single player, I wonder whether these will be available, and whether I'll be able to use these to copy workers (which is not as useful in multiplayer, but was quite fun in starcraft 1 single player. Starcraft 2 campaigns may not be designed to allow effective use of combined species, though.)

The battlecruiser and reaper upgrades seem unlikely to change much, perhaps slightly increasing the use of the units. The hydralisk upgrade may be more useful, although I don't see big game changes from it. The baneling upgrade I could see being either really powerful or really weak. Using a good amount of detectors which would be available late game would make this ability much less useful, but if someone forgets detectors, it could get a lot more powerful. The Nexus upgrades seem the biggest changes. Teleportation in particular seems a possible major change to how the game is played, whether with proxy nexuses or simply fast defense against harassment.

Single Player

Not much new was revealed, mostly the game seems to work the same as it did when announced in May, so mostly I have similar opinions about the game now as than.

The change in the upgrade system sounds interesting, with the upgrades done through missions rather than points, but I am somewhat worried that it will make upgrade points less flexible. (As in, in the terran campaign, you could save money to upgrade later, focus on specific units to upgrade them quickly, etc. In the zerg campaign, it sounds like the upgrade times may be more fixed than this.)

I'm also wondering what sorts of resources the "brood mothers conquer planets" mechanic would provide, and if there is any way to influence those conquests, or gain other effects from them.

Starcraft 2: Campaign changes

2011-09-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Starcraft 2 campaign, while fun, does have a lot of problems with the armory upgrades and research, with some being significantly more useful than others. These are some ideas to change this. As far as I know, there is now way to change the campaign, but if I catch wind of a way to do this, it is something I'd definitely go for.

Armory Upgrades

Still organized as 2 upgrades per unit, but in addition, each category of units (Infantry, vehicles, air, possibly buildings) gets a special upgrade that applies to all units in the group.

1. Bunker

Neosteel Frame: +2 spaces in bunkers

Projectile accelerator: +1 range for units in bunkers.

2. Missile Turret

Titanium housing: Increased hit points

Hellstorm batteries: Adds a secondary AoE, low damage/high number of hits attack.

3. SCV

Advanced construction: Several SCV's can build a structure

Dual Fusion welders: Double Repair speed

4. Command center:

Fire Suppression: buildings heal themselves when below 50% health, put out fires.

Orbital Command: Command centers are automatically orbital commands when built, able to call MULEs and scan.

5. Supply Depot

Hardened supplies: Supply depots have more health

Advanced Logistics: Supply depots give +2 supplies

I. Buildings:

Building Armor: all buildings gain +2 armor

1. Marine:

Combat Shield: +15 hit points

High Density Projectiles: +1 range

2. Medic:

Advanced medical facilities: medics do not need tech labs.

Stabilizer Medpacks: medics heal more quickly, for less energy

3. Firebat:

Incinerator Gauntlets: +40% extra splash area

Juggernaut Plating: +2 armor

4. Marauder:

Concussive Shells: marauders gain an AoE slow

Kinetic Foam: +25 hit points

5. Reaper

U-238 shells: +1 range, +1 damage, +3 damage to light units.

G-4 cluster bomb: throws a bomb that deals a large amount of AoE damage when it explodes. Would be changed to explode instantly, or after a much shorter delay, than in the actual game.

6A. Ghosts:

Ocular implants: Ghosts gain +3 vision range and +2 attack range.

Crius Suit: infinite cloak

6B. Spectres:

Psionic Lash: spells that takes 3 seconds to activate and deals 200 damage to the target.

Nyx-class cloaking module: infinite cloak.

II. Infantry:

Stimpack: Infantry units sacrifice health to move and attack faster. When used by medics, reapers, ghosts, and marines, sacrifice 10 life, when used by Marauders, Stingers, and Firebats, loose 20 life. Medics simply move faster, heal speed is not increased.

1. Hellion

Thermite filaments: +10 damage to light units

Twin Linked flamethrower: hellions can fire on the move, flame area doubled.

2. Vulture:

Field Mines: increases blast radius and detection radius by 33%.

Shockwave Grenades: Vultures do full damage to all defensive types.

3. Diamondback:

Shaped Hull: +50 base hit points

Tri-lithium Power Cell: +1 range

4. Goliath:

Multi-lock Weapons: Goliaths can shoot at air and ground targets at the same time.

Ares Class targeting system: +3 air range, +1 ground range

5. Siege Tank:

Maelstrom Rounds: +450 damage to main target in siege mode.

Shaped Blast: Siege tanks do reduced friendly fire damage

6. Thor:

330mm Barrage Cannon: Bombards an area, stunning the central target. Can be targetted either on a unit or an area.

Immortality Protocol: When a Thor dies, it becomes a wreckage that can be repaired back to a Thor for less than the cost of a new Thor.

III. Vehicles

Self Repair: Vehicles repair 1 hit point per second when damaged, up to full health out of combat. In combat, they heal 1 hit point/2 seconds, up to half health.

1. Medivac:

Advanced Healing AI: Medivacs can heal 2 targets at once.

Rapid Deployment Tubes: Medivacs unload soldiers almost instantly.

2. Wraith:

Displacement Fields: Wraiths can remain cloaked for longer, and while cloaked, evade 30% of attacks.

Penetrator missiles: Wraiths gain +2 air attack range and an extra +5 damage to massive units.

3. Viking:

Phobos Class weapons system: +1 ground range, +2 air range

Ripwave Missiles: Viking missiles do AoE damage.

4. Banshee:

Cross Spectrum Dampeners: Cloaking lasts twice as long for the same energy.

Shockwave Battery: Banshees do line AoE damage.

5. Battlecruiser:

Advanced Weapons: The battlecruiser can launch missile pods (AoE air damage), or Plasma beams (AoE ground damage)

Defensive Matrix: Battlecruisers can create a defensive matrix that absorbs up to 200 hit points and lasts up to 20 seconds.

IV. Air Units:

Enhanced Fabrication: Starports build units 25-33% faster.

Unit Changes

Hellion: Wider flamethrower range for campaign. (Probably double or so from what it already is in the campaign, with the armory upgrade further doubling it.)

Vulture: Automatically replenishes mines for free. Replenishment takes some time.

Diamondback: Coast reduced from 150 minerals, 150 gas, 4 supply to 125 minerals, 125 gas, 3 supply.

Siege Tank: Reduced damaged, reduced damage to light units. (Possibly reduced to multiplayer levels.)

Wraith: Gas cost reduced from 150 to 100, Tech reactor requirement removed.

Research Changes

Protoss 1:

Ultra Capacitors: 5% attack speed increase per attack upgrade.

Vanadium Plating: 5% hit point increase per armor upgrade.

Protoss 2:

Micro-filtering: 25% faster gas gathering.

Orbital Depot: instant supply depot construction.

Protoss 3:

Command Center Reactor: Can build 2 SCV's at once, doubles Orbital Command energy regeneration, halves Planetary fortress cooldown time.

Automated Refinery: Refineries automatically harvest gas with no SCV's needed.

Protoss 4:

Science Vessel: Has 3 abilities: nano repair (repairs mechanical units for energy), Electromagnetic pulse (reduces shields and energy in an area), irradiate (irridiates an enemy biological units, the unit and nearby units take damage over time.). Detects.

Raven: Has 4 abilities: nano repair, Point Defense drone (prevents projectile attacks at the cost of energy), Autop-turret (marine-like damage, somewhat high hit points, fixed in place), Seeker missile (takes a long time to reach its target and does nothing it it takes too long, deals a large amount of AoE damage if it hits). detector.

Protoss 5:

Orbital Strike: All constructed units automaticall spawn at their production building's rally point.

Tech Reactor: functions and a reactor and tech lab combined into one.

Zerg 1:

Shrike Turret: Bunkers gain a turret that deals marine-like damage.

Fortified Bunker: Bunkers gain 150 hit points.

Zerg 2:

Perdition Turret: Allows construction of a turret that buries in the ground when not attacking, and deals AoE flame damage.

Planetary Fortress: Allows command centers/orbital commands to upgrade to planetary Fortresses, that cannot lift off, but deal large amounts of damage to attackers.

Zerg 3:

Stinger: Marauder like unit with 6-8 range that deals high anti-air damage, but low ground damage.

Supply Truck: Ground based unit that heals nearby mechanical units. Less effective than a science vessel/raven, and no special abilities, but is a ground unit, and cheaper.

Zerg 4:

Cellular Reactor: units with energy start with 100 extra, and have +100 maximum.

Regeneration: All terran units gain a regeneration of 1% maximum hit points per second.

Zerg 5:

Psi Disruptor: Slows enemy zerg units by up to 30% move and attack speeds.

Hive Mind Emulator: Can permanently control zerg units.

Guild Wars 2: Reactions to Gamecom/PAX/Sylvari info

2011-09-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

These are some thoughts on the recently released Guild Wars 2 information.

Sylvari Information

Generally like the released information, though nothing sticks out as being more or less interesting than the other race weeks.

The Sylvari redesign was kind of interesting to read about, although they still look pretty close to the originals. Am curious to see what the full range of Sylvari options will end up being.

PvP

PvP maps seem interesting to read about, and the descriptions from people who have played at the trade shows point in a good direction. These maps, do, though, seem pretty complex for a 5v5 match, with more players needed for the different pathways and mechanics to be used effectively.

Character Customization

At the moment, seems both limited and wide open, depending on which descriptions I read. The options available can certainly be expanded to cover a lot of appearances, but descriptions out of the trade shows suggest that the available options don't fully cover the possible options.

New Weapons

Greatsword on a ranger looks somewhat interesting, somewhat boring. It does seem to fill the role of "high damage", but otherwise seems somewhat generic.

Earth Attunement is a bit less focused than I expected, although does still have some interesting looking defensive skills. I do like the idea of bleeds and knockdowns, though, which do fit well how Anet describes the "control" role working.

Hammer doesn't have as many knockdowns as expected, although does have a good variety of control skills. I like what I see.

Achron Boredom and Campaign

2011-07-15T17:40:00.001-07:00

I haven't been playing Achron as much recently, have not enjoyed it as much over the past few months for a variety of reasons. Partly, the metagame changes have thrown my gameplay far off, partly I don't like the new people who've showed up as much. I'm not sure how much I'll get into the game again in the future at this point.

I have been playing the recent released campaign, though have not gotten too far into it, and do generally like it so far. I have noticed so far that the AI doesn't seem to use time travel very much, which could create issues with more advanced levels. The story, as expected, is somewhat clunky, but seems to work well for the game so far.

Thought for Warcraft 4

2011-07-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

After playing the starcraft 2 campaign, remembering that the warcraft series is "the one with heroes" (As described several years ago from some blizzard representative.), and having played Battle of Wesnoth a few months ago, I realized that blizzard might well do something similar for a warcraft 4 campaign. They could use the standard battle for wesnoth like upgrade system, but likely with a resurrection system designed so that lower level forces would be expensive ot keep rezzed, but higher level forces would be more worth it. these characters might also play roles in cutscenes or such, although I don't have as much an idea of how this might work.

Something like this might also be used for the multiplayer of such a theoretical game, although I'm not sure how such a system might work.

Starcraft 2 campaign thoughts

2011-07-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

I've finished the starcraft 2 campaign recently. Overall it was pretty fun, though shorter than expected, so here are some more fleshed out thoughts.

Better Than Usual Missions

Great Train Robbery: Good pacing, interesting mission mechanics. Somewhat complex, but with enough time to respond to thing happening. This is probably my favorite mission at the moment.

Outbreak: With reapers, it is quite fun to watch buildings melt away in seconds to a giant stream of jetpack units.

Breakout (Interesting sequence of names...): Set up as a mission where two bases send forces at each other, while the player plays as Tosh and gives his own side the advantage. I did not realize this when I saw youtube videos about the missions (Just thought it was Raynor's forces and Tosh bashing their head against defenses), but this mission turned out to be really fun.

Save Haven/Haven's fall: Not sure why i liked these a lot, but they were quite fun for some reason.

Shatter the Sky/The Dig: These are more standard "build a base, expand, destroy enemies" type missions, which I kind of miss in the campaign. (Not to the point of removing the odd mechanics, but just a few more would have been fun.)

Worse Than Usual

Welcome to the Jungle: For some reason, I have a lot of trouble doing this mission well. (Though I can complete it.) Am not sure what it is, since the mechanics seem fine, though the timing would be my best guess.

Supernova: For some people, the limited time to do the mission makes it fun, for me it scrunches thing too much, and results in a more sloppy play.

Armory/Research upgrades

Generally a pretty neat system. Like a lot of people, I liked the inclusion of units and mechanics that were left out in development, or additional overpowered effects.

My main issue is that a lot of units do seem generally weaker than others, or more difficult ot use, which does in a way lead towards particular options in the game.

Dialogue

I'd seem from youtube videos that the dialogue was often quite cliche filled, although when playing it was easier to just avoid it. I do like the dialogue when Raynor encounters Tal'darim, where the Taldarim make extreme, flowery threats, and Raynor is simply annoyed.

Mod update: Spell System

2011-06-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

The spell system for was updated over the past few weeks, a process that took much longer than expected, and caused some burnout, thanks to me not realizing that redoing 150-200 or so spells would take a longer time than expected.

Unfortunately, despite the changes, getting something I'll be happy with will take a lot longer than expected, since some of the spells don't have properties I'm hoping to add, and some will probably need AI improvements or changes to other game systems to be well balanced.

I have gotten quite comfortable adding new mechanics in the DLL at least, so should be pretty well set to keep going on the mod in the future.

Heart of the swarm thoughts

2011-06-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

The information released is somewhat bare boned, but still has a good amount of interesting new stuff. As the title of the post says, these are my thoughts on the released information.

Storyline

The two mission flashes that have been shown so far to me seem to have a story that's isolated or distanced from other events or groups, though having more missions revealed will probably change this. Kerrigan only interacting with a few other characters, that were not foreshadowed or expected at all (The Hyperion crew is completely new, but still fills roles that would be expected for that sort of ship.), probably contributes to this feeling as well.

I am definitely curious how the storyline will go, how connected it will feel to the first part, among other issues.

Missions

Only zerglings, banelings, and roaches were revealed so far, which makes the missions seem less exciting to a good degree. However, the missions themselves do seem to fit pretty well with the sorts of things zerg would be expected to be doing. I do wonder how creeps will feel as a mechanic, the yetis did seem a lot like warcraft 3, and may break immersion for me, but other creeps may do a better job if other, similar, missions are included.

Campaign Mechanics

The mechanics aren't as different from Wings of Liberty as I was expecting, mutations seem to work like a combination of credits and research, while the in between missions section are pretty similar as well (Though this is to be expected.). However, the idea of getting completely new units after some evolution is pretty cool. Am definitely interested in seeing what future units are added, and what sort of upgraded units they will get.

The leviathan sets are pretty neat looking, including the vision of the planets Kerrigan goes to.

Characters

Both of the characters are completely unexpected by me, though in broad strokes they do make sense as characters. In smaller details, though, they do seem iffy (The idea of an infested adjuctant definitely seems out of place, while the evolution guy being around since the overmind also seems iffy.)The rogue brood mothers seem a good inclusion, it will be cool to see broods being controlled by queens or such, and was something I was somewhat expecting (Though not this exact form).

I'm hoping that some more missions will be demonstrated soon, should be interesting to see.

Guild Wars 2: Engineer thoughts

2011-05-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

Firstly, the engineer is surprisingly close to some guesses I've made on various sites in a number of ways. Medpacks, special weapons the engineer can make, flamethrower based skills (Though i expected these to be from torches), are the ones I can think of at the moment.

First Impressions

Glue shot and Jump shot are really, really out of place. Glue shot would make sense coming from an elixir gun like piece of equipment, but from a pistol it doesn't work at all. Jump Shot similarly sticks out as an obvious borrowing from FPS games, which it may well be, but one that doesn't fit with the Guild Wars world at all.

The engineer as a whole feels somewhat too technological, though there aren't any particular skills apart from the first two that stick out as not fitting the Guild wars world.

Unique Mechanic thoughts

The engineer unique mechanics took a bit of reading to figure out, but seem relatively simple and organized when I did. I like the idea of equipment packs and the tool belt a lot. Provides a lot of possible skill diversity, adjusted to how players want it, but in what seems a relatively simple way. I am quite interested in seeing the actual skills all of these mechanics actually offer.

The engineer standard weapons are pretty thin, which I wasn't expecting, but with the packs still gives quite a good skill selection.

Updated Plans and Guesses

All the clues point to mesmers as being the final class, so I'd give something like 99% chance for the final class to be a mesmer.

Currently, my plans for race/profession combinations have been set, and don't change with the engineer. If I get the game, character combos are:

Charr Warrior
Norn Guardian
Sylvari Ranger
Human Thief
Norn Engineer
Asura Mesmer
Sylvari Necromancer
Human Elementalist.

Achron update: Grekim play

2011-05-17T16:36:00.001-07:00

After playing the Grekim a bit, I think I've gotten a build order and playstyle worked out pretty well. The playstyle largely involves building as many defenses as needed, while going for Chronoporting and middle tier flyers. Once both of these are in play, I start harassing resources in the unplayable past, attempting to help defend allies if needed, or attacking whatever weak points I can in the unplayable past. Generally, I keep trying to do this throughout the game, if I start winning, I than go to mopping up more powerful bases once I have a good force built up, though still trying to attack in the past if possible.

The grekim are definitely simpler to play using chronoportation than the Vecgir are, and are almost certainly easier than CESO as well. The ability for units to chronoport individually certainly makes the grekim more powerful at chronoporting, which was definitely a design goal, but individual unit chronoporting also makes chronoporting oriented playstyles much easier to do in an interface/control sense, I find myself fumbling or having difficulty arranging a chronoport from the vecgir as the grekim. Individual unit chronoports generally mean less chronoenergy is needed to queue orders, which is a wall I've run into commonly as Vecgir, and chronoportation anywhere reduces the need to move units around to avoid chronofragging. Non-grekim chronoport attacks are something I'll have to work on, but for the moment Grekim seems to fit best with this system.

The issues I've run into so far using this grekim playstyle are that it's easy to get distracted by controlling the chronoport attacks, I have lost some games by missing defense, and don't check on allies as often (though this is something that often occurs in all games, communication isn't as common in the current achron multiplayer), I do often forget to expand, which is certainly a possible source of issues, though is something I do a lot anyway, and will just have ot learn to do better as I keep playing. Otherwise, the playstyle is fun enough, and seemingly effective enough, that it's now made Grekim more fun to play for me than the Vecgir were.

Starcraft MMO thoughts (Basic character design, terrans infantry)

2011-05-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Obviously, a starcraft MMO isn't actually being made, but still have thought of some ideas for how such a game might be made.

General Character Design

Though I don't like character advancement in general, a starcraft MMO does seem the sort of game that could include it in a more fun way. This system is vaguely based on how I have heard EVE works, but with some twists on it that fit a starcraft game.

When players start a character, they would begin using "basic" units of the race. (Terran and protoss would start as infantry, zerg as a zergling like creature.). As players went through the game (getting experience, money, or something else) players could improve their base unit in various ways, or, at a certain threshold, gain the option to play as a more advanced unit (Vehicles for terran and likely protoss, more advanced creatures for zerg). Advancements would continue in this way, until a character reached a maximum equipment load, level, etc. in an area.

Once particular options were made available, players would have the option to respec between different types at particular locations in the game. (So, for example, a player could choose infantry at one point, play for some time, than reach a "change" location and switch to a small ground vehicle). When choosing how to spec a characters, players would get a certain amount of slots to contain unlocked options.

Terran Infantry

Starts with basic gun, basic armor.

-Weapons
Basic gun: single target damage, low damage, can bit medium height units
Needlegun: stronger version of basic gun
Chain Gun: even stronger version
Canister gun: longer shooting time, but longer range and higher damage against some targets
Sniper Gun: more powerful canister gun
Pistols: fast firing, low range
Handguns: more powerful pistols
Grenades: AoE, better against some targets
Explosive shells: Stronger versions of grenades
Flamethrowers: short range AoE
Perdition guns: more powerful flamethrowers
Rocket Launcher: long range, AoE, stronger damage vs. some unit types
Shoulder Missile: Stronger rocket launcher
Nanites: allows healing of other characters
Healing Gun: Enhanced nanites

-Armor:
Basic Armor: low defense, no extra abilities?
Plated Armor: adds extra defense
Neosteel Armor: strongest armor
Heavy Armor: slows the player, but provides more defense than usual
Juggernaut Armor: enhanced version of Heavy Armor
Light Armor: enhances speed
Runners Armor: enhanced light armor

-Special Abilities:
Cloak: turns the character invisible for some time
StimPacks; allows the character to get some bonuses in return for health
Health Packs: Allows occasional healing on cooldown
Grenades: allow some throwns AoE damage
Aim assistance: increases range
Flashbang: Can blind enemies, reducing their chance to hit
EMP: prevents/reduces the effect of special abilities for some time
Sensors: allows spotting of cloaked units. the chance to detect cloaked units would depend on the number of sensors, and the distance between units. Infantry sensors would not be very strong compared to vehicle sensors.

-Other
Infantry company: This is a upgrade that players could take instead of vehicles, if they so preferred. It would change the "character" from a single person to a group of infantry, each of which would be customizable. Infantry groups could be upgraded in a similar manner, at equivalent levels to more expensive vehicle options, to add more people to the group. Maximum would be 4 -5 or so, controllable by the player.

MoO3: how to do it , post #13

2011-04-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

Victory conditions post.

1. Conquer all territory: This would be pretty self explanatory. However, I would probably add a surrender option for empires that were hopelessly defeated (decided by AI for computers, for humans, it would be allowed at any time). This would either give all planets to friendly other empires, create a bunch of neutral planets, allow other empires to buy planets, or give planets to senate control. These options all have their own advantages and disadvantages, but would serve ot shorten the time spend in a lot of 4X games, where a player has definitely won, but still has ot spend time killing everything else off.

2. Senate victory. This would probably require the support of all, or 3/4 of all, participating empires, plus enough votes (3/4 perhaps) out of the total votes in the senate, plus perhaps some mimimum influence or diplomatic relation to everyone. As mentioned in the diplomacy post, several empires would be able to participate in a coalition victory, giving an actual gameplay reason to work together on this victory.

3. Antaran X's: These would largely work in a similar way to how MoO3 actually did handle them. Any adjustments would be focused on making it the "research" victory, while an industry victory would fit with this one, or combat.

4. "Culture"/"Influence" victory: Would involve building a few structures, but would largely be based off of population, trade, espionage, and possibly diplomacy. I'll have to flesh out this idea further in another post.

5. "Economic" victory. Would either be based on money, and/or raw material production. This needs to be fleshed out in a later post as well.

MoO3: how to do it, post #12

2011-04-16T18:42:00.000-07:00

This continues the series of posts on ways to improve MoO3. This one focuses on diplomacy.

Diplomatic Attributes

Attitude: This is the standard "how much different faction's like each other" attitude from most games. Would be based on the usual betrayals, agreements, relative power, and other such details that usually exist in other games. It would effect the type of agreements made available by the empire in question, likelyhood of declaring war, and all the usual things the attitude effects in these sorts of games.

Popular opinion: This, in setting terms, would reflect the opinion of the larger population on the empire in question. It would largely be effected by the same sorts of stuff the attitude number would be effected by, but with a bit more focus on the ways the empire effected the larger population. (for example, merely having a trade treaty would improve attitude relations, while popular opinion would be increased by the actual volume of trade done with a particular empire.)

Popular opinion would determine how diplomatic agreements would effect happiness. If a player made peace treaties, trade agreements, etc. with an empire with good popular opinion, the happiness on all planets would improve, while going to war with such an empire would decrease happiness. The opposite, roughly, would occur for an empire strongly hated by popular opinion, while an empire with a neutral opinion would gain happiness from more neutral relations.

Relative power: This would be calculated in a similar way to how it is done in most games, based on a combination of military, research, population, etc. It would effect, as in other games, the tendency for empires to agree to demands, form alliances against other players, etc.

Although I don't know the details of how this sort of thing would be done, I could see the system for determining these actions being based on what sort of power the particular players had.

Diplomatic Skill: this number could be improved from race picks, government choice, and research. Higher diplomatic skill would lead to better attitudes from other empires, a higher chance to get agreements, and better agreements available. It would also lead ot more votes in the galactic senate.

Agreement types

These exchanges could be offered in any combination. (since I don't know much about AI programming, I'll just assume that the AI could be programmable to understand these agreements, and be glad that this is just a theoretical game and not something that I'll actually be held to produce.)

Resource gifts: Any sort of "raw material" (food, minerals, energy), or commerce, could be exchanged as a one time gift or payment.

Resource payment over time: Any resource, or gold, could be offered a a payment per turn, either for a fixed period of time, or forever until the agreement is canceled.

Research sharing: The receiving empire gains either a percentage of the giving empire's research, or a fixed amount (Assuming the giving empire was actually producing more than that amount of research.) This would work similarly to bow these treaties in Galactic Civilization work, where the giving empire does not loose anything, it simply acts as a base to calculate what the receiving empire gets.

Vision: The receiving empire can see everything the giving empire sees.

Trade agreement: Depending on the trade system, this might have to be a two way agreement. If two way, it would allow the empires to trade with each other's planets. If one way, the receiving empire would gain the extra money from trade, where the trade calculators assumed contact with the giver's empire.

Agreement not to attack: The giving empire would agree not to attack the receiving empire. Breaking this agreement would make the giver very unpopular, both in popular opinion and attitude, of most other empires in the galaxy. Could last for a certain number of turns, or indefinitely until canceled.

Votes in galactic senate: The giver agrees to vote in a particular direction for a particular type of vote in the galactic senate. The agreement would either last for a particular period of time, or until a vote was actually cast. It would never last indefinitely.

No spying treaty: the giver agrees not to spy on the receiver. Breaking this treaty causes a lot of unpopularity.

Spy sharing treaty: The receiver gains some security boosts based on the spy abilities and security of the giver. Would work in a similar way to research agreements.

Tech trade: The receiver gets a technology that the giver offers.

Tech share: The receiver gains all technologies in a given category that the giver researches. This would either last for an agreed number of turns, or indefinitely.

Alliance: This would be a two way agreement. The AI would require a certain attitude to agree, and the two empires would need an active trade treaty, no attack treaty, and vision treaty to be allowed ot enter the alliance. In an alliance, the two empires would automatically join research and spy sharing agreements, would share each other's wars, and would continue the trade, vision, and no war treaties. Alliances would make AI opponents more likely to share votes or other agreements.

Galactic Senate

Senate votes would likely be based on diplomatic skill. I am not sure whether it would use number of planets, population, equal votes per empire, or some other number to further determine votes. (The first two number make expansion highly valuable for diplomacy, so are not necessarily something I'd want to do.) Senate membership would cost some money per turn, most likely a percentage of income.

Senate votes would mostly be based around decisions effecting all empires. A vote could be called at any time, by any one.

Vote types:

Treaties for all senate members: would bring all members of the senate into trade, research, espionage, no attack, no spy, or vision treaties with each other.

Sanctions/embargo: Would prohibit certain types of negotiations between senate members and one particular empire.

Declare War: All senate members declare war on the target empire.

Expel/invite into senate: Pretty self explanatory. invitations would allow the offered empire a chance to accept or decline, while expulsion would be immediate. Leaving the senate would also be possible for empires on their own.

Senate military forces: Empires would have to provide a percentage of either their income, or would have to provide a certain value of military equipment, to the senate. This military would assist in any senate declared wars. Any planets conquered by this force would have a chance to go to empires based on the amount of military equipment they had contributed. It would also assist in defending senate members from non-members. The fleet would likely be AI controlled, but I could see player control possibly being allowed for certain situations.

Senate Technology trade: Would force empires to offer a certain number of technologies to all other empires.

Galactic leader: A victory condition. To give some reason for voting for a particular empire as galactic leader, some members would be considered (possibly based on alliance) to be part of a ruling coalition, and thus part of the victory.

MoO3: how to do it, post #11

2011-04-12T21:57:00.000-07:00

This post has some more specific ideas for how government, health, happiness, and such would work.

Happiness

Sources (positive and negative:

1. Taxes: higher taxes would reduce happiness.

2. DEA's: Recreation, government, and military DEAs improve happiness.

3. Diplomatic relations: If the civilization had treaties and/or good relations with popular other empires, happiness would be raised.

4. Governments: Different types of governments have different happiness effects

5. Race Statistics: Racial picks directly effect happiness.

Effects of Happiness:

1. Government based effects: Each government would gain its own bonus from increased happiness:

Dictatorship: Increases the skill of soldiers and ships, both society wide and from the planet

Representative: Improves diplomatic power, improves trade

Collective: Improves productivity

2. Revolts/strikes: Random events may occur at low enough happiness that stop productivity from a planet, and make it much more susceptable to spies. Revolts may cause the planet to either become independent or join another empire.

3. Spies: Happier planets have greater spy resistance

Pollution

Pollution Sources:

1. Industry: Most DEA's that produced anything would provude some pollution of some sort, with the exact amount dependent on the DEA. Manufacturing and mining would likely produce the most, with bioharvest and energy producing less, military producing less than those two, and government/recreation/spaceports producing little, if any.

2. Population; Higher populations would produce more pollution.

3. Race picks: The amount of pollution generation would be increased or decreased based on the race picks chosen, whether as a multiplier on other sources, or a separate addition.

4. Terraforming and pollution reduction buildings: These would reduce the total generation of pollution.

Effects:

1. Lowered Population growth.

2. Lowered maximum population

3. Reduced productivity of some resources. (In addition to habitability and gravity changes) bioharvest would likely be the most effected, energy second most, mining might be effected as well. Other types of DEA's (recreation, government, military, etc.), may or may not be effected in similar ways.

Government

Effects of Government DEA's:

1. Increased happiness

2. Special effect based on the exact government:

Dictatorship: Improved military unit production, Improves spy resistance more than normally.
Representative: Improves happiness more than usually, improves diplomatic relations/power
Collective: Improves productivity

3. Pollution; government DEAs would either reduce pollution directly, or would act as a "base" for further pollution reduction.

4. Big construction: Government DEA's would improve the speed of production of larger projects, with the effect increasing as the cost increased.

5. Spy resistance and quality: Government DEAs would improve the spy resistance of the individual planet, with smaller effects for the system and empire, plus would provide empire wide improvements in spy training. Would also act as a base for security buildings and further spy training buildings.

Recent Achron game thoughts

2011-04-08T20:27:00.000-07:00

The game is up here.

Although loosing in the end, I was able to play relatively successfully against a more experienced player, I do see this is my currently most successful game. I did use most of the techniques that the vecgir can use (chronoportation to defend the base, teleporting to attack, among other things.), so am feeling that I've largely moved out of "new person" territory.

The ability of the Grekim to quickly rebuild is something I knew about, but seeing it in action in such a big way will certainly keep me much more alert for it in the future. Grekim will probably be the next race I start experimenting with, so seeing how this works is quite useful.

In another game like this, I'll definitely be focusing more in map control, defending my resource processors better, and scouting better. I'll probably have a better idea of unit counters thanks ot the commentary.

Achron Thoughts

2011-04-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've actually started playing multiplayer games in Achron recently, and have been enjoying them quite a bit. Thoughts are below:

General Achron Thoughts

The game is quite a bit less micromanagement intensive ("micromanagement" in the sense of "lots of individual commands" in general, not specifically "unit control" as it is often used in starcraft.) Generally, most units are simply commanded through attack movement, and unit building can generally be done through simple clicking through menu options, hotkeying doesn't seem particularly important. This playstyle does make sense for the game, as timewaves and observers can change battles and reduce the use of micromanagement, and chronoenergy restricts the number of commands that can be given.

The actual game itself feels different to play than the official youtube videos and current demo campaign levels would suggest. This should probably be expected, given how the videos and demo campaign level are more about specifically hand picked scenarios, while multiplayer games involve larger attacks, though the actual differences in feel are hard to describe.

Chronoportation is often a very important part of the game, the implications of which are not shown as often in the demos. The biggest effects are probably moving units from the future to assist in fighting off attacks, or to support attacks in the past, and to do "unplayable past attacks", where, while paused, a unit is given orders to chronoport to a period in the past where commands cannot be issued (Due to high chronoenergy costs), this making these attacks extremely difficult to counter. Chronoporting also has a few other tricks, that I haven't thought of yet for this post.

In actual games, different timewaves can often bring much larger changes than expected, such as large, apparently successful attacks being canceled, or attacks that were left alone destroying slightly different combination of units and buildings. Some of this is probably due to strategies that I haven't figured out yet.

Playbacks for this game (whether replays or videos) are definitely more limited in the information they carry about a game than other RTS games, thanks to the timeline adding a third dimension to the game. Because of the timeline, players not only would need to watch the minimap, or the main window, for major events, but also check at several points in time, to get an idea of what is going on. I'm hoping replays eventually allow players to freely examine a timeline, as this will be very, very helpful to understand a game.

Race Thoughts

I've been playing Vecgir for all of my games, but as I get more comfortable, might start playing as the Grekim as well. CESO will likely be last. Mostly this is because the Vecgir and grekim units are better organized, each race has three "classes" of units with broadly similar roles, plus another set of classes that broadly determines power (For Vecgir, for example, Zayins are ground ot ground, teths are anti-air, and shins are air units. Virs are infantry, pulsar's are lighter units, tercher's are faster units, Halcyons are the most powerful units), while CESO has more individually named units. making roles harder to determine. Vecgir and Grekim building of units is also simpler, from what I've tried.

Vecgir are definitely a race that takes some time to get going, but hit hard once they get up to speed. I can support rushes or other early attacks at some points, but the slow speed of the infantry doesn't lend itself to a strong rush on my own. (this is something a lot of people have noticed as well.)

I haven't used Vecgir unit teleportation that much, though have used slipgates a few times. Teleportation is definitely a cool feature of the game, but I haven't had a chance to really use it much, am still somewhat getting used to the game.

Grekim have definitely shown themselves in several games to be quite good at rapidly building units, as others have said. One game I played was lost to a grekim rush, and I've seen larger grekim attacks in most games I've played.

Why Pet leveling is a bad game mechanic

2011-03-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

By "pet leveling", I'm referring to any mechanic similar to one used for WoW and Guild Wars tamed pets, where a character, on getting a new one, starts off with a lower powered creature and must spend some time using that creature to make it stronger.

In game mechanical terms, Pets have a function similar to skills or equipment, in that they help a character avoid damage, deal damage, effect enemies, etc. These other mechanics, however, do not need to be leveled up. Since characters with pets will be balanced around having a full power pet, this means, if the character gets a new pet, it must spend a lot of time at less than full power. This likely creates a lot of extra grind in the game, never a good thing, and this is a type of grind that other characters don't have do do.

This line of reasoning is something I've been thinking of a lot recently with Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, which both use a standard pet leveling mechanic in a way that doesn't really fit with the rest of the game.

MoO3: How to do it, post #10

2011-03-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

More ideas for how to do MoO3 in a more effective way.

Governments

Governments would be made more transparent in game, (which did not describe the governments well at all.) as many other mechanics would be. The three MoO3 government styles (dictatorial, representative, collective), that are chosen by race customizationn make sense to me, and so do the subtypes. However, I would probably reduce the small variations in governments, and give more obvious roles.

One possibility:

Dictatorial: Stronger military support, somewhat higher security
-Dictatorship: Stronger soldiers
-Monarchy: Somewhat better economy
-Oligarchy: Somewhat better productivity

Representative: Stronger research, economy, environment
-Democracy: Stronger happiness
-Republic: Stronger military
-Corporate: Stronger productivity

Collective: Improved base resource production, security, manufacturing
-Hive: Even higher productivity
-Unification: Higher research and economy
-Collective Consciousness: Higher military and happiness

Government DEA effects

Government types might add effects to government DEA's, in addition to the usual DEA effects. Representative governments might get extra happiness, dictators get extra security and military, collectives get extra productivity, as a possible example.

Guild Wars 2 PAX East thoughts

2011-03-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

Now that most skill information, and other information, from PAX East is in, here are some thoughts on what has been revealed.

Guardian Skills

These seem really, really cool. All the weapons seem to have interesting skills, and if I get the game, I'll probably be more likely to try these skills than others.

Elementalist

Air attunement skills are somewhat of a letdown, they seem to be damage oriented with some variation, and mostly a slight variation away from fire skills. Not all of the air attunement skills are in at the moment, so I'll be watching to see if these skills end up playing differently in some subtle way, but at the moment it looks like air and fire are relatively similar and that the two attunements could be substituted most of the time.

Necromancer Skills

Somewhat of a strange mixture of skills, though they still look interesting. The new death shroud skill seems kind of neat, although it is just one skill.

Warrior

Greatsword skills don't seem as AoE as I'd expect from the description of the weapon. The skills seem o.k., though it doesn't look like as fun of a weapon to me as some other ones.

Attributes

I'm quite happy that the separate damage attributes (intelligence, strength, and agility) were removed, as doing the attributes that way would really reduce the effectiveness of mixed weapon characters, and with base attributes, biased characters towards one type of weapon. The new system probably will have its own problems, but will likely work better than the previous one.

Guild Wars 2 crafting thoughts

2011-03-12T23:18:00.000-08:00

PAX information is coming in more slowly than expected, so this is a post about the crafting system as revealed so far.

Levels

I don't like the fact that these have been included. They do seem to be less grindy than other systems, but they still will probably bring some grind at some point. (using my definition of Grind)

Discovery System

As someone mentioned on some forums, this does cut down on time and cost needed to actually get recipes. It is quite similar to the Team Fortress 2 system, which does it's role pretty well.

Overall Thoughts

The crafting system isn't what I was expecting, but it does something that would work for the game, except for the level thing.

Unfortunately, there's nothing much I can say about it, as the system seems to be relatively simple.

Children of the Nile: More thoughts

2011-03-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

After playing the game for some time, I don't like it as much as I thought I would when I started. Some of this has been due to pathfinding and city building difficulties, but the bigger issue is that, due to the interconnectedness of everything, cities are going to end up broadly similar, rather than having several options for ways of building.

I do still like the graphics, though, and am keeping up playing the game as a diversion at times, but am focused more on other ones.

Inception: Personal Biggest plot holes

2011-03-07T21:43:00.000-08:00

I'm somewhat low on ideas for stuff ot write about again. (Though will have more soon, with new Guild Wars 2 information, and some Civ 4 mod work I'm continuing ot do), so here's a post on inception.

The movie is currently my favorite, but despite that it does have a few big plot holes, so here are the ones I consider the biggest.

1. Time dilation increasing with more dream layers

The fact that time dilation occurs, and by such a large amount, doesn't bug me so much, since I have had dreams that felt like they should take longer than they do (I've only "measured" the time directly when I've woken up, decided it was too early or that I was too tired, fell asleep again, and woke up again something like half and hour to an hour later.) The fact that the time dilation extends through the dream layers, however, is a plot issue.

The main problem is that someone's brain would still have to process the dream, interact with other people, et. at the greatly accelerated rate. Especially in the lower dream layers, this seems far beyond what an actual brain would be able to do.Smaller bits of time dilation might be doable, thanks to no outside senses to process, but the "years within an hour" dilation is a bit much.

2. No projections from extractors

Obviously, there are a few projections (The train, Mal) from members of the extraction/inception teams, but the "background" projections are all from the target of the inception or extraction. (notice how, for example, all the projections in the hotel level react when Fischer is told the environment of the dream, while non seem to know this already and do nothing.) However, since the dreams only have one dreamer, and the rest of the members of the team are dream subjects, they should pro producing some projections as well.

If this did happen, it would have some possibly interesting consequences, such as Saito bringing in armed guard projections after being shot at, and those projections getting into a fight with Fischer's. Though this would mess up the movie significantly.

3. Disappearance of Cobol Engineering.

This is one I actually didn't think of myself, instead I saw it on cracked. This plot hole is that Cobol Engineering simply disappears after hunting Cobb, with no explanation of how Cobb's bounty hunters were told off from looking for him.

4. Saito being so skilled in level 3

Saito did seem to be better at handling dreams than most targets, but there is quite a transition between level 1, where he does very little, to level 3, where he's rock climbing, messing with explosives, doing some fighting, etc.

Guild Wars 2 thief thoughts

2011-03-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

Since the profession is effectively released after the leak, here are some thoughts on it:

Personal Gloating on Speculation

Guessed the weapons largely right, kind of guesses their roles, guessed that the character would use Shadow magic as the setting source of stealth. Missed a lot of other things though.

Initiative

This is a really clever game mechanic, it's not too complicated, but is really unusual compared to other professions have. Also seems to provide a spike flavor with an inbuilt flexibility and limitation on the spikes, which is really cool. This, at the moment, is my favorite profession mechanic.

Thievery

Not to sure about this one, it looks like it could be really gimmicky. I'll have to see what sorts of weapons it actually provides, and how effective they actually are. the Moa bird feathers example probably didn't help as much, since the weapon switches took a few seconds, which seemed to negate the advantage of shutting down the Moa for one attack.

Other revealed skills

Shortbow skills , despite guessing the weapon right, are quite different than what I was expecting. Cluster Bomb in particular sounds like an interesting ability, so I'll be sure to see how it actually works.

Stealth seems roughly like Team Fortress 2 standard invisibility watch cloaking, but the player can attack out of it. I'm not sure how I feel about this in balance terms, as team fortress 2 stealth is quite well balanced, but it does not allow the player to attack. This may become the big issue with the thief, though the stealth is better than how some other games handle things.

City building series: Religion twist

2011-03-01T13:33:00.000-08:00

This is just a random idea I had while playing the city building game Children of the Nile.

City Building game: Biblical Israelites.

Uses much the same "shops, farms, courthouses" system that other such games use, though probably with some twists. I may think of these in further blog posts. (This isn't a completely serious idea, so I haven't fully thought these parts out.)

The main difference would be the religious system. Several of the ancient world city builders have "gods" that bring disasters or good things to a city based on the amount of worship they are receiving. Religion is also needed to keep the population happy.

The twist for this version would be to split these functions somewhat. Any sort of religion, whether idols, temples for the bible god or other gods, other shrines, etc., would keep people happy and supply religious wants. the player would also have to make a choice between the bible god and other gods. To support the bible god, the player would likely need to follow certain rules, eliminate idols, keep away certain types of city structures, and such. If the player went against the bible god, more natural disasters, invasions, and other bad events would occur. This would represent a choice between standard economy and bad events.

Obviously, a game like this could easily stir up a lot of religious controversy, so would likely not actually be made, but I could imagine similar systems possibly being added for other city building games.

MoO3: How to do it, Post #9

2011-02-27T09:07:00.001-08:00

Yet another post about better ways that MoO3 might have been done.

Spy Missions

Similar to the actual MoO3 game, spy missions would be divided into different areas, although I'm not sure whether these

Research

Gain tech information: Infiltration mission. Provides information on technologies researched by an enemy. (This assumes that diplomacy wouldn't already show this information.) also reveals research priorities, total research generated, and other such information.

Steal Technology: Operations mission. Spy attempts to steal technology from the target empire.

Sabotage research: Operations mission. A successful sabotage reduces the research points of the target empire, or destroys a research lab.

Financial

Gain financial information: Infiltration. The spy collects information about an empire's finances, sources of money, and such.

Steal money: Operations. The spy attempts to steal some money from the target empire.

Financial sabotage: Operations. A successful sabotage destroys a financial building, or reduces the treasury of the target empire.

Industrial

Get industrial information: Infiltration. Finds the location of industrial production, amount of such production in the empire, where buildings are, etc.

Sabotage Production: Operations. Destroys industrial DEA's, or reduces accumulated production on some project

Sabotage Raw materials: Operations. Destroys raw material (Food, minerals, energy) DEAs.

Social

Get Social Information: Infiltraton. Gets happiness, growth, possibly pollution and environmental, information from the target empire.

Create Dissent: Operations. Either destroys happiness structures, or reduces the happiness of the target colony.

Health Sabotage: Operations. Reduces the population of a target colony, or destroys environmental or terraforming structures.

Revolt: Operations. Causes the colony to revolt. the colony will either join another empire, or form its own.

Political

Gain Political information: Infiltration. Gains information on diplomatic relations, Government buildings, leaders, and other such information.

Assassinate Leader: Operations. Kills a leader in the target empire.

Sabotage diplomacy: Operations. Reduces diplomatic relations between the target ampire and another, chosen, empire.

Improve diplomacy?: Operations. Improves diplomatic relations between the spy's empire and the target. (In gameplay, this would have a definite purpose, but in setting terms, it's hard to imagine how this would work.)

Sabotage government: Operations. Destroys government buildings.

Military

Gain military information: Infiltration. Gains information on military DEAs, amount and types of ships and ground units, and other such information.

Gain combat information: Infiltration. Improves the damage taken, and damage resistance, against the target empire. (Think of this as spies gaining detailed information on how the enemy is trained, preferred fighting styles, specifics of units and commanders, and such.)

Sabotage Military bases: Destroys military buildings.

Sabotage Military units: Destroys or damages military units.

Anti Spy

Counterespionage: Attempts to find and kill enemy spies operating within the empire.

Provide security: Improves the security (Chance to make enemy spies fail), within the empire.

One, or both, of the above two missions might be targeted at a specific type of spy mission, or at a specific planet.

Hunt for Spies: The spy attempts to find and kill spies in the target empire.

More Spy Targeting Mechanics

Spies would be able to focus their missions on particular colonies, in addition to the empire in general. When focusing on the empire in general, spies would try to seek out areas with less security, and a generic "higher value", but would still have a greater chance of choosing to attack something that the player didn't want, and the missions would end up being more spread out, rather than concentrated.

However spy missions were chosen, the target information would only be based on what the player knew at the time. For example: A player choosing a colony to target for industrial sabotage would only be able to see information that the player's spies had collected, any unknown information would simply be a blank. Similarly, a spy auto-targeting a colony to industrially sabotage would only be able to make use of this player information when deciding where to go. This would make infiltration information important for most spy work, in addition to the uses it has simply from knowing empire information.

MoO3: How to do it, Post #8

2011-02-25T22:54:00.000-08:00

Continuing collection of posts on better ways to do MoO3.

Spies:

Number of Spies: Base value + number of government DEA upgrade + funding? * government factor?

Spy attributes:

Infiltration: effects information gathering missions. These are missions where, say, the spy tries ot learn about enemy military numbers, technology, DEA's, finances, etc.
Operations: Effects "action" missions. Examples would include sabotage, stealing technology, starting revolts, assassination, etc.
Stealth: Effects the chance to get caught
Counterespionage: effects the chance to catch enemy spies
Combat: effects spy vs. spy combat, plus the security needed to defeat spies.
Luck: Acts something like hit points. Higher luck gives a greater chance to escape, or survive combat.

Spy mission sequence: If the spy is not targeted toward a particular planet, the spy will choose a planet randomly to "attack". The spy will bias towards planets with lower security, and higher value targets if applicable. Once choosing a target, the spy will attempt to perform the mission. First, the game would check whether the spy would get caught, involving a comparison of the spy "stealth" statistic, and the amount of security at the target. If caught, the spy would enter combat. If not, the spy would than attempt to achieve the mission. The chance to succeed would be based on the spy's appropriate mission stat (infiltration or operations). The spy would than have a chance to escape, but with a small chance of getting caught, less than that of the first check, but still enough that to be considered by someone sending the spy.

Spy combat sequence: Spy combat would, in calculation terms, be based on a civilization like model, where counterespionage spies or security forces would try to kill the spy. Each round, the spy's combat stat would be tested against an equivalent stat for an enemy, with the chance of winning equal to (spy stat/spy stat + enemy stat). If a spy (friend or enemy), lost a battle, they would loose a luck point. If security forces lost a battle, they would not be effected. After each round, the "attacking spy (the one not in it's home empire) would get a chance to escape, with the chance being higher after a winning combat round (Unless the spy was sent to deliberately search out enemy spies). If the spy did not perform a mission before being caught, the mission would fail. If after an attempt at a mission, the outcome of the mission would not be changed.

Most likely, none of these would take place in the player's view or influence, but the player woul be able to influence spy missions somewhat through options, and might get an option to influence combat, ordering the spy to try and escape or fight it out if caught. A more complex spy game, with the player allowed to interfere, might be fun, but I have little idea at the moment how it might work.

Labor and DEA upgrades

Dea's, some upgrades require extra workers to operate. Other upgrades simply increase all productivity. Extra workers produce small amounts of tax revenue, or produce small amounts of resources based on available DEA's, though not as strong as full DEA workers.

Top 5 games from the 2000's decade

2011-02-17T20:03:00.000-08:00

I don't have any fully formed ideas to write at the moment, so figured I'd stick a list here instead to keep up the habit. I originally planned a top 10 of these, but there have been very few games from the 2000's that I've come back to over and over, and really remember well. (In all honesty, the last three games are really the ones in their own class, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 are reaching towards "play once, than forget about it" territory.)

5. Diablo 2

This game definitely has a lot of flaws, and I'll probably never play it again, but it was quite fun while I was playing it. No other game I've played also provides as much AoE fun, killing hordes of enemies with a few spells.

4. Warcraft 3

I mostly played campaign mode, and often come back to it. Good variety of missions, heros + RTS makes for fun gameplay, this is one I often come back to play through here and there.

3. Team Fortress 2

Despite the issues I have with the game adding so many items, and my relative lack of skill compared to a lot of other people, this game is still quite fun, providing a lot of characters and maps to explore, and some good competition. Have been playing it on and off for the past year or so, and generally enjoy it quite a lot.

2. Civilization 4 (Specifically, the mods)

I did find standard civilization 4 kind of boring when I first tried it out. However, back in 2009, I decided to try out the Fall from Heaven and Planetfall mods, which I had heard about from other places,

1. Guild Wars.

I've been playing on and off since a few weeks after it came out, and still enjoy it to a large extent today. Most MMO's (plus Diablo 2), provide the fun of exploring a new environment, trying out a lot of characters, seeing how they interact, etc. However, Guild wars reduces the main gameplay element that prevents full enjoyment of these things: Leveling and other grind. This change has quite a large effect on exploration and experimentation, allowing me ot play a character in most areas of the game without being statistically over or underpowered, allowing much more freedom of exploration, as well as allowing much faster character "completion (with levels and equipment), that combines with the attribute and skill changing system to make skill experimentation much easier to do.

MoO3 How to do it: Post #6

2011-02-12T18:23:00.000-08:00

Ground Combat

In most space colonization games I've seen, ground combat is very simple. MoO2 and Galactic civilizations do it automatically, with a very small number of different forces, and simple mathematics determining the outcome. Some other games do allow players to fight an actual ground combat battle, but it is also quite simple compared to how space battles go. These are a few ideas for how a more complex ground combat system might work in an improved MoO3 based game.

Number of Forces:

Ground combat in most space expansion games is probably not designed to be interesting because most planets can simply be overwhelmed by bringing a large stack of transports, concentrating a lot of attacking soldiers against a small number of spread out defending soldiers, if there even are any. For MoO3, however, this problem would be reduced somewhat by choke points (So the actual planets an enemy could attack would be reduced), and taking some defensive ground soldiers from the total empire pool, in much the same way that task force creation has ships taken from a pool rather than from a specific planet. The exact percent of pooled ground forces would be subject to balance.

Defenders would also include "militia" units, as is typical in a lot of games, and would include extra units for each military DEA, as well as some military enhancements, on the planet.

Attacking forces would, as usual, be determined by transports.

Types of Units

I imagine these unit types as equivalent to the ship types in space combat, bases that determine hit points, size, and some other properties, onto which weapons, armor, and abilities are added to create the actual unit. The unit bases I imagine would be:

Infantry: Low cost, but individually weak. Slow speed without enhancements, but can handle rough terrain effectively.

Tanks/Armor: medium speed without enhancements, high cost, but individually strong. Do not handle rough terrain well.

Artillery: Long range, good damage, but weak defenses. Moves slowly, but could be enhanced in a variety of ways to make it faster.

Speeders: Weak in combat, but fast. Do not handle rough terrain as well.

Aircraft: Could be designed to attack ground or attack air. Very fast moving, and hard to hit, but expensive, and weak if hit.

Helicopters/Vertical take off: Tougher than aircraft, but not as fast moving.

Battleoids; Very powerful in combat, but slow moving and expensive. Possibly some range enhancement.

Fortresses: Some military DEA buildings would help out defending units, either by directly attacking enemies, or by supplying friendly units.

Roles:

Obviously, all these unit types would be usable in combat, using researched weapons and technology, but using other types of equipment in place of weapons could provide for different roles.

Logistics: Improves the fighting abilities of nearby units in some way, as explained below. Might also get a special unit type.

Sensors: Would help detect cloaked units and increase some unit stats.

Cloaking: Most likely just used on combat units, but this might change the unit's role somewhat to be more of a raider.

Special Operations: This role might be filled by a certain type of infantry rather than just being allowed on any unit. Would have a number of special abilities for reducing the effectiveness of enemy forces. Missions might include sabotaging enemy combat statics or doing raw damage to certain enemies.

Types of combat equipment:

Weapons and armor would likely based off of space equipment, with mass drivers type of research unlocking bullets and shells, Space lasers unlocking ground lasers, Particle beam weapons unlocking similar types of ground weapons, plasma weapons unlocking flamethrower type ground units, and bombs (I forget if bombs were on ships in MoO3) unlocking ground unit powerful bombs and shells. The weapons would probably work similarly to their space combat equivalents as well, with lasers being accurate, mass drivers doing high ranged damage, plasma weapons doing shorter range AoE, etc.

Armor would, similarly, be equivalent to spaceship armor. Ground units would probably get extra armor pieces as well, taking up space but improving defenses.

Combat Stats

These combat stats would be effected by species customization a,d species stats. (So, if a species had extra toughness, all units would have hit points and defense multiplied by a particular amount above baseline.) The combat system is somewhat vague at the moment, so other combat stats might get included on the extremely small chance that this game is actually made.

Hit Points: Act as hit points do in all games. Increased by toughness.

Defense: Reduces incoming damage. Increased by toughness.

Action points: A unit's action points are decreased whenever they do something. When units run out, they can no longer move, and can only attack very weakly. Action points are replenished by logistics units. some races might have better logistics than others, increasing this stat.

Accuracy: Increases the chance for a unit to hit. Like with spaceships, each weapon would have its own accuracy. Effected by species accuracy.

Evasion: Increases a chance for a unit to avoid attacks. this may be increased against particular weapons (ECM vs. missiles, some sort of laser deflector for lasers, etc.). Effected by species avoidance.

Damage: Like with spaceships, each weapon would have its own damage. Effected by species accuracy.

Speed: Increases how quickly a unit moves. Effected by species speed.

Stealth: This would be a number, and the chance for a unit to be detected would depend on how this number compared to nearby detectors. Effected by species avoidance.

Detection: See above with stealth.

Sabotage: A stat particular to special operations units. Increase by spy statistics.

Sci-Fi mod idea

2011-02-10T16:22:00.000-08:00

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1qWdpspsrimKsC4Uy-01x5q_23m3u49OsEFXhJ8_c3sM

This is another vague idea for a possible future mod. I've planned it for a civilization type game with multiple maps, though other types of 4x may work as well for the setting. It is a variation on the Civilization 2 Test of Time Science Fiction game, with an extra alien species, extra planets, and a different settlement order. I also would probably make a somewhat more mystical twist on the storyline, with the "plot threads" involving the merging of species and the understanding of ancient alien machinery given more meaning and purpose, while getting back to home worlds would start as the main goal but would gain other twists as other parts of the "storyline" were discovered.

The aliens themselves are vaguely based on the three starcraft races, though only in very broad terms. In the original Test of Time Sci-Fi game, the human special units were somewhat more machinery oriented, and the "alien" units were somewhat more biological oriented. The space platform map is also somewhat like starcraft maps, which helped to suggest the race analogy. In this mod idea, the "humans" are roughly like terrans in using more technological solutions to problems, while the "biological" race is somewhat like the zerg in mutating themselves and using those sorts of adaptations to fill some roles that technology does for humans, although otherwise they are largely like humans in being independent, thinking organisms, roughly physically similar, still using some technology, etc. Because I wanted all three alien species to be on roughly equal terms, while still being diverse, the third species is not technologically advanced like the protoss, but does have strong psionic powers, and a more mystical approach to life. This species also takes some inspiration from reading about Dune, with prescience, the strongly religious elements, combat with bladesmen, and related elements.

The current ideas are pretty vague at the moment, since no games coming out will have multiple map abilities as far as I know. The general setting details are pretty well worked out though, and I have some other ideas that are not written in the linked document.

I do plan, in the unit, technology, and other description in the game ot be about evenly distributed between the points of views of the three species, and for descriptions involving one species describing its view of another, equal division between different combinations of describer and described.

Inception computer game thoughts

2011-02-09T11:45:00.000-08:00

See Here for an explanation. I'm not sure of the current status of this project, but have a few ideas of how it might work.

Dream Levels

If the game was given a multiplayer, or bot, element, than the interactions between dream levels would become important, in addition to the typical working together at shooting or finding information, multiplayer groups might need to work together on different dream levels in order to manipulate environments, and keep lower level dreams under control. (Think like the rotating hallway scene coming from the van rolling.)

I imagine that, if the game includes multiple dream levels in some way, that it will also contain some parameters (orientation, acceleration/gravity, heat, cold, wetness, smells, sounds, etc.) that will transfer between different dream levels, causing higher level effects to change the lower level dreams.

Dream Design

This would effectively work like a map editor, I imagine, although more easily accessible, with a few more options, and better integrated into the game. If a single player campaign or storyline were included, I imagine that this element would be an important part of it. In multiplayer, the dream creation would act more like a conventional map editor, most likely.

Things to do inside the dream

Gunfights are the most obvious, as these are already in plenty of computer games, and are also an important part of the movie as well. It is also likely that the game would, in some form or other, involve stealing information of some sort, which would involve breaking into safes, lockers, hidden rooms, etc.

If the game were developed well enough, I could imagine dialogue, personality, and psychology systems used to allow interaction between projections and the players, though this would be a much more complicated system.

Types of Game Modes

Extraction mode seems the most obvious, where players would play against a computer to extract some information from someone else's mind. This type of mission might either use premade dreams, or have a player quickly create one, than have the players go up against projections to capture a piece of information, than escape.

Arena seems a likely other game mode. This would likely resemble any other sort of vs. mode in other FPS's, although allowing more unusual environments thanks to the dreamworld construction. Another possibility is that different people in the dream might be able to simply create weapons or equipment, or change the dream in some way, but doing so would attract negative attention. Dream adjustment would also probably be limited by some resource.

Character Creation

Characters would probably be able to adjust weapon skills, persuasion skills, and dream manipulation, among other possibilities.

Heart of the Swarm thoughts

2011-02-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

Although I haven't played the first part of starcraft 2 (both because my computer at the time might not have handled it well, and because of various issues with how Battlenet is handled, copy protection, and such.), I have seen some campaign videos and lets play's on youtube, so am going ahead and speculating on additions to the single player campaign for heart of the swarm.

Units

From starcraft 1:

Lurkers: Seem a very good possibility for inclusion.

Defilers: Seem a good possibility

Scourge: Some chance

Devourers, Guardians: unlikely, since corrupters and brood lords fill a similar role. (Though perhaps, like vultures, they'll get included anyway.)

Old Queens: Since new queens have been added, old queens won't be included directly, but something similar to them might be added.

New units:

Leviathan: slight possibility as an inclusion

Brutalisk: seems somewhat of a possibility to include, although I don't know the exact stats or what role it would play.

Bunker unit (demonstrated at the Blizzcon 2010 art panel): On the one hand, seems like a very specialized unit to actually include, but it does have an animation. I wouldn't expect to see this, but opinion does go back and forth on this.

Unit Upgrades:

Roach regeneration above ground: seems a good bet for inclusion.

Story Details

According to the third protoss campaign, Zeratul will have to bring a bunch of protoss factions together. Unless this has changed since than, this campaign will be the one the explains how the protoss have fractured, as they still seem relatively unified (apart from the Taldarim).

Kerrigan obviously still is zergy enough to control the zerg, I don't expect too many surprises here.

The overmind and tassadar will stay pretty much intact (instead of, say, being a trick of the dark voice.) Whatever revealed information appears in the campaign about these two will add to this, rather than changing it significantly.

Kerrigan Interaction details

It's hard for me to think of something significantly different from buying upgrades for Kerrigan to use to choose upgrades and units. Best guess for me is that missions will, in addition ot opening up units, allow kerrigan to capture specific types of items that she can use to get specific types of upgrades. Another possibility is a research type system, though I suspect that Blizzard will want completely new systems with no repeats.

Kerrigan will spend most of her time in various hives, not necessarily the same one, filling the same role that the hyperion did in the first campaign.

Guild Wars 2: controlling "innovative" expectations

2011-02-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

Guild Wars 2 does get sold a lot on being "a new direction in MMO's", but, like a lot of games, this does raise expectations quite high for the game when it does come out.

There is no question, though, that Guild Wars 2, by the revealed information, does a lot of things somewhat differently than typical convention. I'd argue that the best way to think about these changes, though, as natural responses to problems common in previous MMOs. The rest of this post describes some of the logic that might have been behind some of these changes:

1. The lack of a standard "healer/tank/nuke" trinity.

The explanation from Anet seems to work well here. This sort of role division tends to create more difficulty in finding groups, with character classes and builds getting frozen out of groups. Original Guild wars had this problem to some extent as well, although somewhat more flexible due to the lack of tanking, heroes and henchmen, and a number of methods for shutting down, hindering, or protecting enemies.

I also think that merely having a different sort of combat system is generally fun as well, merely to explore, and to try out new types of playstyles over different games.

Of course, the "new trinity" has plenty of potential for issues as well, but Guild Wars 1's variety of protection, condition, and hex builds does suggest that Anet will be able to put something effective together. Like any other part of the game, we'll only see how well it actually works when a beta, or release, occurs.

2. Flexible Weapon choices, that are (Theoretically) equally effective overall

I don't know which came first, the overall skill system design, or weapon decisions. However, given the overall skill system design, and the need for skill and role flexibility, weapon and skill choices for the professions make more sense.

Most characters (apart from elementalists, as revealed so far with no expectation that this will change for final professions) use 2 weapon sets in combat. Each weapon set supplies 5 skills, along with the 5 utility, healing, and elite skill slots.

Using this system, if any weapon set were deliberately designed to be weaker than another, that would mean a character using it would be sacrificing 1/3 of their potential skills in combat, quite a huge weakness. As a result, the weapon sets have to be designed to all be about equal, or they won't get used. As well, the large number of skills taken up by weapons means that, if characters are meant to be flexibly designed, the job becomes much easier if weapon skills can carry some of the load. Also, if a good number of options are ot be included, characters will need a diversity of weapons, but with a limited total number, some characters will be encouraged to take up "unconventional" ones.

As well, I find some of the unconventional choices kind of fun, at least to think about. In particular, I like that ranged/melee flexibility means more choices for physical ranged characters, which in so many games seem to be lacking in number. (A lot of games seem ot have, say, 4 melee, 5 casters, and 1 physical ranged who "can fight up close if needed".)

3. Loot and experience for everyone who participates

It is such a simple solution to ninja looting, loot fights, and such that I'm surprised few or no games have actually done it before. Although I generally strongly dislike the ideas of loot and experience in general, especially as done in most current MMOs, this method does seem quite an effective method for handling some of the problems.

I haven't thought of any other changes art the moment, but generally remember feeling similarly about them. Of course, as mentioned before, I strongly dislike how leveling time has been greatly increased. (The game had better have a very good sidekick system.).

The biggest revealed element of the game that goes against these sort of relatively logical changes is the attribute system. unlike every other element of the skill and weapon system, the attribute system seems to favor some weapon types over others, and push players away from hybridization of different ranges, or magical vs. physical. this is another potentially huge issue with the game that I'll be watching carefully.

MoO3 How to do it: Post #5

2011-02-06T22:12:00.000-08:00

Continuing posts on a way MoO3 might have been done in a better way.

Energy (possible raw material)

This raw material, if included, would be harvested from "energy" DEA's, as other raw materials are harvested. It would be required to run manufacturing DEAs, and likely other DEAs as well. It might also be used as a maintenance cost for military units. Energy would likely be more efficiently produced on hotter planets, mineral rich planets (representing nuclear energy sources), and/or larger planets.

Energy is a question mark in most of my posts because it is added more as a simple addition than as something ot fix another problem with the game.

Species Picks

Most of these are pretty self explanatory, but are written out here for completeness.

Food, Mining, Manufacturing, Energy (If included as a resource), Research, etc.: Effects the productivity of these sorts of DEAs.

Trade: Improves the money gained from trade treaties and spaceports.

Creativity: When a level of research is discovered, more creative species have a greater chance to discover individual advances on that level.

Growth: Effects how quickly the population grows for a particular species.

Density: Effects how much population a certain amount of space on a planet can store.

Eating: Effects the resource the race uses for food. This would probably be a sliding scale, dividing between food, minerals, and energy, if energy was included.

Environmental: Reduces terraforming costs, reduces pollution generation. May increase the habitability of planets, or provide an equivalent effect.

Planet preferences: This might not be a customization option if this theoretical game were to be released, due to the required amount of input. If customizable, this would effect how habitable different sorts of planets were.

Happiness: Effects how happy the population is.

Spies: Effects how skilled spies are.

Government; Effects the government types the species can use.

Space combat strengths (Accuracy, repairs?, Evasion?, electronics?): Effects different abilities of ships in space combat. I haven't thought of all the details yet.

Ground combat strengths (Toughness, accuracy, evasion, logistics, etc.): Effects ground combat abilities of the species. I haven't thought of the details yet.

Special Abilities: I haven't though of what these might be yet.

I may also have forgotten some other abilities that would be included in this sort of game, but with future posts I may sort these out and edit this post.

Default Species

I actually do like the species options given in MoO3, finding the etherians and Ith'kul to be pretty neat ideas for species. However, if energy is included especially, I have thought of some other ideas for "unusual" species that might fit within the game. (these, as with the energy resource idea, are more included as simple additions rather than fixes to problems, but would at least provide an opportunity for more default species diversity.)

Microbial: A species of single-celled organisms. These would have a very unusual thinking mechanism, rather than using specialized neurons or other such systems, the microbes would use a chemical based memory and thinking system. To exchange information, operate machinery, or otherwise do any tasks requiring a larger body, microbes would come together in large biofilm-like structures, but could split and reform into different structures if necessary. Would be exceptional chemical producers, being able to quickly adapt themselves as their own bioreactors, but not as good at physical tasks.

Would likely be fast growing, and at least productive at growing food in the default state, but would have difficulty with trading and possibly military abilities. Would likely eat either food and minerals, or energy and food.

Plants: Sentient plants.

Would probably be weak militarily, but strong in less obvious skills. Would likely eat energy by default, or food if energy was not included.

Archea: Some sort of species that prefers hostile rocky planets (or at least, hostile to human like organisms).

I'm unsure of the exact types of abilities these might have by default, but they would probably eat minerals, or minerals and energy if energy were included.

MoO3 How to do it: Post #4

2011-02-01T20:19:00.001-08:00

Continuing collection of ideas for how MoO 3 might have bee done.

Economy

From the little I remember from MoO3, money came ultimately from various DEA's, which than was taxed, and passed through a bunch of different formulas to determine how much the empire finally earned. This part of the game was probably the most pointlessly complicated, and difficult to figure out, system used in MoO3.

For a simplified system, that still has some of the effects that I think the actual MoO3 system had, money would be earned in the following ways:

1. "Raw material" (farming, mineral, and energy if included) DEAs.

In addition to producing the raw materials and supplying them to the empire, these DEAs would produce money proportional to the amount of materials they were actually harvesting. Also, excess food, minerals, and energy (if included) would be sold for money, although at a rate where building extra DEA's just for income would often not be as useful as other choices.

2. Spaceports:

As in original MoO3, but using a system that would be much simpler and/or easier to understand, spaceports would produce extra income. The system would probably, in some form, be based on the amount of planets within a certain distance, with extra spaceports, trade treaties (if the planet was owned by another empire), and possibly recreation (as in the original game) would inprove the money generation of spaceports.

3. Taxes:

Each unit of population would generate taxes, based on a tax rate set at the empire level. Extra taxes would reduce happiness, though other results I am not as sure of. (I'll probably figure out some ideas for exact tax effects when I think of effects from happiness. The goal would be to avoid too much effect overlap, so that the happiness effects of taxes, or tax effects from happiness, would not cancel the direct effects, or produce an optimum level for the overlapping effects rather than a trade off between different effects.)

4. Diplomatic resource trade:

Empires would be able to trade raw materials and money between themselves, and some of these trades could involve money. (Tribute, and direct payments also are good possibilities, but for this post I'm writing more about continuous, fair trading sources.)

5. Excess manufacturing?:

This one is a bit more iffy. I could see planets given a "trade goods" function much like MoO2. However, as the MoO3 model has industrial production being a consumer of money, adding a method to gain money from manufacturing centers seems iffy, allowing the DEAs to pay for themselves and removing some of the cost of using them.

I'm not sure exactly how much each source of income would relatively contribute, although raw material income would not be enough to cover the manufacturing that used it (except perhaps in very late stages of the game.), although taxes and raw materials would need ot produce enough to cover expenses before spaceport research.

Income from these sources would, of course, all be effected by race statistics..

Pollution

As with many mechanics, I'm not sure exactly what pollution did in MoO3, although I do remember it costing money in some way. For a simpler version, I would have pollution do the following things:

1. Reduce the habitability of the planet.

The exact effects would depend on the terraforming system used. If it used the more MoO3 like system, than than the habitability effect of pollution would probably just be a percentage effect on population growth, maximum population, maintenance costs, and any other effects (Many of which I haven't thought of yet.) If the terraforming system was more like MoO2, the pollution would either, at certain threshold, change hability to an equivalent of a less desired planet type, or would have a percentage effect on the same properties as habitability.

2. Reduce happiness

Relatively straightforward.

3. Reduce some types of productivity?

This depends on the effects of happiness and habitability. If there isn't any overlap, this could be a second effect of pollution.

Pollution would also have a couple of sources:

1. Resource production, especially industrial.

2. Population. (so population would be somewhat self limiting without good pollution control.)

Like civilization 4 does, "health" related effects might be folded somewhat into pollution.

MoO3 How to do it: Post #3

2011-01-30T23:04:00.000-08:00

More ideas for how to do MoO3 in a much better way.

Ship refitting

This would be added back into the game. To keep micromanagement simple, I imagine that colonies could simply be ordered to produce "ship refits", and the total amount would effect how quickly ships could refit. I can imagine a couple similar systems, one where the "refits' can be stored, and used to instantly upgrade some ships, and another system where the ship refits would be put in a queue, and would be performed each turn as colonies produced refit points. A system would probably be added to allow players to decide how many ships of a certain type to upgrade. If possible, a system to be able to upgrade individual ships would be good, although using the task force system I'm not sure how such a system could be added without making it somewhat confusing for the gain it provides.

Task Forces

Categories of ships (picket, outer, inner) would be eliminated from both individual ship design and manufacture, and from the task force information itself. Instead, task force creation would allow the player to choose a "formation", which would determine an overall placement of ships, than the player would be able to place any ship in any node of the formation. Formations would be changeable as well after the task force was completed.

Task forces, if they got depleted, would be able to pick up new ships, likely either when orbiting a friendly colony, or within a certain distance of a friendly colony. New ships would simply be added into empty nodes in the task force's chosen formation.

Weapons and other combat abilities would likely be designed so that there would be an advantage to placing certain types of equipment in certain places in a formation, but such placements would not be forced.

Templates

To simplify management somewhat, the player would be able to save templates both for task force formations, and for ship designs. This work work in a similar manner to how Build templates are saved in Guild Wars, or how ship designs are saved in Galactic Civilization 2.

Current Guild Wars 2 plans

2011-01-28T20:08:00.000-08:00

Obviously, information on the game is still limited, including a lot of profession and race information, and my final decision on whether to get the game or not will depend on how leveling and side kicking are handled. However, I already have some plans for the characters I'll be making, and some guesses about how I'll play them.

For all professions, I'll definitely be trying out all skills from all weapons at some point, but will probably end up focusing on a few, which are the ones described here. I have also thought of some outside backstories for the characters, although I'm not sure how or if this will get included.

Characters:

Asura Mesmer:
-Not sure of story question picks yet.
-Weapons still need to be revealed.
-Not sure of an outside backstory yet.

Sylvari Necromancer:
-Winter season, otherwise not sure of story question picks.
-Will probably drift into using staff + offhand dagger, main hand scepter or ax. Necromancer weapons do seem somewhat more similar to other weapons, though, so I'll likely be switching around a lot.
-Outside backstory isn't thought up yet.

Human Elementalist
-Noble, prefers Dwayna. Other questions not decided yet.
-I'll probably switch between attunements about equally. Perhaps I'll have a slight preference for water or air. Staffs will likely be my preferred weapon.
-Outside backstory: "(name) is descended from the Canthan Emperor. Like most Canthans, she can trace her ancestry to the Emperor Qinsai, well known for his large number of concubines and illegitimate children. More importantly, (name) is descended from a number of the heroes who defeated abaddon, Shiro Tagachi, and the Lich Lord Khilbron. Her family has been politically active in Kryta, and Cantha before it was cut off from the rest of the world, and imbues its members with a pride in their accomplishments, strong desire to achieve, and concern for their fellow humans to this day."

Sylvari Ranger:
-Unsure of Story Questions
-I'll probably use mostly bows and Ax + torch. I generally find melee physical characters less fun for some reasons, and as a result will likely play those options less. (Though i likely will play them from time to time, and a change in my preferences is a possibility)
-No outside backstory yet

Human Assassin/rogue like character:
-Prefers Kormir as a goddess, commoner, unsure of other questions. (Unless on some small chance I go human guardian, in that case I'll probably pick grenth or Balthazar as a god, and be a street rat)
-I'm guessing this profession will use shortbows, pistols, daggers, and some other melee weapons. Although I usually find playing assassin types fine in other games (Guild Wars assassin, WoW rogue), I do tend to find ranged versions a bit more fun, so will probably focus somewhat more on whatever ranged weapons the class has. Of course, melee weapons being fun is always a possibility.
-Outside Story: "(name)'s parents always told her that she was descended from sunpsears. Of course, most Elonian make such claims, and the records don't exist to actually prove or disprove this. Still, (name) has all the passion and energy that, centuries ago, would have been highly desired in a sunspear recruit. Against the current threats to humanity, (name) practices routinely with local militias, and in her free time practices her skill even further. should anything threaten the survival of the humans in Kryta, and especially the Elonian refugees, (name) will fight strongly to protect them." (This story will be moved to the Guardian on the off chance I decide to do a human guardian, and replaced with a street rat version.)

Norn Gunner/Engineer type class:
-not sure of story questions
-Since we don't know anything at all about this profession yet (even whether it will be a gunner/engineer type), I have no guesses for which weapons or types of skills I'll prefer.
-Outside Story (Assuming the profession resembles an engineer/Governor type. If not, many of these profession plans might change) "(name) grew up as an ordinary norn. At 5, he killed his first wild goat without outside assistance. At 9, he killed a mountain Lion with his bare hands. At 15, He was able to hunt his first small dragonspawn. By 21, he was regularly seeking out and killing mountain creatures that threaten most norn lands. Suck of being a merely ordinary Norn, (name) switched paths in life and decided to learn the secrets of gunpowder technology. through several years of hard work an intensive study, (name) has now become quite skilled with gunpowder weapons."

Charr Warrior:
-Blood or Iron Legion (other personal questions not decided
-Weapon wise, will probably focus on the ranged weapons. I tend to find the physical melee character types somewhat more boring than other types, and as a result, will probably naturally switch into ranged combat. When i do go melee, I'll probably prefer greatswords and Hammers, since AoE is fun (for me).
-I am not sure of an outside backstory yet.

Unknown race (probably norn) Guardian:
-I am not sure of the race yet. The best "feel" for me would be human, and somewhat Sylvari, but I don't want to have 3 of one race. Norn if the most likely actual race pick for this profession, since I don't want two soldiers of the same race, although I've waiting on this decision until other professions are released.
-For Weapons, I don't have a firm idea of which ones I'll end up using yet, as they all seem like they might be fun to use. I'll need to see the actual skills, or at least some role descriptions, to get a better sense of what I'll be going with.
-If the race is human, the Guardian will use the "Elonian sunspear" story above. If Norn, I'll need to make one up. (Though norn is more likely, as mentioned above.)

Guild Wars 2: Guardian Thoughts

2011-01-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

No more blue Mace Lady, Monkagon, Cleric, Paladin, etc. I'll be missing the wide range of speculated names for the class.

Firstly: My guesses for which weapons the guardian will use are almost spot on, though the exact types of skills are still up in the air. The mechanic they use seems vaguely like the "Auras" that I wrote up a few posts ago. I didn't do too much speculation on the types of skills used by the class, although it does fit the widely predicted general role of a protection oriented, monk/paladin like class.

On the gameplay: Some of the skill videos released so far are not as easy for me to read as those of previous professions. The written skill descriptions seem pretty interesting, though. I'm not as excited about the wards or weapons, though those should be interesting to play with, but I am interested in the weapon skills that an interview described as often having buff or support effects in addition to being attacks. I will definitely be looking forward to seeing what the actual skills are at a future demo, or beta.

The virtues system seems like a relatively boring unique mechanic, although I may be missing some subtleties in the skill use that other people will find when the character is actually played. I did see a worry on the forums that virtues might make guardian groups somewhat like Paragon shout groups, keeping up a normally limited skill for almost full time using multiples of the class. I can imagine this possibly being an issue especially with courage, since lots of blocked attacks would significantly improve defense. Of course, there might be skills already included ot combat this, such as AoE's or other ways of applying conditions.

Despite having guessed that guardians would get ranged spell weapons as well as melee weapons, I'm still quite happy that Anet went this route, and the weapon combination themselves seem quite cool. I'm still not sure which I'll likely end up playing most orften, though I'll probably need to see the skills for that.

MoO3 How to do it: Post #2

2011-01-24T21:46:00.000-08:00

Some more thoughts on how MoO3 might have been done better:

1. Moons:

Would be colonizable and managable separately from planets, but multiple moons, or moons+planet, in the same planetary system would contribute to the same pool of production, food, etc.

2. Military DEA's and planetary defense

Like many elements of the game, the exact role of military DEAs is somewhat unclear. From what I remember, their main role is to increase the number of possible orbital ships, and improve happiness somewhat, although enhancement buildings may have a number of other functions.

For a new role for Military DEA's, I would keep the orbital ship support increase, but the effect would be described more clearly. In addition, military DEA's would, in a clearly described way to the player, increase the experience level of ships and ground forces produced on the colony. They might also increase the effectiveness of missile/beam/fighter defense bases, or improve the number of such bases that could be built. To enhance the planetary defensive abilities of colonies with these DEAs, they would also speed production of defensive structures.

These DEA's, as a result, would serve two functions: Improving planetary defenses and improving the quality (possibly quantity as well) of military forces produced by a planet. they would also improve happiness somewhat, depending on the type of government.

Government DEAs:

The function of these DEa's is less clear than military ones. They increase happiness, which is immediately understandable, but also "improve the effectiveness of regional infrastructure", but also increase the "heavy foot of government", the effects of which are hard to determine.

For new government DEa effects, I'd propose:

Improving happiness somewhat (as before) Happiness would depend on the type of government.
Reduced spy effectiveness (not sure if this was also an effect already in the game, but would become an effect in this case.) It might also improve the quality of trained spies, depending on how spy effects work.
Government DEA's might also improve the effectiveness of large scale projects, such as improving terraforming speed, shipyard building speed, New DEA construction, or such.
If educationla facilities were in the game, they would either improve the effectiveness, or would allow, educational buildings.
If crime were included using mechanics aside from happiness, these DEAs would reduce crime. If health were similarly included, these DEas would improve health.
If additional planets led to an increased maintenance costs, or other increased costs of some form, these DEA's would reduce those costs. (Think Civ 4 courthouses.)

The exact function of these DEAs does depend on the other economy details of this theoretical game, which I'll be working out and writing about later.

Master of Orion 3: How to do it (second attempt)

2011-01-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

After playing MoO2 for some time, I've been developing a few ideas of a way to do MoO3 in a much better way than it actually had been done. These ideas aren't fully organized at this point, so will likely be divided between several different posts.

Technology/Creativity

I'm not sure exactly what creativity did in MoO3 (there was a description involving overruns from what I remember, but otherwise, its hard to tell what the effect was. After playing MoO2, however, and seeing how creativity worked in that game, a simpler solutions seems to be to have increasing levels of creativity provide an increasing chance to discover and advance when a research level was discovered. If this is actually the effect of creativity in MoO3, than the effect should have been described better.

Planet Types and Terraforming

There are a couple of ideas I have for how this are of the game might work.

Heat/Pressure method: This one uses the temperature and pressure scale that was/is actually used in MoO3. Instead of circles of planet quality of the same size, however, the shape and size of the "quality levels" of the different planets would be adjustable from alien type to alien type. In addition, terraforming costs would be controllable by the player, to aim for a particular location on the temperature/pressure graph, and the costs would be based on the distance moved. These changes would allow more differentiation between different types of aliens in preferred environments, as well as making terraforming more transparent and controllable by a player.

Planet Environments method: this method would use an updated version of the MoO2 system, which divided planets into types (ocean, Gaia, barren, etc.) However, more types of planets would be included, and the new types would be chosen to allow aliens who preferred different environments to have a good range of quality levels, and allow a good range of terraforming options.

for some examples of how this might work (Names are made up, and haven't been "designed" with specifics in mind):

Etherians might prefer Gas Giants and Ice Giants, viewing them as the highest quality, and terraforming would pass through types of worlds with constantly thickening atmospheres (Starting at, say, Frozen, and going through Ice, Tundra, Ocean, and finally Ice Giant, as one pathway. Another pathway might be, say, Hot Rocky, greenhouse, toxic/Venusoid, Gas Giant)

Silicoids might prefer hot, rocky worlds, possibly "Volcanic" as the type, and terraforming would make planets hotter and rockier.

Guild Wars 2: More speculated profession mechanics

2010-12-24T16:36:00.000-08:00

(At the date this post is written, 4 professions have been revealed, and 4 are still unknown, though the "standard guesses" are a mesmer like class, an assassin/rogue like class, a paladin-like (healer + heavy armor+close combat) like class, and a gunner/engineer type class.)

Here are some new guesses ( I already have a lot of older guesses, but more can't hurt.) for what each profession's special mechanic will be:

Mesmer-like: Mantras that add unique effects to the spells the mesmer casts. At the moment I can imagine 3 types:

One that adds interruption or some other disruption to spells.
One that reduces the recharge and/or casting speed of spells
One that adds damage to spells

Assasin-Like: Assassins in original Guild Wars relied on critical hits for energy. By analogy with how necromancers have an "on death resource" effect in both games, I'm guessing that assassin will have a critical hit based unique mechanic. The best idea at the moment is that a critical hit might open up a special, more powerful than usual skill of some sort. Another possibility is that critical hits might apply different conditions, extra damage, fast followup attack, etc. to the person who scores them.

Engineer/Gunner

I'm using a Team Fortress 2 like guess here, in that this class might get a special resource (metal?) that is supplied by certain skills, or a dispenser like summon, may be generated on its own, plus may have other sources based on what is lying on the ground. Metal would be used to make turrets, throw special grenades (If grenades work as special skills, though I'd expect them to more likely be standard weapon skills), or use other special skills that significantly improve the power of the class over non-metal based skills.

Paladin/Blue Mace Lady/Cleric/etc.

Auras are my guess for this unique mechanic, based vaguely on reading about some Warhammer online classes. My guess, if auras are used, is that they would supply certain effects to allies, while also enhancing some types of character skills more powerfully. Guesses for Auras:

Aura of Healing: supplies healing to allies. Enhances support skills, perhaps by adding healing, perhaps adding other effects.
Aura of Smiting: Improves damage of allies. Enhances damage skills on the character.
Aura of Interference: Slows enemies, reduces their damage, or has some other similar effect. Enhances control skills of the character.

Team Fortress 2 has too many items

2010-12-22T23:44:00.000-08:00

That's my thought after the Christmas update, the polycount update, and some other updates in between.

There are a couple of reasons for this thought:

Firstly, with lots and lots of items being added, it becomes harder to keep track of all the capabilities of different weapons and classes, as well as the appearance of different classes with lots of different hats.

The other issue is that with large amounts of different items, Valve seems to be running low on ideas for abilities of some of them. The Sydney sleeper already seems like somewhat of a stretch, as does the new medic crossbow. With a smaller amount of items in the class specific updates, it seemed that the different items were better at creating new playstyles, and were more solidly differentiated for different roles, but the Australian Christmas update, and various random updates, have blurred item roles, and created a much more random set of capabilities.

MMO ranged physical classes outside of hunter/ranger types

2010-12-06T20:25:00.000-08:00

This post is in response to a minor pet peeve of mine, where RPG's (especially MMOs), have a lot of options for close combat classes, and spellcasters, but only one token ranged class. (Usually a hunter/ranger type from what I've seen.). Even more pet peevy is when the character is given some close combat skills, with a description along the lines of "But rangers are flexible fighters, and can use melee weapons skillfully as well", while the melee and caster classes don't get ranged abilities in return.

The Guild Wars series is the main one I've seen, and remember, that avoids this somewhat. Rangers in guild wars 1 have bow weapon skills only, while Paragons add a javelin class. Guild Wars 2 does have rangers going melee, but also gives warriors ranged abilities (That are not just for pulling or secondary use), and the weapons diversity from the usual expectations seems to suggest that future classes will also have a range of options.

Still, those are only a couple of games, which only cover one sort of skill and weapon system, so these are some more ranged physical weapons that might apply in other games.

Weapons

Bows are the most common, and Guns are used in WoW and Guild wars 2, but these are some more weapons that seem less commonly used.

Javelins:

These are used in Guild Wars Paragons, and Diablo 2 Amazons, but I don't tend ot hear about these elsewhere as fully developed weapons.

Depending on how skill system work, they'd likely not be used with the same skills as bows (compare to how melee weapon skills often apply over various weapons), but I could see javalins being developed into single target focused weapon, with either a range as far or somewhat shorter than bows. (Of course, Javelin multishots are possible as well, or skills like D2 assasin plague cloud and lightning fury.)

Slings:

These have never showed up as weapons in any game that I know of, despite being an important weapon in ancient times, and quite powerful from what I've heard.

In a similar manner to how melee class skills often don't depend on weapons, I could see slings being a straight bow substitute. Alternatively, slings might get more skills associated with stuns, and related abilities. The range would probably be roughly similar to bows, and in systems using blunt, piercing, etc. damage, slings would probably do blunt.

(From the bit I've read and seen of how slings work, multishot skills might make more "realistic" sense for them than bows, though this is based on very basic information.)

Blowguns:

These would probably not be a straightforward damage weapons, but I can easily imagine them as a weapon used by a poisoner type character (And I've made one up for a Guild Wars idea.).

If used as a standard ranged weapon, they would probably be a "piercing" type, with range either the same or a bit less than bows. If used with the own skills, I could see blowguns as applying a combination or poison and physical damage, or purely poison based.

Characters

Since a lot of range skills typically get lumped onto one character, most of the ideas here will likely overlap somewhat with an already existing character somewhere. This bit is more to show how ranged character archetypes could conceivably fill several roles in one game, while not interfering too much with caster types of up close types too much.

"Skirmisher" type

This type seems ot already exist in Warhammer online (from what i've read), and will be in Guild Wars with a shortbow ranger. This character type is/would be based around medium range, while being able to move quickly and shoot.

With the weapons listed above, skirmishers in other games also seem to make sen with javelins or slings, though any weapon type could be justified with the right backstory. I mostly imagine the character as a disruption character with more medium damage, though spike damage, or high sustained damage are certainly also possible.

In order for this sort of character to work, the game would have to be one where movement was important, and could seriously effect the results of a fight. (Obviously, all games are like this in some situations, but mechanics like how WoW raids seem to work, or typical Guild wars boss fights, would not fit this sort of character as well.)

Sinper/Ranged assasin type

This character type doesn't seem common in many games at all, either because the archetype hasn't been well established in typical RPg settings, or because such a character might be difficult to balance.

The idea for this character is that it would be more focused on spike damage, probably from long range, likely with stealth related skills as well. It fits the idea of a long ranged sniper type, but likely using a bow, blowgun, or other long ranged weapon. Since such a character could be extremely powerful (Being able to theoretically rapidly damage enemies without their being able to react), it would need some weaknesses added, with in overall game and map design, or in skills themselves, but either way compensating for the sorts of advantages this character would have. FPS games appear to handle this relatively well, though, so some ideas might be taken from those.

"Brawler" type

This ranged type I imagine as a character that can both take and deal high damage, but that would be weaker to debuffs or other unusual effects. The Guild Wars 2 bow warrior appears to fit this type, with a lot of damage skills plus the high armor that the soldier type classes will have.

I imagine this sort of character as one that could trade attacks back and forth with other ranged (and likely melee) attackers, and have an advantage, though when unusual spell effects come into the picture, it would have a lot more trouble. Such a character I imagine as more of a bow, javelin, or sling character, though as always other types are possible.

Unlike hunters/rangers/valkyrie amazons (in Diablo 2), I imagine this character as minionless, not relying on a pet to absorb damage for them.

Master of Orion 2 thoughts

2010-11-29T20:29:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly enough, despite liking 4X games in general, including space colonization ones, I hadn't actually bought this game until a couple months ago or so. I've only started playing intensely a few days ago, and so far its been quite fun. My first game was as the Klackon, and I'm now in the middle of a Meklar game, and a started game with a custom research race that I will continue after completing the Meklar game.

The bad parts

Different civilization/race traits (creative most obviously.) Don't seem balanced very well in custom design. This is pretty well known elsewhere, but is still an issue.

The graphics are pretty old, and though they work well for the game, it would always be nicer if they were better. This isn't to big an issue, though.

The interface is a bit tricky in some areas. I have figured it out be reading the manual, bit some parts took a bit to figure out (like spying)

The Good Parts

Colony building has been quite fun so far, Its hard to explain how, but the system seems to do a good job at allowing colonies to specialize effectively while still allowing them to generalize well. It is also nice to be able to do things like move people between colonies, in general, the colony system seems to let players do move of the convienience type things they would want to do, and often without too much extra micromanagement (apart from moving citizens between particular jobs.)

The planet quality (radiated, toxic, etc.), and terraforming system also works quite well, at least from what I've seen. Its simple to understand, but still provides a somewhat interesting system that does effect colonization.

The Iffy

Combat and ship design will take a bit to figure out. I'm leaning towards liking the system, as the directional shields, different ranges, move speeds, and such seem to make room for tactics to influence a battle after the designs have been done. The planetary defense systems and galactic movement system seem to allow choke points to develop, while also not requiring a giant fleet vs. a possible mix of fleets. However, I haven't yet figured out well how the different ship properties work, and still need to play for longer to figure out how galactic movement effects fleet size, so am still overall on the fence about this.

The research system is also pretty iffy. I can see what it was going for, in encouraging a need for diplomacy and spying, and pushing players into having to pick between particular paths, rather than just grabbing everything. However, having 1/3 technologies available does seem to overdo things somewhat, while also making the creative trait very, very powerful, moreso than it should probably be. In addition, the technologies seem somewhat randomly distributed, which makes choosing a particular path more difficult, and sometimes seems to freeze out particular technologies that would be useful for particular focuses. (Although "freezing out particular technologies" might sound like the goal of the system, the way the freezing works seems to result in a random mix of technologies, rather than forcing a particular overall strategy to be chosen.) I'll have to play longer to get a better feel for the various technologies, but at the moment I'm thinking that the game might have been better served by having, say, 4 techs per level in each category, civilizations researching half the available ones, rather than the usual third, and having different levels of creativity effect the amount of technologies available at a tier (So fully creative would allow all four, mostly would be 3/4, normal would be 2/4, poor would be 1/4), with the technologies reorganized somewhat.

The spy system seems pretty good at the moment, although I'm not sure exactly how it works, and haven't played long enough to tell how effective spies really are. This is another one that I'll have to work out from playing.

Overall

Quite fun so far, I'm definitely glad I got it, and probably should have gotten it some time ago.

Guild Wars 2 guesses

2010-11-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Its been awhile since a big chunk of guild Wars 2 information has been released, and will likely be awhile longer, so for now, these are my guesses using current information for various elements of the game.

Professions

There seem to be a "standard" set of guesses for the final professions: a mesmer like class, an assasin/rogue type class, a paladin type "holy close combat soldier" type of class, and a gunner or engineer type class. At the moment, I agree that these are the likely classes. For unique mechanics, I have few guesses, bu do have general ideas about roles and skills.

Rogue/Assassin:

One of the few bits of information released recently is that a form of stealth is in the game. Though described for a ranger skill in the interview, stealth is an obvious mechanic for a rogue/assassin type character, and I'd expect that, if in the game, this class will have a larger stealth focus than most. The interview did describe in balance terms how stealth might be handled without unbalancing the game (No powerful "ambush" type attacks that do high damage from stealth, skills to spot stealthed characters, for example.), and from playing strategy games and Team Fortress 2 (with spies, though as spies I'm really, really bad.), I can believe that this sort of character could be balanced well.

For weapons, guesses are as follows:

Dagger: main hand and off hand. I'd expect daggers to have the most commonly expected rogue or assassin type skills, with high spike damage, possibly some disruption, probably some movement skills as well, similar to, but hopefully not overlapping too much with, similar ranger skills.

Other 1-hand weapons (mace, ax, sword): These would involve more standard damage skills. The exact skills depend on the weapons, but I would expect some disruption and conditions as well as direct damage.

Shortbow, Pistol: The description for the ranger class suggest that players who don't like pets will prefer other classes. We've seen the Warrior as an alternative high damage, "heavy" ranged weapon class, covering the high direct damage abilities of a Guild Wars 1 ranger. And assassin/rogue type character seem a good fit for the disruption and condition causing sides of a ranger, and pistols and shortbows seem the sort of weapons suited to use by that sort of character, and weapons that would fit a disruption and conditions type of role.

Torch?: This one is a lot less certain than others, and I am not sure of what sorts of skills a torch character would use. This guess mostly comes from how some in game bandits carried torches and pistols, and bandits seem to be vaguely more similar to this sort of class than other types.

Greatsword? Hammer?: Large weapons to me don't really seem to fit the class, but rangers also are said to have a greatsword for high damage attacks, so a heavy weapon seems a rogue possibility as well. I see a sword as fitting better than a hammer (since swords are seen as more of a skill/dexterity weapon.), but could imagine both as possibilities.

As for the unique mechanic for a rogue type class, I'm not sure what they would go with. For utility skills, I would expect a good amount of movement and evasion, as is standard for rogues, plus perhaps some spike damage support skills.

Mesmer:

Some people have suggested on forums that mesmers might be able to create actual illusions that would be visible to other players, with effects. With the stealth article adding a new mechanic vaguely along these lines, I can see illusions as a greater possibility.

Though rangers have not had interrupts, and hexes have been eliminated as a possibility, I could see area effect or ground targeted disruption effects as part of a mesmer's arsenal. Skills like overload that deal extra damage based on skill use seem a possibility as well. Otherwise, conditions and damage over time seem the best possibilities for mesmer skills.

My guesses for mesmer weapons are not as solid as for other classes, since most of these are spellcasting weapons and could be fit in some way into whatever types of skills were needed.

Scepter: Domination type skills. (Scepters seem more like an intimidating style than others.)

Staff: Support type skills. Mesmers seem a vague possibility for healing, though other types of support, such as buffs, are far more likely. Might also have a couple illusion type skills as well.

Dagger: Direct damage, perhaps conditions.

Focus: Possibly domination type skills, to fit with a scepter, or illusions.

Sword?: I could see swords as fitting with an "aristocratic" style. Skills would likely be direct damage or domination leaving the above weapons for other sorts of skills.

Warhorn?: Mesmers are associated with actors directly, and seem that they could be associated with other performing arts as well. (I can easily imagine mesmer dancers, for example), some sort of singing or music association with a warhorn may be possible. (On a sillier note, both revealed warhorn classes have involved summoning animals in some way associated with the class, which leaves one to wonder what a mesmer might summon. :) )

Am not sure what sorts of extra skills would be added by utilities. Possibly mantra like skills for the mesmer's protection or improvement in other ways.

Paladin/cleric/Blue Mace Lady:

Would mostly use the typical "healing holy warrior" type of skills, with a mix of physical combat and spell based abilities. I'm not sure what a unique mechanic for this class might be, perhaps something like the warrior priests or archmages in Warhammer Online, where damage and support abilities feed each other.

Weapon guesses:

Sword, Greatsword: Probably more standard physical combat skills.

Hammer, Mace: Most likely also physical combat, with more of a stun focus as on the warrior. I could also see these as spell weapons, though, most likely offensive.

Scepter: A spellcaster weapon, most likely offensive.

Focus: Most likely defensive spellcasting.

Shield: Might either be used for physical protection for the character itself, or to supply some defensive buffs for the team.

Torch: Using a vague holy fire connection, I'd expect the torch to be associated with a couple holy spells. More likely offensive, using the system I've planned out at the moment, but might be defensive.

Warhorn: More buffs. Not exactly sure what kinds.

Pistol?: Using the current guesses, pistols would only be available to two classes, so this would round things out. I'm not sure of the type of skills, though, ranged skills could be supplied by spellcasting, plus expected pistol type skills don't seem to really fit the character.

I'm not sure what sorts of utility skills would exist aside from the skills mentioned above. Perhaps some skills for focusing the class on a particular area, or other self buffs.

Gunner/Engineer:

Since concept art for turrets has been included, I expect turrets are a likely unique mechanic for this sort of class. Some people also think that this class will be an "environmental weapons" class, and I could see it making temporary weapons for other classes as well, similar ot elementalist conjure skills.

Weapon guesses:

Rifle: Obvious weapon. High damage per skill, long range.

Pistols: movement oriented, damage in faster chunks, medium range, possibly disruption.

Hammer, possibly mace: These close combat weapons seem to fit the best for this kind of class. Would probably be similar to other types of hammer and mace skills.

Grenades: I'm not sure if these would be a created weapons, or a weapon associated with something like daggers. Either way, grenades would be for AoE damage, stuns, and other possible conditions. (Whether or not grenades are used for weapon skills, utility skills, or something else, I would be highly, highly surprised if a gunpowder class were included without them.)

Daggers: If not used for grenades, seem a likely utility skills.

Torch: Would supply flamethrower type skills. (Sure, carrying a torch around gunpowder is quite dangerous, but it does seem to thematically fit if some right. :) )

Utility skills, if turrets were included, would most likely include turret repair and support skills. I'd also expect land mines as a trap type skill for a gunpowder class.

Stealth

At the moment I don't have any solid information apart from the small interview release, but if I had to guess, I'd expect stealth to work more like the Team Fortress 2 spy cloaking. It could be used for movement, and mentally fooling with enemies. However, decloaking would take a bit of time, and would be detectable with certain skills (as the article describes), giving enemies a chance to spot a character before attacks come in.

Non-human character backgrounds:

We've seem some human and Charr background questions at the demo, so here are some guesses for what other races will choose:

Asura:

Which college (synergetics, statics, dynamics). this is according to Guild Wars 2 wiki.

Which first successful experiment. Also according to Guild Wars 2 wiki.

Character question for Krewe members (Mostly wild guess.)

Norn:

Which spirit is supported. (Wolf, Bear, Raven, Snow Leopard) according to Guild wars wiki.

First great deed. (Would give this a 50/50 or so chance.)

Dwelling place. (This is pretty much a random guess.)

Sylvari:

Time of Day/Season. (Morning/spring, Midday/Summer, Evening/Fall, Night/Winter). This is confirmed at the moment.

Preferred type of plants: (Flowers, Vines, Grass) This is a wild guess.

First questions upon being born. (Also a wild guess.)

For profession questions, I'm assuming the professions above.

Assasin/Rogue:

Type of mask (hood, simply cloth, decorated)

Mesmer:

Type of Mask perhaps as well. (Different types are similar to the Domination, Illusion, and Inspiration types already in the original game.)

Paladin/Blue Mace Lady/Cleric

Relic/good luck charm carried. (Not sure of exact answers, but I imagine them as being written to symbolize determination, brotherhood/community with fellow soldiers or others, and aggression.)

Engineer/Gunner:

If engineer: Favorite tool type. (To represent precision, toughness, and power.)

If Gunner: Type of gun enhancement, perhaps. (Representing Accuracy, Power, and fast firing.) Am not as sure of this.

Game idea: Split personality

2010-10-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

This could be an RPG, FPS, anything where players manipulate single characters. The main gimmick/selling point of the game is that, to represent the split personality of the character, the character would, after a certain interval of time, switch to AI control for a certain length of time, than switch back to player control. If real time, the length of time would be a certain amount of real time, if turn based, the time would be represented by a certain number of turns.

During the time the player controlled the game, the player would likely set up items, and position themselves to manipulate how their AI personality acted during its period of control. I imagine that the AI personality could be one of several different types, and part of the player's goal would likely be determining what their other personality was, to better manipulate it during their uncontrolled moments. If designed effectively, a player would be able to rely on their other personality to fight, pick up items, or do other actions well enough that a player would not just want to hide before the personality switch.

such a game might be difficult to market at first, but I could imagine it being made by someone good with AI and good at writing a story where this could work. Of course, it is just one among many ideas, but hopefully is interesting if anyone reads this post.

Call to Power like combat system for Fall from Heaven (or other fantasy type civilization games)

2010-10-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

Based on this thread. (and more specifically, my last post, at the moment, in this thread.)

The system I imagine would work mostly like the Call to Power system, except with a couple of changes:

1. After each round of combat, players would have an opportunity to cast spells. The amount of spell castable in a combat round might be based on a mana/casting point system, or would simply be 1 per round. I could also see spells being usable at the beginning of combat, and no more.

2. To allow "large numbers of weak unit" armies and "small numbers of strong units" armies to be combined, close combat fighters would not fight to the death, instead, they would fight something like 10 rounds, adjusted for the sorts of hit point and damage numbers in this particular game, than the side with more units would automatically rotate healthier units into combat to fight.

Some more thoughts:

Spells would have to be adjusted to handle this new system in a balanced way. For some Fall from Heaven based examples:

-Promotion and Summoning spells as they currently exist would most likely need to be made out of combat spells. If a spellcaster used such a spell, they would likely have their casting points/mana reduced for any combat they entered during that turn, if such a system was being used. Promotion and summoning spells in battle are definitely possible, though would most likely be temporary for the battle, and balanced around this fact. I could also see promotions that only apply to single units, or to small numbers of units, rather than being automatically appliedto every available unit.

-Damage spells would probably be split into in combat and out of combat spells. If a mana system were used, out of combat spells would probably be very costly to balance the advantage of the caster's stack not needing to join combat. In combat spells I imagine as being less powerful per cast, but with multiple casts allowed per combat. the exact details of how this worked would depend on the damage spells.

-Debuff spells and Healing spells could likely be split between combat and noncombat, in a similar manner as damage and promotion spells.

-AoE effects would obviously not work as they normally would, since the CTP combat system doesn't really represent the actual positions of units in a battle. Since target spells and spells the effect the entire battlefield, or and entire side in the battle, would translate fine into this system. smaller AoE spells would likely target by rows (for an example of how this might work, they could attack all in combat ranged units, in combat melee, out of combat melee, spellcasters, etc.). They also might randomly target a certain number of units, or randomly target units in a particular row.

I'm not sure about whether ranged units would be rotated in a similar way as close combat units in a more numerous army. I do lean towards rotating ranged units out of combat after a round if new ones are available, so that an army's weaker ranged units actually do provide a weakness even against smaller armies. However such a mechanic might encourage players to only bring small numbers of more powerful ranged units. A solution to this theoretical question might be to rotate ranged units out for nothing if there are too few of them.

Spellcasters would likely become ranged units if they ran out of spellcasting ability, or if too many other units were killed.

I could see players given control over whether heroes were rotated from combat or not. Heroes, in setting terms, are presumably always in the fight, for inspiration and/or combat advantage. In gameplay terms, its harder to explain, but at least for me feels right that players should have some control over such a special unit, and given options to save the unit, or keep them fighting for combat advantage, as wanted.

Assasin type units would likely be a separate type, similar to melee or ranged. Their first targets would go from back to front, rather than front to back, as other units would do. (spellcasters, than ranged, than close combat, is how I imagine the targetting order.) Guardsmen I imagine as most likely being placed first in this order, forcing assasins to fight them if some were in combat (so assasins would target: guardsmen, than spellcasters, than ranged, than melee), and/or would force assasins to reverse this order if in a stack. The system is a bit hard to visualize at this point, though, so I'm not sure how I would actually put this into practice if I were actually doing it.

Civilization 5 mod ideas

2010-09-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't yet gotten the game, (and may need to get a new computer with a new graphics card to get it running well), but have tried out the demo somewhat, and, surprise surprise, have come up with a couple of vague mod ideas for it.

Chiron (Based on Alpha Centauri)

The main person who did the planetfall mod has said that they are not interested in doing a civ 5 mod based on alpha Centauri, so I'm hoping ot be one of many possible competitors for introducing a civ 5 mod based on that game.

If I do make such a mod, the big attraction will be the social policy trees. Though they won't automatically work the same way as Alpha Centauri social engineering (so would need some fiddling if I want include such a feature), they seem to have great potential in setting and storyline terms for representing the changes to humanity as they spread throughout the planet and develop new technology.

For an example, I could see having a "genetic enhancement" tree, that would start with, say, Gene therapy, go through disease resistance, physical enhancements, mental enhancements, and perhaps leading to "clinical immortality". In addition, a "Homo Superior" project, or social policy, might be made available if this tree and a cybernetics tree were advanced far enough.)

Another example would be to use two incomparable branches to represent pro-planet environmentalism vs. development towards a human supporting planet. The "environmentalist" branch would lead to transcendence, while the human branch might lead to terraforming Chiron to be like Earth.

Other features would of course depend on what is actually in civ 5.

Pickly's Standard Fantasy Mod

Some of the mod ideas are on this page. A lot of the elements aren't fully fleshed out at the moment, though hopefully some general patterns can be seen.

This mod idea is vaguely similar in concept to Fall From Heaven, but with my own setting. This is a setting that I might have modded straight from Fall From Heaven, but I don't like the civilization 4 combat system enough to do so. The civ 5 combat system looks a bit better, though, so once the necessary mechanics are introduced somewhere, I'll be interested in combining them to produce a new mod.

Generic Mods.

This is an idea from here, where some mods can be created for particular settings (fantasy, space colonization, etc.), that adjusted as desired by other people. Some civ 4 mods (Fall From Heaven, Final Frontier) served this role, but a mod specifically designed for this might be better in civ 5.

Valve time Meaning formula

2010-09-22T17:24:00.000-07:00

(For those who do not know what Valve time is: here. It's pretty much a pattern of being late on announcements)

Though many may think that Valve time has little meaning other than "It will come out after the announcement", it really seems more like a statistical measurement to me, using the following the following system:

The actual release has an 80% chance to come within (3* broad precision of announced date) after the announced date.

If the announcement is precise down to a specific time, than the actual release will have an 80% chance to occur within 3 hours after the announcement.

If it is down to a specific day, than release will have an 80% chance to be between 3 days.

This system continues to apply for months and years.

The system appears to predict quite closely, within a margin of error of (insert high percentage that I have pulled out of thin air), with one caveat: "Soon" unfortunately has little meaning within the system, due to the lack of a specific announced time, and thus must be assumed to follow some vague model based on the size of the project (Larger projects have less time specific versions of "Soon")

"Now" you may ask, "You have this easy to understand system, how about making some predictions with it?" That I can do.

At the time of this post, the polycount update has not yet been released. In an interview, it was said that the update should be released late August or Early September. Since this time period covers roughly 1 month, some might be fooled into assuming that the update has an 80% chance to come out before the middle of December. However, this announcement is a bit more subtle, in that the next lowest fraction of a month is in weeks, thus, the polycount update will have an 80% chance to come out within 3 weeks of the middle of September, or most likely before October.

That is my prediction. If it does come within that time, I was obviously right. If not, I did not specifically say that it was guarenteed within that time, thus I was also right. We shall see the results within a few weeks (or possibly months. Or "soon")

3-D ideas that I'd like to see

2010-09-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

3-D Strategy Game (Or possibly any game)

This idea is based on the development of Achron, which is a game that incorporates time travel mechanics, and some reading about atmospheric science. By 3-D, I do not simply mean a game that uses 3-D graphics, or has different levels of terrain, but a game where the height dimension is as important as the other dimensions.

The first idea I had for such a game could be a strategy or tactical game involving controlling an Atmosphere. In this game, "buildings" would likely be floating, or perhaps rocket based, structures at different heights. "Units" would mostly be airplanes, balloons, rockets, and other flying machines. Increasing a unit of building's height might cost energy, as might maintaining buildings or units at certain heights (to represent the atmosphere thinning out), but would allow increased visions, and likely would have more effective weapon options.

The second idea would be a space game, that simply used 3-D as a natural third dimension. This could again be used for a space colonization type game, or more fast paced RTS style, but with the third dimension adding something extra to keep track of.

The third idea would be to use this for a "caverns" game, simulating a bunch of tunnels, caves, and such. This would allow more complexity than how caves usually are handled, perhaps adding falling, climbing, and such to keep things more complex. (some games, like warcraft 3, do sort of reach towards this idea, but don't often seem to take it very far.)

An ocean or lake environment is another one that could use 3-D, though would likely use the ideas described above.

Current mods

2010-09-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

Fall From Heaven Modmods

Link

As described, the first mod involves mostly tweaks. At the time of writing this posts, I'm in the process of working on a couple of Grigori spells that I have not yet figured out how to get to work. I'm also in the process of figuring out changes for the Sidar.

I'll probably make some changes to most civilizations for this mod, though do need to actually play some of them to get a feel for how they play currently. A lot of the changes will likely be based off of other big mods, (wildmana, Rise from Erebus, Fall Farther)

The more complex "acetum cucumbis" mod is a more long term plan. as mentioned in the thread, this mod will include the remaining mana types, and a couple new religions. I also plan to have some other mechanics, though the actual mechanics included depend on how skilled I get at coding, and whether I maintain interest in doing this.

Elemental Mods

The Lords of Magic mod I've been planning is on hold for awhile. Elemental doesn't have a lot of features at the moment that I hope to change, plus the Fall from Heaven changes have made it pretty clear that I really, really, need to get better at using Python before I start fiddling around with more complex features. I still do plan to do it, but will be waiting to see how elemental changes over time before really jumping into it.

4x Games in General

Though 4X is probably my favorite type of game, it is surprising how most individual 4X games seem to always miss a combination of elements that I would enjoy a lot. Fall from Heaven is a good example of this; the game is fun on its own, but would certainly be more fun both for modding and playing if the combat system were improved over the civilization 4 one. I'd probably start on the religion mod straight from Fall from Heaven if the combat system were improved.

Elemental in theory could have enough elements to actually produce good system all the way through, although a lot of people don't like the current game, and it could probably use some extra features to really fill this role well. (I haven't actually played the game much recently, as the game did not work at all until release, and by that point the focus on the Fall from Heaven mod and a few missing features has kept my interest low for the moment.)

Guild Wars 2: Necromancer and Gamescon

2010-08-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

These are my thoughts on the recent information releases for Guild Wars 2:

Necromancer: Not as interesting as I'd expected, though the new twist on minion skills seems nice. Death Shroud seems an odd unique mechanic, which won't show up as often as the other mechanics that have been revealed, though I suppose I'll have to see more details to tell how fun it actually is.

I was hoping, like several people, for some Ritualist influence, perhaps with spirit summons, and support oriented summons, as minions in addition to the damage oriented necromancer ones. The necromancer does seem, like most classes, to have been made more damage oriented, which does make sense for making the game easier to solo, though I'm still concerned whether there will be enough offensive spell diversity between the classes.

My prediction for the shadow reveal was wrong (I was expecting the necromancer to be the caped figure between the actual necromancer and elementalist, though was right that the Necromancer was revealed after the Ranger. For the next class I'm guessing Mesmer most likely, or an assasin type class, as these will be most similar to Guild wars 1 classes.

The revealed necromancer shadow is quite neat.

Gamescon Demo

Mostly worries from the information coming out of it. The game mechanics seemed pretty nice from what i have heard, and the character backstory options are pretty neat, but my concern over leveling keeps increasing. Unless some sidekick or autobalance system works well, and leveling, including getting skills, is shortened, I'll likely not be getting the game.

I lean towards the dislike side for potions and the higher statistics, though by themselves these don't effect my overall opinions all that much. I do worry about the more standard attribute systems, since most attribute systems of this type quickly work out to have an "optimum" distribution that everyone uses. The split may also cause problems with classes that use a mix of skill types (spellcasting, ranged weapons, melee weapons), in that they will be encouraged ot stick with one category, rather than being able to adjust between all three. (for example, warriors would get encouraged to use all ranged or all close combat). Though less severe than the specialization encouraged by guild wars, it still would reduce the fun of the game.

I'll be continuing to watch the game until it is actually released.

Grinding Definition post

2010-08-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

"Grind" is an idea that comes up a lot in MMO discussions, but people rarely seem to be working on a solid idea of what Grind actually is. This is my idea:

Grind: Any unfun activity that must be done to access a fun part of the game

Why use this definition (imaginary powerpoint slide pops up):

1. It points right to the heart of why grind is such a problematic feature in games. Since, in theory, the point of games is to have fun, sticking in a required unfun activity to access the good parts reduces the fun the game provides.

2. It applies to games other than MMOs. Think about, say, how civilization 4 has advanced start modes (since the early game can be somewhat boring), or the item issues in Team fortress 2.

3. It includes the idea that what is "fun" or "unfun" will change from player to player, and time to time. Something that feels grindy at one point might fell less so at a different time, and some players will prefer certain types of activities that bore other players.

Guild Wars 2: Ranger thoughts

2010-07-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Ranger in guild Wars 2 looks quite similar to the one in Guild wars 1 in terms of the types of skills it uses, with a few differences in mechanics due to the differences between games.

Weapons and Skills

I was one of many people expecting a ranger like class to be able to use guns, and am somewhat surprised at the amount of close in weapons a ranger can use, but will be interested to see further details of what these skills do.

The differences between the ranged weapons are described in terms of range and ability to move around, which gives a general idea of what the skills would do, but I also wonder about skills such as interrupts, cripples, and conditions, whether the ranger has these, and how they would depend on weapon choice.

For close combat weapons, rangers are said to have more movement oriented skills than warriors. My big concern here is that, with a lot of potential classes that would likely use close in weapons, what other sorts of variety will be in the game with close combat skills. Another movement related worry I have is whether bunny hopping type gameplay will become much more common. Games with lots of jumping and back and forth movement can be fun, but generally I prefer less of this.

For the torch: the "fire circle" skill is interesting, and does seem to give an idea what sorts of things a torch would do, and I wonder what other classes will do with this weapons.

The hunter's call video is probably the funniest skill video I've seen. :)

Other skills

One thing I look forward to for the guild wars 2 ranger over the guild Wars 1 version is that, depending on how the attribute system (or equivalent) works, it's possible that a ranger will be better able to mix up its different types of skills, making the class potentially more interesting to play.

The changes to traps and spirits, where the Ranger must be close by to keep them active, is a somewhat interesting one. I do wonder what the distance is, and how this might effect balance. apart from teleport trapping in fort Aspenwood, I don't remember any situations where someone would leave traps or spirits away from themselves, but this may simply be poor memory, and others may have had different gameplay experiences.

Pets

I really, really like the idea of separating pet skills onto a separate bar. As with traps and spirits, allowing the ranger to more effectively mix pet and other skills likely will make the game much more interesting. This is one of the elements of WoW I liked more than Guild wars, and it's nice to see it in a new game.

Charming sharks , or other types of aquatic creatures, sounds pretty cool. hopefully overall rangers will have a variety of pets to potentially tame.

The major issue I have with pets as described is the use of evolution levels. While it's nice that pets will statistically keep up with rangers in level (though as mentioned in other posts, I do not like leveling at all.), it is quite annoying that pet leveling has been introduced in another way. Pet leveling to me is quite annoying in that, unlike equipment or most skills, a player cannot immediately use it right away at its full power, and instead must spend some extra ti8me at reduced power to use the new addition effectively. Since pet skills are presumably an important part of what pets do, throwing in required leveling to access them is something I really do not like.

Alpha Centauri 2: faction customization

2010-07-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't really thought much more about how any alpha Centauri 2 ideas, so this is a post summing up customization options for factions on the game.

Social engineering Modifiers

These are the "industry, planet, economy,..." modifiers that could be adjusted in the original game.

Social system likes and dislikes

These would be expanded from the original game. Factions could have different levels of like and dislike for certain systems, as well as certain modifiers as well (industry, planet, etc. being liked or disliked). This is pretty much the system described in the posts about individual factions.

Social engineering system bonuses and penalties

These would be expanded from the "immunity/impunity..." options available in the original game. I can imagine social engineering properties bonuses and penalties given any multipliers, (so, say, one factions may get its industry bonuses doubled.), and can also imagine any factions getting any type of bonus from particular systems (So, for instance, a factions might get a happiness bonus from free market, in addition to its other effects.)

Special Properties

These would be difficult to handle within a text file or editor. I could definitely see a theoretical (if extremely unlikely) sequel opening up its code for modding, but special properties (like being aquatic, or techseatling) would otherwise have to be chosen more carefully for regular modding. (Of course, some of these could be turned into customization functions, such a bonuses ot attack and defense in the original games.)

New religion mod idea

2010-07-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

I've gotten more and more into the Fall from Heaven mod over the past few weeks. The mod has still remained generally interesting, though is reaching a point where I've figured out a lot of the features, and am noticing some flaws and repetition while playing it.

With the news that a stand alone game of this mod is coming out, and the possibility of the game being a moddable 4X type when it does come out, I've decided to resurrect some of the alinmnent, racen and magic ideas ideas found here and the religion ideas found here, and combine them to create a new mod. this could be both from a Fall from Heaven game (Assuming it has some improved combat features and such from Civ 4), or an Elemental game, assuming someone else finds a way to add alignment and religion to a mod.

The details are sketchy (since these are ideas for a mod of a game that may not be out, and will not be out for a long time if it does occur.), but I have some basics thought out for how this would be.

Religions

This is really the "driving force" for these ideas, in that my desire ot put the rest of this theoretical game together largely comes from wanting to use this religion system. Rather than creating individual religions as civilization 4 does, the system uses 5 more general religions.

These religions would than be further modified by some sort of alignment system, and/or another such system to create differences. These alignments will represent the different ways a particular power or view of the world can show itself, depending on the approach particular worshipers take to it. The only alignment I've currently thought of is good/evil, but I will create some other ones when/if a good base for these ideas is found. Examples of how "good" and "evil" can apply to particular religions are described with the religions themselves.

The religions are:

1. A "Natural world/Self reliance" religion:

Rather than relying on outside forces for power, this religion worships powers existing within the world, such as weather, animals and plants, people's own mental abilities and physical strength, and related ideas. Gameplay wise, I could imagine this faith improving a number of areas, from certain types of elemental or nature magic, or improving generic resource production, though the details obviously depend on the gameplay mechanics of whatever I end up modifying.

For alignments, the "good" version of this religion as leading to strong self improvement, and improved interactions with the surrounding world, so that farms are more productive, surrounding environments are healthier, weather ifs friendlier as well. An "Evil" version I imagine is much more predatory, with constant fighting, blighted landscapes, and constant storms, fires, and and other disasters or other such natural events.

2. A "Law and Order" religion.

This religion would have a strong preference for organization, strictness, exactness, and control. Gameplay wise, I'm not sure what the effects would be, but they would probably involve some form of increased productivity, reduced crime, or such.

For alignments, a "good" version of this religion would emphasize justice, honesty, hard work, and protection. An "evil" version would be oppressive and authoritarian.

3. A "Life and vitality" religion

It's a bit harder for me to think of a more solid description for this religion than the others, though I do have a good amount of ideas in my head for what this religion would be about. In general, it would emphasize things like empathy, health, strong bonds between people, and similar ideas. Gameplay wise, it would probably improve diplomacy, certain types of magic, or health and happiness (assuming these are in.)

Alignment wise, the "good" version pretty much fits the above descriptions, and would focus on improving the health and happiness whenever needed. the "evil" version would twist this, involving emotional and social manipulation, destructive politicking, idealism gone wrong, and other, similar effects. (As mentioned, this religion needs the most thinking through.)

4. A "Fun and cleverness" religion.

This religion would emphasize spontaneity, enjoyment, trickster types, and similar ideas. Gameplay wise, it might be represented by improved happiness, trade, random effects, and quick movement based combat abilities.

"good" versions would focus more on entertainment and artistic achievement. "Evil" versions would emphasize crime.

5. A "knowledge" religion

As the name says, this religion would emphasize knowledge. Gameplay wise, this would definitely improve any research in the game, though other abilities are up for grabs.

"Good" versions would spread knowledge around, using it to improve everyone's lives. "Evil" versions would involve secrecy, using knowledge to harm others, and "deals with the devil".

Guild Wars 2: Warrior, trait, and other thoughts

2010-06-16T20:52:00.001-07:00

These are some more opinions in the recent guild wars 2 updates.

Warrior

The videos are quite cool to watch. (Must...not...buy game merely for graphics....)

As usual, I'll be interested in seeing more detail of the actual skills, although I have the feeling (justified or not), that I can guess warrior abilities better from the weapon descriptions than from the elementalist attunement and weapon descriptions. If I get the game, I'll definitely be interested in trying out the warrior (Of course, like in all these games, I'll be interested in, and starting, a character of all classes.)

The warrior does seem like it will be more fun to play than I found it in guild wars 1, where building up adrenaline for skills often took awhile (or seemed to) compared to how quickly other classes could join the action.

Traits

These worry me somewhat, as the description seems like a perfect way to end up with more annoying grind, due to the way the quests are described as working. They do provide some extra differentiation between characters, but if made too powerful, seem like they could overspecialize a character. Further descriptions (Of traits switching weapons with warriors), reduce this concern somewhat, although the grind problem still seems a potential issue.

As with everything, I'll want to see the actual traits before having a more solid opinion.

Other

My previous, somewhat positive, opinion of weapon based skills have improved somewhat after playing team fortress 2. That game provides an appreciation of how a small number of well differentiated weapons, when movement and interesting terrain is included, can still produce a quite interesting game. Guild wars 2 seems to involve more movement and positioning effects than original guild wars, and combined with the variety of skills that will exist (much more than team fortress), will also hopefully produce an interesting game.

The elementalist has 20 possible sets of weapon skills, the warrior has 19, so that appears to be approximately the number of "first five" skill sets for the other classes.

On the forums I have read, at least, the best guesses for other classes seem to be something like:

Soldier: Warrior, Paladin type profession
Adventurer: Ranger type character, Assasin type character, Engineer type character
Scholar:Elementalist, Necromancer type character, Mesmer type character

These opinions come from concept art, professions shadows, colors in concept art, and other similar sources. In general, I agree with these guesses, except for the engineer one. It may be a type of engineer or gunpowder based class, but such a class seems somewhat out of place, and I have a feeling it will be something slightly different.

Overall, my opinion has stayed relatively similar over the past few weeks. Guild wars 2 looks quite interesting, but also looks like it may easily end up with a standard leveling and unlocking system that other MMO's have, and that I really, really, do not like.

Alpha Centauri 2: First combat post

2010-05-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

This part of the Alpha Centauri 2 game ideas is the toughest for me to nail down exactly. There are a lot of ideas I have for combat systems in civilization games, and combining them into one system is something I haven't fully thought out yet. this is the best idea I have at the moment.

Unit Stats

Attack/Defense: works as in the original alpha Centauri game and pre civ 4 games.

Hit points: Works as in original Civilization games and alpha Centauri.

Ranged Attack: Similar to the Call to Power series.

Psi attack/defense/ranged: Explained more fully below.

Training level: the same as "morale" in original Alpha Centauri.

Information attack/defense: Represents a unit's abilities in information warfare (explained below)

Stealth/Vision: Useful for ambush units/submarines and scouts.

Movement: Obviously effects how fast a unit moves over terrain, but also effects combat in some ways.

Support costs: Effects the amount of units that can be stacked together.

Unit Organization

These mechanics are a combination of Call to Power mechanics, and some ideas I've thought up last year on this blog.

Rather than traveling individually, units would travel in stacks. These stacks would be limited in size to a certain total support cost, limited most likely by technology, possibly by some social engineering numbers as well. These support costs would respond to the "support" social engineering property, allowing factions with a higher support rating to build larger armies.

Non-Ranged, 1-move unit Combat, open terrain

Combat involving non ranged units with just one movement point would occur as follows:

Units in a stack would be matched up, approximately with stronger units facing stronger ones, weaker units facing weaker ones. Each of these units would than fight a series of (Attacker hp*defender hp/10) rounds of combat. The first round would pit the unit from the attacking stack's attack value against the defense value of the defending stack unit. As with other civilization games, the chance for a unit to win would be (unit's stat/(attack stat +defense stat)). In following rounds, units would alternate in roles of "attacker" and "defender".

After this first set of unit battles, units would rearrange themselves for the next battle. Fresh units from a larger stack would be placed in combat, and another set of battles would occur between the units involved. Fighting would continue in this way until one stack was eliminated, or one side chose to retreat. If a retreat occurred, the non-retreating side's units involved in combat would get (defender hit points/10) free attacks, where their attack strength would be tested against the retreating unit's defensive strength. "Free attacks" in this case, mean that if the attacking unit lost a combat round, they would not take any damage.

More than one movement point, fortifications, rough terrain

Units with more than one movement point would have two effects in combat. When alternating rounds between one unit as "attacker" and one as "defender", units with more than one movement point would get that number of movement points as combat rounds as an attacker.

(for example, if a speeder unit with 2 movement points attacked an infantry unit with 1 movement point, the rounds as attacker would go as follows:

speeder, speeder, inf, speed, speed, inf., speed, etc.)

Units with several movement points would also be able to "flank" enemy units. For people who have not played Call to Power 2, "flanking" units could attack attack enemy units at the same time that other units were also fighting, which in game appeared to involve the flanked unit fighting alternating combat rounds against all attacking units.

As I imagine it, in Alpha Centauri 2, the number of possible flanking attacks would depend on the movement points involved as follows:

A 1 move unit would not be able to flank at all.
A 2 move unit could flank a unit that was only under attack by 1 other unit.
A 3-move unit could only attack units under attack by 2 other units.
etc.

I'd expect, in stack combat, that faster moving units would fight each other first, than move to attack units moving more slowly than themselves after other fast units were killed, but am not entirely sure in practice how this would work.

When in rough terrain, unit movement points for above purposes would be divided by the movement cost of the terrain, than the numbers rounded up. (So, for example, in movement 2 terrain, move 1 and 2 units would be treated as if they had 1 movement point, move 3 and 4 units as if they had 2 movement, etc.)

When fighting in bunkers, cities with perimeter defenses, or other defensive structures, units inside would get extra rounds on defense.

(For example, a speeder attacking an infantry in a bunker might alternate combat rounds like this: speeder, speeder, speeder, inf., speed, speed, speed, inf., etc. This example does assume that the bunker gives just 1 extra defensive round, which would be something to balance.)

Ranged Units

Ranged units would most likely work as they do in Call to Power. In that game, ranged in a stack get several free attacks against front line units in the enemy stacks, before the front line units fight. I imagine ranged units working mostly the same way in this system.

In addition, I imagine some ranged units getting a "counterbattery" type special ability, or simply as a unit type. These units would first attack enemy ranged units during their turns of combat, only attacking front line units when no ranged units were left. Most likely, these units would attack before regular ranged units.

Information Warfare

Information warfare would take place before regular combat. In information warfare, a stack's total information strength would be added up, and would "battle" against an enemy stack's information strength for 10 rounds. If one side won more rounds than another, that side's units would get a number of attacks equal to either it's information victories minus defeats, or half the victories minus defeats.

I'm not sure in this system whether information warfare would take place all the time, or only in battles where at least one specialized information unit was present.

More Fall from Heaven opinions

2010-05-14T18:50:00.000-07:00

(For anyone who does not know, Fall from Heaven is a fantasy Civilization 4 mod. I've done some writing in previous posts, but this one goes into greater detail.)

I've been having a lot more fun with this mod after switching from normal speed to quick, the increased game speed in real time terms is quite a lot more fun.At the moment I'm in the process of playing through the factions, as well as trying out some different religions to see how they work. Mostly I've been playing the "conventional" strategies, and am focused somewhat more on the civilizations with more unusual mechanics (As opposed to civilizations like Hippus or Grigori that have a couple changes from a theoretical "standard" civilization.) Some thoughts at the moment:

Sheaim: Armageddon was interesting, though less extreme than I expected. This was the first game where I reached some of the "4 limit" units like Eidolons and Archmages. Worldbreak was a bit of a letdown, but overall I enjoyed conquering the world while setting off armageddon. The Ashen Veil coundtrack music is quite nice as well.

Amurites: Amurites were a bit of a letdown in a game I played, though I'll want to play through them again with a better understanding of the spell system. The biggest annoyance is the limitations to moving units around, which limits Govannon's teaching ability. When I play this civilization again, with a better knowledge of spells as well as of the game in general, I'll definitely play a bit differently in terms of mana use, great people, and such.

There is also a further mod based on Fall From Heaven that seems to make some useful changes to the Amurites, that I am highly likely to try in the future.

I also played using the Empyrean religion in this particular game, what I saw seemed somewhat fun, and I will want to try out this religion when suitable some time in the future.

Svartalfar/Ljosalfar: The Elves in general I think are going to be my favorite civilizations in this mod. The forest/cottage economy is relatively simple to set up, but still has quite cool effects. I have played somewhat with both Elven civilizations in normal speed games, and they were pretty enjoyable there as well, so quick speed should be even more fun. In addition, since I have now figured out fireballs, and magic in general somewhat, in previous games, I should have an easier time handling the elf siege weaknesses.

Currently I am playing a game with the Svartalfar, and will likely play one as the Ljosalfar sometime soon after finishing (Though I will want to experiment with some other civilizations in between.)

Khazad: I have a game started as Khazad at the moment, but have not yet seen the full effects of full vaults, trebuchets, etc., and the game hasn't been too interesting yet. I'll probably pick this up at some point, but have other civilizations I'll want to try.

Future civilizations:

Luichirp: Another civilization I've tried before, but will want to try again. I got bored in the previous game due to the slowness of the game and the lack of knowledge of magic, problems which should be fixed in the future. (This will probably be my next game)

Mercurians/Infernals: I have spawned the Infernals a couple of times, but did not set them up as well as I should have. A better knowledge of the game should help here, as with the Mercurians.

Lanun: another civilization I tried for a short time. As Hannah it wasn't as much fun as I would have expected, but a change to the other leader (for the expansionist property), plus a faster game, should take care of these.

Kuriotates: This is the only civilization I've actually completed a game with, but is one I'll want to try again at some point, using some more strategies I've read, as well as increased game knowledge.

Sidar: Sidar seem like a civilization that are flexible enough to handle empyrean or Esus, although otherwise the seem like a more generic civilization. Still one I'll want ot try out at some point.

Illians: A lot of potentially interesting mechanics here that I will want to try, but the lack of religions removes one of the more enjoyable parts of the game to me.

Grigori: See above on religions, though I will be interesting in trying the adventurer hero promotions.

Alpha Centauri 2: Victories

2010-05-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

These are some thoughts on victory conditions for a theoretical Alpha Centauri sequel.

Conquest

I imagine this as pretty similar to how conquest victories work in other civilization games. I could definitely see some sort of "domination" type victory added as well, as in Civ 4, to avoid the end game boredom of having won the game but having to mop up enemy factions.

Diplomatic

A diplomatic victory is a nice idea in theory, and seems to work o.k. in both civilization 4 and alpha Centauri with computer opponents, but does seem off in a gameplay (or multiplayer) sense, as it effectively asks for factions to vote themselves out of winning the game. In addition, it often ends up as a heavily expansion oriented victory, in order for players to rack up the votes needed to actually win using this method.

Despite this issues, diplomacy as in the game already works o.k. as a victory condition, and with an AI could certainly be designed to work well. Alternatively, something like the galactic civilization diplomatic victory might work, where several factions could "win" by forming a large alliance, and either convincing everyone to join or eliminating them. due to the way I imagine diplomacy working in general, such a victory would rely on diplomacy skills, plus possibly influence.

Economic

I haven't actually ever achieved an economic victory in the game yet, so it's hard to have any strong opinions about such a victory condition. In theory it seems a good one to include, but beyond this it's hard to say.

Transcendence

The Planetfall mod currently has what appears to be an interesting take on a transcendence victory, what seems to make it more a question of planet attitude and other planetary influences than raw industry and technology. I don't know yet how the victory will work in the Planetfall mod (One of the condition hasn't been fully implemented yet, and some bugs are being worked out as of this post.), but the overall idea is interesting, and is the type of victory I'd consider for a theoretical sequel.

The actual details of a transcendence victory, aside from having a good relationship with planet, and being a late game effect, are up for grabs in this set of ideas, thanks to the lack of details in the theoretical game I've been putting together.

Interstellar Journey

This victory condition would be a "raw science/production" one similar to the spaceship victories in regular civilization games. In backstory terms, I imagine this victory as a faction launching a mission to earth to attempt to resettle it. due to the improved technology in the Alpha Centauri universe (compared to regular civilization), the backstory of such a journey would likely involve some sort of wormholes, antimatter or singularity power, some other faster than light travel, and/or other advancements along those lines. It would represent the factions on Alpha Centauri rebuilding their civilization to the point that they could colonize solar systems throughout the galaxy, but more hopefully with more success, due to the greater technology.

Terraforming

This victory condition would represent a faction changing Chiron to be a more earthlike world, with an earthlike atmosphere, similar types of life forms, and other such changes. It would likely be accomplished by building certain types of terrain improvements, whose effects would stack up over time until the victory was reached.

To prevent a "build improvements, sit back and turtle" type of game, several methods might be used. A terraforming faction attracting huge numbers of mind worms makes sense as a limiter, although this might make military power too much a focus for this victory. Alternatively, the faction might need to actively use formers to achieve terraforming, requiring strong industry and support to build and maintain enough terraformers, plus administration so that the formers could work faster. some other methods are possible as well, although I cannot think of any directly at the moment.

This victory condition to me is more iffy than the others, in a backstory sense it goes against the "unification" idea that the other conditions apart from spreading have, but still might add variety to this sort of game.

Alpha Centauri 2: "Expansion" Factions

2010-05-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

These include both the alien crossfire and some new factions I've thought of (originally just as extra alpha Centauri factions, but they do fill in some holes in this new game)

I am not sure whether these factions should be introduced at the beginning (As happens in the alpha Centauri game), or introduced some time into the game, with several extra starting technologies, colony pods, or other bonuses. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Data Angels

+2 espionage (skilled hackers )
+1 influence (hackers effective at spreading information)
-1 police (hacker culture difficult to control)

Loves Democracy
Dislikes Police rating, support rating

Possibly has a "learns any technology known to X number of factions" type ability, free infiltration, or some other espionage related special ability.

Cult of Planet

+2 planet (planet worship leads to better pollution record)
+1 police (cult strongly enforces its rules)
+1 support (fanatical)
-1 industry (does not wish to exploit planet)
-2 econ. (wealth not considered important)

Loves planet social engineering rating
Loves Pro-planet
Likes empath, fundamentalist
Dislikes industry, economy
Strongly dislikes Terraforming civic

Possibly has a psi combat bonus, ability to capture worms, or some other worm related special ability

Marketeers

This is one of my made up factions (see here)

+2 econ (market oriented faction very good at producing wealth)
+1 research (faction emphasizes education and productivity)
+1 diplomacy (strongly supports trade networks)
-1 planet (less regulation reduces pollution control)
-1 espionage (open faction easier to infiltrate)

Loves free market
Loves econ
Likes democratic
Dislikes planned, police
Dislikes espionage

Possibly has increased benefits/decreased costs to free market

Cybernetic Consciousness

+2 administration (logical, organized cybernetic personality increases administrative efficiency)
+2 automation (experience with cybernetic implants and robotics)
+2 research? (logical cybernetic minds make effective researchers)
-2 growth (less emotion leads to less interest in family, sex.)
-1 influence (cybernetic personalities have a difficult time understanding other's motivations)

Likes technocratic, high tech
Likes Automation
Dislikes Empath, fundamentalist

Techsteal from captured cities
Improved specialist effects? (Based on planetfall)

Tremblers
Another faction that I came up with

+2 influence (faction effective at getting converts)
+2 espionage (faction emphasizes subversion to achieve its goals)
+2 happy (faction community oriented, looks after its own members)
-2 training (pacifist)
-3 support (pacifist)

Likes happy, health
Likes Empath, Fundamentalist
Dislikes support, morale, police

Cannot start wars?
Can convert units to gain population, with the chance based on total influence (not the social engineering kind)?

Drones

+2 industry (industrial workers work very productively)
+2 happy (drone policy watches out for most members of society)
-2 research (drones come from lower levels of society, few scientists)

Likes Happy, Health
Likes Planned
Dislikes overall unhappiness in cities
Dislikes Free Market, High Tech

Rebellious cities have a chance to join?

Arcology Movement
Another made up faction

+2 happiness (population adapted for calmness, lack of aggression to live in larger cities)
+2 health (cities designed for higher populations)
+2 efficiency (cities planned to minimize resource use)
-3 training (population not trained for aggression)

Likes happy, Health
Loves Efficiency
Dislikes Rapid Development

More expensive colony pods, but pods found cities with higher populations and extra buildings

Empire
The final made up faction

+3 police (military strongly controls society)
+2 support (military controls society, gets first access to resources)
+1 espionage (strong control makes spying more difficult)
-1 economy (military focus eats up resources from civilian concerns)
-2 administration (the military does not handle civilian administration well)

Likes training, Police, Support
Hates Democracy, empath

Free/improved military buildings?
Sacrifice, or otherwise enslave population for faster construction?

Pirates

-1 growth (seafaring life leaves less time for family)
-1 administration (dispersed sea society difficult to control)

Likes support

Starts in the ocean, with oceanic technologies

Guild wars 2 new information thoughts

2010-05-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

This new information has come out a week before this blog post. Here's a summation of my opinions so far:

Overall

I was unenthusiastic about what I'd heard for awhile, but actually hearing some information has improved my opinion a lot. I am quite excited to hear more details, although the more logical part of my mind is still waiting for more information on leveling systems, and some ideas/features of the game do seem like they could be done poorly, and I'd need to see them in action.

Current 10 skill bar system

Overall, it sounds like an interesting way to organize skills. A lot will of course depend on the actual skills, but overall it seems like an interesting way to organize skills.

To a lot of people, the requirements for the different parts of the bar put a lot of limits on the freedom of skill bars, with only 3 skills being freely choosable (for anyone who doesn't know and happens to read this, 5 skills are based on weapon, 1 is a choosable elite, 1 is a choosable self heal, and 3 are open.). I can see where this comes from, but more likely expect the weapon skills to be a big source of options when creating a skill build. This also depends on how many elite and self heal skills are in the game.

I do like the idea of having less skills in the game, since guild wars did seem to have too many over time, with a lot of "permutation" skills or really specialized, not as useful ones.

The environmental/directional effects method of building skills seems like an idea that could be quite cool, but also that will not live up to its potential. There are a lot of things in Guild Wars that don't quite seem to live up to their potential, so this is a concern of mine. It does seem something between diablo 2 and more regular RPG's, so does seem to some extent to be a fun way to play.

I'm also curious how attributes and such will work.

Elementalist

Seems pretty similar in general terms to the original elementalist. It certainly looks neat, though I'll have to see more details of how it plays to have a stronger opinion.

I am interested in seeing of elementalists get some diversified gameplay over what original guild wars has. Water attunement causing healing suggests a few more roles for elementalists, although I'll have to see how it pans out.

Other Classes

Three "scholars (Light armor), three "adventurers" (medium armor), two "soldiers" (heavy armor). Warrior is one of the soldiers.

I am of course curious what the other classes are. I am most interested at the moment in knowing what the other soldier class is, although I suspect that gameplay wise I'll be more interested in the adventurers and scholars. I strongly suspect that some sort of bowman/ranger is one of the adventurers, but have no solid guesses on anything else, or what sort of other classes will be in the game.

Event System

This is yet another idea that seems like it could be really cool, but that also could fail to live up to its potential. I'll have to see some more examples, or try it out, to have a stronger opinion.

Graphics

The game definitely looks great. (Hopefully it will work on my computer, although I may very well be getting a new one at some point soon.)

Storyline stuff (player biographies, quests effecting character stories, origin effects)

Once again, something that sounds like it could be really cool, but also fail ot live up to potential. Character biographies also seem something that would produce a lot of really cliched/bad ones, thanks to how a lot of computer game players tend to act. these story changes could also create lots of issues for people who like to explore the game, as they could end up missing a lot of content. Still, seems like a potential way to spice up the game.

Hopes/Worries

The biggest concern of mine, is leveling times (this will be true of any RPG type game I play.) This is the biggest advantage of Guil Wars for me, and is the main thing I hope for in guild Wars 2. While I might consider playing anyway if other features are good, if level differences are too great in terms of effects (and the sidekick system mentioned several years ago suggests this), it would have to take some very good other elements.

I am mostly curious at this point about the other classes and skills, though any sort of non-backstory information should be interesting.

Alpha Centauri 2 ideas: Espionage

2010-05-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

Basics

I imagine the espionage system in this game working similarly to the civ 4 espionage system, where a certain percentage of income is put towards espionage, and can be spent on espionage missions, or has passive benefits such as giving a view of cities, revealing research, etc.

Similar to the original alpha Centauri, probe team modules would be a module that could be added to different types of base units. Probe teams would also get a number of special enhancements, as described elsewhere in the post.

The espionage social engineering modifier would most likely increase the amount of espionage points generated. In addition to any other, mission specific events, the happiness of target cities would also effect the chance of mission success, with higher happiness leading to a lower chance of success for enemy probes.

Types of Missions

Probe teams would probably have several sets of missions, based on special abilities added in a design workshop.

Standard: Investigate cities, counterespionage, steal money. Probes might also be given some military functions, with missions that reduce the combat effectiveness of certain units, improve the probe user's faction's combat strength vs. enemies, or otherwise interfere in the military of a target faction.

Biological: Plagues/diseases (of varying degrees of severity, going from adding some unhealthiness to reducing population), interference in food production (either by destroying farms, reducing farm productivity, or some other, similar measure.), adding extra pollution or otherwise changing the planet rating. The success and failure chances, depending on the mission, might be based on the planet ratings, administration ratings, or health ratings of the involved factions.

Influence/happiness (Would probably use empath/psi related technologies): Reduce happiness, cause riots, incite revolt. Success of these types of missions would likely be based on the influence ratings and/or happiness ratings (depending on mission), of the two factions.

Industrial: Stall Production, reduce material generation, destroy some terrain improvements, Sabotage improvements. The industry social engineering rating might effect all this, but most likely would not.

Technology: Sabotage research, steal technologies, siphon research (Which would give the spying faction research equivalent to some percentage of the target faction's research, though not reducing it directly). Similar to the industry examples above, the research rating of the involved factions might effect success rates, but most likely would not.

Other effects: Special modules might be added to probes that would improve their chances of success without any extra missions, reduce the cost of missions, reduce the chance of spy detection, or have other similar effects. With just one such module, the probe teams would only be able to do basic missions, although depending on the exact details of the design workshop in this theoretical game, different modules could be combined to provide both extra missions and other effects.

Alpha Centauri 2: diplomacy

2010-04-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

Some ideas for diplomacy for a theoretical Alpha Centauri 2 game:

Planetary Council Options

In a sequel, I would certainly have a vague hope for more planetary council options, though I am not sure what these would be exactly. These options would hopefully be on par in power with the global trade treaty. Some possibilities to add:

-Stop war involving (faction): this option is in civilization 4, and would be a powerful ability to have for diplomatically skilled factions.
-Start war against (faction): Same idea as above. This should require more votes, however.
-Unity core equivalents: these might be things like "Provide all cities with # production", or "Improve all faction's planetary relationship by X". One time bonues to everyone, that might get used more effectively by some factions than others.
-Planetary projects: These would be projects that would require some sacrifice from all factions, but also provide some benefit. These would represent projects too big for a single faction. (for example, "planetary empathy center" might cost production from all factions for some time, but provide a planet relations bonus.)
-Force social engineering: this is another civ 4 idea, where the planetary council could force all factions to have a particular social engineering choice, if possible. This one I see as more iffy than others, but it is a possibility

Planetary Council Number of Votes Mechanics

I could see several options for this. Votes would likely be based on influence, population, or a combination of the two. In addition, factions might get a fixed bonus, or a minimum amount of votes, to prevent smaller factions being overwhelmed. All of these effects, though, would be adjusted by the "diplomacy" social engineering attribute.

Planetary Council Vote Process

Rather than a simple up or down process, where a motion is put up for a vote and instantly gets voted on, I could see all factions getting a negoaiating period to wheel and deal before the final votes were in. During this time, factions could agree to trade, threaten, beg, etc for votes. Factions would get as many meeting opportunities as desired, and the vote would be only be revealed once each faction had finalized its decision. (for human players, this would be done with a "finalize" button, for whatever the response was, for computer players, it would be part of an AI routine.)

When negotiating for votes, the agreements would be done in an "If vote, than everything else" faction, to allow different factions to potentially receive offers ot vote differently. The actual resource exchange would than occur only if the faction in question voted as agreed. (for example, if a faction agreed to pay another faction some money to vote "yes" to something, the money would only change hands if the receiving faction actually voted yes. Agreements for both factions to vote a certain way would likely need to be done without any other resources, or as two separate agreements for votes, to prevent one factions from avoding having ot pay something by voting the opposite of what they agreed.)

The biggest difficulty I can see with this system is designing a way for the AI to handle it, I could easily imagine a number of ways for this to go wrong with an AI.

Multiparty Treaties

In addition to two party exchanges already in the game, I factions would be able to negotiate 3, 4, etc. party exchanges and treaties. To do this, I'd imagine a "diplomacy invite screen", where human players would choose to invite a number of opponents, who would all negotiate together, rather than simply clicking on a faction and negotiating singly.

Multiparty exchanges might include circular exchanges (where faction A gives something to faction B, faction B gives to faction C, and C gives to A, expanded as necessary), agreements to all go to war together, planetary council votes, etc.

Secret and Open Agreements

In this idea, "open" agreements are the common type in civilization games, where all other factions know who has made peace treaties, trade agreements, etc. "Secret" agreements would be agreements that were kept hidden from all other factions, except those able to discover agreements through espionage. These would more resemble when some factions pay others to go to war, where the paying party will not be known to outside factions. In the game I'm imagining in these posts, secret treaties would not provide diplomatic happiness bonuses, and likely would provide a lessened trade effectiveness.

To really make secret agreements worthwhile, extra types of agreements might need ot be added, such as the ability to go to war in a certain amount of turns.

The biggest disadvantage of such a system would be creating an AI that could take advantage of such a system, or make it worthwhile.

Elemental : War of Magic space colonization mod idea

2010-04-10T19:54:00.000-07:00

When elemental gets multiple maps capabilities, use the multiple maps to act as solar system and planetary levels. In this system, the main map would show interstellar space, with the different star systems at particular points. Those systems would work as "portals" to other maps, which would show the full solar system in greater detail. In these maps, the individual planets (and possible moons) would, in a similar matter, be placed at particular points on the map. These planets would lead to further maps showing the planetary surface itself. The process would be roughly similar to a theoretical dungeon network, but with solar systems ad planets as the sections of the dungeon.

Resource wise, this system would allow planets to have a mix of terrain that effects productivity. In transportation terms, it would allow modeling of trade within systems vs. between them, as well as colonization by different civilizations on different levels. Similarly, this system would allow modeling of different sorts of military conflicts at all levels, allowing specially designed system only ships, orbital ships, and planetary defenses used to fight against interstellar ships.

Alpha Centauri 2: Miscelaneous mechanics

2010-04-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

Influence: This would be a rough analog of culture/influence in games such as galactic civilizations and civilization 4, in that it would determine a civilization's territorial control. Like galactic civilizations 2, I could also see it having planetary council benefits, with more influence resulting in more votes on some issues. Another possibility is that influence would effect the income from foreign trade routes, although with both these bonuses, it might overlap too much with diplomacy.

Unlike civilization 4 culture, cities would not have to expand their own borders. Instead, the distance of faction borders from a city would be based to some extent on an overall faction influence number. (Other total influence, a per capita number, or some combination.) The resulting borders might depend on a mixture of city effects and faction wide influence, although I would not want the system getting too complex. Cities would, in this theoretical game, start immediately being able to work all terrain in their big fat crosses, and would not have to expand borders to work everything.

Later game city founding: As this theoretical game went on, colony pods would gain special abilities allowing them to found cities with more population. These special abilities would allw newly founded cities in later parts of the game to get going faster without needing lots of rush buying.

These updated colony pods might also provide free improvements on the founding of the city, with the exact improvements chosen by the faction's social engineering, or just pre-determined for all factions. Alternatively, a planetfall style system, where all cities are given basic improvements for free with certain advances, could be used.

Sea Travel: Out of two methods I have seen before for handling sea travel of land units (underwatwer tunnels and allowing land units to travel only within national borders) I slightly prefer the national borders system, so this is the system I'd best imagine for this theoretical game.

Special Events: Unusual events (energy surge, Prometheus virus, etc.) might still be included. In this version, though, their severity and chance of happening would most likely be adjusted based on health, happiness, or other sorts of statistics, rather than simply whether a city or faction has particular structures.

Alpha Centauri 2: Original Factions

2010-03-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

These are ideas for the original 7 factions, plus an eighth one to fill out some social engineering. without actual improvements or advances fleshed out, some information will be missing from how an actual game would go.

Gaians

+1 (or +2) efficiency (skilled recyclers)
+1 planet (environmentally conscious)
-1 growth (does not wish to expand and disrupt planetary ecology too much)
-1 training (pacifist)

Likes increased planet social engineering ratings
Likes preserves, democratic, pro-planet social engineering choices
Dislikes factions that produce lots of pollution
Cannot use, and hates, rapid development

Possibly gains a free planet improving building, or recycling building.

Morganites

+2 economy (skilled businessmen)
+1 influence (extensive advertising and media production)
-1 support (Morganites love luxury)
-1 efficiency (Followers consume large amounts)

Likes improved economy ratings
Favors free market
Dislikes/cannot use planned

Peacekeepers

+2 diplomacy (skilled negotiator)
+2 happy (Attracts intellectuals, good human rights record)
+1 health (good health services)
-1 administration (bureaucracy)
-2 police (little tolerance for oppression)

Likes happiness, diplomacy
Likes empath
Strongly likes democratic
dislikes police social engineering, fundamentalist government
dislikes large militaries
Cannot use police state

University

+2 research (strong focus on science and technology)
-2 espionage (open academic networks easy to hack)
-1 happy (ignores less intelligent)

likes +research
likes technocrat
likes high tech
dislikes empath
dislikes/cannot use fundamentalist

Gains a free research building, and/or some free research related ability

Believers

+2 support (Religious population supports holy wars)
+1 espionage (believers hard to infiltrate, produce well motivated spies)
+1 influence (strongly evangelizing faction)
-1 diplomacy (strong religious focus scares off other factions)
-2 research (religious followers suspicious of science or change)

strongly likes fundamentalist
likes support
dislikes research
cannot use high Tech, technocrat

Hive

+1 industry (enslaved population can be focused for projects)
+1 growth (government encourages growth)
+1 efficiency (population taught asceticism, little consumption)
-1 economy (controlled economy grows slowly)
-2 influence (other factions highly suspicious of lifestyle)

likes police
likes industry
likes police state
likes planned
dislikes influence
dislikes/cannot use free market
dislikes/cannot use democratic

Spartans

+2 training (militaristic faction)
+1 police (strong discipline)
-1 industry (resources funneled to military projects from others)
-2 diplomacy (survavilist faction draws suspicion from other factions)

likes training
likes powerful armies
dislikes economy
dislikes diplomacy
dislikes treaties amongst other factions

The spartans would also get some other military bonus, whether a free building, some prototype ish ability, or another bonus

Chiron colonists

+2 growth (faction wishes to quickly settle Chiron)
+2 administration (faction good at organizing development projects)
-1 police (faction citizens do not like to be controlled)
-2 planet (faction ignores ecological issues)

likes growth
likes administration
strongly likes terraforming
likes rapid development
dislikes planet rating
dislikes police rating
cannot use pro-planet

This faction is an additional faction I made up. It fills in the social engineering choices nicely, so I'm including it i this collection of ideas.

Starcraft 2 expansion unit/spell "ideas"

2010-03-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

Cryogenic Strikes

Mothership spell
costs 150 energy
Deals 300 damage over 8 seconds over a wide area

Protoss motherships can significantly lower the temperature of an area of space to nearly absolute zero. This temperature drop cuases any matter in the area to freeze out into solid crystals, and in atmospheres, often creates strong winds as well. These effects resemble the snowstorms that occasionally occur on temeperate or icy worlds, and terran soldiers nickname these attacks "blizzards".

Spartans

100 minerals, 0 gas
50 hit points
10 damage, medium speed, +30 damage to immortals, ground attack, melee
0 armor
"Phalanx Strength" Gain +1 armor per nearby allied spartans
"No Retreat!" Cannot be given move orders while in combat

The very hardest, most dangerous criminals, too extreme even for reaper training, become spartans. They are subjected to a highly secretive training regimen, in which only around 1/10 of entrants survive, designed to indoctrinate and train them to be extremely tough soldiers. Once training is completed, spartans are collected into group of 300 soldiers, though these groups are often split to deal with other threats.

These soldiers do not use guns or grenades like other soldiers, instead, they are equipped with neosteel spears, neosteel defensive shields, and no other protection, or clothing of any kind. Neural implants, rather than controlling aggression, are used to enhance it and channel it towards the ends that the terran commanders choose. Despite the lack of protection, the spartan soldiers are notoriously difficult to kill, having reaction times and pain tolerances far outside of normal, and being able to survive attacks that would annihilate any one else. Many assume that the spartans are grafted with zerg or protoss genetics or technology, but on one will say for sure.

The most famous spartan action is the defense of a facility on Char. In the so called "Hot gates" action, a 300 strong unit dominion spartans defended the entrance to a lava studying facility against waves of zerg attackers, including several Ultralisks. At least, that is the official confederate story, though some people suggest it was merely a defense against a rebel terrain group, and the spartans were supported by regular marines and firebats. None of the spartans themselves can say, as they died in the action, either due to an infested human tipping off the zerg, or just a disgruntled facility worker, who led some enemy through a second entrance to kill the defending spartans.

Kudzu

Overseer spell: Costs 100 energy

Covers the ground with Kudzu. Each speace of kudzu has 50 hit points, regenerates 15 hit points per second, and spawns another kudzu in all neighboring areas every 3 seconds. Kudzu slows all enemy units and deals 5 damage per second to enemies on top of it, and dealing 30 damage per second to buildings.

Little changed from its original form, Kudzu was an earth plant discovered in the remains of a UED ship by zerg attackers. At Kerrigan's orders, this fast growing plant was subjected to a few genetic changes, and after several years was used in combat.

Once an overseer drops a small amount of Kudzu on the ground, the fast growing plant rapidly extends over all surfaces, smothering anything in its path, slowing enemies who try to travel through the vines, and digging into structures. The zerg have changed Kudzu to release corrosive chemicals, further damaging anything that attempts to cross it.

Protoss and terrans have used a few methods to fight against kudzu, using area attacks, and destroying the kudzu before it can get well established. However, the main weapons against this frightening plant is the fact that it damages its users as much as the user's enemies, and can render any piece of terrain almost useless, thus, the zerg do not unleash it except under very desperate circumstances, or in situations where the zerg wish to destroy rather than conquer.

Alpha Centauri 2: Faction properties (Not actual faction ideas)

2010-03-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

The actual faction ideas will come when I think up more game mechanics for this theoretical game.

Social engineering bonuses/penalties

These would work similarly to original Alpha Centauri, with the regular social engineering modifiers (Planet, industry, etc.), plus rush buy cost changes, research cost changes, immunity to negatives, etc. These options might be expanded to include other possibilities, such as doubled social engineering bonuses, reduced positive modifiers, improvements ot regular combat as opposed to psi, etc.

Diplomacy bonuses/penalties for attributes

With this idea, having certain social engineering attributes would also effect the diplomatic relations with a particular faction. (So, for example, apositive "planet" modifier might provide a diplomatic bonus to Dierdre, while a negative modifier would cause a penalty)

Diplomacy Bonuses/penalties for gameplay changes

An example of what I am thinking of (Since it's hard to describe using words) would be to have Dierdre gain a diplomatic bonus towards someone if their planet attitude (the sum of pollution, greenhouses, etc. mentioned in an earlier post), were positive, while having a penalty if negative. The planetfall mod has some of these effects.

More adjustable social system preferences/dislikes

This would be an expansion of the original alpha Centaur system where, for example, Lal liked democratic factions while hated police state. In a sequel, I could imagine having different degrees of likes and disliked (so, for example, Lal might like democratic a lot, empath somewhat, and dislike police state a lot while disliking fundamentalist less severely.) Multiple likes and dislikes could be added ot a faction.

For this system, there would obviously be balance considerations, and stacking of social engineering system (democratic) likes and dislikes, plus single property (growth) likes and dislikes.

More elemental: War of Magic mod ideas

2010-03-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, I still have not been able to actually play the elemental Beta, due to some issues with the game not installing certain files, so still do not have enough of a sense of the mechanics to go into detail with these mod ideas, so these are still pretty general

Naga

These would resemble the large water dwelling snakes found in Guild Wars, Wow, and probably a bunch of other games. I imagine lots of summons of sea creatures, plus water magic, and possibly weather magic.

I'm not sure if the Naga would have any special mechanics, apart from swimming if possible. I see their units as being more powerful than usual, and somewhat melee focused, with some assistance from specially bred sea creatures and no cavalry.

Dune Wars

This mod might be a variation on the Dune War civilization 4 mod. Armies would have a collection of scorpions, bladesmen with shielding, etc. Spice could be represented by various resources around the map.

Other mechanics are a bit iffier, I could seee intermarriage between the various houses represented in the family tree system, and cities could represent spice camps. Other mechanics in this idea are still quite iffy.

Fall From Heaven

Fall from heaven is linked in several elements threads, and both the mod and the game share a lot of similar mechanics (Mana, custom tech trees and buildings, custom spells, etc.)

The biggest improvement I could see in an elemental FfH mod is in the combat system, being able ot build armies rather than relying in civilization mechanics could open up the game a lot.

On the flip side, mechanics like religions and civics that are an important part of Fall from Heaven could be difficult to include in an elemental game.

Starcraft

The custom tech trees and custom unit designs provide a lot of possibilities for a starcraft type mod. Zerg I imagine as "evolving" rather than researching advances, and using spines, claws, thick skin, etc. in unit design rather than artificial weapons and armor. The mechanics of terrain being improved also fits with creep. Terrans and protoss I imagine as being more conventional.

Alpha Centauri 2 ideas: Cities

2010-02-25T15:25:00.000-08:00

Mostly, I imagine cities working similarly to how they work in other civilization games. Each city has a certain amount of population, supported by food, that can either work terrain tiles or work as specialists. I do imagine some slight differences, though.

Health

Overall, I imagine a health system, mostly resembling that of civilization 4, to be used in the game. However, there would be a couple of differences, and a new effect:

1. Instead of consuming 1 extra food per point of overall unhealthiness, the food consumed might go up much faster, such as by triangular number (1 unhealth =1 food, 2 unhealth =3 food, etc.).

2. Overall healthiness (when the "health" number is greater than the "unhealth" number)would improve productivity. I imagine something along the lines of each point of overall healthiness would increase production of all resources by something like 1-3%. This would give an incentive ot improve health, even if happiness already limited the population at a much lower number. the productivity change might also be a penalty for unhealthiness as well.

3. The "Health" social engineering rating would either effect sources of unhealthiness or healthiness, multiplying them by some number. (For example, +1 health might reduce all unhealthiness sources by 10%)

Happiness

As with Health, happiness would mostly follow a civilization 4 like system, though with a few changes.

1. Net happiness. (When the "happiness" number is higher than the "unhappiness" number) would produce extra influence for the city. It might also improve diplomatic relations with other empires, though as the social engineering "diplomacy" stat in this set of ideas effects happiness, I'm not sure if this would create some circular reinforcement. This change would be included to encourage lots of happiness, so that if health limits a population far below happiness, happiness still has a role.

2. Money could be used to improve happiness. This system would work similarly to the "luxuries" civilization 2 system, and "psych" Alpha Centauri system. In this version, though, buildings that improve money production would also improve psych production, either by having psych be a separate payment from the treasury, or by simply having buildings multiply psych by the same amount.

I also imagine that psych might improve happiness the same for each base in a faction, rather than being based in each faction's individual energy production. For example, the psych slider might be set to improve each base's happiness by 1, spending money equal to 1 (happiness)* Cost per happiness point * number of bases. I am not entirely sure of this system, however, in terms of gameplay.

New Improvements

Cities would have two different types of improvements. The first type would be typical Civilization style improvements, that are built once and usually improve resources by a percentage.

The other type of improvement (I think of them as "automation" improvements), could be built multiple times in a city, but the total amount of these improvements would be limited to the population of a city, adjusted by the "automation" social engineering attribute. These improvements would cost a small amount to build, and produce a fixed number of resources. (for example, 2 food, 2 production, etc.). the amount of resources might improve over the game with different advances.

Like in civilization 4, improvements would have no maintenance costs.

Resource Conversions

Currently in civilization games, cities can convert production into other resources. I imagine the same things being done for food, and possibly energy. Food conversion would probably be made possible with some sort of "biofuel" and "biomaterial" advances. Energy conversion is a bit iffier, since it has lots of further uses, though I could certainly see adjustments to rush buy mechanics and the "ultraponics maintenance" mechanic from Planetfall to allow money to be converted into other resources.

Alpha Centauri 2 ideas: Pollution/Planet Relations system

2010-02-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

These are some ideas for how a pollution system might work. The ideas here are somewhat based on the planetfall mod, though with a lot of changes.

Pollution/Planet Rating

(Note: For this post, "pollution" is simply about pollution in terms of the planet, not in terms of a base's population. In this set of alpha centauri 2 ideas, that would be represented by a Civ 4 style "health" system.)

In this game, a "planet relations" (or some similar name) rating would represent the effect of a faction's activities on the planet. It would be based in some way on a summation of all pollution effects within a faction's territory. I imagine the relations rating would consider these summations over several turns, with more recent turns counted for more.

For an example of how this might work:

Planet relations is based on the past 20 turns. The current turn counts fully, the turn before the current one counts 1/2 as much, the turn before that one counts 1/3 as much, etc., all the way to 20 turns. (I suppose this could continue forever as well.). the planetary rating effect for each turn is simply the sum of all pollution effects in the faction's borders.

Planetary relations would effect the ability to breed mind worms (Either by limiting the number, as on planetfall, effecting the strength of mind worms, the cost of breeding them, some combination of these, or some other effect.). I would expect the a positive planetary relations would provide

Pollution Sources

Pollution would likely come from the following sources:

-Terraforming (Most farms, mines, condensers, etc.) would produce some.
-Some base improvements (Factories, some chemical processing, et.)
-Population, possibly.

Counters to pollution (these would be needed ot get a positive planet relations):
-Forests
-Fungi
-Some terraforming (Recycling terrain improvements, for example)
-Some Base Structures (recyclers, preserves, labs, etc.)

I imagine that most pollution effects would come from terrain, rather than population or buildings, though without an eactual game there is now way to know how the balance of this would work.

The "Planet" social engineering rating would effect the amount of pollution released or absorbed by these effects. Positive ratings would reduce pollution by polluting effects, and reduce pollution by absorbing effects.

Fungal Blooms and attacks

Blooms and other mind worm spawns would be done by terrain square, rather than by base. The chance for fungal bloom in a square would take the following factors into account:

1. The total pollution of a square. This would be determined by measuring the pollution of the square itself, plus surrounding squares out ot a particular radius. Farther away squares would be rated less than nearby squares. Increasing amounts of pollution would result in an increased chance of a bloom.

2. Nearby Fungus. Regular mind worm spawns would only be possible on fungus, so the change for a fungal spawn attacking a particular piece of terrain would be reduced if the fungus were farther away. If mind worms did spawn, they would attempt to travel to the polluting terrain to remove improvements, though obviously fighting enemies they encountered on the way.

Blooms would be more likely on terrain with bordering fungus, though the effect would be small compared with worm spawning.

Spawning would only be possible to attack terrain inside a faction's territory. (This is to prevent "loose" mind worms from wandering around.)

Alpha Centauri Sequel: Social Engineering

2010-02-09T06:53:00.001-08:00

Social Engineering

With the greater number of social engineering attributes (growth, industry, etc), each social engineering choice would have more effects, and more options would be available per category. In this system, I have 3 "early" categories and 2 "late" categories, with the idea that the late categories are a way that research could be used to a civilization's advantage.

Government

These governments include the original Alpha Centauri governments, plus a couple extra.

Simple: The beginning choice. Represents whatever structure was used on the original unity landing pod.

-1 administration.

Police State: Government uses an internal spy network and the military to maintain control. The same sort of government as was in the original game. Police states have strong military and spy networks, but are less effective at economic tasks.

+2 police, +2 support, +2 espionage, -2 administration, -1 economy

Democratic: Another original Alpha Centauri government. Democratic governments are governments that, in some form or another, involve the general population heavily in government, whether by elected representatives, or direct votes on decisions. The greater involvement of the population generally makes democratic factions happier, while the stability and openness of such a government improves administration and growth. However, the population is much more difficult to control, and less willing ot involve itself in wars.

+2 growth, +2 administration, +2 happy, -2 police, -1 support

Fundamentalist: The Third original Alpha Centauri government. Fundamentalist governments are governments that use religious laws, and are often led by religious leaders. Religious enthusiasm can be harnessed towards military ends, and the population will also attempt ot spread their beliefs more aggressively than normal. However, fundamentalist governments generally distrust science, and their zeal often antagonizes other factions.

+2 support, +2 espionage, +2 influence, -2 research, -1 diplomacy

Empath: Empathic governments are run by psychally powerful individuals, who are capable of sensing and influencing the thoughts of the rest of the population. the empaths who run such governments are quite good at responding to the desires and emotions of the population, and also make strong diplomats, but are suspicious of robotics, or other non-human methods of achieving goals.

The idea for this government came from the SManiaC Alpha Centauri mod's empath elite, and the Planetfall Mod's consensus government.

+3 happy, +3 diplomacy, -2 automation, -1 industry

Technocracy: In Technocratic governments, individuals gain power based on some sort of outside measurements of their skill in a particular area, whether a trusted judge, a computer device, or agreed upon statistical measurements. These types of governments tend to promote skilled numerical decision makers, and such governments are effective at organizing the research and productivity of a society. However, Technocrats are often unresponsive to other concerns of the general population, leading to unhappiness, and they are not as effective with softer cultural matters.

Technocracy is a government idea I thought of myself, while idly thinking about possible "fourth choices" that could fit within the original Alpha Centauri framework.

+2 research, +2 morale, +2 industry, -2 happy, -1 influence

Economy

Like governments, these economies use the original Alpha Centauri systems and add a couple more.

Simple: The beginning choice. Represents a combination or barter, informal agreements, etc., that were used in the original landing. No effect.

Free Market: This system reduces regulation taxes, spending, and most other government involvement in the economy. It allows the creation of great wealth, but health and educational services tend to suffer.

This is one of the original alpha Centauri economies.

+3 economy, +1 influence, -1 happy, -1 health

Planned: The government tightly controls the economy to fit an overall plan. This economic control is good at focusing production towards a particular aim, but also creates a large amount of extra bureaucracy.

This is another of the original alpha Centauri economies.

+2 growth, +2 industry, -2 administration

Green: A green economy uses regulation to reduce the amount of pollution of all sorts. This pollution reduction is better for the planet, and also leads to a healthier population, but also reduces industrial production.

This is the third original Alpha Centauri economy.

+2 health, +2 planet, -2 industry

High Tech: The government in a high tech economy supports scientific research, information networks and technology, and education. A high technology economy's researchers are excellent, and such an economy makes good use of automation technology, but the open information structure leaves it open to spies.

This is an idea I was juggling around for a possible 4th economy that might go with the original 3.

+2 research, +2 automation, -2 espionage

Military: The government of a military economy puts resources towards to building and strengthening of a society's military capabilities. Other weaknesses as well, such as resource dependence and intelligence weaknesses, are reduces, but at the cost of a strong civilian economy.

+2 support, +1 efficiency, +1 espionage, -2 economy

Development

These are based on the ecology civics from the planetfall mod, which mainly effected terraforming strategies. These civics would not directly effect terraforming (All options would still be available), but do have a focus on terrain productivity and a faction's planet rating.

Though the descriptions of the development social engineering systems suggest a focus on particular terrain improvements, in game, all improvements would be available. I imagine that the bonuses and penalties represent smaller scale adjustments in how improvement is performed (So, for example, you would be able ot build mines under a "preserves" system, but the industry penalty is meant to suggest that the mines would be smaller than usual.)

Simple: The earliest development strategy. Represents a system without much focus.

Low-Impact: Low Impact development makes heavy use of energy efficiency and recycling technologies to reduce the outside resources consumed. these policies significantly improve resource efficiency, and have a side effect of reducing pollution, but also limits resources available for economic development.

This SE choice is based on the biodomes civic from planetfall.

+2 efficiency, +1 planet, +1 health, -2 economy

Pro planet: These development policies seek to make as much use of natural planetary ecology as possible. Factions following these development policies cause as little damage to the planet as possible, and military units learn to live off the land somewhat, but this development strategy limits growth in order to avoid antagonizing the planet.

This is based on the hybrid ecology civic from planetfall.

+3 planet, +1 support, -2 growth

New Earth: New Earth policies seek to turn Chiron into a more earthlike environment. Under such a policy, organization is improved to support such terraforming projects, and growth is encouraged, but the planetary ecology reacts strongly against these attempts to replace it.

This SE choice is based on the terraforming civic in planetfall.

+2 growth, +2 administration, -2 planet

Preserves: Under preserves policies, forests, natural grasslands, and other such environments are favored over industrial developments. Preserves policies usually seek to divide planet between zones for humans occupation, and zones for xenofungus. Though these policies disfavor industrial production, they do result in healthier populations, and the large, open areas provide a great locations for social activities, and other methods of influence.

+2 health, +2 influence, -2 industry

Rapid Development: These development policies focus on industrial development above all else. they significantly enhance the economic and industrial power of a faction, but are often highly wasteful.

+2 economy, +2 industry, -2 efficiency

Future Society

These social engineering choices are the same category as the original Alpha Centauri future society choices.

Cybernetic: Cybernetic societies use robotic technology to replace human workers for most menial tasks, freeing the population for creative or research pursuits. cybernetic factions have significantly increased research and economic abilities of such factions, but menial workers are unhappy about loosing work, and the population looses interest in reproducing.

+4 automation, +2 research, +3 economy, -3 happy, -2 growth

Genetic: As cybernetic societies make common use of robotics, genetic societies make use of genetic technology. Biomaterials and biofuels are commonly used, specially designed organisms provide other functions in society, and genetic enhancements to human beings are common and expected. The common use of biotechnology improves the health and growth rate of the population, research on planetary organism improves a faction's relations with the planetary ecology, and specially engineered soldiers have building an army much simpler. However, the ethical complications in biotechnology make other populations reluctant to engage diplomatically, and biotechnology is not as industrially powerful as other types of technology.

+3 health, +2 planet, +2 growth, +2 morale, -3 diplomacy, -2 industry

Eudaimonic: In eudaimonic societies, the populations are free, and expected, to constantly improve themselves. Creativity and productivity flourish in such a society, whose ideals are often popular amongst other faction's population. However, these populations are reluctant to give up their freedoms or go to war.

+3 happy, +2 diplomacy, +2 influence, +2 industry, -3 police, -2 support

High Density: Using psychological methods, and careful design of living space, high density societies learn to pack larger amounts of people into smaller spaces. The populations of such societies are happier and healthier than other, equivalent sized, populations, and these societies make much more efficient use of resources. However, the behavioral changes needed for high density living result in poor soldiers and a reduced effectiveness at influencing others.

+3 happy, +3 health, +3 efficiency, -3 morale, -2 influence

Collective: Collective societies use several different methods, from empathic to neural interface technology, to merge together people's minds to some degree. Such societies often become dominated by particularly strong willed individuals. They are excellent at organizing societies for large projects and wars, and reducing dissent and outside espionage, but the collective existence reduces individual creativity.

This SE choice is based on Thought control, the Consensus government from planetfall, and a government called The Great Joining from the Civilization 2: test of Time Sci-Fi game (that replicated fundamentalist governments.)

+3 espionage, +2 police, +2 support, +2 administration, -3 research, -2 economy

Future humanity

Future humanity SE choices are based on expectations of how the human organism/individual humans will develop in the future. Originally I wanted to do future governments for this category, but the ideas for those choices instead ended up spread through other categories. Future humanity ideas are based somewhat on the Planetfall mod religions.

Homo Superior: Homo superior emphasizes individual creativity, intelligence, and scientific skill. Biological and cybernetic enhancements are commonly used, and factions using these ideals stress education and learning as well. Homo superior based factions have excellent researchers and artists, but are reluctant to risk themselves in battle.

+3 influence, +3 research, +3 automation, -3 morale, -2 support

Transcendant: Transcendant societies hope to one day remove themselves from the militations of the human body, whether by merging with the planetmin, moving their minds into a computational system, or otherwise transferring themselves outside the confines of their current body. Because of the importance of planetmind to many transcendant thinkers, steps are taken to preserve the planetary ecology. Because transcendants are less concerned with current day events and are more focused on the future, they consume less resources, but also have less of a focus on economic activity and growth.

+4 planet, +3 diplomacy, +2 efficiency, -3 economy, -2 growth

Will to Power: Societies focused on the Will to Power take a militaristic stance. Their populations sacrifice emotions, caring, and other such concerns, for asceticism, military training, ambition, and a single minded focus on achieving more power. These societies are highly disciplined and controlled, well prepared for war, but the obviously power hungry stance scares away other societies, and reduces their influence on other factions.

+3 police, +2 morale, +2 efficiency, +2 support, -3 diplomacy, -2 influence

Extractive: Rather than changing humanity itself, Extractive societies focus their energy outwards, on aquiring more resources. such societies are well organized and economically powerful, but as is typical, a focus on extraction hurts the native ecosystem, and often leads ot wasted resources.

+3 administration, +3 economy, +3 industry, -3 planet, -2 efficiency

Enhanced: Enhanced societies do not wish to change humanity's nature, rather, they seek to enhance the qualities humanity already has. such societies improve the health and happiness of their population, and their more moderate stances improve diplomatic relations, but their lack of unusual goals limits research, and spies in such societies have an easier time blending in.

+4 health, +4 happy, +1 diplomacy, -2 research, -3 espionage

Detailed Alpha Centauri ideas: social engineering factors and terrain

2010-02-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

The previous post in Alpha Centauri ideas was mostly about vague ideas, so the next set of posts will include some more fleshed out ideas for an Alpha Centauri sequel. This first one describes the social engineering values (industry, growth, etc.) that would be in this theoretical game, pwhich would also give a clue to game mechanics.

Social Engineering Stats

Growth: Effects how quickly cities grow (This would probably be the same as in the original game)

Industry: Effects production speed (Again, this would be the same as before)

Research: Effects research speed (Same as before)

Economy: Effects income. Unlike the previous game, this would only effect money, and wouldn't effect energy in general, and would not have any sudden break points

Training: Effects the combat strength of military units

Police: Effects the ability for military units to reduce unhappiness. May also reduce war unhappiness.

Happiness: Provides extra happiness. (I imagine the happiness system as following the Civ 4 system)

Health: Provides extra health (I imagine health as being mostly like the civ 4 system, with a bit of adjustment)

Planet: Effects the amount of pollution produced, and effects the productivity of fungus.

Efficiency: Effects the productivity of barren terrain especially, but also effects all terrain to some degree.

Espionage: Effects the abilities of spies and spy protection

Automation: Effects the amount of buildings per population (This will be explained in a future post)

Administration: Effects city maintenance and the speed of building terrain improvements (the exact city cost/bureaucracy system is something I'll have to think of in more detail later.)

Support: Effects the cost of supporting military units. Might also allow drafting, a "readiness" game mechanic, military production costs, or some other mechanic/s (To also be worked out later).

Diplomacy: Effects the happiness/unhappiness caused by treaties, the trade income from trade treaties, and planetary council votes (All these bonuses are designed to be useful both in multiplayer and single player games.) Diplomacy happiness effects would work as follows: The two signers of a treaty, in addition to the treaty's normal effects, would get a certain amount of extra happiness of unhappiness in all of their cities. The happiness change would be the sum of the two faction's diplomacy scores, multiplied by some number.

Terrain

Land terrain would have four properties:

Rainfall: rainy gives 2 food, moist gives 1, dry gives 0

Roughness: Rocky gives 2 minerals, rough gives 1, smooth gives 0

Altitude: every 1,000 feet gives an extra energy from a solar plant, with sea level giving 1.

Ice cover: glacier gives -2 to all resources, permafrost gives -1, normal has no effect.

Water would have three properties

Nutrients: rich gives 2 food, lean gives 1, barren gives 0

Depth; shelf gives 0 production, ocean gives 1, tectonic (representing rifts, trenches, and such) gives 2

Ocean Current speed: Effects tidal harnesses, slow gives 2 energy, medium gives 3, fast gives 4.

Ice cover: ice cap gives -2 to all resources, seasonal gives -1, none has no effect.

Fungus: Gives 0 resources under any conditions unless the society has a positive planet modifier.

Efficiency and Planet mechanics

The ideas for both of these stats are based off the Planetfall mod for Civ4.

Both of these stats would improve the resource production of particular terrain types. planet would work as follows:

0 and below: no resources from fungus
+1: 1 food
+2: 1 food, 1 production
+3: 1 food, 1 production, 1 energy
+4: 2 food, 1 production, 1 energy
+5" 2 food, 2 production, 1 energy
etc.

Efficiency would work by forcing the base resources of all terrain types (it would take effect before improvements were considered) to be a minimum of a certain amount of resources. The exact resources would be the same as listed above. for a couple of examples:

Dry, flat, unimproved terrain:
0 efficiency: produces no resources
+2 efficiency: produces 1 food, 1 production
+5 efficiency: produces 2 food, 2 production, 1 energy

Rainy, flat, unimproved terrain:
0 efficiency: produces 2 food
+2 efficiency: 2 food, 1 production (the terrain already produces more than the minimum food, but less than the minimum production.)
+5 efficiency: 2 food, 2 production, 1 energy

Improvements, as mentioned above, would be taken into amount after these calculations (So, for example, that flat, rainy terrain at +2 efficiency with a +1 production improvement would produce 2 food and 2 production.)

Negative efficiency would reduce the productivity of terrain, but I am not sure exactl how this would work. It would likely work something like:
-1 efficiency: all terrain produces 1 less energy
-2: all terrain produces 1 less energy, 1 less production
-3, food, production, and energy all reduces by 1
-4: Eneergy reduces by 2, food and production by 1, etc.

Unlike for positive efficiency, these effects would take improvements into account (Since energy is mostly produced by improvements, and to make sure that people didn't fudge improvements around to avoid some effects of inefficiency, and to represent the general waste of resources.)

Alpha Centauri 2

2010-01-31T19:26:00.000-08:00

These are some ideas for what I'd like to see in an theoretical future Alpha Centauri game. A sequel is really unlikely from what I've heard (There's a question of who owns licensing, plus the low sales of the original game, among other possible reasons.), but that doesn't prevent me from having a bunch of ideas for how the game could go.

Terrain

The planetfall mod has a few interesting terrain and terraforming changes from the original game that I think would be interesting in an Alpha Centauri sequel. For terrain, the planetfall mod includes Polar, which seems a useful terrain feature to add in addition to the rainy and rocky features already in the game. "Polar" (Possibly with another name, like coldness), might come with three levels along the lines of "glacier, permafrost, temperate", that represent different degrees of cold, or might be compined into a more general temperature system of "hot, medium, cold". These changes might adjust both food and energy production of a square, most likely energy.

Planetfall also includes ecology civics that effect the production of different sorts of terrain (Biodomes improves the productivity of polar and dry terrain, hybrid improves fungus.) Such changes could be included in social engineering stats in the seuel (For instance, an "efficiency" or "recycling" feature improving resource production in different types of barren terrain, "planet" ratings improving fungus as before, a "terraformed" rating might improve rainy terrain, etc.) These would add interesting effects to social engineering in a sequel.

Terraforming in planetfall seems quite a bit more balanced than in original Alpha Centauri (Where terraforming options pretty much turned into advanced combinations of forests). The terrain improvements would probably not be the same, but I could definitely see Alpha Centauri using "cannot build within 1 square" type limitations, or terrain improvement "series" as a way to better balance the terrain improvements (I realize this is vague, but hopefulyl it gets some sort of idea across.)

Combat and Units

I've had several ideas of changes that might be made to civilization style combat mechanics, (here, and here are the main posts), and I would definitely like to see some sort of more complex combat system (Possibly like the linked ideas, possibly not) added to the game.

Whatever the combat system is, the unit design workshop would need to change to accommodate the adjustments. In addition to such changes, I would wish to have "secondary" stats be somewhat less expensive (In the original Alpha Centauri, for example, movement and defense together became very, very expensive compared to just defense, or just movement, on a unit.). This would allow units to get some speed or defense, while still leaving complete super units quite expensive. If extra stats like stealth or range were added, their costs would operate similarly (Though the exact formulas for particular stats would depend on the exact combat system.)

Sea Colonies

If a sequel were produced, I would like to see significantly more interesting sea terrain. Planetfall helps somewhat by adding quality differences between trenches, coast, deep sea, and shelf terrain, but further changes might be useful.

One idea might be a similar system to the "rainy/rocky/altitude/etc." system on land might be to use a "depth/nutrients/currents" system, where depth effects production, nutrients effects food, and currents effect energy. Other systems could be used as well following this example.

Planetfall and call to power also handle sea transport more effectively. Call to power allows undersea tunnels to be built, which function like roads, while also allowing land units to move through them under the ocean. Planetfall allows land units ot travel over water within a faction's territory. Both systems could be useful for allowing lands units to easily travel to sea cities (For example, this would be useful for moving defensive units around, or moving land terraformers to terrain covered by a sea city's radius, without having to fool around with transports.)

Improvements

Other posts describe some ideas for building improvements in a game.

One that has not been mentioned is allowing cities to build multiple buildings of a single type. This is a complaint that has popped up on galactic civilizations and elemental forums. While civilization games are generally fun without multiple buildings, adding them within a limit (for example, by population, or a social stat like efficiency, or some combination, etc.), would allow greater city specialization.

Crawlers

These should probably be removed or limited in some way. (Perhaps by city population, or some civilization wide limit.)

MoO3: My version of how to do it

2010-01-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

Master of Orion 3 (the link is provided for people who do not otherwise know about it.) was not well received by a lot of people, due to the confusing interface, unclear game mechanics, and lot of bugs. While I was playing the game, I didn't notice a lot of obvious bugs (but there were a few oddities), but did have a lot of difficulty in understanding what was going on in the game, and noticed a lot of missing features.

These are some ideas I have for possible changes to gameplay that might have made the game simpler to run. I won't actually be trying to mod any of these in, since I haven't played the game for awhile and would not be sure of making any of these adjustments. These suggestions don't include bug fixing and balance, which are always assumed as good changes to make.

Planet/Economy changes

1. Remove the GDP descriptions, replace by simply writing directly the money produced from DEAs, or possibly population.

I'm pretty sure, but not completely sure, that money from planets just comes from the different sorts of DEAs. If this is the case, it would seem much simpler to for understanding the game to simply write the amount of money produced per DEA, instead of summing up a complex GDP screen. If the money comes from population also or instead, this also seems something that could be written.

With this change made, planetary management would get much simpler, effectively resembling how Galactic Civilizations 2 buildings work, with planet size replacing planet quality, gravity modifiers replacing extreme colonization modifiers, new technologies for the buildings equivalent to more advanced factories and such. Population and terraforming would be the only big difference, but would be relatively simple ot figure out.

2. Terraforming/Pollution interface should be clearer/simpler

I might have other ideas for how these could work differently, but its hard to come up with a good idea without knowing exactly how these are working.

3. Replace the current system of money management with a much simpler production system.

For overall empire management, a simple tax level, ship production, building production, system seems to work pretty well. I have a feeling that this is the system actually being used, but it is hard ot tell if this is the case. Making the interface clearer on this would certainly help.

I would also adjust planetary production so that it could only go up to 2 or 3x production costs, which would make micromanagement simpler, and would also allow a greater understanding of what is going on.

4. Do not allow mixed races/species on different planets. If different groups do mix, Terraforming should tend towards the preferred environment of the larger group, or at least towards an average which is shown on the "pressure/temperature" planetary environment screen, and production and population should be shown for all populations on the interface.

This is again a way to simplify understanding of what is going on, and to provide a better prediction of what will happen on a particular planet.

Combat

1. Provide different/greater advantages for different positions in a task force, or alternatively, simply eliminate the concept of separate positions within a group. Also, give more number flexibility to the types of ships in a group.

In the current system, the different positions in a task force don't mean anything, but forcing different categories of ships can cause problems when the ratio of ships isn't right. The first adjustment would make the different categories useful, the second would eliminate the problems caused by this system.

2. For ground combat, create a system similar to space combat, where different types of units (artillery, tanks, etc.) can be combined into groups, and controlled on the ground. Different stats like accuracy, toughness, etc. will effect different unit stats. Terrain would also effect combat.

The current ground system is somewhat of a mess, and doesn't give much control to the player apart from the number of forces landed. A new system would likely be more fun overall, give more to do, and provide more control.

3. Ship Upgrades

These would make management of ships much, much simpler.

Other

1. Adjusted spy system

I could imagine a spy system something like the Galactic Civilization 2 spy idea, but adding in effects of the oppressometer, using the spy production system already in MoO3, having the types of spy effects determined by spy category, and having counterespionage assist in spy capture automatically in addition to reducing spy effects. The oppressometer could function by but producing a flat counterespionage effect, and adding a percentage to the effects of counterespionage spies.

Elemental: War of Magic race and mod idea

2010-01-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

These are a few ideas for Elemental: War of Magic mods. After making some new Alpha Centauri factions and playing Civilization 4 mods, I'm in a more confident mood for actually applying some more ambitious ideas for changes to games.

Insect Race

Insect type races are found in a number of games, but the idea of doing one in elemental comes more directly from Age of Wonder's shadow demons, and from ideas in general of how ot add custom units to all sorts of games. Elemental seems to have a lot of potential moddable features for custom races (tech trees, graphics, etc.), that could provide a lot of options for creating such a race.

For unit design, rather than having swords, axes, armor types, etc., custom designed insect units would get body parts, with claws, stingers, and such as weapons, shells as armor, different body shapes representing different unit "bases", and stuff like antenna representing other types of abilities. Economics, research, and such would work in a pretty similar way to human style races. Family trees, however, are an elemental mechanics that would need to be fudged (or otherwise adjusted somehow) to make sense with an insect species interacting with humans.

Until further game mechanics are revealed, my first guess is that I'd create this race to be either unable to use the family tree feature, or with "servants" provided instead of marriages, and also unable to upgrade their units (If upgrading is in the game), but in return, they would get production bonuses, and would be able ot build units using less special resources. Multiple types of insects are of course possible, and I'll likely think of more possible ideas as more game mechanics are revealed.

Lords of Magic mod

Lords of Magic is a game I used to play several years ago. (The wikipedia link is given, that describes the basics of the game.) Though the game itself wasn't well balanced, and in a lot of areas wasn't fleshed out well or at all, the game's background and faiths did stand out to me as something that could be expanded into a fuller game. (I can't explain logically why this is, but I can easily imagine more extended possibilities for what the faiths are like than I can for a lot of races in other games.)

I've actually had an idea for awhile in (in notebooks, word documents, but mostly in my head) for a much more expanded game, that uses the Lords of magic faiths, backstory, and general combat mechanics (Though combat mechanics would likely be improved somewhat) while using something resembling a civilization style map resource system (where the map would be divided into terrain squares or diamonds, and resources would come from workers from cities working those resources), and, for cities, adding a city building system that resembled the "ancient civilization" city building games like Pharaoh and Caesar 2 (Link here), where cities could have houses, production buildings, military buidings, infrastructure, etc. built. It would also have used the "four map" system from the Civilization 2: Test of Time fantasy game. The resulting idea was really complex, and was more for my enjoyment than any serious attempt at a game idea.

The idea to do a mod like this with elemental, as mentioned above, comes partly from me actually playing some mods, and having made some adjustments with Alpha Centauri, and partly from noticing that elemental seems like it will have a lot of game mechanics resembling what I have above, plus some editor programs, and simple moddability, being planned for inclusion within the actual game. Unfortunately for this planned mod, I' have pretty much no experience with this sort of coding for mods, and though I'm pretty sure I could get some basics worked out pretty quickly, and could learn or copy some coding necessary for this sort of mod (Generally, when learning to do something, I can pick it up quite quickly after a couple of tries), there is a possibility that I could end up stuck on some bug, or other unforeseen problem, that would be really difficult for me to actually work out.

I'll also need to learn more about actual elemental mechanics, to see how they would need ot be adjusted to fit within the mod. It will not be an exact copy "city building+civilization+Lords of Magic combat" imagined above, both because that could be quite difficult, and because some elemental features would likely be pretty cool on their own, but should broadly resemble the idea.

Further Civivilization 4 mod thoughts

2010-01-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

Overall:

I can appreciate the option s given in the civilization 4 combat system somewhat better after having played with these mods (Which I think handle the combat system options better than the original game.)

Dune Wars:

After writing the previous post, I installed a music pack created by one of the modders. the music itself is quite good, and helpes further with immersion into the world. (This immersion, as mentioned in the previous post, is one of the strongest elements of the mod.)

My first attempt at a terraforming victory went pretty slowly, but I've now seen an AI civilization try it, so I will try for a terraforming victory in another game.

I haven't yet had a chance to try out all the civilizations to get a feel for their special abilities, but what I've read about and played so far looks interesting.

Planetfall:

I've now tried out a biodomes strategy in difficult terrain, and a hybrid strategy. Am working on a terraforming game at the moment. After playing these different strategies, I continue ot like the idea of different ecological strategies (Hybrid forests also look pretty cool.)

I haven't had much chance ot try out different military strategies, though, except for a worm oriented one. Worms under a hybrid strategy are pretty cool, but seem ot move slowly (Although I like playing on large maps, so that probably also effects things.) I'll have ot play some more games to really determine how much I enjoy thyis element.

I've been helping fill in civilopedia entries for planetfall. Like most of my writing, it seems fine while I type it, but in game looks really aweful. Am not sure how much is due ot lack of writing skill, and how much occurs in general to any writers.

Fall From heaven:

I've played somewhat through a game as Kuriotates, and am in the middle of one as the neutal elf civilization. As designed, these factions do play quite differently, although I haven't played enough games ot know whether other factions are more similar ot each other than these two.

Building super cities was nice as kuriotates, though I did not optimize my city building well, an d will probably need ot play a new game with them to determine the full potential.

I still have not tried mages out much yet, since that element seems the most complex element of the game, but will be introducing them in the game I am playing at the moment.

The music is also quite nice for this mod, though I sometimes wish there was more of it, and that it completely replace the regular civilization 4 music.

Other mods

the three I'm playing now, plus other life stuff, take up a lot of time at the moment, so I haven't had much chance to play other mods. MoO2civ is probably the next one I'll be playing a lot.

Civilization 4 game mods

2009-12-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

These are some opinions and thoughts on various game mods for Civilization 4. Overall, the game seems to have quite a large amount of mods (And was apparently designed for relatively easy modding for someone who knows the coding, which I do not at the moment.). I've been getting the mods from civfanatics, and have been playing a few in the past few weeks or so, though some are not too extensive, so I'll have little to say on them.

All of these mods have been quite cool looking, and do quite a good job of creating a setting. The mods also seem better at handling the civilization 4 combat system than the original game does (Although the civ 4 combat system is my least favorite out of most strategy games I've played.), by better organizing units into different categories that last throughout the game, and providing a good progression with research.

Planetfall

The planetfall mod is based on the alpha centauri game, but with a somewhat different playstyle, and new game mechanics from civilization 4 that the original game does not have. Overall, I prefer this mod better than the original game (at least so far), although the combat system does have some elements (related ot civilization 4 combat mechanics) that I do not like.

The terrain is more diverse than the original game, adding polar terrain and using a "ridge/highlands/flat' system to substitute for altitude in the original game. Sea terrain gets more diversity in base terrain resources. Terraforming options seem better balanced, with more total variety, than in the original game. On the flip side, it is impossible to do things like change heights of terrain, create rain shadows, and such.

Because if civilization 4's civics mechanics, planetfall civics have more unusual effects that original Alpha Centauri's. The big change, however, is the addition of ecology civics, the choice of which is likely the most important decision made in the game, effecting where the civilization settles, the size and amount of cities, and how they are effected by mind worms and fungus.

Planetfall, to me at least, does have less atmosphere/immersive backstory than the original game. While the religions and adjusted civics add a bit, the technology tree is less effective at bringing me into the world (It ends rather quickly, and the ends can be reached quickly.) It is a good tech tree in gameplay terms, though.

I haven't had much time yet to experiment with lots of combat, so don't have much to say in that area.

Planetfall does allow faster colony pod building than the settler building in the original game. Overall, it is a quite fun mod, and the one I've played the most so far.

Dune Wars

This is the second mod I've been playing recently. I haven't yet finished a game, though am a good way through one (I'm on the mid ot late game.). I have not read these stories, so cannot talk about faithfulness, stuff in the stories that the game missed, bu8t the game does a quite good job of immersion in its world.

For others who also have not read the dune books and are curious about this mod, the screenshots and other descriptions in the link are pretty effective at showing the basics of the mod. In the mod, rocky areas serve the purpose of "continents" on a traidtional earthlike world, while sandy desert acts like "oceans". Water is substituted for food, and is rarer, both helping immersion as a desert world, and also changing the sorts of terrain useful for food from flat plains to hills and special resources.

I have not tried out combat that much yet, though have had a few fights in the game I'm completing at the moment. Early game units seem well organized, will attacking foot soldiers, defending foot soldiers, airborne transport units and fighters, and other unit types showing up early in the game and sticking around in a well organized way. Later unit types seem to get more jumbled from civilopedia entires, although I will have ot play through the tech tree ot see if I am just seeing this wrong.

Currently, I am working on a terraforming victory, which involves changing the terrain from a dry desert into wetter and more hospitable types. I will be seeing how this goes.

Other mods

these are mods that I have started games in, and have looked through the civilopedia, game concepts, maps, etc., but have not played enough to have a more solid opinion on the game.

Fall from Heaven: This is far, far more complex than the original civilization game from what I've seen of it. It seems to be one of the largest and more well known of the civilization 4 mods, so following the links and looking at other descriptions should give better information than I can. I'll probably try this out after experimenting with some more civ 4 mods, where I'll have a better sense of where to start.

Future Mod: This is also quite a large mod, involving technologies all the way from the ancient world all the way to far in the future. It also can be set up with different map choices to allow colonization of the moon, titan, Mars, Venus, and possibly other options that I do not remember at the moment. The mod does this in the interesting way of having the individual planets as rectangles separated by space terrain (Through which only space ships would be able to move). It is a clever trick to get several worlds into a game, though does get me wishing that future civilization game, and 4X games in general, will add mod options for multiple maps. (This is something I hope is added as an option for Elemental: war of magic.) The terrain on these maps is also somewhat boring, consisting of 1-2 types plus hills. I will have ot try this mod out more aggressively to say more about it.

Mars Now: A mod simulating the colonization of Mars. This mod, from the bit I've played and seen, seems to have a somewhat similar gameplay feel ot Dune Wars, though with no ocean equivalent. I have not yet gotten farther into the game to see terraforming in action, or have a sense of the units. the terrain at the moment looks kind of boring, but I will have to play farther to see if this is actually is the case in gameplay.

My own potential Civ 4 mod ideas

I do not jknow hgow ot use Python at the moment, so would not be able to create these mods by myself for now, although I may try to get some more people involved in future times, or learn to do the coding I need. There are a lot of ideasd floating around, however, and I would not necessarily want to take up time from people who do know how to code and also have cool mod ideas.

Guild Wars: This mod idea is somewhat fleshed out in my head, in that I have a general idea for how most mechanics would work, although actual numbers and such are not thought out. I'd probably do this mod more in the guild wars 1 sense, using the human nations as the main possible civilizations, with the 5-6 guild wars 1 gods as religions, and using terrain and leaders appropriate for those games, rather than the guild wars 2 sense with lots of races, lots of different religions with the 5 gods as just one, et.

For combat units, I'd probably use the 10 guild wars classes, divided into 2-4 groups (for example,: casters, ranged, melee), and different professions within those groups used for different roles. (for example, elementalists would probably be the "anti stack" units, while mesmers would be anti spellcaster, necromancers anti-melee, etc.) The progression up the tech tree is iffy, however. Extra classes might be added ot round out the units.

Religions would simply be based on the 5 (or 6) gods, and would have effects related ot what that god was known for (for example, lyssa worship might increase culture, melandru food and health, etc.)

A "global warming" equivalent might involve a "nightfall counter" or some other bad guy release counter, although I am not sure whether this would make sense in backstory terms (Seeing as how this theoretical mod might involve ideas from several time periods.)

The main idea I am lacking for this mod is how the tech tree would work, and ideas for civic slots. These would probably have ot be wildly extrapolated, or just made up.

Lava World: This is a nebulous idea for a mod involving a lava world. I am not sure what the backstory would be "possibly some generic "bunch of factions with to exploit a mineral rich world" or such). The main reason I can think of this as a mod is to use Lava lakes and such as an ocean substitute.

Venusian, Jovian, etc. Colonization: Similar to the Mars idea, these mods would involve colonization of different worlds. Though the future mod involves this, it has little variety in terrain types, and another mod could probably flesh these out.

Starcraft (Or some equivalent) mod: Someone is doing a civcraft mod, pretty much creating a turn based starcraft, but I would be interested in seeing a full in 4x style mod using the starcraft backstory, with the thre races playing very differently in terms of units and such. The "equivalent" simply means that some other equivalent aliens or such could be substituted (Fall from heaven does have the different civilizations play very differently, but a starcraft type mod could involve some things that it doesn't have, at least in backstory terms.)

Elemental: War of Magic, thoughts and possible worries

2009-12-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

For any of the 1-2 actual readers who don't know about this game:

Link

I am technically involved in the beta, but have not been able to try the game out much due to some annoying bugs and graphics issues. This post is more about what I've seen and heard from other descriptions of gameplay, both from other players, and from ideas and descriptions given from the developers.

Playing Styles

From what I can tell so far the main "overall" strategies of the game are something like:

1. Lots of cheap military units (requiring a high population
2. Smaller numbers of expensive, but powerful units (Requiring a good amount of population, but also resources)
3. Channeler only (using lots of magic)
4. Several strong heros, (possibly combined with any of the above strategies)
5. Diplomacy (likely combined with other strategies for handling military needs)
6. Questing, using to access powerful creatures or directly win the game (Likly using the above military strategies)

There will likely be other overall winning strategies, and the above strategies could likely be combined in different ways.

Channeler

In the game, the "channelers" are the leaders of various factions. The are the only ones capable of using magic, and the only ones capable of changing terrain to a form that will support cities, both actions using a resource called essence. Essence also at the moment allows, or is planned to allow, the channneler ot imbue heros with magic abilities, or possibly other enhancements. At the moment, loosing a channeler looses the game.

The Essence looks, at the moment, to be an excellent mechanic to reduce or eliminate an issue that appears a lot in 4X games, where one particular expansion rate is an optimum (either as an all out land grab, or as an optimum rate determined by balancing maintenance costs with the benefit of new territory.) The limited essence, however, can be used for heros, cities, or channeler power, and if balanced, players could use a variety of strategies efficiently, provided they are balanced against each other properly.

Other channeler mechanics, (such as the magic available, and how they do in combat), are not revealed yet, so I do not have a strong opinion on these features yet.

City Building/Economics

Once a city is established (using essence), buildings can be built within it to supply food, money, research, etc. City building seems relatively simple, and most balance issues surrounding city building will probably depend on the buildings themselves rather than mechanics.

The economics system seems based on a pretty typical "food supplies the population, gold is used otbuild stuff" system, but with extra resources (Such as timber, horses, etc.) thrown in. Some resources might be needed to do certain things, others would just speed up the building of certain units and buildings, others might have different effects. I will have to get more experience and information on the resources ot form a more full opinion, but at the moment I don't see anything wrong with the system that an't be balanced by testing.

Research

The research system at the moment is divided into 4 categories, "civilization" (appears ot be farms and such), "military", "Magic", "adventuring" and "diplomacy". Rather than following a fixed tech tree, advances have a better chance ot be available as more research is completed in a particular category.

The biggest worry I have about the research system is that it could be biased towards more city oriented players. From the categories described, it seems all play styles will need research, but if the research only comes from city buildings, playing styles that make more use of large populations will gain an advantage. This will be something I'll be watching as development continues.

Magic

The magic system in the game seems relatively conventional, with 6 different magical categories, four (earth, fire, water, air) based on controlling elemental nodes, and two (life, death) based on which faction the leader controls. Magic will be only usable by channelers or those specially imbued by the channelers. I do not know yet what sort of spells each type of magic will have available, or how the magic research system will work.

There are two main issues I have with the magic system as described currently. First, it has different sorts of damage types, which does follow convention, but unless different types of damage are associated with different sorts of spells and effects, that can be countered by tactical changes, than the different damage types become just a "guess the right type" game for determining resistance.

The other possible problem with the magic system is that, while magical power would require more research, strategies likely ot make use of mgaic strategies (pure channeler, heros) seem likely to have less cities to build the infrastructure needed ot develope magic effectively. I will have to see how the game developes to see whether this will become a balance issue or not.

Diplomacy

Elemental adds a potnetially interesting mechanic, that I have not seen before, where channelers will have children, that can be married off to each other to provide diplomatic advantages, as well as providing new heroes and leaders. I am not sure how thi mechanic will work out, but at the moment it seems potentially interesting.

Otherwise, the diplomacy systems seems pretty generic, so it hopefully sahould be simple ot balance.

Future U.S. Politics Predictions

2009-12-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

Before anyone gets to thinking that I am just some other random guy writing some random predictions, keep in mind that I successfully guessed that McCain would be a serious contender for president, that the Iraq war could be expensive and would involve fighting, and that (in 2004) that democrats would pretty quickly become a lot more competetive again. (Of course, I also did not predict any steps of Obama becoming president, and guessed the wrong reasons for Iraq being expensive, so take from that what you will.)

On to the Predictions:

The Economy: Heck, I don't know what the darn thing will do, whether unemployment will decrease, or the rate of increase of unemployment will decrease, or the rate of the rate of the increase in unemployment will increase, or however far these rates go (for mathematical types, I am speaking of derivatives.). for this you'll have ot look at political pundits, most of who will know for sure, but whether they are actuall correct or not is another matter.

On the economy, we'll have ot wait for the next few years ot determine (for democratic leaking people) If the stimulus worked, or if more was needed, (for republican leaning people) whether the stimulus failed, or whether the market forces fixed the economy despite massive government intervention.

Health Care: I'm pretty sure that some form of health care changes will pass, but what form they take is up for grabs. As for what happens to the two parties: If no form of health care passes, it hurts democrats. If health care passes, tyhings could go either way, withless extreme changes being of more benefit to democrats.

Of course, (more serious) a lot of political pundit types seem a bit tunnel visioned on polls, elections, and such, and forget that government policies do have effects besides getting people angry and providing something ot argue about. The big question, for me, if health care changes pass, is whether they work well or not, and how soon are they put into action. If they are not put into action quickly, than watch what pundits say, at least in the short term. In the long term, and if the effects come into play more quickly, than the effects of health care changes will depend on how effective the system is. (less serious)

Deficits: Deficits are kind of like corruption or sex scandals, they are extremely worrying, weakening the country, and potentially causing inflation or other economic problems, and weakening the country over time. At least, when created by the other party's policies. for the near future, at least, budget deficits are here to stay.

2012 Presidential Races: Palin will remain a serious presidential contender for 2012, being a strong threat ot other republican contenders. Than the primaries will start, and some guy none of us are thinking of will become the big nominee (If the 2012 primaries follow the pattern of the past few years, where big attnetion getters haven't done so well.).

I am not sure which party will win in 2012, but I am guessing that a republican presidential candidate will win in either 2012 or 2016, based on the fact that single parties don't usually win more than 2 years in a row. For congress, I am less sure, as it seem historically that democrats have been better represented.

2012 and 2016, like 2008 and 2004, will be realigning elections, at least according to the winning party's pundits at the time of the election (Or possibly some time afterward).

Palin: On a somewhat serious note, I(sn't it interesting how she manages ot get some form of attention every few months? I'm not sure whether there is something ot this, or whether I am just paranoid and selectively noticing things to fit a pattern.

Palin will continue, for reasons I will probably never understand, to get lots of attention and stir up emotions (either love or hatred), and will continue ot find ways to get attention until, as mentioned above, she'll loose out really fast in republican primaries.

So, there are the predictions. Now, when I check back in a few years, I will either have guessed mostly right, or will have edited the post ot make it appear that I was mostly right.

Fun with Phallic objects

2009-12-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

Sure, lots of people have pointed out implications of long, thin, weapons, and sometimes of buildings, but I think these sorts of arguments miss quite a wide variety of other phallic shaped objects and their own implications.

Sea Creatures

Ever notice that most of the sea creatures that get lots of attention have a long, thin shape? Dolphins, sharks, squid, even many food fish often have a similar sort of long, thin shape. I realize several people will be thinking "But a long thin shape is good for swimming through water, and people would most sea creatures people see are swimmers", to which I argue that the pattern is too strong to be merely a coincidence.

I am not sure what the meaning of the phallicness of sea creatures is, but I suspect that the popularity of aquariums and movies involving these creatures represents some sort of subconscious longing, and the consumptions of seafood represents a desire to incorporate dominance and power. Or at least something along those lines.

Fine Motor Skills

Ever notice how fingers and thumbs are phallic shaped? Think of the implications for people who make regular use of these organs. This definitely represents a desire for power and control of the outside world. (Some other people might argue the manual dexterity is also quite meaningful, but I think this has more to do with accidental word roots.)

Plant Food Products

Look at the shapes of the main types of plant food eaten. Notice a pattern? Lots of long, thin grains, plus small, oval shaped beans and peas. Again, I realize that people will argue things like nutrition, ease of production, and such for why these foods are eaten instead of food, and once again I argue that there must be more to the story. Considering how farming is often considered (Source: I'm pretty sure I remember seeing this from somewhere) to lead ot more hierarchial social structures and politics, the consumption of these grains clearly represents a will to dominate and control.

For that matter, isn't it interesting how people consistently choose to eat things that reproduce exually rather than asexuality? Clearly says something about the conception of society. (Clippings, grafts, and such don't count, either because they can use pollen to reproduce, or because they would weaken the argument too much.)

Building Materials

Sure, people could cut wood, stone, and bricks into swuares, but instead choose to use longer shapes, especially with wood beams and girders. Clearly a symptom of a desire ot show dominance over the natural world.

(The post was inspired by the Swiss minaret ban, after hearing of some phallic based arguments supporting it. I haven't heard these arguments directly, but already see phallic arguments as kind of silly, so this made a good time ot make fun of them.)

Problems for future MMOs to solve

2009-11-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

I'm sure everyone who's played these games has their own opinion about things to improve in the future, here are mine.

The PUG problem

Something that plagues all multiplayer games to an extent, and certainly MMO's, is the difficulty of coordinating random groups of people, both in terms of developing a system where people will group together, and in coordinating the actual group.

Some problems do in general seem player created (when systems for grouping are introduced, but not used, for example), but are still influencedby the design of the systems and by the type of players attracted. Certain problems I see as coming from other mechanics in the game (for example, World of Warcraft had, or possibly has, a problem where groups needed certain types of characters that were not as effective at individual fighting and leveling.)

If an MMO comes up with a good method for sorting more fun from less fun players, finds a good way for players to find together, and balances its mechanics properly for grouping ot be useful, I'd expect it to be a more fun game.

Achievement

It's pretty clear that "achievement" of several different kinds is a big motivator for many people playing MMO's. However, as reading forums, reviews, etc. will make clear (Provided that your mind stays intact from the complaining and such), a lot of the fun from achievements comes at the expense of other players (See the complaining from a person about how they "worked" for something, usually arguing against making things easier, for a very common example.) Because of the way achivement motivation seems to work, people with different amounts of time available, motivation from achievement vs. other elements of the game, and other such player differences related to achievement, will end up competing with each other. (If the game includes levels, looting, and and other such differences in character power, as most of these games do, a further problem is created where people of different power levels will have difficulty grouping, and difficulty staying grouped if they do not gain power at the same rate.)

A game that can reduce the competition between different sorts of attitudes towards achievement is one I would expect to be more successful, and more enjoyable for everyone involved.

4X preferences

2009-11-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

These are some general gameplay preferences I have in a number of areas for 4X games overall, whether they be civilization games, space colonization games, etc.

Expansion:

Expansion seems to be a difficult thing to balance in 4X games, with most of the (at least that I've played) having a bias towards a "grab as much as possible" type of gameplay over a "focus on high quality" type of gameplay. Others seem to try to respond to this by making expansion expensive, although land grabbing is still often advantageous.

What I'd like to see in theory, is a system where expansion is easy to do (cheap colony ships/settlers/etc.), but carries enough of a cost that land grabbing is balanced with high quality, or with other focuses in the game. This way, it would be simple to grab important resources and pieces of terrain if wanted, but still carrying a cost that must be accounted for. However, with a lot of mechanics, this may be difficult ot do for a number of reasons, and could also be difficult ot balance properly without creating a single balanced expansion strategy.

Elemental:War of Magic appears to have an expansion system that fits what I'd like to see, although I'm not sure how balanced it is at the moment or how balanced it will be. The sytem involves using "essence" to found cities. The cities, as far as I can tell, are founded immediately, but essence is a finite resource throughout the game, meaning that founding a lot of cities carries a cost in strength in other areas of society. There are some ideas I've had for adding a cost to expansion, although without actually having designed a game I am not sure how well they would work.

Combat:

In general, I prefer somewhat more complex systems (Such as those found in space colonization games) more fun than simple combat systems (Like those found in civilization games, especially civilization 4). This isn't a generally a strong prederence, however, the only combat system I've found unfun is the civilization 4 system (the other civilization sytems are interesting enough for me ot enjoy them). In general, what I'd like ot see are:

An ability to use different situations (Terrain, defending cities/colonies/etc. vs. open areas, for some examples) to someone's advantage/disadvantage.

An ability to counter different types of units using different sorts of tactics (This could be overall movement in land for civilization games, or different spaceship formations in space empire games, for some examples.)

An ability to use different styles of fighting (Lots of little units vs. big units, for example), with these options being balanced well.

An ability to design and upgrade units is always a plus, although some games have mechanics that are not suited for these elements. A good range of different units covering different levels of power makes a good substitute.

Improvements:

These could be civilization game terrain improvements, civilization game city improvements and wonders, space colonization game colony structures, or other equivalents.

One thing I dislike, that a lot of games do, is to use industrial production, or an equivalent resource, of a particular colony/city/etc. to determine the speed of further improvements. This is generally because some cities and colonies are specialized for such production, while others may be specialized for something else, but these non production specialized cities/colonies often end up taking really long periods of time to get built up compared to production specialized cities/colonies. Systems where improvement building speed is based on an entire empire's resources, fixed amounts of time, or on something all colonies/cities will have, are often more fun for me.

Improvement game mechanics are often different from game to game, so there isn't much else I can say in general about these.

Specialization:

Generally, I prefer games that allow generalization, though I prefer that specialization offer its rewards as well. However, games with more potential generalization do seem prone to have different empires, and different games, all play similarly afterenough time (Since as an empire gets powerful overall, it becomes powerful in most individual areas of a game). Balancing this issue ot improve the fun may be difficult to do.

A specific form of generalization that I would certainly want invluded, however, is that specialization in an area should provide enough benefits that an empire will not have glaring weaknesses in some other area. Having such weaknesses either acts to force generalization again (removing some diversity), or would make some strategies quite risky, with a possible rock/paper/scissors type effect rather than a more flexible type of game.

Bottleneck Resources:

"Bottleneck resources" are what I call resources that everything else, or just about everything else, in the game requires. Gold often fills this position (Most space empire games, Age of Wonders games, for example). A resource like this isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but sometimes, the bottleneck resources gets so limited that maximizing the bottleneck resource becomes the main challeng of the game. Such a bottleneck resource often significantly limits the options in a game, since there is not enough of it to use al the options.

Generally, games that avoid such bottlenecks do so by having lots of the resource available, and having other buildings, empire properties, or other mechanics, effect the efficiency that the resource is used for particular areas. Galactic civilization 2, for example, has money as a potential bottleneck resource, but different empire bonuses to production, research, and such allow an empire to sped money more efficiently (as well as simply having more total), and buildings have maintenance costs that further rewards efficient use of individual ones.

Galactic civilizations 2 ideas: Ground combat

2009-11-09T19:47:00.000-08:00

These are a some ideas for how ground combat could be handled in galactic civilizations 2. The combat system would allow player control of the fighting, and overall would use a lot of similar mechanics as space combat. (some inspiration for customization also comes from Alpha Centauri, Call to Power, my own ideas for other games, and a few other sources. A lot of descriptions are based on my space combat ideas blog post.)

Number of Combatants

The number of attackers would of course be based on the number of soldiers the attacker brought along. The number of defenders, however, I could see being adjusted based on several conditions, to represent the fact that people in a group may or may not be willing to fight hard or risk getting killed.

Using current galactic civilizations 2 stats: The amount of defenders (most likely based on a percentage of the total planet's population), would be increased with morale and loyalty of the defending civilization, and would decrease with higher influence from the attacking civilization. In addition, advances, such as information warfare, could be researched that would increase an empire's own defensive troops, and decrease enemy defensive troop numbers, in addition to the other stats. Ethical alignment might also have some influence here, although since ethical alignment also would presumably also influence combat strength (As it does in current GalCiv 2), I am not sure how such interactions for numbers of soldiers would work, or whether the two effects couldn't be merged.

I do like the idea of armies being composed of large groups of citizens (Similar to how armies work currently), since whether or not it is "realistic" (Or at least as realistic as a futuristic warp drive space empire game can get) it is a relatively simple to understand the micromanage system that still keeps invasions costly. However, I am not completely sure how to differentiate between different types of fighters (vehicles, infantry, airplanes, etc.), on defense. The most likely solution I can think of is to add certain buildings (such as airfields, tank centers, etc.) that cause defenders to have a certain amount and/or percentage of defenders to use these different types of fighting.

Types of Combatants

Combatants could be composed of on of several types of units, each with different gameplay characteristics:

Infantry: Clearly, infantry would be one type of fighter, and would be the default from the beginning of the game, and the type used on defense if no special measures were taken. In gameplay, infantry would be sort of like small ships in space combat. (Not powerful individually, but not very expensive in terms of supplies and space individually either.)

Vehicles: Vehicles of different sizes would require advances to develope. Vehicles would fill a similar role to heavy ships (Harder to individually destroy, but more expensive, and easier to hit.)

Artillery type units: These I imagine as emerging from other units, by using lots of ranged enhancements and such.

Aircraft: Aircraft could be built in a bunch of different sizes, kind of like vehicles. They would be much faster than ground troops, would be considered to have a distance advantage over ground troops, and an advantage at avoiding attacks (both representing the effects of flying.) In return, they would be much more expensive, and would take up extra space on transports.

Other types of units: Most different variations of these unit types I imagine as being producible through customization.

Unit Customization

I see ground units as using the same weapons and armor system that space units use, with Lasers, Mass Drivers, and missiles as weapons, and specialized defenses for those weapons. (for ground troops, mass drivers would represent guns like we have today, missiles could also stand for small scale rockets, as well as larger missiles used today, and for lasers, imagine star wars blasters and other similar weapons.) Just like in the space combat post, Lasers would be more accurate, Mass drivers would be faster shooting, and Missiles would have longer range.

Speed increases would be represented by powered armor (or possibly transport vehicles, both for infantry), engines, and such, rather than hyperdrive.

In addition, ground troops would like get some additional customization effects. Increased range would almost certainly be included as an optionfor customization (unlike ships), and additional customizations might be added for Area Effect damage. Weapons customization I imagine as having the option to either bundle all weapon strength together (As is done in space combat), or could be divided into smaller blocks of damage (meaning that each individual shot would deal less damage, but more shots could be fired at the same amount of time). This adjustment would be made to compensate for the fact that ground combat would probably involve a lot more individual forces than space combat.

The actual strength of units would be effected by their soldiering bonus (As weapons and defense bonuses effect space combat).

Transports and Defense

Instead of transports automatically loading with soldiers when built, they would be built separately from the individual infantry, tanks, etc. When the tanks were bui,lt, transports could come to the planets and load up soldiers. this process would involve a good amount of micromanagement, and I could see having an "automate loading" command for transports, similar to the command for survey ships and miners, though programming such a loading process could get a bit difficult.

Each unit built on a planet would consume a particular amount of money to produce, use a certain amount of money as defense, and

For defense, as mentioned earlier, I am not sure exactly how defenders would be able to choose what forces would be produced. (Certainly, with unit customization, the process gets complicated.) The brute force method would have the defending player choose at the start of the battle how to divide the forces up amongst potential unit types, although this would take awhile to do. The player might also have to build specific vehicles and such, with the remaining resisting population being defaulted to infantry, and the defending soldier would choose which sort of infantry unit was being used. the player might also not get the population's help in defending a planet, with specifically built army units doing all the work. (This is certainly a big weak spot in this set of ideas for ground combat.)

Bombardment

"Bombardment" would represent the various strategies (such as core detonation, tidal disruption, mass drivers, etc.) used in galactic civilizations 2. It would be a decision made before the battle, and the severity of the bombardment would influence the planet quality reduction, population killed, reduction in combat strength, and destroyed improvements.

"You can't reduce people to numbers"

2009-11-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

You can, and should, and here's why...

(In all honesty, I think the viewpoints of whether or not people are "reduced to numbers" comes from differences in how people are comfortable thinking, and how the different ways of thinking may not overlap. I'm sure lots of people reading this post will say "But those require less "people are numbers" thinking, not more, and I would agree that, for different styles of thinking, different methods would be useful for overcoming these biases.)

1. "A million is a statistic": I'm sure plenty of people have heard this expression and understand what it means. In cases like these, a more mathematical "a million is worse than 1" mind would come in helpful.

2. "I can identify with him/her/them": Probably also familiar to a lot of people, this is where someone's sympathies will be much stronger for something they are more familiar with or can identify with more easily, even if the less familiar problem is actually more severe for that particular person.

3. "I'd like to be treated as a real person": For some people, "treating me like a person" is a good thing, with friendliness, interest, etc. The bad side of this is, of course, being treated as the sort of person that the treater dislikes or is disrespectful of. This could happen for a number of reasons (gaffe, miscommunication, the "treater" just doesn't like certain people, etc.). in those cases, being treated as a completely anynomous person is perfectly fine.

And, not exactly in the same category, but along similar lines:

"You can't buy happiness": Sure you can, you just have ot know how ot spend the money well. (And, of course, ask a person without much money, and that will provide a response as well.)

(To me, the idea that the expression seems ot be trying ot get across is that the happinewss something can give does not necessarily equal the price. So buying a bunch of stuff isn't going ot work well unless the person has a good sense of why they are buying it.)

Age of wonders type game: Magic types

2009-11-04T17:20:00.000-08:00

Part of the magic system description is here:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dg8gfb6r_6gccgp7fx

Age of Wonders Type game

2009-10-28T21:30:00.000-07:00

These are some documents for a Fantasy 4x game idea I've had. This is not the sort of idea I'd expect to get turned into an actual game (It's way, way, too complicated for one), it's mostly for my own enjoyment (hopefully the few other people reading this post as well, if curious), although it has a few ideas that I'd like to see in other games.

As described in the title, the main inspiration was Age of wonders, but some ideas also came from other sources.

The two documents themselves describe the different races of the game, and in general how the system would work. I'll have more documents in the future describing other elements of this theoretical game. Also, I'll probably split the one describing all the racial categories into a smaller set of documents, (and update this post).

The system for how races would work in this game

The actual races

(An actual fantasy 4X coming out, that will probably do a lot of the stuff I've thought of here in a much more playable way, is Elemental:War of Magic, which I'm theoretically in the beta for, although the game currently does not work on my computer due to some odd bug, so I don't have much to say about it at the moment.)

Guild Wars 2: What I'd like to see/not see

2009-10-24T15:55:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if I'll actually get Guild Wars 2 even if it has the features/qualities I'm describing here (It depends on what else I'm doing at the time), but these are my own viewpoints on what I'd like to see/not see in the game.

Low/No Leveling/gear times:

My favorite feature of the original guild wars was how characters could reach max level relatively quickly, and how gear with max stats was quite easy to get. I prefer RPG type games this way (And would like to see leveling, gear grinds, and equivalents removed entirely) for a number of reasons:

It keeps lots of areas accessible (the character won't be over or underpowered) at a time
It allows people too keep up with each other, even with different playstyles and playing times
It's easier to experiment and try out different sorts of characters
Exploration is more free (there is less of a worry about "If I do this, I won't be able to access that for more time).

It is a worry, from hearing descriptions of the game, that it will be moved to a more typical leveling and gear collection game that I tend to find highly annoying. I'll see how this develops, though.

Good uses for Secondary Professions (If they use the same profession system)

As guild wars went on and people figured out the game better, it seemed that seconadry professions got less and less important and useful. (for a variety of reasons, runes not being available for secondaries, certain skills too dependent on primary attributes). I won't get to actually know whether secondary professions will be more useful (If they exist), but it will be something I look for in reports and such.

The Event System

Original guild wars seemed to have a lot of cool ideas that weren't really fleshed out well, so it does seem a possibility that the same thing will happen with the event system they are describing. If it works, though, it would be a great addition.

Instant outpost travel, quick skill switching, quick respecs, etc.

There are a bunch of features like this in the current Guild Wars game that make it quite a bit simpler and more streamlined to play, and I wouldlike to see these types of features continue into the sequel.

Galactic civilizations 2 ideas: espionage

2009-10-22T15:49:00.001-07:00

Espionage is my least favorite element of the game, I haven't found or read about too many uses for it. These are some ideas to flesh out the system more, and find some better ways to handle the system.

New uses of Agents:

In the current system, agents are either placed on specific buildings on planets to shut them down, or placed within empires in general to gather overall information. In addition to these locations, here are a few other ideas for places to send spies in enemy empires:

Research: Spies in enemy empires could either give their source empire a percentage of the enemy empire's research (sort of like a research treaty), or attempt to slow down enemy research. To me, the first is preferable, since the enemy empire's research would not be reduced, and thus spies would be more difficult to detect, but both methods seem like potential uses of spies. they could also both be offered when a spy was placed in an empire.

Military: Spies within an empire's military could either give combat bonuses when fighting that empire (the idea being that spies have discovered the empire's typical strategies and fighting methods, so they can be countered), or simply reduce overall military strength. As with research, I prefer the first option, but both seem potentially plausible.

Economy: As with research, spies could either siphon income, or reduce the enemy empire's income. My opinions are the same as with research.

Morale/Loyalty/Influence/Production: In these cases, it's hard to think of a plausible backstory reason that spies could "siphon" these from enemy empires, so the values would probably just be reduced throughout the empire.

Counterespionage:

Spies could also be assigned to counterespionage, where they would reduce the effects of enemy spies within your own empire. The effectiveness of your own spies at negating enemy spies would be based on a separate counter-espionage rating (for example, if one empire has twice the counterespionage rating of another, the first empire's spies would be twice as effective at neutralizing enemy effects as the first empire.) Spies might either be sent to negate (or attempt to negate), the effects in a particular area, or into counterespionage in general, where their neutralizing abilities would be spread throughout all categories.

Counterespionage center type buildings on planets would help reduce the effects of enemy spies for that particular planet, either by counting as a particular number of spies, enhancing the effects of spies already in counterespionage, or by a simple percentage. Spies could also be placed on particular planets to provide counterespionage for that particular planet.

When used to eliminate enemy spies, each friendly spy could eliminate one enemy spy. The friendly spy would have a chance to survive based on the friendly counterespionage rating. the chance would likely be adjusted so that killing enemy spies would have the same overall effect as passive neutralization with counterespionage.

Planetary spies

Spies on specific planets could have a similar effect as spies in the entire empire, though would siphon/reduce production by a higher percentage (Probably based on map size) than spies in the entire empire.

In addition, spies could be used to attempt to sabotage production efforts for a turn. The chance to successfully stop production for the turn would be based on the planet's spy defenses, both from empire wide counterespionage, and counterespionage on that particular planet, and the amount of spies attempting to sabotage. The actual chance for sabotages per spy would depend on balance.

Espionage Rating

In the current game, espionage rating makes espionage spending more effective at producing spies (I think). I could see either keeping this system, or having espionage rating change the effectiveness of offensive spies.