I'll apologize in advance for a long post and for possibly having missed some of the ideas in this post being discussed already.I'd really like to see the map influenced by time and weather. I know time has been discussed in another thread and the current idea is that 1 turn = 1 day. I dislike that idea and would like to propose the following:1 turn = 1 week.
This would then allow the game to actually keep track of semi-realistic time and allow such things as weather based on time of year to come into play. Lets assume that the calendar year would then be 52 weeks so each season would roughly last 13 weeks (the current week/month could be displayed someplace so players always know what time of year it is).The game could then keep track of weather and alter the map accordingly. One of the things I remember fondly from my C64 days was playing 7 Cities of Gold which had trees change in the fall/winter (Why is it no games since then actually do anything like that instead opting to fix squares as a certain terrain).Elemental could do the same, changing trees in the fall and adding snow in the winter and removing in in the spring. When snow is on the ground it would slow down movement and give bonus's to units designed for winter (imagine unleashing your horde of Winter Wolves) and possibly penalizing summer/warm units (like a fire elemental). Also in the winter time, rivers could free over allowing units to cross rivers. If the water in the game was designated as shallow/deep then the shallow waters could freeze while the deep would not so large bodies of water or fast rivers would not freeze and would still be boat navigable while shallow ones would be frozen over.The game map could further be broken into Tundra, Temperate, Tropical regions (or smaller maps could entirely take place in 1 climate region). So in Tundra environments there would be snow in 3 of 4 seasons while in temperate you'd only see snow in the winter and in tropical there would never be snow (maybe floods or reduced movement during a rainyseason).This would add a lot strategically as you'd have to decide to attack before the snow set in (reducing movement/freezing rivers/possibly penalizing skills). The game could even reduce the rate of resouce accumulation from mines/food etc in the winter.To vary the seasons a bit the game would calculate the weather 12 months out. So instead of exactly 13 week seasons, you could extend a season by a month on either side. So it would be possible to have some years have longer winters or longer springs etc. Spells could be available to forcast the turn of the seasons (reason weather calculated 12 months out)so you'd know when the seasons might change. Late game spells might be able to altar the seasons entirely in a region on the map.The other thing I'd like to see in this would be that the attacker would be allowed to select time of day (day/night) to attack. Thus if you have units (those winter wolves) designed for night you'd select to attack at night when you'd get a morale bonus and perhaps your opponent wouldn't depending on their units. This would also affect some skills like archery which would be greatly reduced in range at night when you can't see at a distance. Similarly flight would be affected since units can't see effectively to fly (unless they were bats). Once again, spells could be available to add light or darkness to the battle field. Attacking at night should also give a better chance for an ambush assuming the enemy units are designed for day.One last thing about the 1 turn = 1 week idea. This would allow realistic time tracking of a channelers life. I don't recall whether channelers can be taken from game to game (ie persistent and leveling up over the course of multiple games). But if they are, the game could start a new channeler at age 20 and have a built in death-from-natural-causes at age 70 or 80. Thus you'd have a set amount of time to *live* and achieve fame/deeds before you'd need to create another one. It also puts a upper time limit on finishing the main quest. If there is to be a meta-verse like board similar to GalCiv this end of life idea means players wouldn't waste time ending turns to increase scores. It would instead mean you'd rank based on the score you achieved over your life (which may be from 1 uber map or many smaller ones).All these things would make me feel a lot more engaged with the world itself and my character as the passage of seasons went by. That engagement was something I never got from GalCiv or GalCiv 2 because it all felt so abstract. Best of all is that it is all taken care of by the game so there isn't a lot of micromanagement needed by players.
Unless a brilliant dev can pull a rabbit out of her hat and give my my 'temporal automatic transmission,' this is pretty much where I stand.
I don't know how that might link up with seasons, but you don't strictly need seasons to have game weather--especially in a post-cataclysm fantasy setting. Cold waves could easily be driven by the distant struggles of frost giants you'll never see. Or extremely chaotic weather could be a lasting after-effect of the cataclysm, so that growing seasons are about luck and/or good use of local magic rather than relatively consistent annual cycles of temperature and precipitation.
I don't like the idea of totally random weather, independent of seasons. It replaces strategic planning with blatant luck. If there's no way to roughly predict the weather then you can never take it into account except on a turn-by-turn basis, which isn't so helpful. Seasons allow you to take into accout chances of weather in long-term planning. Totally random, meaningful weather would be too much of a wildcard for me.
I guess that's another notion to put in the Randomness-lovers' bucket. But really, the remark was just an example attempting to illustrate the idea that in a fantasy game, you don't need to feel constrained by 'realism' unless you want to. IMO, a deeply random weather system would just be a different source of long-term game variety--I *want* this game to make planning hard, mostly because I want to see the code pretty much eliminate the possiblity of any 'super-strats' like the All-X stuff in GalCiv2.
But a pattern-driven weather system would be fine for me also, especially if it was linked to 'fantastic' aspects of the back story and not boring old terrestrial meteorology. For example, monsoon seasons could follow from the regular change of lairs for the Storm Dragon, and diplomatic intereference with said Dragon could put a serious hurting on crop production in an enemy's region.
Yeah, but some people like it that way for some reason. I'm with you there pigeonx2, but like Swicord says, some like it.
Just as I said there should be different season settings, I don't see why there couldn't be a no seasons, but still weather option. Where its completly random, Advance Wars style.
Weather options would definitely be a nice feature, I'd never say no to that! Personally I'd probably almost always stick with seasonal weather, but this seems like yet another one of those areas where providing options wouldn't be much of a hassle.
Also, I think somebody mentioned this before but geographic weather 'zones' would be amazing. For example, it'd be more likely to snow in tundra regions, more likely to rain in rain forests, and very little precipitation at all in desert regions. Also, I don't want the different 'climates' to be what we'd realistically expect - especially if the maps are going to be flat. (IE, it shouldn't necessarily be a 'colder' climate at the north and south of the map and warmer in the middle. It could also be an option, I guess.
and that I think is where it really counts. (I have been frustrated at games in the past that don't provide options when it wouldn't be much hassle, just like making a variable exposed to the UI game creation options, but then it doesn't happen)
Also, for me, since I want the multi-world feature from Master of Magic to be in place. I'd also like to see it be possible to have different seasonal patterns on different worlds. For example, one would world would be in the 'ice age' seasonal pattern. One would be regular. One would be always be either 'fair' or 'hot' weather, and the last could have only fair and rainy. (this scenerio has 4 worlds)
The suggestion of weather is a great idea and should probably be included as one of the optional features. I suggest optional since some may consider unpredictable weather and natural events as unbalanced or its possible a specific weather event scenario may be bugged.
The weather can include rain storms, droughts, heat waves, snow storms, and high winds which can provide bonuses and penalties from everything ranging from battles, to map movement, resource/food income, to casting of global spells. Ideally the weather would be different for different sections of the map since it would be unusual for a huge map to all have rain at the same time.
Natural events can be more extreme to the land such as earthquakes, volcanic erruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunami, large asteroid stike, etc., .
that really isn't an excuse for anything. "because it may be bugged'" applies to everything in the game and should be fixed should a bug appear.
Well you're wrong here. Anything in the game may be bugged... this is true. However the best method to reduce unbalanced or lost gameplay is by having all critical features optional. Let me provide an example to help you better understand the importance.
Let's say the game was released and weather was not an optional feature. A few weeks after its release gamers found a weather bug when casting X spell after Y spell inside a storm and this bug caused a serious game balance issue as it would kill all units in the area when only some minor damage should have occurred. As a result multiplayer gamers have to arrange verbal agreements with all players to ban this exploit... even then there's no way to be certain the exploit is not being done against independents. Now if the feature was optional then the weather feature can be removed for serious multiplayer games until the major exploits are fixed.
Optional Features are a good thing.
In the most general terms, I quite agree. But I have a competing axiom: Too many decisions made in the name of multi-player 'balance' are not good for the health of the core, single-player game.
Plus there's the whole 'one person's exploit is another person's strategy' problem. My favorite way out of that sort of debate is by heading for the Hills With No Scores. Or by deliberately 'crippling' myself by refusing to adopt game tactics that 'work' with the software but just stink story-wise, like the fact that in GC2 you can invade a world that you couldn't colonize directly because you lack the required environment tech. You then have a world where population grows, research goes on, and physical production is impossible.
If the game is sufficiently complex, which I believe it will be, *some* problem of the type you describe is more or less inevitable. I'd rather see MP folks needing to do the manual coordination you describe instead of devs deciding to ditch a feature because making it an option wasn't working well in their overall design (which usually includes limited space for option names during game setup).
It isn't feasible to make a game in which everything that could possibly be bugged or unbalanced is optional. The result would be an enormous number of permutations of significant game options, and there is no way in hell the developer would be able to ensure that all methods are equal.
I'll take your example. Let's say that the example weather bug you described exists. Let's also say that Faction A is a race that gains various types of bonuses from different forms of weather. When it's hot, maybe they get stronger, when it's cold, maybe they become stealthy, when it's raining they move faster, etc. No, take out weather and that race just lost a fundamental identifying factor and is worse off for it. So by playing without weather effects in order to circumvent a bug, you create a major shift in balance, making one faction much worse off than the rest. There is no reasonable way to make a balanced game where all the "critical features" as you call them are optional.
The real solution to the problem you bring up isn't to make every single thing optional; it's to have a developer that quickly fixes bugs. And in the case of game-breaking bugs such as your hypothetical one, the solution is an immediate hotfix, not a promise from the developers that a fix will be included in the next patch, due in a month.
The best method to reduce unbalanced or lost gameplay is to have developers committed to rapidly fixing problems as they surface. Especially if you care at all about the long-term. Making everything optional would only be important in the short-term, but once the major problems are fixed then the ultimate result of too many optional "critical features" is a poorer game.
I'm not talking about minor or even moderate unbalances within the game... I'm talking massive huge unbalances. Also optional features are not just for bugs and unbalances, but also for user preferences. Take a look at the WOG for heroes_3 which has default settings, but virtually everything is optional... thus no one is forced to play with a feature which is either bugged, unbalanced or to their disliking.
WRONG... because the feature is OPTIONAL which means gamers can CHOOSE to include the feature for their games if desired. This allows gamers to choose which scenario will work best for the factions being played as compared with being forced to play with all critical features.
Fixing the bugs is very important, but no one knows how serious or time consuming a game bug can be until its finally fixed. I work in the business software industry and fully understand software bugs may take months to fix depending on the complexity and some bugs are so extreme they need to wait for the next version... aka game expansion.
Having criticial features as an option allows the gamers more control of the overall game balance, overall game stability and overall desired world. As an option it does not remove it for those who choose to include the option.
I'm not arguing with you that there shouldn't be lots of options, NTJedi. I agree with you. But there also does need to be a limit. I don't want to have to sift through 5 pages of radio buttons and drop downs just to set up a game. Fear of bugs is a horrible reason to include too many options. The time making all those features optional would've been better spent finding and fixing the bugs.
The only really good reason for making features optional (and it's a damn good reason) is user preference. Especially when it comes to Stardock and their track record for frequent free updates that continue for years after release, and considering their lengthy betas.
When deciding whether or not to make a feature optional, these are the questions that should be asked:
How difficult (time & effort) is it to make this feature optional?Will turning this feature on or off disrupt gameplay, or just change it?Is the resulting difference worth the developer time required to make it optional?
It seems to me that where we differ is in the second question. You don't appear to care what the answer to the second question is, while I think it's just as important as the other two.
That said, if Elemental were being made by EA, I would agree with you wholeheartedly that the more options the better so we can circumvent bugs. But that's because I don't trust EA to release a finished, polished product, or to even bother fixing many or any of the bugs or other issues after release. I do, on the other hand, trust that Stardock won't release the product until it's finished, and I also trust that they will continue to support the game long after its release date has come and gone.
Since the elemental game is still relatively new I've been advising on the optional settings for critical features since the early stages of development it's easier to make features optional for the final product. Naturally the game will most likely have default settings allowing someone to quickly start playing. The 5 pages of options should exist only within an advanced options section where a long term experienced player goes for tweaking a specifically desired game... the same as what's provided with WOG from Heroes_3.
In regards to the second question I was not planning for options to be adjusted during a game, but more as options for creating the game. Including the ability to enable/disable options of criticial features during a game opens the window for new bugs and should probably be avoided. The only options which should be allowed to be enabled/disabled during the game should be those involving the battle such as altering the speed of the battle or if auto combat is desired or etc., .
The first and third question are closely related involving "is it worth the time" which of course must be considered. This depends on how far the coding has been developed for each of the critical features. Obviously the developers will use their best judgment on what features should be optional as no one wants the developers to spend 3 months coding one feature as optional.
Overall the only reason not to include critical features as an option would be if it's too late thus too time consuming to make the feature as optional.
I in no way meant changing options in the middle of the game. What I meant is: having an option enabled vs. disabled: what is the difference? Does it merely change things around - (like maybe an option to continue playing after channeler death), or does it actually disrupt the game? Does it cause inconcistencies, does it affect different factions to significantly different extents? If disabling a feature (or enabling a non-standard feature) actually disrupts the game, there needs to be a lot of thought going into the decision of whether or not to make it an option.
Making features optional is definitely easier the earlier on in the process it's decided. But nonetheless, making a feature optional inevitably requires extra work. If making every feature optional required a menial investment of time and money if done early enough into the process, then a plethora of options would be much more common than they are. Actually, there's another reason. Too many options can just as easily degrade a game as improve it. Quality control is much harder to do when you provide more possibilities than you can ever consider.
That is so true. Though, usually the reason that something isn't optional is because programers forgot to make a variable a variable (i.e. its hardcoded somewhere) and fixing it requires a lot of work.
I don't think the point is to ask for many options per se, just that anything that doesn't "Make the game" should be to be turned on or off. For example, this game is about building armies, cities, and casting spells. Those things should not be able to be turned off. Without those things, it would not be the game it should be. Things like weather, certain world viariables, time effects, random events, and so on are not the game and ultimatly would not change what the game is whether or not they are included. They enhance the game, not make it. So, extra time and budget to add additional features but be weighed value vs. time and cost.
We shouldn't shoot down additional features because they arn't needed, just remeber that they are 'additional features'. There is certainly a 'vision' or 'goal' that is more than just 'build armies, create cities, cast spells, trade goods' that probebly include things like additional factions, quality graphics, superb enemy AI, and such. Stardock has made it clear that they won't be satisfied until they have these things are completed, even though the game is still a game without them. So stardock has already signed on to ensure they get in certain 'additional features' and I am sure they want to have more 'additional features' beyond that. Some things like superb AI really does't hurt the game to turn on and would pretty much only hurt to turn off, so that passes. But just about everything else could be an option.
So everybody needs to remember helping stardock find the best choices for their search for additional features. We need to look at this and try to see if we can come up with really good additional features to include, things like budget shouldn't be too much of a worry for us, that's stardock's problem
to be a supporting community, we shouldn't ever really discourage an optional feature, only give more support for additional features we do want to see stardock spend time and money creating. I say stardock should make the game as fleshed out and full of features as their budget allows, then have the option to turn off or change any features that are not needed to have the game be playable.
I say that, yes... too many options can be bad. But at the same time, thats usually at the flaw of a UI situation (such as too many options that new players get bogged down), or balancing (because that takes time and effort). Players should have the ability to shape their experiance though, so we should always be able to give them options that don't hurt the experiance directly.
For example, if you save your options to a save file (so you can quickly load the settings ), but the save file has more variables available then what are accessable via UI, then players are not bogged down by having to many options and the ability to change things that establish balance can be changed, but only by those savy enough to go and edit the save file.
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