In Elemental, you design your own units. Give them whatever name you want to give them, equipment them with weapons, armor, helmets along with deciding how much training they need.
Creating a soldier or a scout or a knight or what have you boils down to how long it takes you to have the equipment on hand and training which is raw time.
There is still "quick build" but that simply, at a cost, gets supplies to that town a lot quicker. It's like having your "stuff" sent to you via Fed Ex Air rather than UPS Ground.
So we're still playing around with this concept so would love to hear thoughts on it.
The OP:s idea with customizable units is appealing to me. I always enjoyed designing my own, ever since i fell in love with Master of Orion (the original one, not the others).
-When looking at the crude schematic I started to wonder if all that matters will be values X,Y and Z. In many games (like Civ 4 and to a small extent MoM) certain troops have anti-unit abilities that comes just from their equipment (pikes vs cavalry etc), which makes diverse armies more important and battles more strategic. Then it would make sense to have some pikemen along just to protect archers whom otherwise are very vulnerable to fast moving light cavalry. A requirement for diversity also prevents a player from only researching swords for example, even though his swordsmen would be great they are just not flexible enough to win.
-If troops are obtained with resources and training time, can several different units be trained simultaneously in the same town or will they still need to be qued?
Perhaps it is a little late in the day for such a question, seeing as this journal was originally posted over two months ago, but I was wondering whether this equipment model meets the implication that you ought to be able to loot the bodies of your fallen foes for any intact items which you could later use to equip your own units. For instance, if I route a regiment of the powerful Flugurlan Guard, do I get to swipe a couple of their coveted war spears, enchanted with potent fire magics?
Also, as a side note, I would be interested to know how much of the work you do in planning parts of a computer game are still done with good ol' fashion pad and pencil. I mean, I see you have posting scans of diagrams you have drawn, Frogboy, but are those the exception or the rule?
I think there should be some external tool that allows you to design your units outside the game. Like pre-setuping your civilization/unit tech tree before you play to let you play with the options and finetune them. And perhaps then you could upload civ templates online and share them with others?
I like this concept and the sketch especially, just one question. Why is it on graph paper instead of a bar napkin? A good concept cannot be properly displayed on anything but bar napkins, bonus points if it has beer or grease stains.
How do you know the original wasn't done on a bar napkin? Maybe bar napkins just make bad photographs!
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