Well today I have to start putting together all the assets that are going to need translation so that we can get that going.
For Elemental, the plan is to have a much much higher level of writing quality than we had in previous games by bringing on professional authors and editors to help.
So what sorts of things do we have in mind?
The Factions
There are 12 named factions (races) in Elemental. In addition, players will be able to create and submit their own factions to be shared by other users.
Each of the 12 named factions will have its own history and back story. Those factions are:
The Kingdoms are of men, the Empires are made up of the Fallen.
Technology Trees
The technology in Elemental is largely the same for each faction with a handful of distinctive early game features that enable special buildings and units per faction.
There are roughly 20 different technologies. This seems low because of the way (far more fun IMO) technologies are implemented. Instead of there being "Advanced Swordsmanship" or something players instead choose a more generalized tech and the more they research into it, the better that stat gets. Spell books are where the more literary interesting stuff comes in.
Spell Books
Men and Fallen get completely unique spell books. The spells are broken into the 5 different schools of magic:
Earth. Air. Fire. Water. Life/Death.
Each of the 5 schools will have around 20 different spells in them.
Quests
Unlike previous strategy games Stardock has developed, Elemental will have optional quests. How in-depth these get will really depend on how much time we have. But ideally, we would like players to be able to see their sovereign as a quasi-RPG unit that can go out and deal with a particular quest.
There would be a huge, and ever growing, quest pool for the game to make use of.
We are budgeting for an initial quest pool of around 500 quests.
The Campaign
Like the GalCiv series, Elemental will thrive the most in its sandbox mode. Unlike GalCiv, our intention is for the campaign in Elemental to have a lot more to it. We'll have a firmer idea of this later once we figure out how powerful the engine can be made in the time we have with it.
This sounds awesome, thanks for finally throwing out some nice details to us!
100 spells are much more than I would expect. It doesn't need more than it, after all the spells need to be balanced and quality is preferable over quantity especially in this where spells are so important in the game. Better less that are cool (nicely animated) and usefull than tons of useless skills. I hope a big part of them will stand has ultimate ones (or usefull till late game), instead of only a few. I mean, that allow for different late game strategy instead of just a few ultimate ones, because then it would be progressive.
By the names model of each faction, if there is any, It looks like Izen should a Kingdom while Ithul an Empire. 500 quests also looks very fine, much than I would think especially because they are optional. Those numbers impressed me. The Technology system seem to be as free or open as the system that will be used to make units, in which you choose the names and the itens you want, so might be also nice and probably to be a combination of gameplay style. Looks like you can go for as many points as you want at your own risk of not improving the other ones or the player point distribution to be very tweakable. Just guessing tough.
re: spells, I'd be interested in a spell 'forge' where you craft new spells. Something players can do to create new custom content.
Spells break down into two components:
1) Special Effects (audial/visual)
2) Mechanics (gameplay and ruleset impact)
(note to self, and to others... did I miss anything?)
Special Effects:
Each of the 5 schools may have a common or set of common effects to represent the audio and video component. A player may then overlay additional effects to provide sight/sound variations between spells of the same school. As a simplistic example, perhaps all Fire school spells have a reddish video component and an animation that is reminiscent of fire or smoke - and a base sound loop of some bonfire or other. But a player may then overlay addition color or sound effects to provide some unique flair for his/her newly 'forged' spell (Atomic Fire Bunny - Rank I).
Mechanics:
In many games (or at least those that I have experience with) spells - despite seemingly endless variety - spells/skills/feats/etc. tend to be fairly limited in possible impact. A fireball spell may do an initial amount of damage over a radius, and targets may then experience damage over time effects, with the damage being of 'fire' type (to provide for any resistances or mitigations the targets may have). Lightning bolt spells are very different thematically speaking - but they still deal damange. The effect is essentially the same type of spell (damage dealing) though perhaps the two spells vary in their degree of damage and damage over time impact to a target.
I make this point to provide a conceptual foundation for the idea that the game's 'spell forge' (or out-of-game toolkit) contains a pool of pre-created spell effects. These spell effects are assigned to spells as desired. So, if someone wants to create the above example (Atomic Fire Bunny - Rank 1), we've covered the fluff of animation and sound, but now we want to determine what kind of in-game rule or mechanic is impacted by this spell. In our spell forge, we assign to our new spell:
* a damage type - useful to determine what, if any, target damage resistances or mitigations come into play
* a damage variable or possible range of damage (conceptually, we can call this 'hit points of damage')
* a range variable - is it a melee or ranged attack (or some other range related mechanic)?
* damage over time value?
* non-damage effects? (e.g., modifies target movement rate, to hit combat chances, adds a poison effect, reduces morale, etc.)
* required resources - do you need gold, mana, some number of widgets to research and/or use the spell?
There aren't that many ways to affect a target of a spell - as long as those are defined and exposed to our theoretical spell forge, we can create a fair amount of customization and variation for the player community.
I'm interested in custom spells also, but I suspect Aesir's "Mechanics" list is too small. GalCiv2 finally got a Custom Tech Tree Editor, and it covers about 40 categories of technology. Admittedly many of them are not likely to have analogs in an Elemental spell category list, but the items Aesir lists so far seem to be just basic combat spells. If we get to build our own spells, I surely hope that we can customize global ('world wrecking') spells as well as our own magics to affect commerce, diplomacy, citizen loyalty, farmland productivity, etc.
The basic distinction between special effects (UI) and mechanics seems important to keep in mind, though. I'd very much support a fairly simple set of options on the in-game presentation side if it meant we had a pretty wide range of underlying functionality to play with.
If the plan is to have custom spell design possible within an active game, I think this kind of stuff would be a good candidate for a third major parameter. In the tabletop RPG Champions, basic superpowers like an energy blast or telekinesis can be modified with Advantages (raising the cost) or Disadvantages (lowering the cost). For example, to make a fireball, you add an Area of Effect advantage to a basic energy blast. To make that fireball design cheaper, you could make it harder to cast (costs more mana), or give it an activation roll (you can't always be sure it will work).
Awwww, maan.. You suck.
only if they have a spellbook maker or something like that so I can save "silly spellbook" and "tournement spellbook" as different.
Does Stardock plan on relying on third-party publishers for Europe distribution, and if that's the case, will these publishers handle localization of the game?
Or if you plan on handling worldwide publishing yourselves, would you rely on the community for translation?
Frogboy, if you see this and have the time to answer, I'd like to ask if the names of the nations are work-names or their actual names. I don't want to intrude on your creational process but if Humans and Fallen are both divided into adamant Kingdoms and Empires it feels a bit.. dichotomic.
Modular Spellbooks! Every time you research a spell, you can put it in one or several custom spellbooks that you define yourself. There'd be one big spellbook with all your spells. Going into it, you could define which other spellbooks it'd show up in.
Most people would likely only have two or three main spellbooks - World Spells, Battlefield Spells (if any), Buffs, etc. But with modular spellbooks, everyone could sort them however the hell they want! You could download that "800 Silly Spells, including Luckmann's Dancing Ferrets, Landisaurus' Thesaurus, Swicord's Archaic Stopsign, and Pigeonpigeon's Exploding Pigeons (not to mention Vandenburg's Flying Deathtraps)" without it completely cluttering every single spellbook, no matter how the game itself categorizes those spells (battlefield, etc).
It would be funny to see a Scandinavian Localized version. Mixed Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Take whatever words are the most archaic in every language when deciding what to translate to, and bam. I'd lol.
I think Gal Civ and Sins of a Solar Empire where eventually localized by third-parties yes.
Man, don't forget the Finnish!
In terms of quests, I've often wondered if there's not an opportunity to weave gradually developing, multi-episodic quests into a game like this.
This would be similar to the "Good / Neutral / Bad" episodes that came up in GalCiv 2, but with a thread running between them. So, if something comes up, and I send a character out on a small quest early in the game to rid the countryside of a marauding band of Orcs, maybe I see a reference to an Orc chieftain named "Thugrak".
Depending on the outcome of that first quest (do I find and slay the warband, do I hire them as mercenaries to serve in my own army, do I pay them money to leave me alone?), there's a branching storyline. Wouldn't take more than 3 or 4 "episodes" to create an engaging narrative thread, and I'm assuming you could build the scripting language so that you don't get the exact same result every time.
This is also the kind of thing that modders could go crazy with. Let them craft their own quests, with their own outcomes, and provide their own writing. There would be a lot of duds out there, but there would be a lot of gems that would rise to the top, and be easily included in our ongoing games.
Something along the lines of those pop-up text passages you used to get in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, if that rings any bell? Otherwise, it feels to me like we're left with the simple, engaging but somewhat tedious "Go here / bring me this / kill that" experience where every quest begins to feel exactly like every other quest.
That sounds like something out of Castles II: Siege and conquest.
Great game, and I loved having the storylines.
Ron, that was the game I was thinking of, I just couldn't remember the title! The storylines were the most fun part of that game, and definitely added some flavor "on the cheap", from a development standpoint.
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