Alright, this is my first post here on the forums, but the reason I'm doing this right now is that I was inspired by the whole "wild spaces" concept to write this.
I enjoy the entire process of building civilizations, but I think this would be fun to do as well. Does anyone else think it would be fun to play as simply a very powerful single hero type guy the length of the game, investing your essence into yourself instead of building an enitre empire? I doubt the game mechanics would allow for this sort of play, but I think it would be fun to do. From what I understand of the way essence works, you can use it to imbue the land to create cities, you can give it to your followers to make them stronger, or you can keep it to yourself to create a "Sauron" like ruler. What I'm suggesting is that instead of making cities, you can simply wander around the world and not be tied to being a ruler but instead being whatever you would want ot be in the game world, possibly allowing for a more RPG like experience.
You start off the game as any other channeler would. Except you wander around and explore, go through dungeons and look for important artifacts, work on the master quest, et cetera instead of building entire civilizations. You could eventualy make yourself into a "super" entity and hold diplomatic relations with empires and other entities (liek dragons or whatever) that have been talked about. Maybe, instead of working to create habitable land for an entire city, you could make yourself your own "Fortress of Solitude" kind of home. Perhaps you can gather support from various contacts throughout the game world to allow you passage through neutral terrotory (if it will be in) and other empires. I think this would open up a whole new realm of possibilities in terms of how victory can be achieved. For example, you could loot dungeons to look for special magic items and spend your time trying to hone your magical ability (like a different form of "research") until you can gather enough mana to "break" the game in your favor somehow, or you could spend your time wandering around, gathering support from neutral creatures, allowing you to get a powerful enough army to conquer the world, or you could even spend your time trying to assassinate all the other channelers with your own character, thus winning you the game, or you could simply spend your time doing the master quest yourself.
Again, I doubt this would be possible to integrate into the game, but I still think it could be a really cool idea.
Good idea... probably something possible from the modding features Stardock plans to include.
I think it's a great idea. I think the stock game offers about 70% of what you want. Nothing says that you have to use your essence on city building or other units. Just make your ruler essentially your hero. All your essence with go to him. He then goes around and enjoys the rpg aspects of the game (adventuring, looting, talking with other chars). I can't comment on the diplomacy part but I dont think it's impossible to have what you want.
The only issue is trying to mod out the starting city/city management aspects of the game. Not sure if you can do this or not...
In an mysterious tone a voice says, "If you mod it, they will come."
...what is it with me and movie references?
I hope this sort of playstyle will be possible in the vanilla game. Sauron is actually more like what folks seem to think a 'normal' channeler will be. He invested essence in Mordor and in the Nazgul, and, of course, the Ring. Gandalf, on the other hand, is clearly a Major Power in Middle Earth, but he wants no land or people to rule.
We haven't seen any details on game setup or what things might look like at the start of Turn 1. GalCiv2 begins with your homeworld established, but plenty of other TBS games start you off with just a unit or units. If Elemental starts with just your channeler on the map, then our choice trees begin with City or No City.
It would be especially sweet if you could choose to deliberately found something like a manor/tower that could include just a family or three to maintain the property, some warehouse space, and your study/library. That way you could do some limited trading and keep up with your spell studies while maintaining your role as a wandering meddler/advisor/observer.
Ya, it is a great idea. The only problem I can forsee is that unless you mod the channeler to be fun to control, battles may be a bit boring. A channeler would usually be in an army in battle, and so will need to be simple to control in battle to prevent it from being overwhelming in normal gameplay. This could leave the player of a single channeler as his army bored since they would have very little to do.
That assumes that playing Gandalf-style means staying alone. Perhaps some champions will join you as the Companions did in Fellowship, and surely some fanatastic creatures (at least summoned ones) could be maintained without a large infrastructure behind you. Heck, it might be possible to get enough 'income' from adventuring to pay a steady stream of gold to your Companions.
Actually you should play a few games of Dominions_3... you'd see that choosing an all powerful pretender(aka_channeller) does not guarantee long term victory. Also no army is ever bored, there's always something to patrol, scout, attack or defend. Within Dominions_3 you can choose a weak little mage or a tall powerful prince of darkness who causes regular units to run away in fear... even with this large selection of choices you do not know who will win the game until it reaches the center of late_game or the end of late_game. Duing SP games you might know by the end of middle_game.
I personally am interested in tackling the RPG aspect of this game in the mod space. because of all the RPG talk (I blame NTJedi the most) I have cooked up some sketchy ideas of things I'd like to try depending on how the dungeons turn out.
I personally imagine that you'll be able to get a set of heros. So like in MoM, each hero would take up his or her own tile. In an RPG only, you'd cut out all the units and stuff leaving only the heroes to explore dungeons and stuff. I figure we could have a fantastic creature or two join the party, like you suggest GW Swicord. Every 4th edition D&D party, errr, I mean Elemental party needs a dragon in it.
Here is an idea for alternate gameplay awhile back-it might be of interest to people new to the forum. I still think this would be a lot of fun.
-In a really really large game world (the type that Elemental could provide) other game objectives could be developed. For instance, given the potential for unit and monster variation in the game as well as excellent AI, it could be a fun alternative challenge to have a long, thin strip of a world (providing we can dictate world dimentions) and have two cities at either extreme end of the world. Each player would have a certain amount of time to build up a city/nation, then gather up your 10 best units (or something like this) and move them out into the greater world outside of your nation. The first player to have his group make it to the opposite ends of the earth wins (this might include a battle when the two groups meet in the middle). With smaller maps, this would not be very interesting but on a much larger map this sounds like fun to me.
What do you think?
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