When people think of 3D hardware and its benefits, they usually think of first person shooters and RPGs. But ever since Galactic Civilizations, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire started popularizing strategic zoom the possibilities have really opened up that 3D acceleration, now mainstream, let us do a lot of amazing things.
In Black & White, players could zoom out to see the world or zoom in to see individual villagers living their lives. It gave us a taste of what could come.
One of our biggest goals for Elemental is that we want players to feel like they are affecting the world. It’s a pure strategy game that happens to have elements from RPGs and adventure games in it simply because it enhances the strategic depth of the game.
When you start the game, you have no army. No city. Nothing. It’s literally just you.
And by you, I mean, literally a single man (or woman) wandering the world. When you’re looking at the map in its normal mode, you’re not seeing an icon representing you. It’s more akin to what you would expect to see in a third person RPG or action game. When you found a city, the people don’t just appear out of thin air. They come from the countryside to live in your town.
A major element of the strategy is getting people to come to your villages, towns, and cities. It’s not merely about cranking out enough food (though that is obviously a very important factor – people need to eat). It’s about making your civilization more attractive to those who are scraping by in the wastelands.
The founders of each faction are channelers. They have the ability to channel magic from the elemental shards of the world. One of the first moves of the game is to use that magic to bring life back to the world which in turn will quickly attract enough people to build up your first keep which in turn will let you start to build farms, housing, barracks, black smiths, mines, libraries, universities, pubs, stores, and so forth.
Pretty soon, you have a bustling cities researching new technologies, researching new spells, producing things for your kingdom that you will need, raising armies, farming lands, and so on. And while players can choose to look at this in the abstract, we’re going to do our best to make sure that players can also zoom in and enjoy the fruits of their labors in as much detail as we can muster.
WAY too complicated, considering the vision is to have tens or probably hundreds of thousands of citizens.
If I weren't masochistic, your constant sadism in posting things to come in the distant future would be quite irritating. I'm really loathing Civ at this point.
Considering the developing curve of any game, it will be interesting to see what will actually get included into this one. Room needs to be given for expansions, and time is always short to make a game perfect.
What I'm particulalry looking forward to is to be actively engaged in the BETA. I usually see games in the eyes of a non-hardcore gamer. Elemental is a kind of game that I'm especially drawn to. I've played so many already that it would be interesting to actually be engaged (indirectly) in the making of one.
Bring it on!
I just need to say that I love that screenshot The mere shadow of the notion that I'll eventually get to play a 4X TBS game that looks like that, and works like they say it's going to work (even if only half of it makes it in) makes me giddy...
In Civ / MoM / MoO and other games of this nature your first few turns have a HUGE impact on the game due to the escalating nature of production and growth. It sounds like Elemental will have an even greater scale of escalation, balancing you starting options will be fun.
Sammual
OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.... sigh. This is sounding like the game I've dreamed of making/playing. Strategy games need more personality and involvement. I absolutely cannot wait to play this game. Looks amazing. My preorder is already in and I look forward to contributing to the beta program.
This, from what has been shown so far, is already making it sound like it could be the most epic game ever made. KEEP IT UP GUYS/GALS!
n33t! The vision demonstrated in the OP is awesome!While for most games I’ll like to start from scratch, like what is described in OP. But make sure the RMG has the ability to make maps that has various shade of fully developed cities/opponents/map. There are a lot of times that I don’t want to play from scratch (on top of hand-made scenario), make sure RMG is capable of that. No just an empty map with blank landscape every time.If it is a world, my sovereign & friends should be able to age, marry, get sick and die of old age. If it is a world, I like to play as his descendents. Make the game 1 turn equals to 2 weeks (for example), so after hundreds of turn, my sovereign dies of old age.Devs , pls look at the AI PrePlay or Dynamic History thread to see what I meant.
Sounds like Devs are laboring some mechanism to do so. I am not especially hyper about this, but maybe SD can pull out something special or really unexpected.
Just how far can you affect this "world" you speak of? Can you kill off the parents of a child, repeatedly kill off all foster parents that come afterwards, and destroy every orphanage that try to raise the poor child untill that child is driven mad and plots to get revenge?
See the link below for an example:http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/05/28/episode-1133-pretty-obvious-really/
Il looks like the Caesar series of city-developement games.
You would construct houses, then crops, mines and infrastructure services, and you would see people coming, settling and working. When conditions of life were improving (through more infrastructure, libraries, temples, stadiums), they would multiply and others would come. When conditions were deteriorating, you would see some people leave your city.
Nice to see something like that. It really has a feeling of colonizing or starting anew a civilization in a wasteland like in the Pharaoh version.
I must admit I used to dream about a game where you start as one person and form or take over a kingdom and then it switches to a whole new level of play.
I like this idea a lot. It was actually really engrossing in hinterland to be developing my character, my party and my town all at once while exploring the countryside and adventuring... this sounds like the massively scaled up Nth degree version of that, and quite frankly bring it on.
Like a lot of people are saying though, this sounds pretty ambitious and you've got somewhere between 9 and 18 months or whatever is left to get it to release... I know we're at the early stages of development where it's common for a lot of ideas to be kicked around, many of which never make it into the release. But go for it... put them all in, go for your later release date (as torturous as this is) and make a game that will change the genre forever.
I want to play a game I can really get excited about, the way I did when I played CIV1 or Dune2 or for that matter MoM - you just need to get enough of these new or unique-combo ideas in and working and Elemental will be that game.
cheers,
Kul
*sigh*
Sounds awesome. As ever. LOOKS awesome too..
Can a non-standard development of your game work too? If you don't want to be the King of Channelira, can you be a channeler-for-hire, with a small outpost with extremely trained soldiers and wizards, going around selling your services to the highest bidder? Ending up, maybe, dominating some nations under vassalage?
not really. saying something is too complicated is never the solution
having base stats would be fairly easy, then seeing how they contribute to overall stats of a society. It doesn't have to pertain to every citizen, because after a while you could be able to create schools and what not and maybe then that would take care of increasing intelligence or whatever stat.
I just think it would be really fun in the beginning to approve or disapprove of the first 100, and you can get a head start the way you want, but if you chose wrong can still turn around later.
I'm very curious how building the populace of a kingdom is. will i need a female and a male to get a child? will there be limits to how often they can reprouce? so if i have 2 women, i can only get two children in a year? will their be children?
maybe later i'll read all the journals again if i misses something then post a big long thing
with your cities, will you chose cultural systems like slavery or fudalisam. also is human sacrafice posible?
Something a lot easier would be to have 99,9% of your citizens have standard stats. Once in a while someone exceptional is born with superior intelligence, or strength, or whatever - strong in ONE stat. And then extremely rarely you would have someone who was strong in two or more stats. I am thinking kind of along the lines of gifted people in Civ IV, but not exactly the same. Definitely less cumbersome than unique stats for 100,000 (?) populace.
like i said, once you have 100,00 this could be a useless system. maybe just do 100 like stated, and it amtters early on
we really need more info about how citizens play a role, and how creation of things works. is there going to be a default school building that will increase intelligence(random example)? or will i have to meet some standard? will my school be able to teach as much as the smartest person I have? if i add a research component how much will that increase what my school can teach?
I love the idea that you start with only one person and then build your own empire!
Also very good, and fresh, idea that you actually have to attract people from the countryside to your civilization.
Will we be able to choose abilities and looks of our sovereign before starting (hope so), or does each faction come with a (more or less) preconfigured sovereign?
Another in favour, this sounds like a great idea. I'm now even more excited about the game.
The suggestion that you could go off on a sort of adventurer mode instead of founding a civilization appeals as well. To that poster: try some Dwarf Fortress in the meantime, it has what you want.
I'm also glad to see Black & White being used as inspiration. That game had so many good ideas and such gorgeous style.
Not sure if your sovereign == channeler or not. I can't see the channeler aging and dying just due to the way the empire is dependent on their channeling ability.
However, aging population would be cool. King of Dragon's Pass had council members that aged, got better, or worse because of it, and eventually retired or died off. Having that set of individual characters and their lives be part of the game was really cool. It made it feel both more personal and more dynamic.
I could even see this extending to the diplomacy engine. Maybe a way to sway a small independent (AI neutrals) kingdom to your side is to marry off one of your top advisors' sons/daughters. Maybe getting one of your independent ally's people killed off might drive them to rebel.
Seems like a mix of Caesar (in a lesser extent), Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Spore's simplification qualities to bind them all together.
Of course that Elemental will have its own unique blend and hopefully with a better result than Spore's. I'm just using these past examples to try and get a reference of what to expect. Maybe other games can be better used as reference examples?
So far, the plan seems to be for most population 'growth' to actually be migration from blasted lands to the lands that channelers restore by using (spending) essence.
I'm one of the folks who would like to see a timescale that ran across multiple generations and included either agelessness for channelers or a succession system, but I would be surprised to see it happen. Haven't seen the slightest encouraging peep from the devs for any of that sort of calendar-related talk.
Don't completely give up hope! The devs are very careful about what the say... They've revealed all sorts of information that wasn't ever referred to previously, so you never know what's in the works. For me, either way has a sort of epicness to it: if the game spans multiple generations then it becomes an epic saga about a nation, while if it spans just some years, it'll feel epic just because so much will have happened in so short a time.
The game ends when the channeler dies. The campaign is about two channelers beating each other (more or less according to speculation). Not likely a succesion/aging system in place? Surely for the campaign not but maybe they could add it to the skirmish/sandbox if time/money allows it.
Lineage could easily be added but doing it very well so it feels important would take some time. It might not be in at launch but I would suspect that if the demand is there Brad would have it added in a patch or expansion.
Edit: two words: Super "SOLDIERS"
In my personal opinion putting the emphasis on super instead of soldiers would imply a lack of humanity or a focus on technology / magic. Placing the emphasis on soldier adds to the humanity of the person in question in addition to their ideals, values, and what they are fighting for. In short every real soldier is human(oid) and could be a "super solider" but not every "super soldier" is human(oid).
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