Why does the sovereign even need to be a unit in the game? Maybe im just a MoM fanboy but if the game is going to end when your sovereign dies then he should not be your main hero. I like the idea of the sovereign being holed up in the capitol city and not even moving around on the map. If the game is going to start by letting you have a hero then maybe it should be one of your sons... not the sovereign himself.
Wintersong, good points around the end, but I'm not sure I understand your first paragraph, so let me be more specific.
Cheat loading (or for Arun's sake, the "loading asset") is something that every single person will use, as Arun has illustrated, and I have numerous times although no one seems to notice.
Now, there are certain features and execution of these features that will make the "loading asset" more powerful, and other features less powerful. A very powerful sovereign unit that replenishes his power and hit points quickly and progresses based on XP from successful battles makes the loading asset very, very powerful and skews the use of the sovereign toward the player using as a unit, rather than a different purpose. After all, if your sovereign is in a city helping with global spells and such, loading your game doesn't give him the chance to become more powerful. A sovereign on the battlefield does after a reload (he can win this time, or he is in a battle he otherwise wouldn't have faught without his reload asset).
If the sovereign dies too easily (or there are penalties to sovereign death, but he lives on), the AI must be designed in such a way that it must tread carefully with its sovereign as a unit, otherwise it will lose the game (and is a crappy AI). That will involve engaging in less battles and gaining less experience per capita than the player. The player is released from this caution, even if they aren't chronic reloaders. So the player is given a freebie. How much of a freebie depends on how powerful the sovereign unit ends up being.
Its cool, I would just use him initially to build a few town's then horde him in my capital, thats what I usually do in these game's hes like your king in chess, hes mostly useless, but he can get you sometime's .
The only concern I have is that in many games, the AI fails to protect his hero/sovereign unit. This could lead to players exploiting this weakness.
But then again, Stardock did not make those games, so I remain hopeful in this aspect of Elemental's AI.
As I mentioned in a similar thread any single variable in the game which decides whether someone wins or loses should be a game option. Thus a diplomatic victory should be a game option... a quest victory should be a game option... the game automatically ending after 100 turns should be a game option... a sovereigns death equals losing should be a game option.
Certainly I can see moments where I'd want to play a game where I can keep playing after my sovereign dies and vise versa.
There's always diplomatic/quest/magic research/conquest victory conditions planned (There's those buttons when you create the map)
But when you design the Sovereign and his different options, you cannot be balancing thinking: "What happens if in turn 1329, the Sovereign loses a battle against a Dragon NPC and loads the game?". The only way to prevent players to abuse the Load function is to not allow it and have the game autosave each turn, offering you that savegame whenever you want to load that specific game. And that wouldn't prevent people crashing the game or something during a turn to avoid some bad results in the current turn and get the still good last autosave of the previous turn.
I understand what you mean but balancing the game according to a Load function sounds quite wrong to me, therefore I consider it unimportant to consider. In multiplayer people won't go cheat loading and in single player... well, it's single player. If someone feels like he must load the game every time something doesn't go well (be it because of Sovereign or because he lost a city to a Dragon or he changed his mind about the strategy he is using) let him. There is no ripple effet in that.
I consider much more serious the threat of the AI not being able to handle correctly the Sovereign (be it playing carelessly with him or not using him to his full potential). This would be one of the reasons that would make me reject the Sovereign as a unit. And would make me very sad too because I love the idea.
Hopefully I explained myself better this time?
And NTJedi is right about having the Sovereign Death as an option. I would have it always checked (as I do have Super Events in Gal Civ II) but it would be nice to be able to disable it for those not interested the same as with the victory conditions.
We have a sovereign that can heal the land by infusing their essence into it. Powerful stuff indeed. Why can't this same FINITE resouce be used to "save" the sovereign from certain death and teleport them back to safety. Sovereign death would have teeth but not equal an instant game loss.
As a practical matter, we would probably let players have their cake and eat it too.
That is, an option for "hidden sovereigns".
In this mode, the sovereign only becomes a playable unit in the game when the player wants them to and the rest of the time is simply "hidden" somewhere and is untouchable.
Yes I mentioned my worries for abrupt ending if a sovreign dies, but I also agree that having the sovreign in the game is a rather cool thing. In fact the best and most original solution ever, came (again) in Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, where the player's avatar is a wizard who gains no experience by fighting and has all advantages by staying hidden in his tower (quite realistically!!). Also if the wizard has built other (expensive) towers we would respawn in one of them as long as he still controls them. Notice that the big disadvatages of getting killed are 1 Not knowing where he is going to respawn (unless he only has one tower) 2) He loses all artifacts 3) All the active spells he has cast when he is respawning are dispelled (which is a huge disadvantage since they took him a very long time to cast).
So my suggestion is very simple: let the Signeur be on the map and respawn when killed in a asimilar way. A huge handicap could be that when he dies he loses all his gold or whatever object he was carrying on him! The Age of Wonders system is the best possible since it is the result of a long trial and error research by the game designers!
A la Netstorm: you have a priest(game over if dead), but when lowered to 1 hp he becomes immune and immobile and cant do anything, he then can be picked up(captured). The player can then build an altar, and using his own priest(sovereign) he can complete a ritual to kill the enemy priest.
Implentation: when " killed" sovereign is immobile and invulnerable , no magic no bonusses. He can then be captured and taken to enemy capitol, where he's ritually killed.
If he's incapicated, he can't do anything and needs to be healed or he regens slowly himself. Another option would be that he has to return to his captial/big friendly city and be (slowly) ritually revived, maybe with some extra costs as well(essence, xp) . This means that getting your sovereign killed in your own borders is not good, but not gameending since capturing him back and reviving can be done a lot easier in your own base.
However, outside your borders it will not only be harder to capture him back(less bonus, and reinforcements farawaY), if you succeed it will also take a lot of time to get him back to your capitol too.
And why not choosing what the sovereign is doing of his time ? He could be helping researching. Or upgrading the network system, or searching new heroes. Or helping the poor. Or helping the farmer. He could help warriors training (and they would get some "blessed" perk on training).
If he helps farmers he would get a few points in constitution. If he helps researching, he would get some intelligence points. And so forth.
Simple, give a Soverein a Very high Withdrawal, aka, if he is not the lone actor, a native 50% withdrawal. After-all, in FFH, people are learning that 90% withdrawal can be a very powerful thing .... units teleporting over mountains and oceans even due to "withdrawal" ... but I digress.
I agree that its perfectly fine to have a mortal Soverein unit. Adds to the "realism" of the game in a way. Also, sometimes multiplayer games adopt courtesy rules to avoid imbalanced-ness. What you describe seems to be "rushing" which, why stop there, simply destroy their starting city while the soverein runs away! I would say its much moreso "rushing" than sovereign chasing, although it could be a matter of perspective.
Also, it helped in Total War when most "sovereigns" were mounted units with an elite mounted body-guard intrinsically attached to him. (2 hp instead of 1 hp each)
To add to a Sovereign's surivability, when you kill an opposing Sovereign you could gain Divine blood equipment, which gives a one-time usage of immortality, or rebirth in the capital city. (an extra life)
some-how this argument reminds me of a guy talking about how "hard-core" some MMO's were. That if you died you had to start over, or somthing. Although it might have just been that you lost all your equipment and gold (which you didn't have in the bank) as well as a possible experience loss of some-sort.
basically wether we are talking about extreme (forget) -> mid-level Ultima Online -> easy WoW
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