After reading Climber's 5 Unique playstyles by making each individual tech tree viable thread, I got to thinking about the Adventuring branch of research, and how little we know about it and how it will work.
The first, and probably most important thing we don't know about is dungeons. Are they even still in the game? The original beta schedule called for dungeons to be implimented in Beta 3 (the one that would give us the 3d engine). The updated beta schedule makes no mention of dungeons at all. Are they a feature that got dropped? Or "quests" synonymous with "dungeons"?
Excluding dungeons, there is also confusion over what exactly a in-game civilization would look like if you chose to focus on adventuring. A civ, military, or magic based society is pretty standard, but what about adventure? Personally, I have two thoughts on what it would look like (and both can be possible without excluding the other).
The first is the "Going Gandalf" method talked about way back before the beta started. It's basically just your sovereign, maybe with a small party of other adventurers. No cities, no armies, no anything else. Despite the novelty, I don't think this would really limit you too much in terms of possible ways to win. If you level up your small party a lot, depending on final balance, you could probably still manage to acheive a conquest victory; you would still be able to ally with everyone for a diplomatic victory, and I would imagine you would proably have a leg up on everyone in attempting to complete the Master Quest. You might have a problem with the Spell of Mastery though, since you wouldn't have a ton of cities to perform research. Or, you could take "going Gandalf" to the next level, and do what he did; use his diplomacy to create an alliance of like-minded factions against the other faction/s, and let them fight it out, providing assistance as necissary.
The other path I could potentially see an adventure-oriented society go is more similar to a "traditional" civilization. You have cities, maybe less of them than normal, that are built and designed to attact Heros out of the wild. You focus on recruiting heros, and having them attempt the Master Quest.
So those are my ideas on how adventuring might work, what are yours?
I hope we can create a 'MORIA' style dungeons. May have to use many tiles.
Exactly! Is there any hope for that being in the release? We haven't heard much of anything about that.
The alliance bit is dead on as far as adventuring goes. I want to have players creating heroic leagues that may be good/neutral/evil and align themselves accordingly. An adventuring player that chooses to focus on diplomacy would be fairly effective at creating protectorates and giving the endgame a whole new flavor.
Here we could meet neutral players that need money enough to become mercenaries for hire based with large numbers of heroic elites that could really stomp in a 10 player game. One of the allies could be a mage sovereign and the others could be other such specializations, giving the game a unique play experience every time.
I would personally enjoy seeing a game that doesn't have an army larger than 50 men, because everyone is using elite heroes and soldiers.
It may work like a normal game, but you focus on adventuring and the search of artifacts. Say, Birthright: Gorgon's Alliance had a lot of artifact that really helped even big countries, and they helped smaller ones even more. Notable ones are artifacts that increase the bloodline limit - it's an equivalent of essence in this game (rules are different, but it has some similarities). If amount of Essence is really important for a Spell of Mastery or equivalent victory, and there are artifacts that give Essence, that's a good enough bonus as it is.
With artifacts that improve your army and economy, as it was in Birthright, you're not that bad in general competition either.
Also, there is probably a way to level up your group of heroes so much that they will be able to kill everyone on the map by themselves. It certainly was possible in Master of Magic - i remember how my Torin The Chosen with a lucky random abilities (Lucky+Defence - so he got Super Defence), he was able to solo 4 AIs in 10 years. Well, really the point was to level him to a Demigod as fast as possible, i competed for a fastest Demigod with my friend. But it happened that Torin killed everything but two cities in a process
So, that's at least three options that were implemented in other games, and Elemental may use something like that too.
I'm really also looking forward to this path of the process. And what it all entails.
More on how the implementation will work, and how expansive dungeons will turn out being. Like the sovereign going on dungeon raids as it were, finding ancient lost whatevers...
And then see if there would be some tactical combats against various denizens of those lairs. And so on. And if we'll be able to bind a few "adventurers" to a band and have them adventure together, exploring these. (Hopefully there will be plenty of them.)
And the methods for paying freelance adventuring parties to go explore, and terrorize other peoples lands... but doing so as a neutral force, surely having taken money to do so but not giving allegiance to our kingdoms/empires.
Anticipation on implementation of this is building. I must admit.
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