i have played my share of strategy games and for me there is one rule that if kept in mind when designing them makes great games. and that is that every choice should be a difficult one. such as choosing between 2 upgrades but having the one that you didn't pick be closed off to you(unless you get rid of the one upgrade and then you can rechoose). i think these difficult choices make you form specific strategies.
in elemental one of its weaknesses is that you can pretty much have anything you want. there are no real hard choices. some would say that choosing techs would be a hard choice, but with the many library resources in the game i always have tons of research early on. the same goes for other resources as well. i always find my self with thousands of unused materials.
so without making this post to long, post the design rules that you think the dev team and modders should keep in mind to make the game and their mods truly memorable.
Like I said in another thread, Everything takes no risk to make. Want to build a city? Sure, just build a cheap pioneer that takes like 3 turns to finish and almost as expensive as 3 peasants and set sail! The city got destroyed by a random bandit because you didn't plan it properly? You can just train another one!
What's that? You don't know what magic to research? Just get all of them, it's not like researching them takes long anyway.
Need more research? Simple, just spam a bunch of cities and build studies on them.
Want to defeat your enemies? Design a random unit with the strongest weapon and armor you can and spam the hell out of it. It's not like it's gonna act differently towards a spearman, or a knight, or a maceman, so just 1 unit type will do.
Sorry if I sound so harsh when making this post, but the situation this game is going through is incredibly frustrating.
I have just have three rules:
1. The game has to be complicated, and deep. But also make the basics easy to understand.
Yes I am asking too much, but there are games that I think succeded in this area. One fo my favorite was the Earth 2150/2160 series.
2. Enviorment effects your decisions. Your decisions effect your enviorment. They should be a combination of difficult, medium, and easy decisions.
The Civilization games, and Alpha Centauri have done a great job of this I think.
3. Finally... this is probably my most important rule. It is possible to win the game by using more than one or two Strategies! If you have to use multiple strategies to win the game.... even better.
Best game I can think of that describes this is Earth 2150/2160 series. I will use Earth 2150: Moon Project as an example. Some examples of different strategies 1) fortifying and building long range high powered artilery (good for opponents who rarely scouted) 2) Dig tunnels and deploy units behind the enemy defense (if your oponent used the traditional forward defense strategy) 3) Try to research bombers early on, and criple enemy resource production by bombing the hell out of any attempts to expand 4) Scout and find out what weapons your opponent is producing and then produce countermeasures (if your opponent is producing bombers research AA missiles, AA guns, AA plamsa cannon, interceptors, etc. if he is favoring the long ranged heavy artillery build cloaking devices so he doesn't know where to shoot, dummy targets so he wastes ammo, and produce bombers/mobile artillery to take out his artillery, if he is slow to research shields research plasma/lazer/emp/tesla cannons and role over him).
man i loved that game! i never got the chance to really get into because i played it fairly long after it came out, but it had ALOT of cool ideas.
For me the most important thing is what I call "diversity":
There should be multiple factions with different game mechanics, bonuses and available units/unit components, which encourages the player to use different strategies when playing them, which increases the replay value.
Also there should be multiple unit types that are really different, and should be used in different situations - examples: fast cavalry units, good for scouting; hidden units that can infiltrate the enemy territory; melee units, some (like Pikemen) with a bonus against cavalry; ranged units; support units - healers, mages; siege machines that are helpful when capturing a city; flying units - available only to some factions; generals that increase stats of units etc.
Also an important thing is the "Depth" - not everything should be simple and easily accessible. The player should be forced to make important decisions that influence the course of the game.
Unfortunately Elemental doesn't have much of these things.
Edit: for Nack210, I agree with everything you wrote.
1) Choice - Like you said every choice should be meaningful and difficult to make, in that they are balanced. I always find it annoying arguing with people who say something has plenty of "options" when there are say 4 choices but 1 is noticeably better then the others. It's like sure a player can purposefully gimp themselves by choosing to but that doesn't really mean there are a lot of "options" for a player looking to play at top level.
2) Counter - Everything in the game should have a counter to it. Like the pikemen counter cavalry and such. If you don't take this approach it quickly becomes a game of "Who has the biggest stick." Much like elemental is currently
3) Location, Location, Location - Just like with real estate your location is everything. Where the battle takes place should have a fairly large impact on how things play out. For example normally Calvary would quickly close on archers and mow them down. While Archers places on a cliff edge with the only access a ramp in the back would shoot down the Calvary before they can make it up there to take them down. Without location your just playing a fancy game of paper rock scissors since you know what counters what on an open field.
Well said.
yeah i really agree with number one. to many games have the obvious choice.
i think alot of game makers could benefit from chess. a game that's just about perfect on a strategic level. units designed for simple purposes but when used together create tons of deep strategic choices.
to be able to really out think an opponent and put them in a bind, and they not even know how they got there. that would be excellent.
also, the devs should read "the art of war" by sun tzu. give them some ideas on mental strategy.
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