Some old ideas, some new ideas, both big and little that need to be considered to improve the Game.
Races need to be each unique either through appearance of armor and weapons, and/or through bonuses and penalties. Each race should look different in their armor. Having slightly different eye/skin/hair color among the 6 tribes of humans means shit under the armor, they all look alike.
When creating a custom faction, we need to be able to tell which bonuses don't work with Empire or Kingdom, seems simple, but apparently not. Also, when I am choosing colors for my faction, I should be able to see it modeled on the...um model on the right. Hard? Think not. Also, I should be able to change skin and hair color for my factions.
I should be able to play agaisnt enemy factions ,and I should have the ability to design their AI like I was able to do in GalCiv2.
When starting the game, I should have the option of how many neutral factions there are, how many resources there are, and so forth, options, options. Things that we had in GalCiv2.
Minor factions should be a little more active, and have a large diplomacy rating so AI doesn't just wipe them off the map for no gain. Let them at least arm themselves, have a few spells, and maybe a few troops and send out caravans. They should even be able to create a little army, and maybe have special troops that can help allies. Like if the Orekeepers ones had troops with that pressed iron armor and longswords they make, they could at least protest themselves, and if they are are conquered, instead of them disappearing, that neutral city is special and can only produce their special troop and items, making them both valuable to keep alive or conquer, depending on how you play. Also, non human factions would be nice.
Quest are too few, and fairly pointless. Why put the work into getting the Sovereign sword, when by the time I have it, I have better weapons? Orthe Sov Shield I can buy. Make quest items special for the whole game and unique. More quest, and have them pop up randomly. Also, maybe a random event that is centered around one of your champions and they have a quest. "Viy, you must seek out the great Sage at Darkroot Mountain" and then Viy gets some special item or ability. Something like that.
When you take a tech that produces the resource, please make the fucking resource pop in my fucking area. Great, I got darklings that showed up in Kraxis control, hope they pick the same tech and theirs shows up over here so I can use it. Dumb people, really.
And Stop letting other factions create cities in your area of influence. So stupid.
Sovs need to follow the int requirements of casting, or you need to make int more important to the damage that spells cause, otherwise, I will continue to make retarded Sovs.
Make allitems usable for everyone. Why can only humans of the race of men can wear the Azor quest armor or the the pressed iron armor and why can't Ambrose wear human armor? Frustrating.
Add "wizardly" items to the game. Maybe I don't want all my Sovs, champs, or children to be iron clad warriors. How about magic robes that don't offer as much protection as iron armor, but add dodge bonus, and magic staffs that work like bows?
We need separate light armor tracts and heavy armor tech paths, maybe I don't want to specialize in heavy steel armor, maybe I am a iron poor nation, so I specialize in armor that needs less iron, but provides more mobility and agility? Add back in the scale and chain armor and make them an alternative to the heavier, more iron costly armors.
Champions need to be more diverse and interesting. They are all human now, they all have boring clothes or leather armor on. Wow, boring. They should be each of a race or nationality, and list it in their description, "Viy a Yoren", or Tarth, or whatever, and since every faction has a unique look to them, armor wise, they will stand out in your army, most likely as they have their own armor look and color scheme. Neat, huh? Also, a Champion with a city based profession, like farmer, should gain exp every turn he sits in a city that uses his skill. They should have different personalities, and maybe form rivalries or enemies with other champions, they should have loyalty and a glory stat, if you are not giving them chances to gain glory, like combat then they get less loyal, or if you keep using a farmer to fight, then they lose loyalty. Champions shouldn't be killed, they should be captured and put in prison and traded on the diplomacy screen.
Tactical combat needs a complete overhaul. Units need ZOC, meaning that you can't just rush past the unit or through units. Spells and Arrows need much smaller ranges, you should have to position yourself to land a good shot. We need meaningful terrain. 3D terrain like in Final Fantasy Tactics battles, or at least rivers, mountains, forest, things that change movement, line of sight, and dodge bonus. Movmentand positioning, make up, of your armies should be very important. Unit types, like Heavy, light infantry and mounted should provide bonuses based on the terrain that the battle is fought and who they are fighting. Look to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Brigandine, and Final Fantasy Tactics for ideas. They are old games, so don't tell my the new fancy game cant do it.
No reason to have the entire kingdom disapear like a fart in the wind when the Sov is defeated. That should casue the faction to have a new leader rise up, either a child or a Champion, and maybe the remaining empire splits up into factions. Also, see Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Need random events, like the ones that GalCiv2 had and FFH2 had. Also, more interesting world places, like FFH2 had that trapped angel, that stonehenge thing that provided certain bonuses with some of the factions. Or giant dragon bones, neat shit like that, that makes me think, oh cool, this part of the world is special, unique.
Thats's it for now, sure I will think of more.
On succession:
Would it be possible for a faction to lose the ability to win if their sovereign dies but continue on. They could become for intents and purposes a minor faction. One that doesn't expand etc. but under the leadership if the next in line. Obviously this wouldn't work from the players perspective, but for the npc faction it would get rid of the annoying 'fart in the wind' disappearance.
Good stuff, but there is still the issue of manually controlling a stack for patrol purposes.
I really like the idea of researching caravan armaments and/or being able to assign stacks to guard a caravan.
Or even being able to assign the caravan route as a patrol route to a stack/unit.
If watch towers were (re) introduced they could affect a safe zone that could keep the monsters away. Maybe only if they were manned.
Don't mistake my post, I like the idea of a warning, but feel that in and of itself is not necessarily the complete solution.
These are solid ideas. I love the concept of caravans but i stopped using them because its a hassle to scan the lands. The patrolling would be a nice feature so i'm not constantly checking the routes for monsters that may spawn right next to the bloody caravan.
Yeah, I'm with you. First step is the warning indicator, then we see where that takes us. It might be cool to have a building (guard station or some such) that protects caravans from attacks. But that turns what should be a dynamic game aspects (clearing your lands, making the area safe) into a mandatory improvement build. Ideally I would like caravan attacks to be a dynamic consequence of things the player has done wrong, we will see if we can hit that.
I would say that instead of having to micro the building, maintaining,and defending of caravans, we simply take out the idea that we need specific units for them to begin with. As you said, the idea isn't to mimic what's going on, but make it a dynamic system. So routes are first build by caravans and then the benefits 'just happen' over time. Monsters can essentially siege routes as cities can be sieged and this reduces the benefits (until you're actually taking a penalty) until the monster is cleared; monsters naturally take damage over time (with reducing by armor) and this damage scales with time/tech. Sieging monsteres get a ! or whatever over their head. This way, the player doesn't have to worry too much about cleaning up smaller monsters (they'll end up going away in a few turns at most) but particularly powerful monsters have to be dealt with. The player also doesn't have to worry about micromanaging parties of units specificially for caravans and making sure they'll all up to date on tech, etc; this is essentially automated for them. After all, there's not much reason for a player -not- to be doing these basic rote tasks; we don't want players to spend a chunk of time simply checking each caravan route for unit attrition and whatever every turn. We only want them to do so when it's really important.
one idea- caravans get a str value based on the power rating of the faction, so 1 darkling cannot take out caravans once you get strong enough?
Actually, you know what - I personally *really* like the sieging ability suggest by sagittary. Since the caravan is a stretch of road between two towns, it makes sense that killing one particular wagon on this road would not kill the road or scare the merchants away. Now with the wandering monster gradually weakening the road and taking away its income it gives you plenty of time to send someone over to deal with the problem - which i think is what Derek is aiming for.
Combine that with some kind of radar or intruder locating system and I think you might have a winning idea.
edit: In fact i like the idea so much i'm gonna give sagittary right now
Since we're usually looking at the characters from the top down or from a diagonal view, they could just give us like 8 different types of shoulder pads. Sure it's sort of the direction of Warhammer or WoW, but they would standout from a distance (aka even zoomed out), and they would be somewhat simple to make. One set could have 3 spikes on both shoulders, another could have 6 spikes on the left shoulder, another a lions head, etc.
Oh god please no. No shoulderpads.
But you do bring up a good point - in order to make soldiers visually distinct, we don't necessarily need to have a custom model for every single piece of armor they're going to wear. If we could just customize the appearance of one or two more obvious pieces somehow - like cloaks or helmets, maybe shields - it'd go a long way towards having soldiers that are easy to distinguish from each other (whether we're trying to distinguish my swordsman from my archer, or any of my guys from any of the other kingdom's guys).
Also I'll put in another vote for customizable armor colors (just like the clothes, which are a wasted effort when you cover them with armor). Obviously this isn't as good as having unique armor models, but if the models are too much effort for the benefit they provide, then it seems like a cheap alternative to at least be able to add a little color to generic armor.
You know, thats actually not a bad concept. They might not have to create entire new sets of armor, maybe just the chest or helmets, just enough to be able to see a difference and give a different "feel" between them.
Ha, I didnt see Austinvn post before I posted, great minds think alike.
How about giving each caravan a driver (a character who can gain levels), and a small escort of body guards. Allow caravan battles to be fought tactically, and give the option of trying to outrun an enemy before the battle begins. This is mostly to fend off wandering monsters, but also small enemy forces. The lands are dangerous so you would think a caravan guard would make sense.Drivers and caravan guards would only be useful from within the caravan system and could not be transferred out to armies, or vice versa. Guards could be upgraded over time by purchasing better equipped ones, and maybe the caravan itself for faster travel which would increase income, and also help with outrunning the more powerful enemies.
Just a thought.
I agree, they don't have to provide a bunch of different options, just enough to give it some mixture. When I mentioned shoulder pads in relation to WoW/Warhammer, I wasn't really talking about the abnormal sizes, but rather the options to make characters look different (spikes, single shoulder, etc).
I still think a min strength should be required to attack caravans. One peasant with a club, wolf, or darkling shouldn't be able to take out a caravan.
If everything else on Xia's list gets fixed, I can live with caravan micro...
Derek - how about a separate menu to manage trade routes? Something akin to the mini-map that shows cities, colored routes, threats, and a ledger type menu showing turns to upgrades, how many used/free trade routes per city, all that jazz? It would be cool to visually see the caravan connections and manage them from a dedicated menu. It's kind of a pain to manually find and click on the caravans to see when the roads will upgrade and such. However, totally agree there are higher priorities. I do like the threat warning improvement though - having a caravan destroyed by a monster you didn't know existed does suck.
I think this nicely summarizes it all.
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I would have added in a paragraph about spell improvements but hey. Also I think the path of least resistance for improving minor factions is to make them major factions. Obviously this is all going to take awhile to implement, if it ever happens, which at the rate things are going I'm wondering it it might not. Looking forward to giving the game another go after a lot of this has been put in the game. I had fun with 1.08, when the game became playable on my machine, but not enough fixed/added into 1.1 to keep me going. I hope Stardock is not building the entire game with just the AI in mind. But if they are, I guess it is their game.
Not really sure how concerns about caravan micro came up. Sure it could and should be better but mostly it was just an annoyance, not a fundamental absence where something should be. More pop-ups I don't see as a good solution.
If I may add my 5 cents here - custom factions were essentially the only thing that lifted GalCiv over other Space-4X games in my book, and the only thing that's keeping me from buying Elemental is that feature not being implemented* (yet). Maybe I was hoping too much for a "fantasy-themed GalCiv", but I guess I am not alone with this specific wish. Anyway, all the other issues appear important as well, although I can not comment on that before having played the game properly.
Edit: And the developers (probably for good reasons) not seeming interested in doing so. Note that I am not talking gameplay-differentiation, only renaming and changing portraits/logos/colors and so forth. Things like this mean a lot to me, even though they may be aesthetic changes. Maybe I am too much of a roleplayer for this, but I like playing with and against creations of my own imagination instead of someone else's. Truth be told, that's why I love games with a lot of customizability.
there IS a way to do it, only its complicated- there is a 'factoin creator' optoin in the 'workshop' section but there are some bugs in the coloring.
I've actually found it easier to mod my own factoins in. What i do is create a faction with the 'faction creator', then copy and paste the XML of the 'vanilla' faction with the colors and names created from the faction creator.
I don't give two shits about the caravan in any way, micro, automatic, couldn't care less, its not interesting or thematic and only function it to make roads. Don't care, the easier you make it to ignore, the better for me.
Hey, I didn't realize that. Thanks for the hint! There might be hope after all. Now I just need to get back home where my PC can actually run Elemental...
Dear SD,
Please put as your #1 priority the crashing and OOM issues.
the end.
Hmmm, that may have been the original intend but with so many heroes to care for, cities to build, trade, diplomacy, exploration, neighboors to manage... It is just that, a fantasy empire building game (Civ Fantasy if you will). There is nothing other that binds you more to your sovereign then it does towards your other heroes, in fact given that you loose your empire if your sovereign dies he's best suited to spend his life locked away in the capital with an escort to quickly move him off in case of a threat.
Imho, if you make it so that the appointed successor inherits the sovereigns abilities and stats if below them or gets an additional bonus if he's above them along with all the goodies and stuff it could work, maybe even consider a single death to a sovereign to be acceptable but turmoil (ie loose the game) to hit when the successor dies off as well before he's being succeeded by one of his offspring (minimum rule of 100 seasons or so). This will enhance the whole attachment and agency stuff imho, it sure makes more sense then to have this immortal sovereign in each kingdom or empire. Add in naming your kingdom/empire and you can have them automaticlly be named %name% the II of %country% etc... Also opens up the posibility of assisination units/spies etc.
I hate the idea that if your Sov dies, you get to replace them with an equal or better Sov. No incentive to keep your Sov alive, the Sov should be scary powerful, A champion or even child that replaces them should be vastly inferior, the Sov should be the thing of legend, while the champions and children should be heroic, they should be less than the Sov. If the Sov does and then someone else takes over, you should be penalized for it, not rewarded, but still allowed to continue the game.
I agree.
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