This Thursday (October 30th) we plant o have an opt-in beta which is basically a preview of Beta 2 (not quite done but getting there).
This is what will be in there:
Minor factions in Sorcerer King interact with you purely from conversations. It’s not a trade screen ala GalCiv, FE, Civilization, etc. Instead, each one has specific things they can do for you (and to you) and gaining their favor requires doing specific things based on which minor faction they are.
Between now and release, the minors will get much more fleshed out. We’re just putting in the skeleton of this system for Beta 2. You will need their help to win (or at least, you’ll need them to not side with the Sorcerer King).
The Guardian Sovereign
The guardian sovereign is the master of terraforming the world. She can raise and lower the land as needed. If you need to wall yourself off (or protect shards by surrounding them with mountains) you can do that. If you’ve ever played Populous, you will get an idea of what we’re going for here with the Guardian.
We are really hoping that the Kumquat 3 engine we’re using that supports morphable terrain will differentiate Sorcerer King from other 4X games (such as Fallen Enchantress). We will be very interested in hearing the ideas of other players on other interesting things we can do here (and we’ll want it to come from people playing the game and not theory craft <g>).
The Tyrant is modeled after Saruman. He’s envious of the Sorcerer King and fancies himself taking his place. The Tyrant can destroy shards and absorb their magic. He too can cast the spell of making. In a way, he’s in a race with the Sorcerer King to accumulate the power to destroy the world for his own ends.
We got a lot of good feedback from Beta 1 and began implementing it here.
For example, if the Sorcerer King won, why is the land relatively clear of his presence? Well, in Beta 2, he has garrisons around the map and strongholds start peppered around the map from turn 1. These strongholds train units, build improvements (different ones from you) and look to get even more land.
They also spread the Shadow lands – land that has been corrupted.
Shadowlands are utterly ruined but, for players who have enchantment books, they can be converted into fertile lands and be built on by the player.
We also have Thralls in. As the Sorcerer King becomes more powerful, more and more of your citizens fall under his sway. Thralls are basically the same as units you build except, they don’t’ do anything. The cure for that is hope which can only be found through the sovereign’s skill tree (i.e. there isn’t a “hope building” here).
What we want to do with Sorcerer King is provide a clean slate to build on. That is, we imagine releasing Sorcerer King early next year and then having yearly expansions based on player feedback until people don’t want them anymore. This means Sorcerer King itself needs to be a fun, tight, innovative experience.
Right now, I can think of two excellent fantasy 4X games on the market that player can choose from – Endless Legends and Age of Wonders 3. We don’t want Sorcerer King to take away sales from these excellent titles so we want it to provide enough distinction that it’s not competing. This means we have our work cut out for us.
So let’s talk about the things that you might be worried about and the things we’re worried about:
Crafting
Frankfurter and others have made a lot of outstanding suggestions on how the crafting system in Sorcerer King might be extended. What’s ironic, is that we already have a crazy powerful crafting system…in XML. If you open up coreitems.xml you ‘ll see that items have Game Modifiers on them. This is a techie way of calling them enchantments. We just never created a UI for them.
We have been frustrated with the current crafting system in that it’s basically just a store with ingredients as currency. I don’t like it.
So this is what we are looking to add to it:
Recipes provide the means to both create items and enhance them.
Example:
You are vastly outnumbered
When the balance is right, players who aren’t playing on beginner will feel like they’re up against crazy odds. That’s because they are. You won’t win through traditional 4X means. You’re going to have to nuke parts of the world. I don’t think there’s any way around it. You’re going to have to use powerful, world breaking spells to keep them back.
You’re going to have to craft items and weapons and defenses that make the ultimate stack of doom. This game isn’t going to punish you for having a stack of doom. It’s going to punish you for NOT having a stack of doom. Make that stack of doom. You know you want to.
Your stack of doom, however, will be going up against a very smart opponent. That is, I’m going to be personally coding the Sorcerer King’s units actions in tactical. It’s not going to be dice rolling here. I’m going to be looking at what you got and trying to counter you actively. You will need to look at what spells the Sorcerer King has gotten (this will be in Beta 2) and be careful not to run afoul of them.
Sovereign Differentiation
Obviously the different sovereigns have different units and their own unique skill tree (our tech tree equivalent). The goal here will be to make each type of player very distinct.
The End game
Over the course of the game you’re going to run into a lot of quests that are where you get a lot of your special items, crafting ingredients, special units, etc. But you will also be making choices that will determine what kind of character you are (ala Ultima IV). So at the end of the game, when you meet the Sorcerer King, he will, in effect, be a mirror image of what you are.
Right now, the end battle is the same no matter what. But as we go forward, the Sorcerer King will be the anti-you. You won’t be selecting a specific Sorcerer King at the start of the battle but when you do reach him, you will be presented with a general summary of the way you’ve played that particular game and the particular consequences that will ensue as a result.
Sorcerer King vs…
For Sorcerer King to succeed at the level we want, we need to make sure it is truly unique. That is really stands out.
Below are the 5 areas we are trying to focus on to do that:
What’s next
So Beta 2 is still due in early November. But the Opt-In beta is this Thursday. Obviously there’s still a lot to do between now and then but hopefully this starts to show you where we’re going.
Please feel free to comment.
Very good point, Dr Franknfurter, but I think I need to explain what I meant a bit more. Thematically, I am in favour of having increasingly rare, artifact-level items craftable. But my issue with the proposed system is that of increasing marginal return from ingredients, ie gameplay mechanics. The return from a few ingredients grow the stronger the item is to begin with because of multipliers from champions and abilities. Two red gems which give me +4 fire damage is more beneficial than one red gem giving me +2 fire damage on two other units. 8 red gems giving me +16 fire damage is infinitely more beneficial than 4 red gems giving me +8 on two other units. This issue is again compounded because if a unit dies, the items are permanently lost immediately.
Simply put, I am punished for building many lesser items and rewarded for building few powerful items. I am tasked with building a stack of doom.
There needs to be a punishing diminishing return on the benefit from supplying additional spellbook levels, mana and ingredients towards crafting high-tier items. This keeps the artifact-level items in reach, craftable, but not superior from a gameplay perspective.
Interesting point. But I think there is already one choice, the trade-off between making inferior weapons early for rushing to shards and quests. Or to save them, fight harder battles or pick weaker enemies and wait for a super overpowered item to add to your hero.
I'm not sure I'd in favour of encouraging the player to make lots of lesser items like rings of +3 defence and equip them on every single troop. It'd be a micromanagement burden and the annoyance of losing them or making too many, or replacing them all when you get new recipes. (But it's nice to have that option remain and be viable, so I agree with you there). I'd much rather have a tough choice as to what my precious ring of power will actually do and which hero or troop I feel safe in entrusting it to. Anything to encourage that I support.
Items having a power level and level requirement would solve that. You'd want the trinkets to equip on your newly trained troops. Artifacts for (high level) heroes only. You'd have a self imposed limit, you'd want to make it low enough power for your troops to be able to use it, even if you could make it amazing right from the start.
For diminishing returns, surely that's easily accomplished by having the costs between each level double. So +1 attack is 10 mana, +2 20 mana, +3 40 mana etc. It's a balance point on the crafting system costs rather than a hard cap or absolute. [edit] any exponential growth in costs would work for diminishing returns. Doubling is just easy to see, but it makes a very low soft-cap. It's all balance and spreadsheets.
I found that in the version before the pre-beta2 that's just been released, items that are equipped to your troops get put back in your inventory when they die. I'm not sure if this is only battles that you win, or whether the sov "calls back" items that the user can't use any more in all battles. I'm pretty sure that you always get all items back when a unit dies, but not 100% sure.
It has been said often that the crafting system in SK was ingenious because of it's simplicity. It never got in the way of the games flow. If you wanted a bit more depth, you could have made some of the ingredients harder to find, or harder to win.
To change now to a complex crafting system, I think, would be a big mistake.
Honrstly, I felt finding nothing in goodie huts except crafting ingredients to be anti climatic.
Tattyhat - I'd say it's simple compared to crafting normally but complex compared to a shop.
As a shop (which it is currently) it has a poor interface (a big list, not icons as in FE/LH) with dozens of forgettable resources (unlike having just gold). So it's harder to judge how far away a craft option is, or knowing what other items are using those ingredients that you'll no longer be able to make after crafting. Also you have the issue of checking back after each battle or goody-hut to see if you can finally craft something useful. (Breaking flow).
I'm not sure if it'll be better or worse for you, the ideas and the implementation are often very different. Still, I can see why added complexity is annoying. But I'm looking forward to the ability to craft Excalibur... I would like to be able to name an item too. I hope that's in there.
I find any aspect of a game that resembles work (complex crafting, unrest, etc:) extremely boring. Why is it that no one make's games anymore? It's either 'whip me till I bleed or work me till I drop'.
I'd say complex crafting gives you more stuff to play with (so more fun for me at least), while unrest ties your hands a little. Playing with tied hands can be fun, but sometimes I agree you don't want to have to get out a spreadsheet or a pen and paper to work out what's the best way to play.
On unrest, fiddling with tax rates each turn (or ever) in FE/LH isn't something I enjoy. But at least unrest was integrated into the mechanics well - affecting lots, linked to production, tax, buildings and ZOC. It's just that some of the links and the display felt artificial and opaque to me. That magic gold would be modified by tax or magical inspiration reduced by background levels of unrest somehow never felt quite right. Things like the +2 per turn enchantments actually meaning +0.4... that seemed odd. As did number of cities being linked to unrest (the core premise of the mechanic). War, famine, hostile creatures in your ZOC all I can see increasing unrest... but not having another city nearby. Also not for it to be worse for it to be a friendly city than an enemy city over the hill. Sometimes mechanics make you scratch your head and ask, why did you add that? What were you intending to solve and did you manage to do it elegantly? (Did it solve city spam? Did it allow for tall or broad empires? Does it work in a logical and thematic way? Does it feel good, or fun?)
Unrest... kinda worked, but I'm not sure it ever felt right. Well implemented, but not always logical. Plot holes, if it were a story. Now fame=growth on the other hand. More cities = less growth per city... people flocking to the cities based on stories of your deeds, spread out amongst the cities that have room to house them. That was a mechanic I liked. It sounds positive if nothing else, fame and growth are both positives... unless you have infamy. While unrest is only ever a negative... unless you have negative unrest... or order. Which the game never had, sadly.
But it wasn't well balanced, unlike growth from food it wasn't capped e.g. it could have been balanced so that you attract 50 people per point of fame, split between all your cities. Much like growth from food is capped. Your fame also never went down (ditto with food, no famine or plagues) and the actual bonus was small compared to every other growth modifier so the mechanic ended up being overshadowed and then scrapped. A shame really. I always liked it. C'est la vie.
Huhu! SK brought something new to the table, and all was well. Some of the idea's that frog has for the game sound spanking, but there are others that threaten to label the game as (just like all of the rest), the same old tiered formats that everyone should be sick of by now. It would be a shame if it turned out that only half the game was great and the other half a sleeping pill.
I like the colour scheme of these new forums. They are dead sexy.
Regarding the issue of "losing" items on units that die in combat: I think that should be addressed as an optional skill on either heroes or the sovereign himself: "Salvage" levels 1 and 2: have a 50%/100% item recovery of slain units in combat. On the sovereign it would always apply, on a hero it would only apply if that hero was involved in the battle.
HenriHalk,
Items are returned to the pool automagically now. Is the request that items should be lost in future? I'm not saying I'm against it, just after testing last night I killed my heroes to test other things and noticed that for the normal troops items aren't destroyed.
Seems awfully kind to allow the player to cover their trained troops with gear, then get it all back if they are slaughtered.
I vote for partial recovery, maybe let an ability up the percentage chance of recovery.
there is another problem:
you can transfer items back and forth many times / turn - why have so many items if I can fight a battle, then move my best equipment to the second army?
I think that if a unit dies in combat, but you win the battle, you should be able to keep all the fallen units equipment. but if you lose the battle and all your units and heroes are slaughtered, then you should lose all the gear permanently.
I was thinking the same thing. If you lose the battle, you should lose the equipment. If you win the battle, you should keep the equipment.
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