I'd second the comment on tactical combat being a must-have for a Fantasy TBS game.
In a game environment like Gal Civ, delegating combat decisionmaking to the AI is totally compatible with the gameplay--it fits fine with a "competing societies collide" kind of theme.
But not being able to issue orders to your heroes in fantasy combat? That'd just be too much of a departure for the genre. Ever since
LoTR, fantasy has been about the individual characters.
One of the things that MoM did so well, that so few other games have done since, is to create a more dynamically hostile environment, as opposed to just a static environment where the only competition came from opponent players. I can remember beating off wave after wave of Phantom Warriors rampaging out from the unexplored Dungeon near my city, until I finally had enough troops to venture into their lair and clean them out myself!
That really helped to avoid the linear "Colony Rush" phase that handicaps most of those TBS 4x games, and made for interesting trade-off decisions early in the game.
I have enough confidence in the Stardock staff to where I don't worry that they'll just give us "GalCiv in Etheria" or somesuch. But, it's also obvious from the way Draginol talks about the design decisions in the GalCiv games that designing an AI-friendly game system in from the start will be a top priority.
There are a lot of flavors of tactical combat here, if they're interested. [
Heroes of M&M and
Age of Wonders both give us refinements of the original
Master of Magic combat model, although I think most AI has difficulty modelling such open-ended conflicts.
Disciples and
Warlords IV both gave us flavors of a slightly different tactical combat model that didn't play out on a map per se, but seemed a bit easier for AI to handle.
Etherlords gave us an interesting example of a card-based tactical combat system, albeit if they wanted to head in that direction, I'd strongly encourage them to look to the recent board game release,
Battlelore, for something that is a hybrid of board-based and card-based combat.
Dominions and
Legion:Arena are both interesting examples of game systems that emphasized scripted orders as a means of putting the AI and the player on a level playing field for tactical combat.
I'm intrigued to get more details on what this game might be about. In any event, I doubt we'll see it before 2009, so I guess I'll just content myself to wait for the first chance to pre-order!!
