End of game? Option to extend the world and keep going!

And why not begining with a big landscape? That woud have the same effect without coding anything more.

Personally I see a campaign working in the way that you describe, however I must agree with vieuxchat that for a skirmish game I don't see why you wouldn't just start on that larger map to begin with.

Well, the suggestion does have one advantage: if you generally outperform, outgrow and out-tech all your opponents, then you can have a new lot who you don't dwarf.

Although you should probably be playing on a higher difficulty setting anyway.

This might be strange in multiplayer, though would be kind of neat if it let players who had died but still were watching the game for some reason come back.

This sounds pretty cool but i foresee a few problems. First of all, if you had managed to defeat your enemies, you probably were getting close to maximizing your spell research or whatever else there will be to research. So once the cataclysm comes, you won't be able to get much stronger. You'll already have uber powerful dragons and stuff, and that might take some of the fun out of it. It would just be a matter of who could build the biggest army fastest. I suppose you could say that the cataclysm that open up the new continents caused your wizard to lose much of his research or something....

If it could be made to work it DOES offer some interesting ideas though. You would have to watch how you spend towards the end. Let's face it, once we control 75% of the map and victory is pretty much inevitable, who bothers to keep upgrading newly conquered towns and stuff? This way you would always have to watch what you do right up to the end because as soon as you "win", you'll be facing enemies just as tough and developed as you are.

Yeah, and how would the world destroying spells figure into this?  At some point the world is going to end, and how could you continue then?

I don't think the spells destroy the world so much as they modify... you would destroy a piece of land to create a gap in order to force an attacking army to take a detour as opposed to completely annihilating the continent that your enemies are attacking from. Stuff like that.

I think this is a good idea... It would be like several small states fighting it out, one becoming the victor and then the victor goes on to challenge other nations instead of a states. These could be specifically laid out as a certain mode of play so the rate of research is modified to accomodate a really vast campaign of sorts. Perhaps after you conquer your continent, you could then face off against other continents... Only if there was a dimensional rift border plane of existence that could connect two worlds... then you could face off against other worlds. O_O

That is what I would expect to see.  I mean MoM had the alternate planes of existance (other worlds).  a feature that no other strategy game has really mimiced to its fullest potential (underground is close, but not quite the same).  Its like one of the high concept features, so if this game claims to take anything that would be 'unique' from master of magic, alternate worlds would have to be it.

That would make it so you could open a new world that has the other factions (the ones you are bringing in with about your level of power) and a new world that is all open and full of monsters.  You would have to war against the new factions to claim  the empty world first.  Because if you ran and just started beating up the new faction, they would get the freash plunder and resources found in the barren/monster filled world.  loosing the capital MIGHT be worse, but how long does it take to cast the move-tower (or in this case I guess just walk your channeler out of the world) really?  If they managed to rebuild they might be stronger, so it would have options for sure.

good idea, but not so good if you are starting on already large maps, like others have said; you would probably have max tech and large armies. it would simply be a production contest.(considering the economic complexity of the game, however; you might still be able to reach even higher tech levels than before the expansion, and the whole experience could be somewhat end-game-apocalyptic if you play your cards right.) However, for the most part, the game would be dull, and an epic steamroll if you could beat other factions to the chase(the production chase, that is). The idea is innovative to say the least if you start on a small scale, and if the tech levels were ever expanding, then larger maps could work with this system as well...

Please watch out for a problem I've noticed with expanding maps - automatic flanking.  On a set map, you can hold an 'edge' and have one side secured.  If the enemy appears, fully developed, on your 'secure' border, you're going to get pwned before you can re-allocate your army.

Map expansion could be pretty fun. Although, if you're playing at the right difficulty on a very large map it should achieve similar results. After all, if the AI is good enough/cheats enough to present you with a challenge all the way through the game, by the time you've become a truly massive empire, chances are you won't be the only one.

Nonetheless, it would be a fun option. Maybe it would have to be an option you choose ahead of time. That way it can generate a very large map ahead of time, but start you out in one small region of it. Once you take control of your whole region, it would expand and generate opponents at a similar level to yours, and so on. One downside is that it would kind of force your kingdom to be very square-shaped most of the time... 

On the other hand, I remember one of the devs saying that the random map generator can use a preexisting "stamp", or piece of a map, and incorporate it into a random map. Given that, and if they want to include a map expansion feature, then it should always be available upon victory. It could just generate a new, larger random map with the original map as a piece.

Thumbs up, friend.

The new opponents could spring up on other continents via bridges (natural or otherwise). Your original domain would simply resemble the initial continent you were fighting over. The game would generate 3 or 8 more grids of similiar size to house your opponents and neutral pieces of land.

I think if such a mode was used, I would probably play it often. Gives you a really good opportunity to utilize end game techs.

If the GC2 campaign had worked along the lines the OP describes, I'm sure I would have played it through. And if sandbox mode could somehow support a "put me in a bigger world and let me keep going" command, how could that *not* add appeal to the game? I'd probably start all my GC2 games on Tiny maps if that were possible, and I've never made a serious try at any GC2 map smaller than Medium.

Why not just use the "all techs available" option when you start though?

The only way I can see a use for keeping the game going after a victory is to completely influence the whole map 100%for the sake of vanity.  The Total War games give you the option of trying to paint the map one solid color after completing your objective and it works great for that.  Maybe SD could implement minor and major victory options for a shorter or longer game, respectively.  Similar to TW where you must eliminate 1 faction and acquire 15 territories for a short win, or eliminate 3 factions and acquire 45 territories for long. 

Because teching up is half the fun.

What I would like is a system like this for a semi campaign mode. Let's say you start on a small map with up to four expansions possible. Thus tech and spell research is restricted to a fourth of everything before the first expansion. After each map expansion, another fourth of all technology and spells becomes available for research. Enemies newly appearing on the new map parts should have all or most of the old technology allready researched and have a functioning empire.

Map expansion could happen after certain specific goals are reached, like conquered half of the map, defeated two of three enemies, a certain amount of cities owned, etc.

Thus you would always get new adversaries with a similar strength that you could fight or befriend.

(Though I would guess that's it too late for such a feature. But it would be nice to have, together with changeable difficulty settings during the game.)

Now that would be nice.  I've often wished I could tweak the AI difficulty in-game while playing GalCiv2, to find my perfect setting quickly and easily.  I also forget what difficulty I'm even playing on in the first place anyway!

If they make AI difficulty tweakable in-game, I hope they include an option to prevent you from doing it. I, personally, have no will power and I don't want to be tempted to lower the difficulty if I'm in a pickle.  

I can see that being a serious problem actually. Hmm to avoid this, you could have the player's position always be the top-left or something.

Or just have a period of peace at the beginning of each new game. Perhaps the cataclysm kills off most of the military units - or there's an initial period of 10 turns of diplomatic peace during an agreed "rebuilding" or something.

see thats why I want to support opening new worlds rather than expanding maps.  Because that could be a problem for sure.  (on the other hand, you don't exactly build very secure boarders in MoM or anything like that.   And it wouldn't be too hard to ensure the newly spawned armies don't find your capital cities before you'd have a chance to get back to them.   Also, you really shouldn't strech out so thin.  You should have had a 2nd army in production back on your 'secure' boarder already.  If you didn't, it probebly wasn't that important of a location.

I really don't understand why the whole square map with 'safe' inpenetrable boarders still exist.  Back in the day I played a game called "enemy nations" with a completely wrapping map.  I 'knew' that almost all strategy games would be that way by 2005.   That being said, I was wrong since almost no strategy games since have (civilization being the only one that comes to mind with such an option.)

Personally, I would like a nigh-endless tech tree, so there is no max tech.  The ideal length of tech tree is one which has no end. 

@Landisaurus: It doesn't even seem like it would be a technical feat to perform... just not being a lazy developer. Hopefully Stardock will have such a thing!

Until it overlaps to 0 or to negative value.

Master of Orion 3 overlapped the credit value, to much money and it becomes a negative value.

MoO3's worst problem was overlapping their own buzz. Sooo many years in development, suuuch a craptastic outcome...

Try to turn it around and look at it the other way. One possible option would be just the opposite; rather than expanding, the map would shrink. I imagine this option as some kind of diplomatic aggreement.

I will not count with 2 types of maps: "standard" with borders and "civilization" one when one side of map is joined with the one on the opposite side. I presume the standard one, but I dont think this would be a problem in the other one too.

Example in standard: We have 2 vs 2 large super map, each player starts "at corner" and over time develops an empire. So at some point, call it Time of War, 4 empires stop expanding and meet each other in the middle; players can then vote to shrink the playground to the middle section. Once shrinked, you can only issue orders in the new play area, but your previous empire is not lost; trade still applies and you can cast spells...only your actual active playground is smaller.

Propably a cosmetic feature at first glance; but I believe that players, once they have focused view, start to think a little differently. They have smaller territory to work with which is much easier; and every plans will count only with these territories (since they will be the only possible). They will fight with their "starting town" on the focused view like with their capital; the difference is, if they should fail and lose the game, they still have an empire behind them.

Not that I am discarding the "expanding" concept but this one looks interesting too.

Another good way to do this would be when a small or tiny map is generated, in reality a max size map is generated (gigantic/huge) and only a small-map sized chunk of the top left hand corner is initially available for play.

Result? The game expands naturally once you "win" in the small scale, no compex map modification code is required and the landmasses all make perfect sense rather than looking a bit odd at the borders between the old small map and the larger new one.

The thing to remember about this is that plenty of gamers have a sentimental side. Sure some people who play 4x games are robotically logical but me personally... I get attached to my kingdoms, my heroes and my cities, and it's always with a touch of sadness I leave them for the next, bigger game.

If you can just keep expanding you keep your old kingdom intact as the core and expand outward. The strictly logical gamer is probably neutral about that, but the fluffy bunnies will love it to death. Then you've got your roleplayers who will also dig it. End of game / new game mechanic without even bending immersion, let alone breaking it? Priceless.

I absolutely think any kind of campaign should operate this way, and it would be great as an option to random map games.