Elemental: Community Support Part I

This is excellent news and will add great replay value for the game! 

Here are some features the community would be interesting in modding: 

1)  New Races/Nations:  And the related details(spells, technologies, items, abilities, units, buildings, etc.,)

2)  New Terrain Types:  examples= Lava, Snow, Caverns, Tar Pits, etc.,

3)  New World Map Structures: examples= Gates, Mazes, Altars, Graveyards, etc.,

4)  New Channeller Shapes/Designs: examples= Saurons immobile flaming eye, Medusa(Gorgon), etc.,

5)  New Battlefield Skills for Units/Champions/Channellers: examples= Turn_to_Stone, KnockBack, Possess, Spray_Web, etc.,

6)  New Abilities for only Champions&Channellers: examples= Tunneling, Alchemy, Stealth, Assassinate, Tracking, Hibernate, etc.,

7)  Adding new game elements: examples= Merchants Guild(Another Trading Method), Arena Death Match (Each_Player_sends_1_Champion_to_Fight_for_the_Prize(s)),  Traveling Weather randomly moving on the World Map, Natural Disasters(Plague), Mercenary Boards(Temp_Hire_Mercenaries), etc., etc., .

8)  New AI Personalities:  Custom AI Scripting allowing the creation of unique interests, personalities and behaviors for the AI opponent.

Hope this helps.   

What is the scope of this? Are you aiming to have the game be so moddable that one could recreate, for example, a Civilization clone with it?

If yes, that would be awesome. (Although I know I shouldn't expect so much from any game.)

Sounds great.

What was the engine for Empire: Total War made for, if not specifically for a strategy game?

Greater developer support for customising a game is always appreciated though. Fans will get around recalcitrant developers if they must but the more open the game is, the more likely you'll get the "Counter-Strike" of strategy gaming.

Hm, I wonder how this game will evolve... I guess, it depends a lot on how user friendly the modding tools are. Can someone, who has never modded before, have an easy start with it and change the game to a total new one? Perhaps even without looking at code at all? This would be a daring task... And a fitting achievement for stardock as I learned to know it.

It would end up in having creator programs for everything: Units, houses, cloth, plants, beasts... Even rules for the game mechanics...

Edit: I know design programs will be included, but it seems as if this is becoming larger then I have ever imagined... Righ now the ELEMENTAL project sounds to me like getting a good turn based strategy game with the possibility to make any turned based strategy game you desire...

If you could make a Carcassonne total conversion you could probably make one for any board game as well. Ah, the possibilities...

And even better: Master of Magic reloaded.

It was made for a loading screen game!

Nice list. I wonder how the AI will be able to manage correctly all this kind of stuff.

Very nice to see such a strong focus on it.  I'm already pretty sure I, hopefully with others when the time comes, will endeavor to make a Roguelike from it/out of it! 

A damn solid list of suggestions so far; they all work for me.

Mikey Likey! Ah this is just another evolvutionary step for gaming, I'll probably have more fun making stuff than actually playing the game...well as long as modding will be noob proof...I'll admit it I'm a noob when it comes to modding (except when downloading them)

Such as, or is this one of those things only a professional would understand?  (The only thing that comes to mind is draw distance -- you need to be able to draw a lot more in terms of distance for a strategy game)

Keep those suggestions coming! Great Work!

So we would be able to mod a Hex grid into Elemental?

Would this involve licensing the engine or will a scripting language be included in Elemental?

Sammual

All hail the frog! 

Someone should re-make Archon in the Elemental engine.

If Empire really is a brand new engine, that would be true.  As far as I know, they haven't come out and said they rebuilt it from scratch.  They've definitely modified it heavily, but you can do a lot of modification.  Just look at what Valve did with Half-life.  They took the Quake engine, modded the shit out of it, and put out a game that looked far better while maintaining excellent stability.  They then took that same engine and made countless modifications over the years, eventually becoming the titan of the first person shooter that is the Source engine.  It's not the same engine, but it's not really a new engine either.  A technicality perhaps, but it would explain his statement.  Most strategy game engines are either modified versions of their predecessors, or engines from another genre entirely.

Can you make more complex than Spore yet just as accessible?

As in making First person shooter ?

As far as the Empire Total War engine goes, I would say it is the same base engine that was used for previous total war games, it just has a few more features and updated graphics. Of the coding from the previous total war game, I would guess around 50-75% of the coding remained unchanged.

What I think more companies need to do for their strategy games is adopt the zoom scalability so wonderfully captured in SoaSE and GalCiv 2. In total war, you can only see part of your empire at a time, and on the battle map you can almost never see your entire army at the same time. Most strategy games have the somewhat small ability to zoom in/out , and so it feels like playing your game in a box with a low ceiling.

Time to be a negative nellie and scream about how this will fragment the player-base and end up preventing people from finding others to game with.  Of course, I still play the V&K Middle Earth mod for Diablo II... 

man, I have to say a carcassone mod would be quite a site to see.   What a great board game.   While we are at it, we could have a settlers of catan mod too

Well, disregarding balance issues for submitted content, I think people just need to be less picky about what they play.

The greatest support you can give me would be bears and a variety of stock mounts.

I have been a long time fan of Stardock and I am very much looking forward to Elemental.

Even though I have every expectation that the base game will be a blast to play, I am excided by the stated goal of mod support. To me mods to a game add a huge amount of replayability and enjoyment to games, sometimes even more than the base game.

The two best examples of this for me are Team Fortress and Fall From Heaven 2. Fall From Heaven 2 is a total mod of Civ 4 (and based on the devs stated interest in civ, I really hope you guys have played it). It turns civ 4 into a dark fantasy world and adds in spells, real religions, changing game world (hell literally can take over the world), and many other changes. The mod was only possible because of the huge amount of support that Firaxis built into civ 4. This allows the modders to not just modify some config files here and there, but to write new python scripts, and even new c code and custom dlls. The access level given to the modders is amazing.

I mention all of this because I would love to see a similar level of mod support from Elemental. While only a few dedicated fans would make use of it, many many other players would be able to benefit from what they come up with.

Since el presidente has posted on the FFH2 forums and shot the shit with the designer, I'd guess he's played it.