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Where epic meets boring!

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Where epic meets boring!

The timeless question!

from Elemental Forums

Every TBS I've ever played has suffered from the same problem. At some point, maybe half way through or later the player either knows he has won, or knows he has lost. It seems to be in the nature of the genre that once a certain point is reached victory is either guaranteed, or defeat is inevitable. I'm hoping Elemental is the game that can break this trend, and find a healthy alternative to the "mop up" phase, and give player some insentive to continue playing, and keep things interesting right up until the end. There is hardly ever a large shift in power that can destabablize the game. Now there certainly are obvious ways to do this such as adaptive difficulty and similar things, but in my personal opinion I find games frustrating that punish the player for doing well and reward players for doing poorly. This seems counter intuitive Also most games have several paths to victory, but I find most of them anti-climactic

-What this post is for is essentially to say I hope Stardocks AI expertice will alow for a game that will keep us on the edge of our seats without frustrating us or be punishingly difficult. I'm thinking that they certainly can, as GalCiv 2 had probably the best AI of any TBS i've played thus far. One reason I bring this up is this game seems like it's going to be very epic. From sprawling maps to strategic battles this very well could be the game TBS fans have been waiting for, but we need to know where epic meets boring! At what point does the games epic scale become a liability? At what point does awesomely huge maps become 'OMFG when will my troops get there?' or 'How am I supposed to manage this huge empire?'. These are just some thoughts I have been having, and was wondering what you guys thought?

elemental
20,431 views 29 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Serik55, reply 24

Good point. One of my favorite aspects of 4X games is eXploration. Certain Civ IV map scripts can generate "new world" continents and islands. The first civ to explore and settle them can become extremely powerful from the additional cities and overseas trade routes.

I'm mostly familiar with Master of Magic and not Civilisation games, but if the same is true for all of these games it indicates a deeper problem. Apparently eXploration is only an early game thing ! This is not very fun, and not very realistic either. In real life, exploration (discovery) of other continents required advances in navigation, cartography, communication, transport... I think requirements for eploring further continents are not harsh enough in MOM. You can scout the entire plane with just your starting spell Magic Spirit. Fortunately there's still Myrror plane, and you need either a spell or a strong military force to break in. There could be more things like Myrror, and with different requirements. Myrror was mostly about having a strong enough army to punch through.

I think in this case limiting long-range exploration units would be beneficial to gameplay. MOM gave too easy access to fast, floating Magic Spirit. The point would be not to make eXploration strictly worse, but rather introduce more stages of exploration. You'd need better ships or other workaround to reach farther continents, for example.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

b0rsuk, what you request is accually already exists in CIV - you have to "explore" technologies that allow you to use ships, etc. This is not realistic too, though. But the point is making the game NOT to heavy on these high resolution details because is makes most people very annoyed and makes the game long, tiring and speards the focus on issues that do not add additional value to the fun/deepness of the game.

 

Anyhow, I wish we could see some Master of Orion Sequel that deals with these issues.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

I think it would be pretty cool if EWOM had alternative planes you could explore and colonize, though this might be a moot point if the normal game worlds themselves are as large as it seems they will be.

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting StoweMobile, reply 3
I think it would be pretty cool if EWOM had alternative planes you could explore and colonize, though this might be a moot point if the normal game worlds themselves are as large as it seems they will be.

Well there's a deeper fantasy immersion when being able to enter a myrror plane, undersea plane, caverns plane, underworld plane and clouds plane where each of them have several types of unique terrain/structures/creatures in combination with common terrians/structures/creatures... as compared to crossing a body of water to explore a different island or continent which has batches of the same earthly type of terrains/structures/creatures.