Sorcerer King Beta: Week 2
SorcererKing Forums
Greetings!
HOLY COW! Things are coming along great! And much of the reason for that is you.
We’ve gotten a huge amount of really constructive feedback from the community. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of “Early Access” needs to be sent to the Sorcerer King and/or Stardock forums.
Your wish is my command: UNREST!
We got a lot of requests to bring Unrest back in some form. But we wanted to do it in a way that connected it tightly to the overall game.
So here’s how it works:
Every 100 points of Doomsday generates 1 unrest for a given city. Every point of unrest reduces logistics by 1.
Simple right?
And yet, the consequences are far reaching. If you city spam, you can really cripple yourself because the unrest is not connected to population. It’s per city. Unrest represents your people falling under the thrall of the Sorcerer King.
As the Sorcerer King becomes more powerful, your citizens start to worship him instead of, well, you. This is per city so be careful about spamming cities.
Unrest sucks away at your precious logistics
Your sovereign’s tech..er skill tree will have the ability to lower unrest per city. That means, of course, less magic for mana and learning spells.
The player gets to take off the kiddie gloves: Trade magical power for more fertile tiles if you dare!
As you know, in Sorcerer King you can only found cities where there is food. By default, those places can be few and far between. We did this so that new players wouldn’t wreck themselves by overloading on cities without realizing the potential consequences (the unrest mechanic just reinforces that).
But what about experienced players? If only there was some, I dunno, magical way to let people build more cities.
Hmm. Magic.
Hence, we are bringing back the restoration spell. If you have the mana, you can revive the land. The Sorcerer King likes that sort of thing of course but it means you gain a lot more control over what types of strategies you want to employ.
Sorcerer King’s terrain engine – how much are you willing to destroy the world to save it?
The terrain in the Elemental games have a distinctive look. We didn’t realize that it was so distinctive until the Sorcerer King beta came out and people made a point of saying that they could tell it was related to Fallen Enchantress. This was a highly useful bit of feedback because, to be honest, we didn’t see it.
The players are right. Elemental games do have a distinctive look to their terrain. There’s a reason for that.
When the engine was being designed, we required the terrain to be as morphable as Populous. Morphable terrain has a distinctive look because the land has to be, well morphable.
Remember Populous 3? Well, here’s some screenshots. They might seem…familiar.
Populous 3
But, you say, Fallen Enchantress didn’t morph its terrain. You’re right. We took out the spells that morphed terrain because we couldn’t balance it. The bulk of our 3D engine was ignored because it was impossible for the AI to deal with a world that was morphable like this. So we took it out.
But…Sorcerer King doesn’t have that problem. You want to lock yourself behind a mountain range? Knock yourself out. The Sorcerer King would be pleased if you holed up back there and let him take control of all the minors.
Want to Volcano an enemy? Go for it. Want to flood the continent? Have at it. Basically, because this is an ASYMETRICAL MAGIC game there’s no reason not to let the player loose on the world.
Oh no, I’m stuck by a huge mountain pass. I guess I should just go around. Or wait, no, I’m a powerful wizard.
There we go
Now, players of Fallen Enchantress knew we had spells like this but they were made so limited and so expensive and there were so few of them that they were more a gimmick than an interesting part of the game. But now that the player is encourage to annihilate enemies en-masse (pillar of fire? Pish posh) the question will be how much are you willing to wreck the world to save it?
Map Sizes: Big is really big
Click on the screenshot and you can see how big the large maps are going to be.
The bigger the world the longer it takes for the Sorcerer King to become a god. While obviously necessary it is makes it a very different game. I must confess, I haven’t finished a game on large. It takes hundreds of turns to win on tiny. Large is going to be for the truly dedicated as it’ll probably take thousands of turns.
Beta 2: November 6
We will have an opt-in beta coming up that will have really rough versions of this with the official beta 2 date being November 6.
Stay tuned!
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