Elemental: War of Magic (Stardock's fantasy game) announced!

[JanusTalaiini]

Well MoM was a derivative of an old C64 fantasy game I used to have. A lot of todays games had their origins in old SSI Strategic Simulation Inc. C64 games, certainly all the 4x space games. I'm not sure about the fantasy world before Lord of the Rings.

Ahh, SSI. They're responsible for most of my hours spent in front of a computer screen during high school. Good times.

 

[Enthralled]

Im very excited. The beta should be available soon and Im anxious to jump in.

I can't wait to jump in on the beta so I can start to lobby for the name of some npc in the game to be Kael

The most interesting thing about this interview to me was the comments about how one thing they will be focused on will be a robust quest system. I love what has been done with the limited quest system in civ4 and I am looking forward to seeing what could be done with a system that was designed in from the ground up.

Despite the comments about there being 12 factions and 2 races, as compared with civ which only has one race, I still remain worried about the variety of units we will be allowed to build. I guess without seeing the full magic and tech trees it will be hard to get a good feeling for but the dev journals talking about the design of how training and equipment improve units has me a bit worried.

The more I see of the game though the more it looks to me to be a heroes of might and magic style game and not a master of magic style game. I look forward to seeing more details on the tech trees and how city settling and building will happen.

I did have to smile though about the good and evil terrain. One of the things that hooked me on FFH was hell terrain.

 

[FireBlaze]

Hey out of curiosity, does anyone have the overlay of the biggest elemental map to the biggest civ map?

 

[VSPavlov]

Hey out of curiosity, does anyone have the overlay of the biggest elemental map to the biggest civ map?

Do you mean this one?

 

[JonathanStrange]

I like that the Elemental War of Magic game seems like it will include Tolkien-style maps.

I've often wished that Civ IV had the capability of printing out an old-fashioned hand-drawn appearing map of our nations and continents; it'd be a sort of certificate of "our world". I guess though I'm the only one into maps though.

 

[Emptiness]

Well MoM was a derivative of an old C64 fantasy game I used to have.

Which one?

A lot of todays games had their origins in old SSI Strategic Simulation Inc. C64 games, certainly all the 4x space games.

MoO was derived from SPI's "The Sword and the Stars" board game. Did SSI make that into a computer game for C64?

 

[FireBlaze]

Do you mean this one?

Yeah, thanks.

 

[Breunor]

Which one?




MoO was derived from SPI's "The Sword and the Stars" board game. Did SSI make that into a computer game for C64?

I remember when MoM was first being advertised pre-sale. I always thought of it as a fantasy version of Civ, although in practice it is much more combat oriented. I thought of MoO as a space version, all being done by Microprose. Clearly MoM was influenced by MaTG.

Best wishes,

Breunor

 

[Tasunke]

Something Like FFH and such NEEDS to have a more combat oriented engine imo, otherwise those giant stacks that kill you leave you slighly unentertained. Afterall, the coolest things right now are you heroes, and watching your empire grow and expand. If you are being killed however, at least you could try to influence in battles. And if there were battle maps, perhaps there could be some sort of diminishing returns on army size, where larger armies are simply less effiecient or forced to be more spread out.

my two cents. Which is why a total war mp on the campaign level would be that much more epic
(tho the vic conditions in total war may need an overhaul in that case, but in a conquest win, diff people have different thresholds for admitting defeat, or thinking they have won, which makes it all more interesting. Against AI, you basically know when u have won, at least if u can see the whole map)

 

[Emptiness]

I remember when MoM was first being advertised pre-sale. I always thought of it as a fantasy version of Civ, although in practice it is much more combat oriented. I thought of MoO as a space version,

MoM was heavily influenced by Civ, but MoO I think not so much.

 

[GoodGame]

Something Like FFH and such NEEDS to have a more combat oriented engine imo, otherwise those giant stacks that kill you leave you slighly unentertained. Afterall, the coolest things right now are you heroes, and watching your empire grow and expand. If you are being killed however, at least you could try to influence in battles. And if there were battle maps, perhaps there could be some sort of diminishing returns on army size, where larger armies are simply less effiecient or forced to be more spread out.

Not sure I totally agree. The Radiant Guard scenario showed that a tactical scenario could be achieved with FFH. Make cities and teching very limited, start with a large number of hard to replace units, and the result is a more tactical than strategic scenario.

 

[JonathanStrange]

However the game turns out, I'll likely have bought it regardless. If it's a success, I'll cheer. If it's a failure, I'll have complain' rights. Win Win.

 

[Anathema]

Not sure I totally agree. The Radiant Guard scenario showed that a tactical scenario could be achieved with FFH. Make cities and teching very limited, start with a large number of hard to replace units, and the result is a more tactical than strategic scenario.

You're right that it's.. not impossible to remove strategic elements from Civ4/FFH2 and wind up with something more tactical than strategic, but it kinda goes against the design of Civ4 and doesn't come close to tactical combat in other games. Civ4 just isn't made to emphasize combat, it emphasizes economy/politics/unit spam, with the ultra-simplified combat almost an afterthought. You can't do a whole lot to affect the outcome of a battle, so it's a little frustrating when your tank gets unlucky and loses, but with 7 more generic tanks rolling out of the factories it doesn't really matter in the end.

Compare this to FFH2 which emphasizes the individual units - that first lucky warrior who gets 10 promotions, or the unique hero you can never replace, or the all-powerful archmage that sows destruction across an entire army - and this mod is begging for a better combat system than "roll a dice and if you're lucky your hero will slay the goblin horde - one goblin at a time." I mean the FFH2 team has done an incredible job of turning Civ4 into something more tactical than it was meant to be - particularly thanks to the spell system - but it could be so much more if it had a tactical, real-time combat system that actually lets entire armies participate at once (something I doubt Civilization will ever have), and that's what I'm crossing my fingers and hoping to see in Elemental.

 

[GoodGame]

Compare this to FFH2 which emphasizes the individual units - that first lucky warrior who gets 10 promotions, or the unique hero you can never replace, or the all-powerful archmage that sows destruction across an entire army - and this mod is begging for a better combat system than "roll a dice and if you're lucky your hero will slay the goblin horde - one goblin at a time." I mean the FFH2 team has done an incredible job of turning Civ4 into something more tactical than it was meant to be - particularly thanks to the spell system - but it could be so much more if it had a tactical, real-time combat system that actually lets entire armies participate at once (something I doubt Civilization will ever have), and that's what I'm crossing my fingers and hoping to see in Elemental.

Well then you're talking about Dale's Combat Mod (or at least an unbuggy version). I agree the plain Civ4 has a little too much I go-you go in the combat engine. A fully functional DCM (not sure that that has been achieved yet) does improve Civ4 and any mods.

 

[RFHolloway]

Now the game is out - any of you guys bought it? what do you think of the modding capability in there

 

[tesb]

:/ there is already a thread going:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=376188

as of now it is bad, basically a beta.

 

[Deon]

Yeah there's almost no total-conversion-style modding capability for now. Basically it's very limited and you can't normally change/replace what's in there without making crazy tricks, only add new stuff. Civ4 is much easier to mod. I think they will improve it in a year though.

 

[tesb]

they do have the tile editor and a particle editor though which is very good

 

[Deon]

Yeah, the fact that bothers me is that they have extremely fun and awesome "secondary" systems without working "primary systems". Maybe during this year they will higher a good designer, this would speed up their work a lot. Ideas are great but they are not organized in a working manner.

 

[Ellestar]

Yeah, the fact that bothers me is that they have extremely fun and awesome "secondary" systems without working "primary systems". Maybe during this year they will higher a good designer, this would speed up their work a lot. Ideas are great but they are not organized in a working manner.

Haha you didn't saw their early idea of having 150+ different resources with a per-city storage and semi-manual management of that. I said, come on, are you crazy? 150 resources * 10 cities = 1500. How do you want to make an UI to manage it? (I'm not even talking about the fact that noone will want to play that). But no, they made an official threads asking what kind of resouce system people want - manual or somewhat automatic... Of course, they dumped the idea, in like 3 months or so, when it really takes only one multiplication and half a brain to figure it out instantly.

After that, i decided that whatever their game designer is smoking or sniffing is a really good thing! And it's certainly much better than the game he will be able to make.

P.S. Prooflink http://forums.elementalgame.com/352821
>> We have the code in for handling a pretty sophisticated/complicated economic engine.
>> Everything in Elemental is a resource. Food, metal, swords, armor, horses, you name it.
>> Those swords can be directed to be shipped to various other places (with sliders or other UI means to determine what ratio goes where).

Can't find where they said about 150 resources or so in the game, but it's more or less explained here.
http://forums.elementalgame.com/329473
Every sword type, armor type, mount type etc. is a different resource under their old system, in addition to all normal resources (like food, different metals etc.)