Warlords preview on GameSpy.com, interesting new mechanics

[Rabbit, White]

There's a new Warlords preview on GameSpy.com and they describe some new interesting gameplay mechanics, ones I haven't heard of before. Just thought it'd be of interest to modders here.

There's the ransom town feature, where as soon as you capture a town you could sell it back to the owner.

Another interesting one is treasure hunting. You fund a treasure hunt just like a tech and when it's done you get a location of the treasure on the map, you send a special unit there and if it returns successfully back within your borders you get the treasure (probably just money of course ).

This one's particularly interesting. The obvious use for this is of course for fantasy mods where it could probably be expended to finding not only money, but also equipment, items, etc.
Another use I could see for this could be something like diplomatic missions. So instead of just using the trade screen for maintaining diplomatic relations, you could have a feature where some situations develops somewhere (maybe like hostages, to use something current), so the "treasure hunt" funding is used for something like intelligence gathering, and then you send your diplomat (or if we're talking intelligence gathering, it could be a special ops extraction team) and if they successfully reach it and then return the mission was a success.

Anyway, just throwing out some ideas out there as a prelude to the expansion.

 

[Prestidigitator]

A very interesting find Rabbit. Makes me even more anxious about the game, only 24 days left .

 

[woodelf]

Ransoming a town sounds cool. I wonder if you can take techs instead of cash...

 

[Dual]

Another interesting one is treasure hunting. You fund a treasure hunt just like a tech and when it's done you get a location of the treasure on the map, you send a special unit there and if it returns successfully back within your borders you get the treasure (probably just money of course ).

This one's particularly interesting. The obvious use for this is of course for fantasy mods where it could probably be expended to finding not only money, but also equipment, items, etc.
Another use I could see for this could be something like diplomatic missions. So instead of just using the trade screen for maintaining diplomatic relations, you could have a feature where some situations develops somewhere (maybe like hostages, to use something current), so the "treasure hunt" funding is used for something like intelligence gathering, and then you send your diplomat (or if we're talking intelligence gathering, it could be a special ops extraction team) and if they successfully reach it and then return the mission was a success.

Anyway, just throwing out some ideas out there as a prelude to the expansion.

Another cool thing to do with the treasure hunt would be to use Python to spawn a powerful unit (like a dragon or something) when you reach the treasure's location. And require the player to defeat the unit before taking the hoard as your reward.

And,if you fail to kill the dragon, it would rampage around pillaging things until someone did manage to slay it.

 

[Wyz_sub10]

Another cool thing to do with the treasure hunt would be to use Python to spawn a powerful unit (like a dragon or something) when you reach the treasure's location. And require the player to defeat the unit before taking the hoard as your reward.

And,if you fail to kill the dragon, it would rampage around pillaging things until someone did manage to slay it.

That is soooooooooo nerdy.










I love it.

 

[dh_epic]

It says the ransom feature and the treasure feature are a part of the Viking scenario. It goes to show you, there's a lot of potential to give a scenario its own new gameplay -- not just custom units/techs/buildings!

 

[Rabbit, White]

It says the ransom feature and the treasure feature are a part of the Viking scenario. It goes to show you, there's a lot of potential to give a scenario its own new gameplay -- not just custom units/techs/buildings!

Well sure, but it also helps not only being a professional programmer (we do have few of those ) but also knowing the entire civ4 source (code) inside and out, and in some cases probably by heart.

 

[Padmewan]

Another interesting one is treasure hunting. You fund a treasure hunt just like a tech and when it's done you get a location of the treasure on the map, you send a special unit there and if it returns successfully back within your borders you get the treasure (probably just money of course ).

Sounds to me like clever use of existing mechanisms (which Firaxis demonstrated in C3C). Unless this is separate from the tech tree, which would be a MAJOR game engine change, seems instead like some of the techs have a trigger, probably in Python, that places treasure on some point in the map.

Likewise, it sounds like the ransom concept is also coded and currently codable in Python.

Not to say that these aren't great ideas -- I'm just saying that all of us should be as imaginative as Firaxis when it comes to bending/stretching the core mechanics to do new things...

 

[Rabbit, White]

Not to say that these aren't great ideas -- I'm just saying that all of us should be as imaginative as Firaxis when it comes to bending/stretching the core mechanics to do new things...

Well in an ideal world we would be, but so far most (not all but most) of the stuff we do are improvements, incremental upgrades and/or moderate modification, not brand new concepts. I think the only thing that I saw on forums that can compare in how different it is to what firaxis has done, is a unit making factory type system that someone built some time ago.

In any case I'm just pointing out some new mechanics in warlords, that using "moderate modications" or "incremental upgrades" could be turned into yet more interesting stuff.