I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of learning how to win tactical fights, but sometimes the late game can get tedious when you have to run lots of fights where you'd have to work to lose.

Field commanders worth trusting and the option to turn over command to them would be nice, especially when you're confident of having overwhelming force and the target has no special aspects that need your close attention.

Actually, Brad said that he would make autocombat about as effective as if you fight it yourself so I wouldn't worry about that. I worry that the tactical combat will be too simple in that it doesn't do much difference if you fight it out yourself or not.

I can see how this could be weak (if strong player input has little value).

But if by some wild chance the idea is to have an autocombat AI that learns to emulate an individual player's tactics, then it would be a neat option for deeper game play instead of a problem. Did you spend enough time lately with your field commanders? Are their rules of engagement getting stale?

Do you mean giving orders like "stay back and protect the archers" and "full charge! Casters is top priority!"? If the troops would consist of stacks like in Age of Wonders then it would work good. A stack of tanks and magicusers could get orders like: "Defend the mages. If enemy got mages, charge! If my own range capacity is 50% or better then the enemy stack then sit back and defend".

Would be much better then the AoW autocombat which was battles like the units were standing next to eachother like in Disciples. It would help generally but wouldn't be as reliable when many factors are included (enemy wizard ((player avatar)) uses magic) so tactical combat would still be better in complicated situations.

But an option to change the gamespeed would also help and would make many tactical battles much more botherable <-- is that even a word? lol! Like the 50th identical combat occurs you ramp up the gamespeed to 1000% so when you attack an enemy the outcome is defined immedietly.


Hey Stardock! If you want input on the designdecisions then ask us. I got some good advice.

Some great suggestions have been made. I'll add to a few of them, just in case Stardock is listening.

DIPLOMACY!!!

Age of Wonders had a basic kind of diplomacy.

Heroes of Might and Magic had none.

I'd like to see a Galciv-esque diplomacy model in the game. Being able to make or break alliances, trade technologies, give/receive tribute and bribes, and other options would be great. If you had races in the game such as Trolls, Goblins, Elves, etc then the AI for the Goblins and the Trolls would be more likely to form an alliance to beat up on the elves, etc. Just how the evil races tend to fight against the good races in Galciv2.

I'd like to see more research and advanced tech trees, besides what we've already seen in Heroes of Might and Magic, and Age of Wonders.

Besides just a "Spellbook" tech tree and a "City" tech tree, what about...

Armor upgrades (leather, chain, plate, etc - would affect more than just one unit type)
Movement upgrades (light horse, heavy horse, war horse, advanced bridles, etc)
Weapon upgrades (arrows, swords, lances, maces, etc.)
Economy upgrades (trade caravans, money-changers, etc)
Diplomacy upgrades (envoys, clergymen, etc)
Empire upgrades (aqueducts, roads, city walls, better farms, education, etc)

Also, what if you could "Construct" your own units?

Instead of just building a "Knight"...

Take a basic humanoid, and think of him as a template like a medium sized ship in Galciv2 or Master of Orion.

You could "build" this humaniod with a light horse, leather armor, a bow, with steel-tipped arrows, and extra sight range. Presto! You have a horse-archer with some boosted offense, and some scouting ability.

Later on, let's say you don't like your scout archer anymore. Redesign him, give him a longbow, a heavy horse, take away his extra sight, and give him a sword to use in close combat. Now you have a "light knight" who is a good archer, but a bit more well rounded to take on melee troops.

Just some ideas, Stardock

I'm a little afraid about diplomacy since if it's weak it can completely break the game (as in Age of Wonders) and even if it's smart it will still be exploited and make the game unbalanced. F.e. trading away everything in an area that the Orcs are invading. You should also not be able to trade for spells since then your starting choice doesn't matter and you eventually get access to any type of spell which makes you too powerful.
And selling technlogies is also abusable. Like selling new technologies in Galciv to every race.

If diplomacy becomes a big part of the game then you'll be forced to focus on it if you want the best chance to win.

Defining teams in the beginning would be enough for me.

the first "unofficial" info on the new 4x from the main man himself:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=939846#post939846

Hehehe Brad you can't hide from us We'll find you wherever you are

Scripted actions was tried in the Dominion 1-3 series... I hate it!

It was very very simple, and you didn't have much control at all. You set up all actions before hand, and then it all plays out without any input from you.

Sure for heroes you could control up to 5 spells in advance, but often you would get the AI casting stupid spells after that... The other normal units you had no control at all really.. Just choose to let them attack, hold and attack, fire, and some limited target (closest, closest calavy, archer etc).

Let's face it, part of the fun of researching all those spells is so you can get the chance to use a well chosen spell cast at the right time to turn the tide. So you had nice spell battles... One guy hits you with doombolt, and almost kills your hero, you counter with healing... He casts black sleep on your unit , you dispel it etc..

Also in MOM, you wanted to win, but without hurting your mana reserves too much, which made it a interesting balancing act....

I think a lot of fans out there know what is a good 4x strategy game.

However, games that sold millions of copy bring new concepts to the genre. I.E Total ware series, turn base strategy, real time tactics.

Something that have been overlooked in the past about fantasy strategy based, is the progression and evolution of the unit.

The unit don't have a lot to offer in RPG terms for all those war games before.

The most we have seen in the unit progression, is UPGRADE in HOMM or UNIT XP level in Total war.

Tactical RPG game offer a wide variety of upgrade for the unit. (Ogre Battle, Final fantasy tactics) The upgrade path, with the appropriate XP and/or event and/or group composition and/or heroes affinities and/or physical place (tower of the dark could upgrade a swordman elite in a wraith swordman, if 5000 xp and a summon wraith spells by a black mage)...

A deep system for upgrading unit, with many steps to upgrade them.... like having a Lich Lord should be not tedious, but suffiently difficult to don't have 5000 Lich Lord and 2 swordman in an army.

But, i cannot stress more it, UNIT progression should be the main new feature develop with care and a lot of combinaison to do... like, it is my 4th game, 3 months after the first... and it's the first time I can upgrade those wraith swordman in wraith knight.

The advocate of anti-micromanagement will say NO... I say to them, don't micro it, and you will be happy. But let people that want upgrade unit, take the time and effort and knowledge to do it. Not simply like HOMM : click on the building upgrade -> upgrade your troops.

Having Vampire Lord is a nice addition from the Vampire unit of course. It is fast, easy and straigthforward.. GOOD! But those Vampire Lord unit will be the same all the game long... to change them, you will change your hero or recruit more vampire.

So, after 2 games playing with Vampire Lord, I am a bit bored of them... no way to change them, to specialized them, to do something real nice... Like a Vampire Mage for example... or a Vampire Thief (stealth and backstab)...

The Unit system could use a CLASS system. That class can be changed and/or evolve with XP point.

And I want more, I want UNIT GEAR has well...

Gear that you create at your city.
Gear that you find in dungeon.
Gear that you find on the battlefield's corpses.

And like someone said, the evolving unit class system could use some requirement with gear to evolve. Like a skeleton swordman, equip with a full plate and a horse could be a skeleton knight.

Gear is level dependant in most case, so your units should be really class evolve to use magical items and so on.

Surely, that kind of feature would need some AI option for the players, to remove the tedious aspect of it. You can put some config to the AI (artificial intelligence... not sure if I don't mix with IA in french though) like the gambit in final fantasy XII where you give priorities of gear and conditions to do gears.
Like:

1- Horse production = 20% unit (this will produce horse gears for unit in a proportion of 20% of your total unit number)
2- Sword production = 15%
3- Full plate = 20%

So, the first condition (Horses) will prevail the two others. The kingdom have put priorities on horses.

Then, you could have an auto-equip feature if armies come in (option/on/off - > with AI custom priorities) to reduced the tedium (the concept of some lazy people) of managing gears of Armies.


I played Master of Magic for 1 year. I think it is the fantasy 4x I played the most. I replayed a lot of games later until I got windows XP. But even that microprose game (the only company should I pray for them to continu to offer more to the gaming sphere at that time, because they had give a lot more than Sierra or EA) was not enough in the massiveness of unit choice, versus conquering.

Dominion 3 - is something you must play to see what a 4x made in a basement can be. It is so popular actually, even with low grade graphics, that you cannot miss it. And in that regard, Dominion miss a lot of deepness in the city managing department, the unit system of independant troops versus nationnal troops is interesting. The magical system is really interesting, the unit can channel some spells of your knowledge with point in the magic school. Forged items permit your mage to have boost in spell school to use that lvl 3 fireball you had research, like having a ring of wizardry. Something power gamer loved to do in HOMM, is raising all the last unit level of each race castle they have to make an armies of Dragons/Behemot/Devils/Angels...

In that regard, that unit evolving system can bring a knight to become a Dragon Knight (merge of two units, to have better skills) or a Dragon Mage ( spellcasting on the back of a dragon ).

I can't stress more :

Evolving UNIT - Class and GEAR -> Infinite possibilities -> replay value boosted

The gear aspect of it, is easily a winner and you had experienced it with Gal CIV custom ships and TECH research.

CLass unit have been done in Tactical RPG game (that are really boring if you don't like the concept of class unit evolving because it is the only RPG concept in play for that king of game that sold hundreds thousands of copies).

The merger should give the old school tabletop wargame the real feeling back again.

In that regard, the 4x fan will play their gameplay like before, but you will take new peoples in the genre, because you will bring new concepts and deepness in it. That will raise the bar of the future fantasy 4x and surely put your title in the classic game like MoM.

Arkanciel

Arkanciel, you make a lot of interesting points.

On the unit progression front, Warlords IV actually did a pretty good job with that. The production was so rushed and the development so botched that it didn't shine through in the initial release, but Steve Fawkner has worked with a few volunteers to release some patches "on the side" that have fixed a lot of those problems.

Two years after shelving Warlords IV, I downloaded the latest patches posted at www.warlorders.com, and I'm back to playing it and having fun! And upgrading my units carefully... Still not as polished a game as it could have been, but on a shoestring, they've made it very interesting.

The unit upgrade paths are something that is very interesting. I'd only add two thoughts around a thoroughly open-ended design template for units:

1) Designing a system where AI can grasp "good" and "bad" decisions in unit design/production is critical, and this might be more problematic in such an open-ended system. It seems harder to model synergies in AI than for human players;

2) Part of what I enjoy about most games is having individual weaknesses in a faction that I have to manage around. If you allow totally open-ended unit development, then each faction can be anything. You gain replayability value for a single faction, but sacrifice it for the game as a whole--the Heroes series and Dominions are both good examples of games that feature very different gameplay for different factions within the game.

I definitely enjoy the notion of incremental upgrades to units, in terms of experience and equipment. Legion: Arena did some very cool stuff with this, but at the end of the day, the neat item descriptions (e.g., "Large Shields") really just amounted to changing numbers on the spreadsheet that underlay your army.

I find games that emphasize fewer units, with more customization and "history" per unit, are more enjoyable to me. Civ IV also did a decent job with their XP system.

I tried the demo of Dominions 2 but quitted it after 2mins since I didn't understand a thing. Found a guide on the devs board but it's unreasonable that I should have to read a guide on how to play a game. Anyway, that game was a spreadsheet just like GalCiv which is of no interest to me.

I certainly hope the game they're making is deep, but it have to be either intuitive or have a good tutorial. And most important of all, don't make it abstract! I find no joy in spreadsheet type games such as GalCiv (I got GalCiv II and regret buying it) but I really like Age of Wonders and Heroes of Might & Magic so I'm asking for a game where micromanagement matters.

Lords of Magic offered a few neat additions to the genre too, aside from realtime combat:

Espionage being dependent on the amount of contact with a faction. The more often you traded, spoke and interacted with a faction, the more you knew about them and the more accurate that information was. Of course, your thieves could spy or even interrogate prisoners to find more information, but it was a nice way of linking diplomacy and espionage. Kind of makes sense too, you don't spend several years trading with a neighbour without finding out a little about them.

Experienced heroes could train recruits. High level characters could spend time in their building and add experience to any unit recruited from there (until the building was razed at least). This added to the value of experienced heroes, kept even basic units relevant to the late game (partly as a function of experienced units being considerably better than lower levels) and gave more tactical options, since a training hero couldn't research new spells (yet a higher level wizard was better at research, so do you leave your mage training for 10 turns and hope you can catch up with the magic race with the better experienced mages, or do you try to research with your inital mage and train up the rest through battle?)

The early game also differed depending on your choice of Lord (Mage, Warrior or thief). The lord character began at a higher level, with one artefact, and was crucial to the game - lose your lord and it was game over. This lead to a different approach with each lord type - warriors would gather a party as soon as possible and begin plundering the nearby sites for experience. Mages would want to research a decent combat spell before risking themselves alongside the troops, although you had to balance that against using your initial mercenaries to level up your mage for training purposes. Thieves offered similar options, but also excelled at espionage. If you needed to kidnap a key member of an enemy party, did you risk your much better Lord with a chance they'd fail and be killed, or did you use a lesser thief and hope for the best.

Personally, I am just waiting for news on this game that they're making. From what I understand, they already have the engine (I read Draginol talking about it somewhere in a dev journal), and they are most likely deep into the brainstorming process. And now that DA is done and patched, I think we wont have to wait long.

For those that have AoW:SM

http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=612

this mod makes the game allot more MoM like

too bad there was never a lords of magic sequel. it had a lot of potential. i was/am also hoping for other sequels to great games such as majesty, fantasy general and kohan (a true sequel to KAG not the lame KOW). i think it would also be awesome if the guys that do the total war series do a fantasy total war game. warlords 5 and wbc 4 will also be done assuming that i2 can find a publisher for them.

Actually I think they're done with the brainstorming and are busy coding since you don't announce games that haven't atleast reached alphastage and they said they announce it in a few months. They also said they had good ideas on what elements from Master of Magic they want to keep so the brainstorming process can't be that long....

Why haven't atari gone bankrupt yet so Stardock can buy the rights to MoM..? Can't understand why they don't just put up the old IPs on auction....

They did and several have been sold off for, shall we say, highly inflated prices.   

do you know if anyone bought MOM yet?

Could it be Galciv III???

I wouldn't count on seeing a GalCiv III this decade. Maybe next decade.  It'll be quite awhile before we are able to make a GalCiv sequel.

Wonder how it would fare against Fall From Heaven...

I can't wait for this game, and for some more news about it! A fantasy turn-based strategy game of quality is really what is missing out on the market since a long time.

In case Stardock is interested in some inputs from their latest fans:
- the feeling of the graphics needs to be different from sci-fi DA (more lush) Please note that in fantasy, the feeling (the willing suspension of disbelief) is what makes it break or sell platina!
- instead of technology: please make a huge magic tree (skills in all honour but blasting your enemy with a fireball is what makes playing really fun)
- magic can be very different from magic in say the normal RPG: in addition to combat spells etc you could have "realm magic" that works much like technologies in DA, e.g. blessing a city of your empire, casting a protective shield around an area, barring undead from entering an area etc.
- please note that monsters (humanoid and completely monstrous) is one of the main features of a good fantasy game.
- try and keep much of the diplomacy from DA
- please keep the options to create your own race and also your opponents

I read the information the Brad provided in the link posted earlier.

I think I broke my keyboard because of all the drool.

Stardock, it sounds like at least from MY perspective, you guys are going in completely the right direction with this game. From what little details I've been able to dig up, it is like you are mixing a special blend of drugs that will appeal exclusively to me, and instantaneously addict me. This could be dangerous.

I cannot WAIT for more news.

new info from Brad about the upcoming (eta 2009) game:

"It’s a turn-based game with tactical combat which is also turn-based. One could describe it as part Master of Magic, part Populous and part X-Com."

from this interview:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14842