Elemental: Grand Ambitions

Sounds great, a bit like I thought Elemental would be like, and perhaps should have been. Although we can't tell for sure untill release obviously.

I'm just wondering if part of the reason the battles have been scaled down is due to engine and hardware limitations. If so, it would be hard to scale them back up.

Yeah, that's precisely why didn't make a big promise. Still, even if there are hardcoded limitations there might be a why around it by making a robust reinforcement system or through unit abstraction.

Preliminary plan released.

I like your plan! Some thoughts:

How about instead off prestige determining growth, have population growth caused by births (I guess that is what you intended), and have prestige determine where those new people will live. If for example you have two cities with free living space, one with 9 prestige and one with 1 prestige, out of every 100 people born 90 would go live in the first city, and 10 in the second. This would represent people coming of age, and choosing where to live. This has the advantage that it isn't totally different from the original game, so it won't be a big adjustment for players.

Perhaps you could also add a mechanism that large populations cause negative prestige, thus slowing down the growth when a city starts to get overcrowded.

I am wondering how you are going to handle small villages and towns? These are going to be dwarfed in almost every way, maybe to the point of insignificance, by the larger cities. Some might argue they should be removed so you can focus on your cities. I hope you won't though, it would feel a bit to much like civ4. But you shouldn't have to put a lot of effort into managing them, considering the aims of this mod. I have an idea that might work, it needs some polish though.

How about removing all building options from the smaller settlements? So when you build a new outpost, it would just cover one tile, and that would be it. This tile would always produce 1 prestige, house a number of people, maybe produce some taxes, and that would be it. It would allow you to use one nearby resource, like a mine or farms. If you want to grow it into a village, you purchase a second tile. This two tile village would still not have any building options. It would produce maybe two prestige, house more people, and be able to use two resources. Same thing happens when you grow it into a three tile town, and a four tile large town/small city. You can only train some basic militia-type units at these towns, nothing fancy. Only when you start expanding it beyond that, it becomes a full fledged city with all the building and training options you would expect.

Only one real building option would be available to these small settlements, that would be adding a fort or castle. This would create security, maybe generate some prestige because of it, allow you to station lots of troops for a longer peroid, and allow the training of all troop types.

Like I said, it needs some polish, but I think it could be a good way of having smaller settlements without having to micromanage them a lot. What do you think?

Excellent, my friend. This is a revision I have planned for "Raven's Epic Fantasy Wars" Mod. Perhaps we can pool our efforts on this part.

We've got the same goals here as well. Indeed I think this is something we'd all like to see. Since I'll be rebalancing everything to support larger numbers for my "Epic" Mod and the Dragonlance Mod, we should definitely work together on this. Incoming PM...

sounds awesome, best of luck to you

Well, I posted a rather meaty response to you, but it got lost on the Internet. So I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate these ideas. I like the idea of prestige being used for migration. I'm probably going to predominantly use it for attracting NPCs with special skills and maybe use it for noble titles and such.

As for rural communities, I don't know how I'm going to do it yet. Right now they exist graphically on tapped resources. They'll probably end up mostly being used as eye candy but able to hold some population which counts toward the population of local urban centers.

So here's a quick sample of what I'm doing now. I'm in the process of redesigning all the resource tiles. This particular one is the "wild game" resource. Everything is about 25% size, allowing bigger settlements on each tile. The downside will probably be higher processing costs, but once I get around to setting the visibility layers it should be much easier on your video card.

Once I finish all the kingdom resources I'll upload it into the Elemental... thing.

Someone better appreciate this one. I'm pretty sure it gave me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Wow nice work on the scenic view (I think its a scenic view), it looks awesome and reminds me of an HGTV show that was showing off some houses in Italy and to get to it they had to climb some long ass stairs and didnt have access to a vehicle, but it looked amazing.

That is Awesome my friend Well done indeed. I'm doing that with my custom made faction. After that I'll work on making unique buildings for every faction.

That second tile looks great! The first one is not bad, but doesn't scream 'wild game' to me. But that's just a personal thing I guess.

That makes sense. I guess you are going more towards the Total War games, with having mostly the main population centres on the map (I don't mean that in a negative way). My idea doesn't quite fit with that I suppose. Still, no harm in sharing an idea right

It has given me an idea for a mod of my own though. I'm thinking of something a bit smaller in scale, say the roman conquest of the Italian mainland, where as yours would be more their conquest of the rest of the Mediterranean I think. I might borrow some of your stuff, if you don't mind off course . Still need a good name though, 'mediocre ambitions' just doesn't doesn't feel right

Thanks. It's actually inspired by the Spanish town of Ronda, which is a cool place to visit if anyone ever goes there.

Sure, go right ahead. I don't mind if anyone "borrows" anything I do so long as they give me some kinda credit.

As for a title, what about "Imperial Dawn", or "Rise of the Latium"?

Might I just say, the tile editor is amazing. It's so easy to use, it's like I'm making NWN maps again, except with more flexibility.

And, here's the thing. If you wanted to, I'm pretty sure you can scale things bigger to make a really strong tile-based RPG without all that much effort. Just scale up the items. BOOM! Suddenly, you've got a wall with a sconce for your dungeon suitable for one-character per tile RPGs. It's incredible.

I was a little concerned with how an Elemental RPG would look with such a small scale. I'm no longer concerned. Frankly, the way I see it, NWN was an RPG you could turn into a weak strategy game with a lot of effort. Elemental is a strategy game you could turn into a feasible RPG with much less effort.

I'm going to post up some "prototype" RPG tiles when I can.

I haven't tried it enough but seems to lack a "select a group and apply same effects to the group" (moving, scale...). Can be painful when you are trying to align walls to create a very large one, for example. that details aside, it's pretty amazing and only worries me how to add new "people" to it. The initial selection is nice but sooooo limited.... :/

This is what happened when I dropped some tiles into the game:

Oh noes, the giants have enslaved the little people! Actually, my big fear was that the tiles would be way too small for the zoom level and would slow down the game considerably. So far that doesn't seem to be the case. The zoom levels compensate well for both large-scale and small-scale. In fact, you could actually shrink it another level if you wanted to, although at that point it might be a little hard to see the poor little dudes.

Things will probably look a little better when I start working on the normal tiles.

So far, my biggest gripe is that that there aren't any 2D decals so that you can manually texture the tiles. If such a system were in place, you could make some really beautiful stuff. As for right now, the 2D decals that take up the entire place don't scale well to small sizes for the most part.

Looks good, can't wait to see what an entire town looks like after you've given it an overhaul

You lost me in the last paragraph though, what do you mean when you talk about decals? (The only 3d software I've got experience with are some engineering programs for design and simulation, nothing to make pretty pictures). What I gather from googling it, they are 2d pictures you stick to surfaces, like scorch marks, posters and graffiti, chalk outlines, etc...

I've thought of something else I desperately want... a "Would you like to save before you quit?" dialogue. Two hours of work wasted from a misclick.

Yeah, essentially. There might be a more accurate technical term for what I'm thinking of but that's the gist of it.

I agree with having the "Would you like to save before you quit?" dialogue.  Also, a good thing to do is turn Auto Save on and set it to save every 1 turn.  So the most you lose is what you did in the current turn.  And you also have the option of loading the previous autosave (from the previous turn) and save that as a permanent save if you want.

Best regards,
Steven. 

I think if we set auto-save to save every turn they need to make sure the auto-saves overwrite the previous auto-save. If not and someone plays a Really Long game then all those auto-saves will start eating up a lot of space eventually.

Well, without the python coding in yet it's going to be difficult to do some of the more ambitious things, and I want to hold off getting deep into tile creation without the giant tile art pack that's coming, but I think what I'll do instead for now is make some miscellaneous mods while I plumb the depths of the XML. Perhaps a custom faction? Yes, that'll be a good start.

That's exactly what Folcik and I were talking about earlier this evening. We've got some stuff in the works to mess around with to learn the ropes as it were.

I will be following this, it doesn't feel like a 'kingdom' with 12 soldiers and a leader with a couple summoned units and a hero or two conquesting the known world... not to mention the un-random maps