What is that thing consisting of several non-concentric circles and some dots on the outer circumference?
Is it a mine? Is it the cluster-core? Is it a castle/keep? A magical stonehenge?
A place holder for your wizard's tower. I didn't spend all that long on it.
So, I did read the OP, but I can't seem to find any answers to these questions. Sorry if I missed them! Anyone who can answer, feel free to!
Being a Real-Time Strategy, this does have a ton issues that need solving that a turn-based strategy does not. However, RTS games are generally funner then their turn-based counterparts. How do you plan to deal with these problems? For example, a player plays 24 hours a day, and generally just wins 24/7. Eventually, would he be able to become unstoppable? Would you limit the power a player can have? I feel that it is very important that any one player can be a huge influencing factor on the game, but I do not feel that someone who cannot spend all day playing will be punished.
Moving on, will this be a true RTS, or something more akin to web-based ones in that things can take hours upon hours to complete. I really find it disappointing if this turns into one of those games you can enjoy for ten minutes before you run out of resources. From what I have read, this won't be the case, but I would like confirmation.
Payment. Will this be completely and always free? Donation-based? Advert based?
Are there any plans on doing races/nations/tribes/different magicians? How would one player be different from another?
Many persistent world multiplayer strategy games are browser games, which are designed to encourage you to spend small amounts of time every day playing, I'm guessing as a way to limit bandwith usage. I want to make this a game that you can play a bit in the evenings, but that you can also sit down and play all weekend. To meet this goal there will have to be different layers of reward, similarly to how EVE is structured. There will be as i see it now, three parts of the game, the fast game: collection of tiles and valuable resources via exploration or conquest. the mid game: building and management of the civilizations on the airland. And the long game: The upgrading and expansion of your tower. Each game feeds into the success of the next. By finding and protecting the best resources, you ensure that your civilization will thrive, which gives you the necessary manpower and equipment to make the permanent improvements to your tower.
The intent is that you will be able to play the fast game for hours on end, which will allow you to survey a larger amount of land, and give you access to higher quality resources. This will give you a direct advantage in the midgame, without projecting you out of reach of your peers. The long game of building up your tower will give you the ability to more quickly recover in the face of catastrophic losses.
I am planning on having a variety of types of civilizations, which will be founded based upon the villages that exist on the tiles that you scoop up. Add a village of Orcs to your airland, and they will start to grow into a city, and may begin expanding. I'm thinking of having the development of governments based on the events that occur, having many isolated cities without room to expand might lead to city states, while having a central city that manages to conquer the minor cities around it might lead to an empire being founded. This would play into the idea of the wizard having indirect control over the civilization, rearranging the lay of the land to achieve a desired effect. I've also been planning on, in addition to variable stats, giving particular cultures crafting specialties, which would be giving bonuses to crafting a particular item. An example would be you have a tribe of dwarves that have great skill at making furniture, giving them the ability to get multipliers when converting the stats of the raw resources into the finished product. This would have to be designed to prevent max stat-ed products from being the standard.
As far as payment goes, It is hard to say right now, as I don't know how much of my time this could potentially consume. I plan on always at the very least, having a free version available. If, as it seems it will, I end up doing all the work on this, I'll be less likely to release it as open source. Toady has proven that you can be successful with a free game, but also has the luxury of DF not being a multiplayer game. This creates an additional level of complexity in that there needs to be some form of control given to the operators of servers to control their own player population. If I can't cover costs on donations alone, I could potentially see this playing out with a free single player game, but a single payment needed for the multiplayer version.
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Topic: Airlands Project (Read 43263 times)