Well, welcome around then !
Do you mind if we post some suggestion around ?
Oh crikey, yes please... And you don't need to ask, as I'm the guest in here!
Perhaps mages could be attached to a commander's command retinue or something.
Can't go into much detail, but yes - absolutely on the plan. And rather more than you're suggesting, I think.
What I would suggest is having the 'General' Schools of magic (including the current ones and whatever is planned) that everyone can research, and then some sort of Aurora'ish design system for specialized schools that can be continually researched for continual improvement (which should be so focused that going deep into one particular area will force a sacrifice in the others) For example, maybe a certain city you control is known specifically for summoning increasingly impressive amounts of temporary tigers, while another is home to a very powerful individual mage who is a part of your strongest army, and the next city is home to a clan of moderately strong mages who are split between healing magic for your choice of gold income or troop production bonus and some other useful ability, and the final city is home to mages who specialize in a type of diplomacy.
Darn... it's difficult to answer suggestions of this calibre without giving too much away...!
Curse you
Um.
There are a further 7 spell schools under development in addition to the current 3; and some of them are fairly imminent.
There are options being looked at for a variety of applications of additional mana and/or components during the casting of a spell that could influence the parameters under which the spell operates.
In regards to the specific customisation of various abilities - again, can't say too much about this... however the crafting system (and also the spellcasting system) will be highly dependent on the components put into the recipe. Much of the release of the current NPC drops and the current tournament is an indicator of where these developments are headed (as well as being a live stress-test of many of the trade v2 mechanisms).
In short, we do intend there to be unique "recipes" (be those spell or crafting-related) that draw their outcomes algorithmically based upon the components, skills, intentions etc that people put into them, as opposed to purely being pre-written by the Illy content teams. I think that's what you're getting at!
One thing I've always wondered about SC, is that running cities like an absolute tyrant at 100% taxes while the people starve from lack of food has minimal impact if you've shipped say 3000 food into the city, then queued up a week/month of advanced resource production, then keep taxes at 100% while producing. The only thing theoretically keeping me from having 100% taxes always is waiting for the one caravan to arrive so I can queue things up again. At 100% taxes there is plenty of gold to import the resources you sacrifice for the gold income.
I'm not sure if it would be something to be changed or not though, since it sure helps me stimulate the economy and it keeps my cities building. I imagine once there are more uses for magic it will be an incentive to not do this as magic point production is affected by taxes.
As a general point (which also applies to your previous question very pertinently)... we're striving to encourage specialisation; initially at a city level, and possibly later at a player (or indeed, alliance) level.
Everything we're developing is focused towards the goal of specialisation.
There'll be a lot of howling, I'm sure, when these specialisations start arriving, as people realise they have to make choices, and possibly even "undo" some of their previous choices in non-Capital cities, but atm there's no real penalty to being a jack-of-all-trades *and* a master-of-all-trades simultaneously, and this is the key issue we're addressing going forward.
Not all cities should be resource producing cities: some should be crafting powerhouses, some should be specialists in certain types of magic, some should be traders, some should support docks/navies and others should support armies, diplomats etc. We want there to be actual, genuine choicepaths for each city.
I hope that answers some of your initial questions, anyway... don't hesitate to ask more though, and I'll answer as best I can!
Best wishes,
SC
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Topic: Browser-based game: Illyriad // Bay12 Alliance Formed! Updates on first post! (Read 58745 times)