How will be the factions handled? Would it be possible for you to make items/creatures/factions moddable and allow people to make their own factions with modded equipment, stats, rules, description etc? It would provide great customization to anyone who wants to play specific scenarios or to make "whos race wins" bets... Et cetera, it would make the game much more interesting to play with .
Also if you can, please add descriptions to anything possible (which you can inspect). You can even make them simple/nonexistent for now, and let the community fill it, it would add a lot of flavor to the world. I would jump on such project gladly!
And of corse: it looks great!
Intelligent creature factions will not exist in the first alpha, but when they do, factions will be generated and then iterated through several simple generations of conflict to create empires and smaller city-states. Each will have a colour, and a randomly generated name, flag, and various other things. I don't plan to allow modding in the traditional sense just yet, but I will likely put in a function to allow you to design specific factions that will exist in a game, or to generate a world with very specific parameters. Say, if you want to let the world generate, that's fine, but if you want a world with one gigantic empire and you start off with just a tiny village, that should be possible too, but that's once factions actually appear! Of course, wild creatures etc have factions, but those aren't the same. And thanks! Stay tuned for the winter screenshot update
Oh, there are already descriptions for absolutely bloody everything
. I might end up asking for ideas, though, so thanks a ton for the offer! Currently, creatures all have detailed descriptions. In the next few days I'm going to properly add trees and plants back into the mix, and they'll all get descriptions. Also, the names and histories of forests, mountains etc are all generated, and come with descriptions. You can also view a weapon, which will give you a close-up ASCII image of the weapon, in addition to info about its history, make, benefits, etc, and a general description. There's a bloody lot of words in this game!
Back with some more MAGIC questions
First of all: Will a highly trained mage be able to draw energy out of living creatures and use it for spells? And could he draw energy from heat, movement (as in falling rocks 'n stuff), electricity, wind?
Could he actually end up killing himself by using up all his energy? (like, his heart stops because he is over fatigued)
Would there be drawbacks by using magic (mental problems, sickness, pain)
How powerful would mages be at their highest? Would they be awesomely strong, godlike, one man army's that could throw men and monsters around like leaves in a hurricane and level entire cities without breaking a sweat? Or would they be no stronger than any other man, but with an army of zombies and elementals?
Would magic mostly be focused at singular (fireballs, and magic missiles) or AOE (tornado summoning, oversized air blasts, meteor showers, and mass necromancy) magics? Or would it be a mix?
Could you store mana in objects for later use? Would it drain over time?
Would magic be something rare or common? And how powerful would an 'average' mage be?
And finally... Could you enslave a village, leech energy out of the villagers and then use their drained corpses to make an army of undead and take over the world?
In order
:
Living creatures, probably not. Weather etc is much more on the mark!
Hmmm. That could be a good balance, actually, though there are some other ideas for risks from 'over-using' magic.
At their strongest, I'm not sure how strong mages will be, really. It'll all need balancing. They will probably be able to take out a hefty portion of an army at once, at the most, but there will have to be some major negative repercussions of that too!
Individuals might have some small magics, but most of the magic of consequence (or all; not sure yet) will be on a much wider scale, and used by very few individuals.
Super, super, super rare. The average mage'll be pretty strong!
Ah, now, if they're dead, I suspect you'll be able to leach from them