[deccan]

Good topic!

The Total War series is excellent for combining long-term strategic considerations with great tactical combat. Personally, I would like to see a World War 2 type game based on this system, with a vastly expanded battlefield to accomodate vehicles.

Recently, I downloaded Chaos Overlords, an old game that I played a long time ago, from the Underdogs site. I couldn't help but think that it would be really good if the basic premise and atmosphere of Chaos Overlords could be combined with Dominions, i.e. instead of nations vying for dominion, you would have criminal gangs running around a huge megalopolis trying to influence the population into paying you protection money and working for you. In Dominions, whenever two rival armies are in the same province (unless one is stealthed), they always fight. It would be cool if the game were done like in Chaos Overlords, so that rival gangs in one sector don't actually fight unless explicitly ordered to (they could be given orders to kill a particular enemy that they see in the same sector or be set to patrol and kill any enemies in the same sector), and could be doing other things like researching, intimidating a special site to work for you, collecting protection money, recruiting, buying equipment etc. But when combat does happen, it would be done in the way Dominions now works.

I'm also irritated by the lack of a sci-fi equivalent of Daggerfall / Morrowind. I had a bLast with old games like Planet's Edge and Megatraveller: Quest of the Ancients. I wish there were good sci-fi RPGs on the market, but there doesn't seem to be any.

Finally, I'm still waiting for the perfect Elite successor. So far, the best one seems to me to be Hardwar, but that's considered old now too. I'm talking something with a high-fidelity flight model, real-life physics and astronomy, a full blown economics engine with AI bots that move around the universe in an intelligent manner to further their goals, and interesting dynamically-generated missions to perform.