Conquest of Elysium 3 dev log

[Doo]

A good video, cheers whoever posted it

I noticed that towns you own have a simple border of your color, anyway to make the towns have flags or the like? Little things like that add player immersion in the game.

I'm going to play some CoE2 to remember....

[zlefin]

Please make the ai highly moddable.
While making ai takes a lot of time; once a game is out for awhile, sometimes there's peopel who will put in the time to seriously build/tweak ai.

I wish i was in the beta, got any slots?

also, is qm in? qm should be, with all the balance work he's done.

[Gandalf Parker]

Flags would get very cluttered. Some nations can only claim cities and mines. But others can claim swamps, and forests, and lots of other things.

[Edi]

Most level 3 spells are useful, but some you really need to watch. There are also differences between spells of the same name that belong to different disciplines of magic.

To take an example, Black Death is available to Necromancy, Foul Magic, Nahualli Magic, Kuro Do, Troll Magic and Hedge Magic. It is a mass disease spell. In Troll magic it has an aoe of "all enemies". In all the others its aoe is "entire battlefield", which is obviously going to also hit the caster and all of his troops.

Undead are not affected by disease, so the only one who can use it reliably without shafting his own troops is a necromancer who has already transformed himself to a vampire or a lich. Given that disease has little direct effect in combat (well, Str -1, so less damage inflicted by those affected) but is otherwise much like Dom3 disease, the usefulness of that spell is much less than, say battlefield damage spells (especially if your own troops have immunity).

Then there is stuff like Meteor Showers which is a 1d20 blunt + 1d8 fire battlefield damage spell. It's great if you have tough troops of your own who can take the pounding and a caster who's either immortal or tough enough to survive and the enemy has more fragile troops. If you only have standard troops and a standard (i.e. fragile) mage, casting that spells is a surefire way to wipe yourself out pretty thoroughly. So use with care.

Whereas something like Hellfire (battlefield wide 1d10 fire damage) is great to spam if you have a fire immune army. Of course, if the other guy's army is also fire immune, that spells is decidedly less useful.

There are this kind of considerations in many cases. Also one of the things is that sometimes it is actually useful to memorize "useless" spells (such as poison resistance when facing units with no poison attacks) in order to curtail the choice of spells available for casting in a given battle. Then the random selection has a greater probability of hitting something you want, especially if there is one spell you would prefer the mage to cast over others.

[Gandalf Parker]

There is a video altho not on youtube. Its on IndieDB
http://www.indiedb.com/games/conquest-of-elysium-3

[WraithLord]

Thank you for the screen-shots & video. The game looks awesome.

I recall there was another thread re. COE3 where IIRC I asked about PBEM but I can't seem to find it. So I'd like to ask again what MP forms are supported?- Hot Seat only?

[Gandalf Parker]

So far.....
The setup is much like Dom3's direct-connect method. Blitz game style.

I can setup a game by simply telling it "server mode" and what port to use. People then bring up their copy and connect by telling it my IP and the port I assigned it. There is no PbEM. The turns in CoE3 would be awfully fast for PbEM anyway.

After that it gets quite different. The game parameters are setup by the players, not the host. And the games go very fast. Players can drop out, and drop back in, or someone else can pick up a players position who has dropped out. And the turns move very fast. I think it will tend to play best if done thru IRC or Chat. OH and in server mode the turns are simultaneous. You can watch your allies actions as they make them

So far of course.

[WraithLord]

Sounds great for the blitz oriented crowd.

For casual gamers who don't have time to sit out a blitz game PBEM would work better I assume. That, or a scheme that allows players to play on and off in slower paced games.

[Gandalf Parker]

It can be taken down and put back up. It does have autosave, game restore, etc.
So if people wanted to play 100 turns then drop it till another day, that would work. But there is no in-game communication so without IRC or Skype or something then it would be hard to manage

[WraithLord]

That could work well.

Are all the players required to play at the same time?- I gather that the answer is yes. This will limit the game players to the same TZ and similar routine (as in have a free evening on a given day...).