Gauging interest in a Dominions Roguelike...

[magnate]

I'm a huge fan of roguelikes and will gladly help. I can't code for toffee, but I can do ideas, docs, tables and balancing. Let me know when you get started.

CC
(P.S. I never finish any projects either, such as rewriting the random artifact code for Angband, so I know exactly how you feel.)

[Ed Kolis]

Cool! Yeah, I'll definitely need idead, docs, tables, and balancing!

I'd post what I have so far but it really doesn't DO anything other than display a grid and some player stats/inventory, and who wants to download a 25MB .NET runtime for THAT? (Yes, I did say runtime - the SDK I had to download was 10 times that size! Price you pay for ease of programming, I guess...)

[Kristoffer O]

You should take a look at Dungeon Crawl. It is a very good game.
Magic is fun. You have several schools and when you use skills you use up experience points and get increases and eventually learn better magic.
Armor has a random value. Prot 15 protects 1-15. You have an evasion value etc.

[quantum_mechani]

My 2 cents:

-As much as possible of the Dominions battle system should be used.

-Try to only use Dominions units as monsters (not too hard considering all the myth Dominions draws on)

-A random god generator, preferably based on the current god title system. Each game a set of gods would be rolled, and each title would add a diferent blessing/curse they could give (so, one with the title 'god of courage' could bless you to resist fear effects, or bestow a curse that any creature is able to scare you).

One thing that would be a bit difficult to transfer is blood magic.

[Ed Kolis]

Blood magic? Well, assuming I don't manage to get some sort of pets/companions system in (which would be perfect for blood slaves ), I can always have blood magic drain the caster's HP or Constitution...

[rylen]

Further thoughts -- everything follows from the story. Let me sketch some increasingly big ideas.

V1: To kill a god. A Dom2 prequel. You, an asperant, climb through a series of challenges to petition the great god. A nice, linear dungeon crawl.

V2: For the greater glory. You are an assassin / army leader. At game start you pick a faction and a chasis. You pick or are assigned an opponent faction. You enter their land, avoid or defeat patrols, find the fortress, move through it, kill their Pretender, and go home.

V3: Dom2 from the ground up. Again you are an assassin / army leader. At setup you spend points on yourself, and paths and scales for your pretender. The compter does the same for other factions. Then you go to neighboring lands, find several flags, and claim the place for your faction. You may poke around heavily and find magic sites which give your pretender gems and bonuses. As you wander around, your pretender does research, recruits units to guard the places you've grabbed, and summons increasingly powerful critters. Eventually, you find a different factions land. Capture or skirt their provinces and find their keep. Enter, kill their pretender, taking the magic item that allows him to seek godhood and bring it home for your guy. Rinse and repeat.

While your doing that, your pretender is securing some lands and buying some troops. The other factions also have their Rogue-Heros and armies trying to grab and regrab lands and kill the other guys.

----

What I really like about this idea:
1 -- it replaces depth based difficulty with time based difficulty. The nearby provinces are a challenge for a starting character. The first faction you fight has some basic troops and commanders. Much later you'll face experienced elite troops, equiped commanders, and strong summons. You'll also have the option of using your own nations troops.
2 -- it recreates the story from a different perspective
3 -- it has a Dom2 choice b/w short and long term power. Having a high path, good scale boss means great assistants and items, plus secure provinces in the long term but a weak chasis and equipment. Or vice versa.

----
Yeah, way too complex for the start. But I think the narrative is the big thing.

Rylen

[Endoperez]

I don't believe that one should be creating a pretender/god in the RL. That closes of the possibility to become one! Well, you could also be *playing* one, but we have Dominions for that, don't we? The view of commander/soldier/assasin for your god does give a whole new view to the game.

I also like the idea of a story. To blind the opposing Cyclops that was harassing your homeland with his fiery armies, to destroy the spirit that guided Pythiumian forces past defending armies to destroy your home... Really, that sounds great! And you can have *16* main targets!

About races and character classes, what about the already-suggested Abysian, Caelumian, Pythiumian etc. with Gladiator, Legionaire, Theurg, Hydra Trainer... for Pythium. Each nation would have some classes unique to them. Crawl-like classes that show what the character has learned in the past but that don't affect what he can (or will) learn might not suite Dominions very well, but adding some of it would not hurt...


About magical sites: many roguelikes have Vaults, known by different names in different games. They are huge rooms filled with many/stronger than usual monsters, often guarding great treasures. "You discover a way to get past the fiery wall, and find a way leading to the Tar Pits. There are two experienced Fire Drakes and a huge Fire Elemental guarding it."

Sorry if these ideas distract you, I don't except you to be far enough to implement any of these yet. I just am quite excited about the idea...

[Kristoffer O]

Some thoughts on the game system.

Some have said that you should use the dominins combat system. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I like the dominins combat system, but I think it wouldn't fit a rougelike very well.

Most roguelikes focus on character development. Your character begins the game as a looser that kills puny monsters. When you have killed enough puny monsters you can go on and fight more powerful monsters. Unless there is a steep development of your character's combat abilities there is not much reward in the killing. If you have the same problems killing a bear for the first time or the 101st time as you have killing a warden for the first time you will not feel as if you have progressed. Resistance will never change and you do not need to (or have the ability to) increase your power to enter the magic keep or horrible dungeon. You will always be good or bad depending on your startup. Some kind of research would of course alleviate this problem if you have a magically adept character.

If you use the dominions system progression will have to focus on the story instead, more like a regular pen and paper RPG (not AD&D). This might be good, but it leaves the rougelike gameplay and demands a lot more of the plot (which would not be replayable infinitely).

Dominions does not focus on development as much as quantity and deployment of troops and equipment. The magic system is an exeption. I believe that characters in a rougelike needs a means to achieve great powers (compared to the beginning character) if the game is to be replayable for any length of time. The combat system of dominions is good, but does not allow much development. Artifacts can boost a character, but very few humans can become SC's in the dominions system.

I would prefer to see wardens very powerful and not something slightly better than a tower guard.

The 2d6 system of dominions might be used, but stats should be increasable to high levels.


Hmm, I'm starting to suspect that I misunderstood what you meant by using the dominions combat system. Good luck anyway. I have started the Great Waiting.

I wonder if I would prefer to play or fight wardens, guardians and other national troops? Dark blue 'G' surrounded by green 'W'.

[Ed Kolis]

Wow, I got a Dominions developer to comment - and start a "Great Waiting"!

Hmm, I'm kinda in a dilemma here now... I'd like to move forward with this, and there are quite a few things I could implement now (dungeon/terrain generation, ability to move character about, inventory, etc.) but I got started on creating an XML database of all the spells in Dominions and geez, there are HUNDREDS of them! How the heck am I going to enter all those in?!? I have a schema pretty much set up (all that's left is a list of ritual spell effects - by effects I mean generic stuff like "do damage" and "heal stuff" without specifying exactly how much or where - and maybe some effects are missing from the combat spell effect list, IIRC)... but anyone want to help with data entry? Not the most rewarding task but it might help me get over this block I've stumbled across... I could move on to something else but I know I'll have to get back to the spell list sometime anyway, so it seems kind of futile to even do anything else...

Another thing that distracted me, too, is that entering in all these spells would create an ideal spell reference, but I'd have to modify them a bit to fit a roguelike, so I was thinking maybe I should try to make my own spell reference first without modifying them - but that would take just as long! So I'm looking right now at other fun pointless things to do with XML and game data files (such as maybe an SE4 ship design analyzer which tells you all kinds of stats like "total hitpoints" and "damage inflicted per turn" about your designs before you actually build them - the designs would be stored as XML data, if you were wondering where that would fit in), just because XML seems fun to work with BUT - that would distract me from the roguelike even more than I already am, and I know you all want me to move forward with that...

[Kristoffer O]

When we made dominions we didn't intend to make 1000+ units and hundreds of spells. At first I had perhaps five spells planned for each magic path and there were no schools at all. Our first step was to make a battle field where you could move a single soldier and have him strike an opponent. Then some more soldiers followed. Then soldiers were bereft the freedom of will and squads and commandrs were introduced. Then came orders other than move/attack. Still no spells. Then some strategic level with a map. Then some magic research, but the research system was remade several times until it became what it is today. By that time we had more than a hundred spells, but still not what we have today.

Try to start with some basic things. Huge lists can wait. It's very easy and fun to add new stuff when you have a system that works.

Your first priority should probably be to make something that you can 'play'. First of all just an '@' that moves around. Then a way to fight monsters and a monster to fight. Then some magic perhaps. Then more world to move around in. Etc.

This worked for us anyway. If we would have started with a list of 1000 units and spells we would have given up sometimes during 1997