Illwinter, are you keeping it multiplayer?

[Argitoth]

I'd like to see MMOs with epic battles and I wouldn't mind it if the graphics were very 2d and lacking in a physics engine. It's the feeling of power you get. Very few games give you that. Instead of each player being a member of an army, each player IS an army (a commander of an army that is). I've yet to see a game that is in first or 3rd person where a mage can actually be powerful and summon an army of undead to do his bidding or destroy waves of units with battle, or be a small group of fighters and cut down 50 weaklings. No, it's always 2v5 3v7 4v2 2v1, small RPG battles. I want to see 300v500, 2v70, battles like that!

I want to be a mage that hides away in a dungeon slowly building his army out of clay men, gathering clay, gathering gems, etc, and then BUST OUT with 30 clay men and take a nearby province.

[JimMorrison]

But, you could do that in my game. You could do whatever you wanted, with the tools that your chosen character has access to - including spending your time developing other tools, by acquiring gear to supplement your abilities, or by hoarding gems to Empower yourself, etc.

[Argitoth]

ok now i like your idea

[Aezeal]

Well who would play a fighter in a MP game where a mage can summon an army to kill 10000's of fighters seems suicidal to say the least

[MaxWilson]

You're kidding, right, Aezael? Would you rather play a plain vanilla commander with an army of 80 Barbarians, or a thugged-out Tartarian? That's not to say that playing a mage commanding hundreds of longdead wouldn't be fun as well.

-Max

[Gandalf Parker]

Beginning to sound like an MMO version of Illwinters first game, CoE

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Aezeal

Well who would play a fighter in a MP game where a mage can summon an army to kill 10000's of fighters seems suicidal to say the least

Obviously some sort of balance mechanism would have to be built in to account for the disparity between different chassis - probably borrowing on the fact that you can start with your indie commander on turn 1, and the Tart is fairly late game.

If it interacted with large scale real Dominions TBS games, then there could be systems whereby you generally start with a character that is much weaker, but you may at a certain point use your accumulated wealth to gain favor from your liege, convincing him to summon you a Tart, and GoR it.

Even if the overarching game progression took place completely in real time, and you were just fighting for AI pretenders, there could be quests that simply allow you to trade "X for Y", where "Y" could be a new incarnation as a powerful mid-late game summon of some kind. Then everyone would be fighting for the ascension of their god, of course, and the AI would fumble around as they will tend to do in every game against themselves, but the actual war of ascension would be won and lost through the actions of the individual players.

[Argitoth]

Hey, that's an interesting idea JimMorrison, a game based on the idea that the AI controls us (so like we can't automatically get certain powerful summons or something).

My original idea was that even a weak fighter could gain lots of hitpoints and attributes, this is more akin to standard RPG, but I figured it would work well. A mage wouldn't be able to gain as much HP as a fighter for balance, just like other RPGs. Not only that, your regular hired units can become just as strong or stronger than you. We can do that...

OR...

We can say that you can only become slightly more powerful more akin to Dominions and your main source of becomming stronger is by upgrading your army in different ways. However, then how do you balance magic commanders with non-magic commanders? That's why I had the idea of RPG-style. Mages got spells, fighters got endurance. Plus, like I said, I wanted to see 2vs70 battles, you and your friend in co-op vs all, give the player the choice not to have an army.

The main joy from realtime battles is all the joys you don't get from turn-based battles. The ability to use buffs in the most effective way, the ability to target spells correctly, etc.

Edit: But don't get me wrong, we are all just dreaming about such a game. It's fun to contemplate I guess. I think one day we'll see a game like this.

[rdonj]

You could get your increase in ability by earning the favor of your god. Say, you have to prove yourself by performing certain actions and once you earn enough favor your god will offer you a blessing they will bestow upon you. Maybe you could be turned into a different creature, or be promoted to a different sort of commander, or be empowered. There are lots of different ways you could go about it depending on what way you chose to go for the base of the game.

[Argitoth]

Part of the fun of playing OpenGlad was the fact that no unit had a limitation on how much power they could gain. Just because you are a commander shouldn't mean you have more abilities than a soldier. You should be able to have a small team of undefeatable falchioneers, how cool would that be to be the most feared group as opposed to the most feared person who commands a bunch of weaklings.