OT: Starcraft II and Elemental - Page 7

Doo · #1 August 23rd, 2010, 05:54 PM

Space Empires: Battle for Supremacy

http://www.mpogd.com/news/?ID=6379

Zeldor · #2 August 23rd, 2010, 07:31 PM

My first impression of Elemental is that it's poor man's Civ without any soul with artists being paid in non-alcoholic beer - sovereign and unit arts are just disgusting. Nations are a joke. UI is a joke. Economy seems bland. I will play a bit more, but so far I don't like it at all.

HoneyBadger · #3 August 23rd, 2010, 07:39 PM

The truest heir to Master of Magic that I've ever played has been Lords of Magic: Special Edition.

Not an exact copy ofcourse, but definitely similar beyond mere reminiscence. And it quite possibly
has the most sheerly beautiful (map) scenery porn in any game, ever. It's very much like playing on
some centuries old Italian master's oilpaint landscape.

The game itself is fun, and the (many) elementally derived Nations play differently, because they are different. This does affect the balance a bit, unfortunately, but not horribly so, and anyway, you can play every single Nation, ranging from the very benign to the very evil.

The focus is on heroes, which are generally incorporated very well into the game. It's a little bit like Warcraft 3 in that aspect, but to my mind, the incorporation seems even a little bit smoother in terms of the gameplay, considering LoM:SE is years older. Storywise, there isn't much, ofcourse, but the game lends itself well to making up your own story, as you go along.

The AI is also not great, and it's a fairly easy game to play, and beat (perhaps a little too much so),
but there's multiplayer support, and from what I've heard (I haven't tried it), it isn't awful. I couldn't find an item editor, though, and I don't believe the game itself has very powerful modding tools.

Even if not terribly challenging, games are long and feel suitably epic, atleast in a "better than average saturday morning fantasy b movie" kind of way (think "Krull", "Beastmaster", "Hawk the Slayer" etc. but with better special effects and slightly more coherant story.), so it's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon actually enjoying a game experience, rather than fighting for survival.

The nicest part is, I got my copy for less than 10$, and that was years ago. Unfortunately, for everyone else, it's currently around $45 at Amazon. Worth it, though, in my opinion.

Does the game have a personality? Yes, and a fairly well-adjusted one at that, I think.

HoneyBadger · #4 August 23rd, 2010, 09:54 PM

When you've got a game so old, and so influential, as the "Master of..." games, the idea of making a true sequel at this so very late date is a dubious fantasy, at best. I'm not certain that would even be very desireable.

It's pretty easy to list the things we (plural) liked about MoM, and create a game that utilizes those ideas, while discarding the body of outdated "stuff" that 20 years of programming has improved on.

For that matter, I suspect it probably wouldn't be terribly difficult to just mod the latest version of Civilization into a more or less MoM clone, if all you want is a fairly straight copy.

Personally, my wish is for a turn based strategy game that was deeply generic, and that let you create units/structures, and harvest resources, right from the ground up, in a Spore-like fashion, maybe with some user-defineable universal physics, along the lines of a user-created tech and resource tree--discarding the trappings, and inherant limitations of "fantasy/science fiction/historical" strategy games. With a deep and broad enough level of gameplay, you could end up with something with a whole lot more replayability than any given rehash.

Doo · #5 August 24th, 2010, 04:26 AM

I kinda suspect that Stardock would like to have put more things in at release but didn't have the time and it is good enough as a release version. I suspect a lot of crinkles will be ironed out over time.

You can see the Stardock team sitting around a table saying:

"Only some seeds give good starting resources, a bad seed effectively screws the game."

"Oh poo...."

"Lets release it on schedule and run with it, more maps can be added over time. It will fly."

And thats ok by me.

*edit* Immediately after writing this I went to the Stardock Elemental forum and guess what, Version 1.01 released with more random seed maps

Folket · #6 August 24th, 2010, 05:55 AM

I would buy Elemental if it had hotseat. As it stands now I will pass on that game.

HoneyBadger · #7 August 24th, 2010, 07:15 AM

Gandalf: Stardock gives good AI, but consider that it's AI in GalCiv is operating in a really simple combat environment.

That's always seemed a little suspect to me...

It feels like, once you've got the AI performing well in terms of overall strategy, that it shouldn't be to huge of a step to code in some kind of tactical framework that can go beyond "paper-rock-scissors".

People have been designing competitive chess games for well over a decade, that are able to outperform genius-level human players (1997: Deep Blue vs Kasparov, 1998: Rebel 10 vs Viswanathan Anand etc.), so why successfully create an AI that can perform on a macro-scale, but then not even make the attempt at one that can compete in a deep microgame? It's a letdown, in retrospect.

Another letdown is that the Dreadlords (the big bad Balrog-types) are neither capable of "learning" (they never adapt new weapons or defenses to the tactics of others), nor of fully operating on the grand strategy level (they don't take new planets), so that, to me, is a major failure of the AI towards giving the single player (which this style of AI seems to have been adopted for the benefit of--obviously, human players wouldn't require these kinds of handicaps), the ultimate challenge of trying to overcome an enemy that is not only strong, but in some fashion, smart.

It's a perpetuation of a tired old cliche: that of the supervillain who exists only to wait around for the plucky heroes to knock him off his dark throne. Once again, Tolkien in space. And in this case, there's not even the excuse of a Barad-Dur for the villain to be tied to, or a Cracks of Doom/Ring of Power weakness.

In GalCiv, Sauron has a spaceship.

LDiCesare · #8 August 24th, 2010, 11:38 AM

Stardock's handling of maps is very bad. They've been told to open map scripting to modders, who proved with Civ IV that they can do it.
No, they preferred to do it themselves. Now they have a big map generator, that is slow, that has to pick bits of here and there because they can't think of a non-fractal random map or can't create good fractal random maps and make them fast...

As for the ai, it will be decent enough given time, but right now, the Gold version is just worthy of a beta.
And I concur that Stardock games had good ai's because of simple rules.
Now, it's much harder with Elemental, which has way more varied rules, and in which many tricks will come, including unforeseen ones I believe, like self-hasting fire giants.

Doo · #9 August 24th, 2010, 05:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

Gandalf: Stardock gives good AI, but consider that it's AI in GalCiv is operating in a really simple combat environment.

That's always seemed a little suspect to me...

It feels like, once you've got the AI performing well in terms of overall strategy, that it shouldn't be to huge of a step to code in some kind of tactical framework that can go beyond "paper-rock-scissors".

People have been designing competitive chess games for well over a decade, that are able to outperform genius-level human players (1997: Deep Blue vs Kasparov, 1998: Rebel 10 vs Viswanathan Anand etc.), so why successfully create an AI that can perform on a macro-scale, but then not even make the attempt at one that can compete in a deep microgame? It's a letdown, in retrospect.

Another letdown is that the Dreadlords (the big bad Balrog-types) are neither capable of "learning" (they never adapt new weapons or defenses to the tactics of others), nor of fully operating on the grand strategy level (they don't take new planets), so that, to me, is a major failure of the AI towards giving the single player (which this style of AI seems to have been adopted for the benefit of--obviously, human players wouldn't require these kinds of handicaps), the ultimate challenge of trying to overcome an enemy that is not only strong, but in some fashion, smart.

It's a perpetuation of a tired old cliche: that of the supervillain who exists only to wait around for the plucky heroes to knock him off his dark throne. Once again, Tolkien in space. And in this case, there's not even the excuse of a Barad-Dur for the villain to be tied to, or a Cracks of Doom/Ring of Power weakness.

In GalCiv, Sauron has a spaceship.

I thought these supercomputers used a brute force AI, that they simply run play out millions of optional moves and where they lead and then pick the best.

Zeldor · #10 August 24th, 2010, 01:37 PM

Is there anything interesting in Elemental that would make you want to stick longer to it?

And some questions:

1. How to deal with Golems? They pretty much insta-kill any armies.
2. Or maybe auto-resolve comabts sucks so bad that with 10x higher attack you lose anyway?
3. Is there any hard limit for tiles for my cities? OR any pattern? Some of my cities have same size, but 2x less tiles...
4. Can I make more adventurers or do I have to run like crazy with my sovereign to check all huts taht pop up everywhere?
5. Do games take hundreds of turns, or is it just me?
6. What's the strongest sovereign? So far it looks like the one starting with 2 units just owns everything, as he can amass insane amount of gold etc from monsters and treasures. what's +1 gold per turn if you can find 200 gold chests?