ericbabe
Posts: 11927
Joined: 3/23/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BossGnome I personally dont really like the economy of COG, but an overly simplified model à la "rome total war" could seriously ruin the game. Let's be honest with ourselves here: budget wise, matrix could never beat activision, so COG must be (and currently is) beating RTW by brain power, that is, having more diverse diplomatic and economic options, since it would be hard to make COG battles as entertaining as the RTW ones (sorry for those who prefer turned based). My view is: you lop off most of the economy in the sequel, and you lose almost 1/2 of your advantage over rome. I haven't played Rome Total War, so I can't speak to that comparison (I did play Shogun Total War once shortly after it first came out). There will actually be more distinct economic options in the sequel, it's just that the equations that govern these options will be simpler and less-opaque and some of the smaller economic "wheels" that operate over the long term with more gradual effects will be replaced by more dramatic operations that have more immediate consequences in order to give players more immediate feedback on their economic decisions. I personally find RTS games boring unless played against a human opponent whose strategies I know well (then one can start putting Col. Boyd's theories into practice...since the length of the AI's OODA loop is measured in mS, there's really no head-head out-Boyding the AI.) I don't think our battles are any less fun than, say, Shogun Total War's battles were (for my tastes, I much prefer ours, in fact). I think we can compete simply because there are a lot of strategy gamers who want to resolve their battles with a strategy-based sub-game, not a real-time click-fest. Some people might like a strategic game where the battles are resolved with a first-person shooter, since lots of players like FPS's ("and then Napoleon picked up his musket and started picking off the advancing Austrian mass" -- the game Dungeon Keeper was essentially a strategy game + FPS, can't think of any other examples...) but I think there are a lot of strategy gamers who simply wouldn't find such a thing enjoyable. (I believe that RTW is in the reverse sort of situation... their main selling point is their RTS battle system. If their strategy game were too robust, it would be a turn-off to many of the RTS fans.) I appreciate all the enjoyment that players who write on the Matrix forum get out of the game's complicated economy -- one of you guys should have written our review in CGW or CGM! The mainstream reviews did enormous harm to our prospects of distribution, and as long as I'm making less than minimum wage I've got to try to figure out a way to please/appease the reviewers so as to try to sell just a few more copies. I don't think that the new rules we have in mind will be any less enjoyable than the COG systems, but if there are enough players who don't like them, then it may be quite possible to have the game run in two different modes: have Basic and Advanced Rules between which players can choose. In Basic rules, mines might be +1 iron, in advanced rules their effect might be (+10%*Population+(15%*Roads_)/((Distance-From-Capital)^2*WasteLevel).
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