ericbabe
Posts: 11927
Joined: 3/23/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Arinvald
Well I think you had the right idea; instead of 2+2=4 always, sometimes it will equal 3 or 5. Nothing wrong with some uncertainty. However, I sometimes felt that it was all a random crapshoot since I didn't have a good sense of why 2+2 didn't equal 4 at times. maybe simply a better feedback mechanism so that the player can easily determine what went wrong, even if there is nothing to do about it. My main complaint with the game as a whole was the interface felt like a chore at times. I hope that in COG2, the interface is streamlined without the gameplay being dumbed down. I also felt that I was more of an Economist than a General, but I dared not turn it all over to the AI. I am a control freak with these kind of games.
Do you know yet how you are going to modify the econ part of the game and if so, could you explain a wee bit? I also hope for an option to play with a more historical sized forcepool. I really didn't like seeing multiple huge armies running all over Europe. I think that once a Nation has conscripted over a certain percentage of the population, bad things should start to happen, both economicly and with civil unrest. Looking forward to COG2.
We want to make the current rules the "Advanced Economy Option". The default rules, tentatively, will have only two resources, money and labor. Each province will produce a fixed amount of these. There will be no trading of resources, no slider bars, no waste rules (we'll find another mechanism to make making huge empires more difficult). Not sure what to do with things like merchants and the Feudalism rate.
Provincial developments will be limited in some way since many of them don't apply. I recall that many people didn't like the fact that you were in control of the whole economy (they imagined that one had a "Stalin-like command over the economy", which is not what we intended the player to imagine at all... c.f., spirit-of-Austria), so we may just eliminate provincial developments as well, though we'd keep some of the numbers such as Barracks and Docks since these are useful game concepts, I hope not too confusing for people, and serve a direct militaristic purpose.
As for the historical sized force-pool, the original game had severe "waste" rules for limiting the force-pool. The original design of the game also didn't have any super-long scenarios. Based on customer demand, we mitigated the waste rules and added the super-long scenario, at which point the gigantic army sizes crept in. We also had more customers complaining that they couldn't build up their economy enough to support the 2M-man army that they'd built, and that therefore the game was broken... many people just didn't "get" that the economy/waste rules were supposed to be there to prevent you from building giant armies in the first place. Anyway, we want to add a new mechanism for limiting army sizes, something more direct that players will be able to understand more readily (like a "Maximum Army Size Rating").
(Apropos of talking about the economy, one confusion that persists out there is that "Courts" refer to courthouses -- as if one were building county-jails or something. "Courts" refer to palaces, called "courts" at the time. Napoleon built many new ones in territory newly acquired by France in order better to govern that territory by way of establishing his new aristocracy there; the book The Eagle in Splendor is a great source of information on these.)
_____________________________
|
Printable Version
COG Expansion Is Officially Under Way - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread