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So, I'm actually a programmer working on this game at the moment, so I can answer some questions for you if you have any. To be quite honest I'm not entirely sure what I can and cannot talk about, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't get back to you with a reply; it's probably because I'm asking my boss about what I can say. Anyways, I can confirm that the game is indeed completely turn based and that both the tactical and world maps are hex based. Arrrthritis posted:I remember, about a year or so back, I sent a big email to Triumph calling them jerks and to at LEAST make a Kickstarter for an Age of Wonders III because there's bound to be a fanbase out for the game! This was the response I got... We actually get a few emails like this I believe. Notable ones include the numerous death threats we received after we released pictures of minions clubbing baby seals in Overlord 2, the 9 year old girl who asked if the next Overlord could be a woman that has naked man slaves, and the guy who sent us 2 insane, expletive filled rants complaining about the random number generator in AoW:SM. We actually implemented a Mersenne Twister in response to that last one, though I don't think we replied to him.
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Feb 8, 2013 17:07
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Geokinesis posted:Why didn't you do this? Apparently we considered having man slaves for OL2, Rihanna Pratchett (the writer) was very much in favour of it, but in the end it got dropped due to a lack time. Splicer posted:You are good people. First question: What's with the giant piles of weenies? I assume they're all "a unit" (as in, buying a weenie now actually buys you a squad of weenies)? Or is that just a promo shot and one archer still equals one archer? I would be happy with either, just curious. Yeah, most units now are represented by little squads rather than individual figures. Big things like Giants and Dragons are still single figures. Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 8, 2013 |
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Feb 8, 2013 17:15
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Splicer posted:Also want to ad my name to the AoW music fans. The same guy who made the original music is making the music for this game too. quote:Follow up question: How does health work for squads? I will accept "Would have to explain far too much about the battle system to give a meaningful answer" as a response. quote:If units are represented by squads, if a unit in that squad dies, what happens with regards to healing and unit firepower? We haven't quite figured that out yet to be honest. At the moment the number of figures simply reflects the HP that a unit has left (i.e. a unit with half health only has half its figures), but that leads to an issue where you instinctively feel that a unit with fewer soldiers should do less damage, which isn't the case. quote:Semi-related question: How close will combat be to the originals? Do we still have the 7 hex multi-stack system? The adjacent hex rule is still in, so up to 7 stacks can be involved in combat at once. There are also other changes to the combat system, for example flanking a unit will do more damage and let you get a free strike without retaliation. quote:Will the lord/avatar play a more direct role? That's the plan, yeah. We're still working out details on this though. toasterwarrior posted:Is Rihanna Pratchett writing for AoW3 too? Not her and her dad's usual cup of tea, but Overlord 1 & 2 had some great writing and if Terry could write serious stuff well (better than the usual comedies actually since I love Night Watch and Small Gods), she probably has the chops for it too. Nope, I believe we've rehired the guy who did the writing for the previous games. Which is a pity, cos Rhianna's actually a really nice person 
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Feb 8, 2013 17:33
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Splicer posted:A) Are fancy crypts coming back? (I expect the answer to be no). I have seen designs come along for little dungeons like that, but I don't know what the plans are in terms of actually implementing them. Unfortunately big features like that aren't really something I can talk about, since I can't commit the company to anything. quote:B) Will you be going back to AoW1 "point buy" treasure rewards, AoW2 style "One only, might be good might be bad", or something new? I think the reward system has been designed to be quite flexible, in that it can offer you lots of different things, like units, one or more items and stuff like. I haven't been personally involved in the implementation of that though, so I can't really be sure. Anyways, I'm off to have dinner and waste my evening playing games and stuff. I'll probably swing by during the weekend and answer what I can.
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Feb 8, 2013 18:41
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Arrrthritis posted:How many races are you guys shooting for to be in the game? Is this number definite? Sorry to disappoint, but I believe it's 5 or 6. Each class has it's own set of units as well though, and they all have racial variants too, so you'll still have a huge amount of variety. DatonKallandor posted:Please have a look at the king of Fantasy TBS Combat - Fantasy General. It made the distinction between units that are squads and the ones that are individuals matter by basically letting individuals always fight at full strenght and be easier to heal (although that latter part probably won't be relevant - FG differentiated between deaths and wounded in combat). It also had a few squads that were incredible badasses that never lost combat power because for every casualty the remainder just fought that much harder. Sure, I'll tell the designers to check it out.
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Feb 9, 2013 14:05
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MinionOfCthulhu posted:Answer the important questions! Monocles for your avatar: Yes or no? Yes! At least, I saw one in the prototype leader customizer...
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Feb 9, 2013 16:33
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Bloodly posted:Isn't that how the Shadow Demons/Shadow Realm worked? Oh yes, they're gone, aren't they? Fraid so  On the bright side, I mentioned to my boss about people wanting dire penguins and a few days ago someone concepted them. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, then they're back in the game.
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Feb 19, 2013 00:45
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Fintilgin posted:Is there any intent to make the 'world map' gameplay of AOWIII a little bit more Civ-like? Like it would be nice to be able to build farms/enhance your terrain a bit more. There is some more of that kind of gameplay yes. The current system involves connecting fortresses to cities so they can grab resources from a wider radius, and using terraforming to tweak tile income. We're still pre-alpha though, so a lot might still be changed. quote:Yeah, only certain races can get maximum farming out of certain terrains. Undead on wasteland, nomads on desert (I think). I don't remember the specifics, but it might be on that big fan website. From what I remember, it affects gold income, and only in the tiles directly surrounding the city.
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Feb 19, 2013 09:13
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We've released new gameplay footage! http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-26-new-age-of-wonders-3-gameplay-video-shows-empire-building-and-leader-classes I'll be around for a little bit tonight, otherwise I can try and answer any questions people have tomorrow.
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Mar 26, 2013 23:31
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Mr.48 posted:I'm a big fan of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, could you briefly describe what's better in AoW? What, relative to HoMM 3? I don't really feel comfortable saying why our game is better than a classic like that, but I can outline the main differences: - Heroes are actual units in the army, instead of off field commanders. It's quite possible to field armies without them, though they're still very useful to have around. - Units can't be stacked up, so you can't have 500 knights in a single slot in an army - Terrain and positioning matter more. Different units move at different speeds through different terrain types, and different races prefer different areas. So elves move faster in forests and get a morale bonus in them, while Orcs get bonuses in barren landscapes. - City building is more involved, with a civilization type resource system. A city surrounded by plains might grow faster, while one surrounded by forests gets more production (don't quote me on this, the design is still a little bit up in the air here) - You can choose both a race and a class, the former affects units and cities, while the latter affects research and special units. Orv posted:When's the absolute earliest I can put your game in my brainmeats? We'd like to release some time before Christmas, but there's no real fixed date yet. It could get pushed back to next year. Armies work pretty much the same as in the other AoW games, so only 1 unit per army slot.
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Mar 27, 2013 00:04
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Taerkar posted:Is your main guy like he was in AoW II/SM? As in he doesn't gain levels, or is he more akin to a normal hero in AoW 1? More like AoW 1, in most respects he's just like all your other heroes. Demiurge4 posted:This is looking really, really good. Looks like you've already got the core gameplay down which is excellent. I'm really digging the strategic layer to flanking units, causing it to waste a retaliation. Will there be certain units that are much stronger on the defence when attacked from the front? I'm thinking shield walls and spearmen that are able to keep a defended front while faster units flank. The main defensive ability is still first strike, so pikemen hit you first when you attack them. I'm not sure about directional defensive bonuses, I think we have some units with them, but I'm not sure of how well they fit, since a unit will always turn to face you after you attack it. Fintilgin posted:The more they push the CIV/MOM style the happier I'll be. I like that feeling of starting with a tiny hamlet which you build up extensively while you expand and build new cities across the map. I haven't played a lot of AOWII, but it seemed to miss a lot of that feeling, and seemed to throw you 'into the action' much faster, with you able to field your higher tier units pretty quickly and city/empire building much less of a essential part of gameplay. Yeah, AoW 2 cities were pretty much just there to produce troops, we've been working hard to make them more interesting in 3.
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Mar 27, 2013 00:18
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Mr.48 posted:I noticed that units were visually dying in a unit-formation as the formation was taking damage (The formation started off as 6 swordsmen, but were later reduced to 3 as they took damage). Does the formation's own damage-output decrease to reflect the losses it suffered, or is it just a decrease in overall formation HP? Just HP loss at the moment, we're worried that reducing unit effectiveness with HP levels will draw out battles and encourage annoying micro. It also creates odd imbalances, since formations with fewer figures become more powerful. This could change, it feels intuitively odd at the moment that a unit with a single archer is as much a threat as a group of 8.
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Mar 27, 2013 00:31
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:For multiplayer, are there going to be any better options for keeping the pace up in this game? The problem with earlier AoW game's multiplayer was that even though they had simultaneous turns, tactical combat still bogged thing down a lot. Mostly hoping for a more robust quick combat system, maybe that allows you to have a small degree of control like choosing to retreat if things start looking bad, telling heroes what kind of spells they should/shouldn't cast, stuff like that. Also, IIRC in AoW2 if another player was involved in Tactical combat, nobody else could be doing ANYTHING. AoW1 wasn't like this, so definitely hoping for more like AoW1 here. I'm sorry to say that this is most likely still going to be the case. There's a whole raft of technical and design issues that arise if you allow one player to do things in the world map, while another is busy fighting in tactical combat. I wasn't at Triumph for AoW1, so I have no idea how they managed to do it there. On the up side, quick combat is much better, since now the game actually runs through the full battle with AI controlled armies, rather than fudging it with invisible dice rolls like it did in AoW2. So the results it gives should be much less slapdash, and you have the option of watching a replay of the battle so you can see what happened. As for your other suggestions, I haven't actually coded any retreat behavior into the AI yet. Theoretically, I should be able to add something like "If you lose half your units/army HP, try and get out", maybe link that condition to how much HP the enemy army has left somehow. Limiting spell use would be easy to implement code wise, but the interface might be a bit of a nightmare to design. Anyways, I'd best run cos
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Mar 27, 2013 09:21
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:You could also have something like, when you are about to get into battle and get the 'Do you want to Retreat, Manual Combat, or Tactical Combat?' window, you could have a dropdown (or maybe separate buttons) for, fight defensively (units start to pull back if life less than 50% and army starts to pull back if more than 50% of units are retreating), fight normally (pull back units if their health drops below ~30%), or fight aggressively (units never retreat), etc' which would tell all units that they should try to retreat if their HP starts getting low, or something like that. That'd be really simple GUI wise and would give you a bit more control over the fight. Turns out there's an issue here for Play By Email matches, since the defender would never get a chance to make those choices (because only the attacker would actually be playing at that moment). I'm not sure how it'll pan out, maybe they'll decide to dump player driven quick battle config, or simply disable it for PBEM games... Anyways, the retreat stuff was about what in line with what I was thinking. Spell casting is a whole other kettle of fish, someone suggested a system where the quick AI will only use spells if the pre-battle prediction detects a loss. Issue there being that one player's side will think "Oh, I might lose, I'll use spells!", which means they win. Logically, therefore, the other side should also choose to use spells, even though they're predicted a win, otherwise they'll lose. So the whole system breaks down. These kind of things where the AI plays chicken with itself are gonna be the bane of my existence when I go back to work on it  Regardless, we must have a system to stop quick AI using spells, since it would be really annoying if you were trying to cast a spell in the world map, but couldn't because the tactical AI kept burning through all your mana/casting points. Taerkar posted:It looked like that the combat system takes a fair amount from AoW 2/SM in regards to movement and attacks. Guys that moved got less attacks than those that didn't. Is this correct and does it affect ranged attacks as well? Yeah, a unit starts with 3 action points, as they move those action points get used up (though you can't use up your final action point by moving, so you can always attack once). Repeating abilities (Melee Strike, Fire Arrow, etc) will get one use per action point, single use abilities (Gas Breath, Heal) will either need only 1 point or 3, depending on how powerful they are. You'll see when a unit is selected that the ground lights up different colors, these mark how many action points the unit will have when it moves to that location. Another thing to note is that a unit's action points recharge at the end of their own turn; so when the dragon is retaliating, it's using up points which would otherwise be available to it next turn. If the dragon had retaliated 3 times, then it wouldn't have been able to act in its own turn at all. I'm pretty sure that's how it worked in AoW:SM as well though... The spells were being cast by the leader, who wasn't in the battle, using up casting points from the same pool that is used to cast spells in the world map. The hero has his own pool of casting points and own selection of spells, but casting a spell counts as a 3 point action, and the hero chose to attack instead. Another thing that wasn't mentioned is that heroes have classes too. The one in the battle was a Warlord, so he had access to Warlord specific spells that the player as a Theocrat wouldn't otherwise be able to use. Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Mar 27, 2013 |
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Mar 27, 2013 18:32
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KnoxZone posted:Does the main hero need to be in a wizard tower to cast spells in faraway battles like in 2/SM? At the moment, no, they can cast spells anywhere. We're playing round with different ideas with it though, like maybe have it so the leader can only cast spells in their own domain or where another hero is present. There's also thoughts of having the leader use a different pool of casting points in battle, so that spells cast their don't interfere with spells cast in the world map.
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Mar 27, 2013 18:55
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Taerkar posted:How about having there be benefits to being in a tower compared to wandering around. A balance between going out and getting XP versus staying home and supporting the troops in the field? More casting/research in the tower? Stronger spells? Limit what spells can be cast to support other battles when they're not in a tower, etc... Well, thematically a Wizard's Tower doesn't really make sense in the game. Half the classes aren't actually magic users, after all. I'm not sure where the design is at with regards to giving a benefit to keeping a leader home. One game mode idea is to have the player lose if their leader is killed, so it might come down to simply keeping your leader at home because it's safer. At one point we messed around with the concept of having heroes have in town abilities, a bit like specialists in Civ, but I think the idea was dropped because it went against the idea of what a hero is really suppsed to be about. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but in previous games, wasn't only the attacker able to retreat anyway? No, that's completely correct. I've had a long day and that didn't occur to me at all  Unit self preservation is tricky to do for the AI. There's a saying "The best defense is a good offence", and it's hard for the AI to make judgement calls for when that's the case. You don't want the AI to stop a unit from attacking, if that leads it to lose the battle (and that unit). On the other hand, you don't want the AI to suicidally charge with a half dead swordsman, when the battle could easily be won by the other units in the field. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:For spells, honestly I think just being able to tell a spellcasting hero if he should not cast spells would be fine. Easy to do and solves the real major problem anyway, which is heroes wasting their spellpoints and mana on battles where they don't need to. It'd probably be good to just make it a toggle on the battle mode selection screen. We're thinking of having a global toggle, so PBEM players don't get screwed over. victrix posted:Let me in the beta I have literally no idea how our beta is gonna work, but I think a good start would be to make yourself known as a poster on the official forums, since there's a good chance that beta testers will be chosen from among people there: http://www.ageofwonders.com/aow3live/forums/ Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Oh yeah, have they said anything about modding capability? Mods sure added a lot of life to Shadow Magic, so it'd be good to see full support for them in AoW3. Forgot about this post til just now We're definitely going to release the Level Editor so people can make their own scenarios and campaigns. The editor will let you create new items and heroes as well. With regards to modding other areas of the game, we're definitely trying to set things up so it can be modded, but I have no idea if/how/when modding tools will be released.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:21
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Shadowmorn posted:I had a friend muse on a really simple win for this, How about optional spectator mode? At least this way you can egg on the bad guys while your buddy gets horribly crushed by a giant bone dragon. This is an amazing idea, and I'm going to see about getting it done tomorrow. I could be wrong, but I think that it should be fairly easy to implement as well... Splicer posted:How will leveling work? Same as SM, where you choose from one of 3 randomly offered? I think the current plan is more AoW 1, where you get points to buy upgrades. That's not final though. As for the beta, all I can say is I think that they'll want to try and get people from the community, which essentially means people on the main forums and people on the heaven games site. I don't know though, maybe closer to the time I'll be able to wrangle some invites for people here, really can't promise anything though. Elias_Maluco posted:HoMM 3 was the best before HoMM 5 got Tribes of the East and the unnoficial AI patch. Does the AI patch change the difficulty at all? I got annoyed with 5 since the normal AI was a pushover, while the next level up seemed to cheat so hard that whatever I tried I'd end up facing some undefeatable doom army and would have to quit.
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Mar 27, 2013 23:09
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Splicer posted:On that note: Have you considered having the "Boring" skill-ups (attack, defence etc) run off a different track to the "interesting" things like Life Stealing, Round Attack etc? Raw number-go-up level ups are vital, but boring. If you either got to buy them from different point pools (so instead of 10 points per level you got 5 boring points and 5 interesting points) or just had the number-go-ups be a function of your race and class (Everyone gets 5 interesting points per level, but in addition to that Orcish Warrior chooses between +1 attack or +1 damage at level 2 while Elven Mage chooses between Movement and Defence at level 2) then you'd never feel like you were wasting a level on boring-but-mandatory things. Just asked a designer about this, and he said that in a game like Diablo 2, stat boosts become mandatory since enemies are constantly becoming more powerful, so you have two sets of skill points, 1 for stats and another for abilities. In Age of Wonders this isn't the case, the only things that get more powerful over time are heroes. So we want to make it so the player has to choose between stat upgrades which boost the heroes survivability and basic combat strength, or utility abilities that give the player more options like fireballs or wall climbing. Also, with regards to the optional spectator mode, it turns out the idea is so good that we implemented it weeks ago and I didn't realise. So, hurrah for us!
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Mar 28, 2013 10:19
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Splicer posted:I do know that in SM that unless you went full caster there was a definite point where if you hadn't invested in +attack you were kind of boned vs anything interesting late game. There's actually a very big difference that you might not realize. In AoW:SM, it was possible for units to miss, so low attack units were essentially worthless against high defense ones. In AoW3, this isn't the case, Attack and Damage have been merged into one value, a low attack unit striking a high defense one will always hit it, it will just do less damage. Regardless, I guess if you want a hero that can go toe to toe with a dragon, then you're going to have to drop some points into damage and defense boosts. Or bring your own dragon to help
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Mar 28, 2013 11:29
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Tithin Melias posted:Has anyone done an LP of the earlier games? couldn't find anything in the LP Archive and I'm interested in reading / watching the intricacies of the earlier games (not necessarily playing it though) There's one running now: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3539534
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Mar 28, 2013 11:36
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Splicer posted:
It was me, I used to get so annoyed when my Dread Reaper would miss some stupid halfling swordsman  We tried having effects work in a similar way (the effect had a strength, and would always affect units that had a lower resistance), but they all ended up being too overpowered. Effects now work on probability, so every point of difference between the strength of the attack and the target resistance indicates an X% shift in success probability. You can see the probability being displayed in a preview popup in the video when the evangelists use mind control. Most resistible spells now have an "On Failure" effect though, so even if they effect fails the target will still lose some HP or some move points or something.
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Mar 28, 2013 12:31
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Tell whichever designers proposed this I love him and/or her. This is seriously the best thing.
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Are there other random factors to combat, or is this representative of your design philosophy overall? There's random variance of something like +-20% in the amount of damage done by any attack. There's also a debate going on about the whole "Using X damage has a Y chance to cause Z effect", like we had in Shadow Magic (where using lightning damage on something had a small chance of stunning the target, for example); It's not currently implemented, but it's possible it will be. The idea wasn't so much to reduce random factors, more to stop a player performing an action that had no effect. Many people (like me) hated the way that you could go "Let's try this cool ability!" and just get a little boop sound as it did nothing. We're definitely keeping randomness, since we don't want combat to deteriorate into a determinate chess game where people can accurately predict exactly what the consequences of their actions will be. Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Mar 28, 2013 |
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Mar 28, 2013 13:02
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bamhand posted:Am I the only one that liked the chance to miss stuff? I liked some units in AoW 1 being tankier because they had more hp and others were tankier because they could block/parry hits. Just flavorwise I liked guys with shields being able to block the first hit of a round or being able to parry etc. Leprechauns No, you're not the only person. This is a very divisive subject, I'm afraid. The presence of multiple figures in each unit also influenced the decision, it's believable that single goblin will miss and a single elf, but it gets very weird when you have 6 goblins who all miss 6 elves. I think what we have now is a bit of a compromise, some things are hit/miss, some things are more reliable. If you take a risk with the hit/miss stuff, the rewards tend to be a lot better. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I dunno, being that this is a strategy game, I could see a lot worse things happening than this. Usually games that go this route (see something like Vantage Master as an example) go to lengths to keep things interesting by having lots of subtle factors that are worth considering, like terrain effects, height effects, a unit type wheel (W->X->Y->Z->W kind of thing), unique temporarily unit buff skills and debuff skills, stuff of that nature. Not saying this is necessarily the way AoW3 should go mind you, just that it's perfectly viable for a strategy/rpg kind of game to have extremely few random factors and be a lot of fun. Oh, I agree with you. I think "deteriorated" was the wrong word to use. In my experience, games without random chance tend to be a lot more hardcore, since the decisive factor is always player skill. By adding randomness, we make it so that a player's ability can be mitigated by bad luck, giving weaker players more of a fighting chance. Another reason people have wanted to keep randomness around is the sense of tension it adds to the game, where someone knows they can win, but only if this webbing touch actually succeeds a 50% roll.
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Mar 28, 2013 16:47
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victrix posted:Oooh, game design philosophy. Have some words. I agree with you here, one of the issues I had with the hit/miss in AoW:SM was that often, you could only move 2 or 3 units per turn, and having most of them miss was just so frustrating. If you compare that to something like NWN, where your character will miss quite frequently, it doesn't have the same psychological effect because you're taking a swing once a second anyways. There's a similar thing in FFXIII; normally in JRPGs I never try to debuff enemies, but a Saboteur will just keep spamming debuffs, automatically ignoring the ones the monster is immune to, so it feels more like a matter of time rather than an exercise in futility. DatonKallandor posted:Making an attack roll for every single unit in a multi-person squad means the damage isn't as swing as if you rolled one collective attack for the entire unit. It would also involve a huge rewrite of a lot of systems, including parts of the AI and the combat interfaces. It's a nice idea, but beyond the scope of what we're really able to do I'm afraid. MaterialConceptual posted:Just wondering if there is any chance of a Linux port for this game? I think it would really stand out in the list of Linux games on Steam that's up right now. Eador apparently is getting ported, but AoW III is THE REAL DEAL and I am very excited about the prospect of playing it. I'm kind of sad this game never got a Kickstarter because it seems like a Linux port would have been more likely in that case. If it doesn't happen I'll hope for good Wine compatibility. Sorry to say I'm not really able to answer this. We're focusing on the Windows release at the moment, where we'll take it afterwards is really beyond what I can talk about.
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Mar 28, 2013 19:08
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Leal posted:Very important question: Will hell hounds be making a return as a summon? I think so, yes.
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Apr 4, 2013 08:52
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Raygereio posted:Will there be descriptions for units like there was in AoW1 and Shadow Magic? Yes! Splicer posted:So Undead: I see an undead Dragon in the preview there. Since they're not a race, is there going to be a Necromancer themed build or are Undead purely NPC at the moment? I needs me my Zombies. There are definitely undead units in the game, but I'm not allowed to saying anything else about that I'm afraid.
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Apr 4, 2013 13:19
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Shadowmorn posted:Will anything be changing for holding your territory and making it less fiddly? Having to have 1 waterwalking/flyer unit to recap stuff when a single mob runs past, or loosing a city to a roaming swordsman was somewhat frustrating. Maybe a city attack option like Civ5 or have it so garrisoned armies can defend local objects easier? Well, non-magical classes still get spells. They're just thematically less magical. For example, rogues get spells for gathering information and poisoning people, while dreadnaughts get spells that help boost war machines and things. They still cost mana though, and for all practical purposes can be considered to be spells. As for your other question, we want the focus of defending your territory to be based around defending your domain, which means you'll mainly only need to defend fortresses and cities. There's a bit more to it than that, but I don't think that information's been released and I'm not at work so I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say
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Apr 8, 2013 18:05
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Mr.48 posted:Any news on figuring out how to decrease performance of multi-unit formations as the individual units die off? I've passed on all the suggestion to various designers, so we'll just have to see what they make of it. We're all really busy at the moment trying to get to the alpha stage, so details like that will probably have to wait until we're working towards beta.
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Apr 10, 2013 21:15
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Slashrat posted:On the topic of singleplayer storytelling though; will AoW3 feature more immersive delivery within missions (be it separate cutscenes, or just zooming in on units on the map while they act out some story-related scripted sequence within their current location) or will it still just be textbox pop-ups for in-mission storydumps? I don't know, to be quite honest. My main focus is on gameplay mechanics, mostly tactical combat and a lot of the world map stuff, most of the campaigns and cutscene things are handled by other people. In engine cutscenes have definitely been mentioned, but I haven't seen any in play yet. Shadowmorn posted:It is the same person who wrote AOW1, AOW2, SM and now AOW3 right? Because hot drat. It might be standard fantasy but its enjoyably well written nether the less! Yep, we have the same writer and the same composer as before.
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Apr 10, 2013 22:39
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Geokinesis posted:Are there going to be lots of interesting terraforming/land altering spells available? That's the idea, though currently we're not completely decided on what impact different types of terrain should actually have. Splicer posted:Pretty sure that bit is just saying that if you want to play an Evil Theocrat you should take red-and-black so your dudes look more evilly, not because it actually makes you more evil. Colour-based alignment adjustments would be pretty This. I'm pretty sure that alignment is entirely based on your in game actions, with some minor racial modifiers. AFAIK your choice of color has no in game effect.
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Apr 11, 2013 17:17
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Not as far as I'm aware. Everyone's really busy trying to complete the alpha at the moment, so I'm not really in the loop as far as press releases go though.
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May 2, 2013 17:32
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Mr.48 posted:Any word on figuring out how to make formations lose effectiveness as individual units die? Sorry if it seems like I'm harping on this, but this sort of thing bugs the hell out of me and is one of the reasons I decided not to get the new Eador game. I batted some ideas round with one of the designers, and he agreed to look into it after alpha. I think it might be cool if we can use it to make weaker units more worthwhile, so you could have a big goblin squad which does damage comparable to a high tier unit, but rapidly weakens as it takes hits. We've still got a lot to do though, and at the end of the day the game could easily survive without the feature, so it's hard to say whether or not it'll make it in.
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May 2, 2013 23:15
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Shadowmorn posted:So nothing in exact words yet. Hey, Gerblyn, if you see this and something goes up about the Scenario Tools, hit up this thread would ya? I don't know if we have a Dev Pournal planned for the level editor or the random map generator. I can tell you that we're planning to ship with both of them though.
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Jun 3, 2013 10:37
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Shadow magic had that sooo good.
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Shadowmorn posted:Awesome. Its one of the reasons why i keep coming back to Shadow Magic whenever i get an itch for this kind of game. Just spoke to my boss about the Dev Journals, and he said that it's likely we'll make one covering the level editor and random map generator. We're still pushing for alpha at the moment though, so it might take a couple of weeks before anyone has time to write one.
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Jun 4, 2013 08:37
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avoraciopoctules posted:Can you still enchant customized items for your heroes? Yeah, you'll be able to enchant items. I don't think it's locked off for any leader types, but the design for who can use which enchantments and how they're unlocked is still a bit up in the air.
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Jun 6, 2013 08:13
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Taerkar posted:The cannons do a direct-line attack and he positioned them so that the flame tank wasn't in the line of fire. That's correct. The attack also does less damage to units behind obstacles, if you pay close attention you can see it glitching in the video. At around 7:15, the horned god gets shot through a wall, and the combat preview displays 7-11 damage, but the shot does 27 damage. This is because the preview sees the wall and reduces the damage the guy takes, but when the ability is activated, it destroys the wall first, so the code that damages the horned god doesn't apply the damage penalty. Rabhadh posted:So I'm guessing that if you play an Elf Dreadnought you'll get Elf musketeers? Sort of, being a dreadnaught unlocks the ability to build musketeers, the race depends on the race of the city that builds the units. So, a draconian city will produce fire resistant musketeers, while an elven city will produce musketeers who can move better through forests. Playing as an elf does mean you're start city will probably be an elf one. Most class specific units work this way, with the exception of unique things like land ships. Shadowmorn posted:I wonder if the cityscape battleground gets bigger if you have more forces flanking the defenders? I'm afraid not. We experimented with various ways of making the city maps so they'd more closely match the situation on the world map, but none of them really worked. Either the city ended up looking comically small, or you ended up with huge maps that took forever to play through and were too expensive for our art/design team to make. It would have been awesome if we'd managed to have AoW1 style tactical maps that had roads and walls and things that matched the world map, but it just wasn't practical 
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Aug 22, 2013 09:52
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Leal posted:I do have a question for the goon that is working on this game. Assuming you read what the community says, and if not can you ask someone who does, do you sometimes just read what people say and just sigh deeply and shake your head, possibly taking a shot of your alcohol of choice as you continue coding? Sometimes, yes, though probably not as often as you think. A lot of the time when you read these big arguments on forums about a particular game's mechanics and rules, the posters are all saying things that reflect what the Devs themselves were saying to each other when they decided on those mechanics. As an example, 2 or 3 people at work have been discussing fonts for hours, and running round asking everyone what they think, and which font should be used where and why. By comparison, the official thread looks kind of tame. To put it another way, it's hard to mock someone who's gone to far down the rabbit hole, when you're a guy who lives in one. Of course, sometimes an individual or group will latch on to some idea to a degree which is kind of tiresome. But this is usually because they refuse to let something go even when it's been discussed to death and a decision has been made, and really everyone wants to just get on with things, not because what those people are saying is wrong or naive or anything. I'd imagine Diablo 3's art department felt something like that about the whole "COLOURS!!! " poo poo storm that blew up a couple of years back.Edit: Also, not to sound too PR person-y, we do actually encourage discussions like the font one. Forum discussions often contain useful feedback, and sometimes give us ideas on how to fix things or implement things that we're still unsure of ourselves. Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 10:14
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OwlFancier posted:I really like slow but beefy units so hopefully, AoW3 keeps some big mobility differences between factions. In AoW3, builder units can build forts to cheaply claim an area and its resources. The fort acts like a sort of half city, it claims an area like a city does, but has no production or growth. You can then send a settler to the fort and plant a city on it, and it becomes a city with walls. I'm afraid that AoW3 doesn't do much to fix what you're talking about though, enemies can move over your borders and the only way to stop them is to intercept them or block off choke points. There's a thing called the "Adjacent Hexagon Rule" which means that you can have 2 stacks next to each other, and you can't attack one without also attacking the other, so in principle you can block off wider choke points. There are also spells you can cast which penalize enemies that move into your territory, I believe we have a spell which damages an enemy stack for each turn they stay in your domain for example. I don't really have a handle on how the older games deal with it really, though I know you can use the adjacent hex rule to block off wider chokepoints.
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Jan 28, 2014 10:33
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Demiurge4 posted:Did you consider zones of control for the strategic map at any point during development? I know you've countered mine sniping somewhat by linking them with cities and it's a decent way to handle it. But are chokepoints or open maps a philosophy when designing your maps? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by zones of control? We've tried to remove the sniping from previous games by saying that the only things worth sniping are forts and cities, since capturing those gives you control over everything within their domain. You can move onto an enemy's mine or farm or whatever, but that only denies the enemy that structure's income while you sit on it, as soon as you leave ownership goes back to whoever owns the local fort/city. At one point we had it so you could raze mines and things, but it was too easy for an attacker to wander about razing everything they saw, while the defender has to run everywhere with a builder rebuilding things. Edit: Just asked, Lead Level Designer favours open maps, the Creative Director favours chokepoints. I guess you're gonna get both! Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 10:50
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Demiurge4 posted:Edit: Cool! So the only way to distrupt an enemy economy now is to take his forts and cities? That's the easiest way. You can also cast spells on their city's for various effects, like to try and reduce the cities happiness so it becomes less productive. You can park units directly next to a city, and that reduces the city's income by 1/6th for each of the 6 surrounding hexes you occupy. We don't have a "Can't move past enemy stack" system though, I don't think anyone even considered one and it's pretty late in the project to try and add it now. Gerblyn fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 11:18
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