I still have to finish some of my mods for PM - but I got pretty sidetracked by RTW. I still can’t get over your doing "Master’s of Whatever"TM. There is not a single game developer I’d rather have do it than Stardock.
For example, Rome Total War is great, but the AI is seriously Monty-Pythonish (RUN AWAY!, I see horses, RUN AWAY!). You don’t realize it until you’ve put in a lot of hours and make some money. Then it kind of becomes transparent. For example, I wrote CA and Activision asking them exactly what changes when you move up the difficulty level and they refused to answer saying “that’s your job to find out”. So I did, and discovered the AI just cheats by getting more money, more benefits for buildings etc, while the game takes away your money, etc. It doens’t seem to have any better AI with higher levels of difficulty. Probably nitpicky, I just had higher expectations for a series as well-developed as that of “Total War”.
It just seems game AI is so neglected vs. the increasing power our computer’s have nowadays. Sheesh, even for such an “advanced” game, DOOM III has some of the least existant, and utterly stupid AI I’ve seen this year. Although considering 100% scripting - AI is probably quite a complement…
So Brad, glad a company who can program decent AI is doing MoW… and can’t wait for Gal Civ2. Custom ships. Oh man… That was the one/only thing Space Empires had on GalCiv. :D
Well you’ll be happy to know that we’re ripping off as much as we can from Rome Total War. ;) I really love the big map view with the trade routes.
What we’re hoping is for GalCiv 2 to last a very very long time. So like on the 3D models, they’re really detailed and depending on the setup, the # of polygons can be decreased. So we can have really high polygony ships that look really good but if your system isn’t up to it, it’ll lower the #.
The idea being that years from now the game’s graphics will keep “magically” getting better. ;)
We plan to do the same with the fantasy strategy game. I want to see ogres and orcs and trolls and such that LOOK like orcs and trolls if I have a really high end system and that keep looking better year after year.
These days, 500 polygons in a unit is a lot and looks good. But if we can do units that have 5000 polygons that scale down to 500 polygons thatlook great by today’s standards. But 2 years from now, same game scales up to 2000 polygons and it keeps looking better and better.
That works to an extent, but its limited by the core technology. I don’t know exactly when its coming, but graphics won’t always be polygon-based (or primarily polygon-based). At that point higher polygon counts will still be insufficient. Better, better, and not so much better.
Good Brad! Take the good stuff :) It always amazes me how some game developers refuse to look at their product or at good competor’s to learn and make their own titles better (Chris Sawyer/Locomotion I’m talking to you).
If I had one concern, it would be to not lower the amount of ships/options to just focus on fewer more high-ploy detailed ones.
Thing’s to change from RTW though:
Scalable map. Can’t zoom out far enough. It would be nice if the higher resolution you used made, allowed you to see more of the map at once, and then still allow you to zoom really close-in for map details.
I liked controlling trade routes in Gal Civ. An autotrade option like what RTW has would be nice if you didn’t wan to micro it… but I would not want to see it disappear. Reason? There are trade routes I’d like to establish with certain countries over others, and be able to designate what-to what as GalCiv has. They made trade in RTW dummy-proof. Good for dummies, but not for strategy players :)
Don’t lose any of the diplomacy GalCiv has. I LOVE the diplomay and would not want to see any of it neutered - but instead expanded.
If it’s not too much extra work, maybe you can get ATI to chip in and add 3dC to your new titles ;)
Hehe. I think it was HOMM I or II when I first realized that game developers were often just using “cheats” to make their AI competetive instead of more intelligent. Man was I disappointed. On normal difficuty level, I had a town surrounded and the AI was still pumping out twice as many units as I could. Sadly, it got NO better through the rest of the series.
Brad, please don’t copy the REALLY BORING strategy side of RTW.
Strategy is choices… often difficult ones (Which is why Dom2 is so fun)…
There are no choices in RTW. Everything is entirely predictable. The fact that you can have the AI automanage your cities and tax (and do it better than you can!) says a lot!
Unique characters is cool (although in RTW they get hopeless fast, annoying). . but the rest of it is less comlpex than Command and Conquer grr.
We’re not stealing game concepts from Rome Total War. We’re stealing some of the visual techniques.
Example: We really like how they show trade routes on the map. There’s a lot of subtle visual flair that we really like.
RTM and GalCiv are totally different games so even if we wanted to steal from it, we couldn’t because it wouldn’t make sense. ;)
BTW, I’m also pleased to mention that Paul Kerchen who helped write a good chunk of Simcity 3000 has joined us and will be working on the new planetary management system before he starts leading the Master…fantasy strategy game team.
