AltarofScience

i didnt bother reading the whole stuff until i raged down to write a reply and here it is:

 

I personaly think that what makes any film, book or game-idea be "worhty", have "dignity" and a right to be made is if the idea/story is original and anti-cliche. I think for amateurs today, the key to breaking into the industry isnt to make superb visuals (movies) and good gameplay (games), but good STORY!

Thats your way in. Because THAT, the STORY, is what critics today are so unhappy about today:

bad stories

 

my opinions are mine alone

You people with all your analogies have never written a book or painted a painting have you? You better not take this shit to a writers' forum and expect to impress people.

Do you know what editors are? Do you know what drafts are? What you wrote a 10 page paper in college and got an A and expect people to give a shit? Look, go to a writers' forum and make a post like this about books and when everyone agrees with you get back to me.

There is no person who just walks up to a painter and says I want to paint a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge and then the painter just paints it. Its usually the painter himself who decides what to paint. The most common "designer" of a song is a singer songwriter. Or one guy who does lyrics and then another who plays or w/e.

People who can ONLY think up ideas and have no technical skills are worthless. You know the only case where someone tells the singer what to sing? Industrialized pop music. You know who decides? The suits. The same for painting. A rich person commissions a portrait. You can design any damn game you want if you FINANCE it, too.

So to clarify, things an idea guy needs to be valuable:

Money

or

Programming

or

Art

In which case he is a suit or a programmer or an artist, too. And generally unless you are a suit, the artists and programmers get to make decisions, too.

There is no where in the art world a case where people sit around dreaming up ideas and then get someone with skill or talent to make that complicated art piece for free. Not one fucking place.

RTSs stand out when they go all in on something. RTTs like CoH are one example. Grand strategy like CK2 is another. Simulated troops like Majesty is another. Basically don't try to mix it up too much unless you really know what you are doing or you are mixing in something completely new. RTS games like WBC3 have average economy and combat but they spin in a shit ton of RPG to make them stand out. Perimeter added unit transformation but was otherwise nothing more than Total Annihilation. Stronghold had a semi okay economy but was mainly notable for its extensive fortress simulation with siege and walls.

Some games stand out with a shit ton of balance and/or polish like Blizzard games, even if their economy is boring.

Basically you need to pick one aspect and do it REALLY well. In a way that hasn't been done. Or you could take one game and make a more polished version, but that's unlikely since you are indieish.

can you give a description of your game ? thus far it s not even clear whether upgrades should belong to characters or buildings,or are you still trying to choose between the two ?

 

if anything, i wouldnt worry about processor-power over a formula, a decent computer should be able to make the necessary calculations all the time and show them to the player if/when the player wants to see them/needs to make a decision based off them

You can get character skill, with their mind and body parts, bonuses from tools, and bonuses from facilities, all applied to the basic quality of a resource and a type of item, ie chain vs plate.

You're ruleset is ridiculously over-complicated. Having to check 9 different stats (6 defensive and 3 offensive) just to determine the amount of damage dealt by a bullet to one layer of armor is ludicrous. With two armor layers and two damage types per weapon, there are 21 different stats that can affect how much damage a person takes from any given attack. It really feels like complexity for complexity's sake, which is rarely, if ever, the origin of an enjoyable ruleset.

In the context of designing fleets though its not really too complex. And it provides interesting realism where neither side really knows what the other side is going to use, similar to real warfare.

I can't imagine the point of this. The only reason to make complex calculations is to force a player to make decisions in a single fight. Otherwise everyone will just memorize a wiki made by some math crafters and all this work will be for nothing. In theory you might use this in a system when you can customize weapons and armor, ie, the enemy prefers lasers for w/e reason so you create an armor to minimize lazer damage catching them off guard.

Part of my current project involves an aspect of developing characters for the economic and combat simulations. Its extremely difficult to find games close enough to evaluate for ideas and almost no one wants to discuss design theory. So I suspect your chances of finding anything really similar are quite low.

Unless you wanna go from hockey to football or baseball or soccer or something.

So as part of my current project I am creating an engine that can handle the character related tropes of role playing games. Notice I said character related. I have no interest in RPG combat or story lines because my engine is focused around RTS games. Not limited to, but the basics behind a game are intended to always include a map which you are trying to exercise real time control of.

There are countless examples of combat related rpg characterization to fall back on, improve on, iterate on but, its not so easy to look at successful implementations in the context of economics or trade or science.

Its also a little harder since it has to integrate in other systems in a way combat doesn't.

Basically I based my initial plan on crafting systems I've conceptualized for VOWs. I have to decide on a level of detail. I basically have 2 choices here. I can run a stat per resource or I can run one per field. I prefer resources, as a min maxer its more interesting, but it might be less memory intensive, for the player and the computer, to do fields like alchemy and cooking and so forth. Fields might also be better for size reasons. It might be nice to specialize in specific resources and processes to make specific potions to gain efficiency, but only if the map size is large enough to support a potion making structure for each kind. This can partially be offset by having labs functions as items, which have no corporeal 3D form, inside potion workshops. So you could have 4 labs per workshop. However you would still need a pool of educated citizens large enough to support a large number of potion makers.

Another issue I have is that time management wise it might be easier to run one guy doing all the potion skills instead of specializing. If my goal is to reduce micro it would be easier to run multiple projects under one guy who focuses on his field and not his specialty, instead of having several guys overseeing a smaller number of workers/projects.

Basically I feel like there is a sweet spot between how much control the player has and how much work is required to exercise it. I know that crafting works well at the field level from MMOs. So I have to decide if given all the other design risks I'm taking whether more granularity in production will pay off.

Crusader Kings 2 has an aspect like that. Mixed in with Dynasty management. I'm not sure if its pure enough. You also have to deal with combat. Well, not technically, you could eschew it if you wanted. And the event system is helpful since you can make choices about your guys. You search around the game for good marriages and try to breed good congenital traits to your dynasty and used education to get good traits for your kids.

Academagia has a system for this. Most you take classes and get events and choose to go to various locations. Its basically a Hogwarts simulator.

Personally I thought Earthsea or the Name of the Wind or other similar magic systems are much better. Because its not just shitty massacring of Latin.

There are rules to the system and you can manipulate them. Honestly even The Darkness series by Turtledove had a better magic system and it was actually an alt universe WW2 that didn't even focus on a magic academy.

Are you familiar with King of Dragon Pass? It's, to my mind, the archetypical story/strategy game.

http://a-sharp.com/kodp 

 

The strategy is around establishing a mythical/fantasy tribe in a new land, and the story comes in as you have to manage people as individuals as well as the tribe as a whole.

I'm glad someone mentioned this. KoDP has a great story.

I am working on my modified RTS engine right now trying to make weird genre blending exploratory strategy games. Currently I'm doing Majesty/Emperor combo but with deeper guilds, but later I'm going to be doing some storyish Dominions/KoDP event system style things. I'm actually writing the event code right now. There are gonna be several individual events but also some long interlocked series of events.

If OP ends up making a game I'll be interested to see his method of integrating story. I'm always looking for new surprising genre combos.

He has a GDD and he wants to submit to Activision...

Sometimes humanity, you vex me.

Well one major problem is how little entertainment success has to do with the product itself. So much of it is tied up in name recognition, popularity, marketing, and other such nonsense.

You really only need a baseline quality in a product and then its all about perception and marketing.

How about something based around crystals like the Kryptonian ones from Superman -- when used correctly they're able to grow crystaline structures or even land-masses which take on certain properties based on their surrounding environment?  I don't really have ideas for similar mobile units, but it could be an interesting idea for structures.

The Tok'ra used crystals for construction in a similar fashion.

I agree with that. It is one of many reasons to have variable strength factions. Another example is a faction like LA Ermor that is specifically designed to be ganged up upon. Its incredibly strong because it causes disparate factions to need to work together to take it down. It changes so much of the game and adds that spicey variant to the game to keep it fresh.