Saluk: Running from meat eaters might be fun for a while, but really, EVERYONE would want to be a meat eater.

Not necessarily. Your carnivore/herbivore idea sounds like a very good one, I urge you to implement it! But your mistake is in thinking that herbivores avoid carnivores. Not true. Some run, some hide, but others fight back. For example, many plant-eating dinosaurs had large skeletal plates acting as armor, in addition to things like spiked or clubbed tails that they swung at attackers. Attacking something like that was actually dangerous, and a gamble on the meat-eater''s part.

In a game, merely avoiding the meat-eaters will not be much fun in the long term, but being able to fight them if it comes to that will. You can have it that the plant-eaters have high hitpoints but low damage, as this would be a pretty good interpretation of reality (not all actually did low damage, some could kill in one hit with their tail if it''s well-aimed).

But the difference in the sides can be that the plant-eaters are best off avoiding meat-eaters - running or hiding, only fighting if need be. This works for a class-based approach, because you can have some herbivore dinosaurs that mainly hide, others that mainly run, and others that mainly fight. So the fighters could fight while they others run away, and the hiders can be scouts, and so forth. The very tall dinosaurs like bronchosauri and dipplodoci have lots of hitpoints but are slow and can''t attack, but they can go in deep water unlike any other dinosaur.

The carnivores will just have a variety of stats and attack types - velociraptors which are quick and dexterous (that''s where the "veloci" comes from) and Tyrannosauri which are strong but relatively slow, and Allosauri which are faster and do more or the same damage as Tyrannosauri, but with less hitpoints (I think this is sort of accurate, not sure though).

To give the plant-eaters something to do, look to reality! They must always be consuming plants. To do this, they go where some healthy green plants are (that are in reach - only tall dinosaurs like bronchosauri and dipplodoci can reach tall trees) and stand there. Standing still makes them automatically eat anything within melee range. Plants are consumed and the leaves don''t grow back for a while (one real-life hour?), so plant-eaters need to always be moving to the next patch of fertile land, which puts them in danger. They also can''t go long without eating anything, since each individual plant only slightly lowers their hunger.

The meat-eaters, when they kill a plant-eater, stand over the corpse to automatically eat it. Each corpse can fully replenish the stomache of one carnivore. So the carnivores don''t need to eat as often as the herbivores.

Obviously with a system like this, it will not be very eventful. More suspenseful. The meat-eaters will usually not know where the plant-eaters are and will have to hunt them, and the plant-eaters will usually be doing nothing but eating. So it would be a more relaxed, social game - players can just chat and stuff while their characters eat, or whatever.

But the system I described won''t work as a MMORPG - just a 32-player game or smaller, probably.

~CGameProgrammer( );

But who doesn''t want to be an individual? In fact, I think something like Warcraft III could have been much better if we had only one hero per person, but could customize them ahead of time just like an RPG hero - appearance, name, class, etc. So instead of merely controlling an army, the players actually had an individual unit they could call their own.

~CGameProgrammer( );