Working title: Crystalpit Genre: mix of strategy, economy sim and roleplay elements (a very very rough idea doc) The player is an abortive accountant in a land of greedmeisters. Because he is very greedy he wants to open a crystal pit (crystal fragments are the currency of the land) to get wealthy. For a pit he needs workers, pit ponies to pull heavy loads of all sorts of materials in and out of the pit and shot firers, who blast tunnels to the precious crystals into the mountains. The player character has some skills like accounting, authority, trading, assessig... These skills help him to manage the crystal pit. The player can upgrade his skills by buying (high priced) books. Each year (or month or day:)) the player has to pay taxes. At this time his accounting skills are in demand... Depending on his skills the player has to pay an amount of crystals. To accelerate the transport of crystals and stones etc. the player can buy pit ponies (heavy bodied, low set... i.e. Shetlands). There he needs assessing skills to determine how strong etc. the ponies in question are. Shot firers and workers have to be hired too. Because the work in the tunnels is very dangerous the player needs a high authority skill. The player has to force his workers to work properly. To harvest the crystals and to dig tunnels big explosions are needed. For that purpose the shot firers place bombs in the tunnels. These excavate the crystals, split them into fragments and push the tunnels deeper into the mountains... look & feel side view, mouse control, more or less predefined building places for barracks etc., very free tunnel building. well this is only a rough concept i hope i can finnish the game. if i have the time i want to implement a two player mode where each player starts on one side of the 2d mountain and the players try to reach the big underground crystal areas first. maybe at sometime the tunnels cross and then there raises an underground melee. best regards atr_23 [Edited by - atr_23 on September 28, 2007 7:46:34 AM]

This sounds uncomfortably similar to my own idea... But in any case, good luck, sir!

I think many people have or will have a similar idea. Crystal mining combines at least two of the elements (crystals and explosions). Thinking of pit ponies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_pony) and speculators who invest in mining does the rest. Then one can link everything together to these 4 elements :) under the mining-theme.
That is the reason why I wrote my ideas to this forum this early so I can make sure nobody will later say "you stole my idea"...

I hope i will have the time to realize my version of this idea.
Because of what I said before i understand when people have the same/a similar idea :)... And I wish you good luck.

@dmoonfire
Yes and this makes it even more interesting to compete in the 4E6 contest. :)