Quote:Original post by Kitt3n
We wasted lots of time with this, decorating houses, doing npc day/night/job-cycles - for something which didn't really interest the player in the end.

Again: Whatever you want to do: Make a judgement: Is the time needed for creating this, relative to how much time the player is going to put into investigating it - and more important: enjoy the time spent on it?

But perhaps this has a value over and above the time the player spends investigating it? The fact that the player has the option of entering these buildings, even if they choose not to, improves the atmosphere of an open and complete world for exploration.

You would no doubt receive complaints of a lack of depth to the world otherwise?

I think there is a possibility of too much space. Take Total War for example a game I love, but you get to a point where you have a good foot hold on your territory. Then you make the same units over and over to conquer further lands to double/triple your territory. The first stage of fortifying your position is fun, then the sending out the armies to conquer the rest seems like more work than intended. Sure its fun to conquer, but the last castle you invade is the same process as your first castle you invaded during the start of your conquest (after you have fortified your position, mid game). So if things are continuing to change, new units new technologies will help to overcome the repetitiveness similar to Empire Earth. Keep the technology rolling to keep the player with new stuff till end game.

Also be wary of all the space dwarfing your units. Sins of the Solar Empire was pretty fun, huge amount of space to work with. However trying to find the big battle ship that is about as big as a letter from typing, amongst the other ships of similar or just smaller size was a little dumb. I think if the game allowed for more zooming in, it would of had a higher rating in my book.

-Chris

Quote:Original post by Draiken
I think there is a possibility of too much space. Take Total War for example a game I love, but you get to a point where you have a good foot hold on your territory. Then you make the same units over and over to conquer further lands to double/triple your territory. The first stage of fortifying your position is fun, then the sending out the armies to conquer the rest seems like more work than intended. Sure its fun to conquer, but the last castle you invade is the same process as your first castle you invaded during the start of your conquest (after you have fortified your position, mid game). So if things are continuing to change, new units new technologies will help to overcome the repetitiveness similar to Empire Earth. Keep the technology rolling to keep the player with new stuff till end game.

Also be wary of all the space dwarfing your units. Sins of the Solar Empire was pretty fun, huge amount of space to work with. However trying to find the big battle ship that is about as big as a letter from typing, amongst the other ships of similar or just smaller size was a little dumb. I think if the game allowed for more zooming in, it would of had a higher rating in my book.

-Chris

If what you do in a game is smaller than the space you do it in (like you say in Total War), then you can run out of interesting things to do and the end game can just seem to repetitive (grindy). This is a failing of more than a few strategy games (both rts and tbs). Another incidence of this is when you become so powerful that victory is assured, but you still have to wipe out all the enemies (my biggest problem with Rome: Total War).

I also agree that if your units are too small compared to the world, they can become dwarfed. But this can also be in an abstract space, not just the physical (distance) space.

If the number of units is large, and there is not an easy way to locate a particular one easily, then your units can become lost is the large (abstract) world of the number of units.

However, I disagree with what you were saying about Sins of a Solar Empire. It is possible to zoom right into a Fighter ship and have it fill a significant portion of the screen. The size of a fighter to the capital ship is very large (with the capital about 100 times the size). As you can zoom that close into a fighter, it is certainly possible to zoom close enough to a capital ship for what you are saying.

However, I will say that it does have the abstract space problem. In Sins, you have hundreds of ships, and selecting a single one out of that can be hard, however, using the tools they have provided alleviates this somewhat (using groups, and pressing tab to cycle through members of the selected group, using the fleet list on the left side of the screen, etc). these mitigate it somewhat, but not completely and frequently I have scrambled to select the exact ship I need only to be caught up in the masses of ships available.