You mentioned something along the lines of an interior map editor; Is this plans for increased modding support than in Aiwar? As I've always made fairly evident, I am a big fan of modding stuff, and being able to write some custom spells or mechanics, or even just tweaking around balance values is something I would look forward too.
Yes and no. We're not having custom spells or monsters or stat tweaks, but we are making it easy to make interior room designs, NPC dialogue, character naming components, and even other "chunk script" type logic. We're just not that interested in making larger modding platforms, as that sort of thing is really involved and basically involves making pretty open-ended runtime code extentions needed if it's going to really support anything interesting.
However then you mentioned multiplayer servers and all.. I am interested to see if you plan on having some sort of a 'official arcen server' where us forum guys can get together and do stuff or something.
Quoting myself from the (admittedly long) article above: "One thing that I do want to mention, though, is that initially the beta won't include any multiplayer component. We got a rough version of that working early in the project, but it's been semi-neglected as the game has grown up since we've been trying to focus on the game itself. It's definitely not ready for showtime, and we don't feel like we can hit both an awesome single-player and multiplayer experience right from day 1 beta without delaying beta for a few months. Therefore, multiplayer is just what's being delayed a few months, and we're going ahead with the beta in the meantime. This doesn't mean our commitment to the multiplayer component is slipping at all, but this is the way in which we feel we'll be able to deliver the strongest experience to everyone -- single and multi player -- in the most reasonable amount of time."
To add to that: no, we've not played any multiplayer since maybe March or so. We got it working, tested the barebones of it, but without movement smoothing it felt pretty jerky, even though it was functional. Then we've reinvented the game a number of times in terms of mechanics, and that's long since broken the multiplayer. That said, the base framework of the multiplayer has been there since March or whatever, and we've been consistently and conscientiously coding to it to make sure that when we re-enable multiplayer we have to do as little re-jiggering of it as possible. Hopefully that re-enabling process will take under a week, but then it's a matter of adding the smoothing and getting players to help us find all the MP-specific bugs that are likely, etc.
I just don't want to do that in tandem with the initial beta, or set people up for expectations of flawless multiplayer on day one. So we're focusing on the game experience itself first, and then going after multiplayer once that's settled down. My best guess is that we're going to see a month or two of beta before we even mess with multiplayer at all, because people will keep us so busy during that time. But we'll just see; if things get where we want them to be faster in solo play, and/or people are really clamoring for multiplayer earlier, then we'll get to it earlier.
Additionally, and another not atypical query of mine - Are you planning any pvp setups? I would find it interesting if the strategic stuff could become dual-party, in that multiple human settlements, in a multiplayer environment, could somehow declare war or raid each other for supplies and whatnot - In a large scale multiplayer server, this could cause some very interesting things to come about.
Edit: You mentioned in another post that theres no real pvp at the moment, which is understandable given your earlier games 
Well, in a lot of senses PVP just doesn't really make sense here yet. It's kind of like playing... I dunno, Zelda or Castlevania or something. What would PVP even look like? At any rate, until we get the core experience going fully, I don't see trying to over-extend ourselves into other game modes. But the game is inherently cooperative in a lot of respects: there are no individual character levels or EXP, for instance: EXP and levels are shared amongst all characters in the world. That said, everything ELSE is player-specific, including loadouts, crafting supplies, etc, so some interesting PVP could probably still be made around that.
I don't see PVP as an early priority, but it is very possible to attack other players at the moment, so it's not like it's impossible. Unlike AI War, which basically has no good chance of ever having PVP just due to its nature, AVWW is more of a complete world and I really would be surprised if we don't have some robust PVP modes during the next year. That's going to take some player feedback, though, because it's not a mode I've ever been interested in, myself. And again, more of the core world and game needs to be done before PVP could be appropriately layered on, I suspect.
Another note on multiplayer; If some group of people (say, 4+ of them) all go fighting some giant megaboss dude, and end up failing miserably, resulting in all of their deaths.. their only real penalty is that they now have a group of vengeful ghost things roaming around?
If the group contained upwards of 8 people, would that spawn a single large group of ghosts, or multiple small ones?
On the first question: yes, for the most part,
at the moment. That would also really depress all the NPCs, and productivity then drops. Also, your citybuilding interface starts filling up with more graves, too. But what you have to remember is that it's still incredibly early and we're still just trying to get even a respectable number of spells and enemies in there, things like that. These things take time. We kept pushing the beta back and back and back, but at some point we have to get it into player hands. But the experience isn't remotely complete in terms of what we want to do with the game, even though it is a fun thing already. Once we hit beta, it's going to continue to grow daily, as you've seen with AI War in the past. All of that is to say, we'll be looking at other interesting ways to make death meaningful, and also soliciting player ideas on things of that nature.
In terms of the second question, that's a good question and not one we've addressed yet. If it were two or one groups, most likely it would still behave the same in terms of fighting them goes, because you'd still have to fight them both simultaneously if they were on the same tile.
Have you done much multiplayer playing? (does the game even support that yet? sounds an almost silly question to ask, but for some reason I feel like i need to ask it) you dont really mention that ' on the beta multiplayer server, xyz happened '
Keith and I have put in cumulatively maybe 30 minutes, 6 months ago. It has been non-play-ready for the last 5 months. I don't mean that in a harsh way, but I also don't want to set player expectations wrong.
And a final question; Have you considered having the player start at, say, level 5 or so? That way, if they really wanted to encounter stuff their level, they can, but if they find it challenging they could start messing around in level <5 areas for items/levels/whatever. Additionally this could mean that if you wanted to, you could strategically order your civilization to do stuff in level 1-3 areas or whatever, without too much risk.
It wouldnt really change anything you start with or can do (incrementing all the level requirements by 5 or something). If anything, its a mere cosmetic change for the player's level, but allowing you to more accurately portray areas that should be easier to do from the start.
Not really sure how it would work with your current difficulty system, but i mean, just a random suggestion.
It is something I was thinking about yesterday, yeah. I kind of wonder if we should be doing this, too. Some rebalancing of when things become available would then have to be done, but it wouldn't be a huge deal. I dunno, I'll have to talk to Keith about it some, but it's interesting. It would certainly be the friendliest thing to new players in a lot of respects.
Games of rpg -> civ building have always been something I really seem to enjoy for some reason - i really love the rpg style of play, and also really love the rts/rtt style of play.. Quite the hybrid genre, but its absolutely awesome if done right (see: Mount and Blade), so I am definitely looking forward to trying out this beta
Thanks! It's packaging in a lot of Keith's and my favorite things, too. It's just such a LARGE project -- really it dwarfs AI War in every respect. That's why it has been so challenging to even get to beta at all, and there had to be a cutoff somewhere. We basically wanted to cut it off when we had a small but fun Metroidvania experience, with the start of all the rest of our larger systems in place. We're basically to that point now, and then we're just going through final polish and testing and stuff to get the first experience feeling tight and good. Then we go to beta, and actually start the long process of actually finishing the rest of the game. The worldbuilding aspects are incredibly mature at this point, as is the general underlying engine, physics, etc, and really multiplayer is 80% implemented even though it's not in a functional state. In terms of spells and crafting and enemies, we're at something like 5% of where I want to be for 1.0, if that, and with the macrogame/strategic aspects we're at maybe 2%.
The good news is that most of the boring back-end stuff is done now, so for the bulk of what comes from now on, it's things like polish and actual gameplay expansion. That seems like a pretty exciting time to be starting the beta, because it means that things will get added rapidly and daily, versus core mechanics or internal code shifting around a lot.
