Oh yeah, I remember Populous. Never played it, but it seemed interesting at the time. Same with From Dust. I played Black & White and a few other games like that, but they never really clicked with me in practice. Loved the idea, but not the execution (just personal taste).
Regarding PVP, that was something I had discussed as being likely in the other thread, but we've since changed our thinking on that. Having a fail state wouldn't make that any more possible, really, because overall the goal is still inherently cooperative. There's also only so much we can pack in for $5 without blowing our budget way out of the water, to be honest. We still have yet to make a profit on any game but AI War, and I'd really like to see that change someday.
It's our own fault for not keeping budgets under control.
Sounds interesting, but the lack of an overall arching theme (meaning, something really compelling to tie in between missions ) is causing my eyes to glaze over a bit, I admit.
There are more overarching goals between missions is greater here than in any other game Arcen has done, actually. Did you read the original post?
The missions are carried over between campaigns and are something that you're trying to complete outside of any one campaign. You gain more buildings and other content as you complete missions in various campaigns, so there's a progression mechanic. And there's something else we're considering, but haven't announced yet.
In co-op, each player takes a side and the two players work together to try to achieve the best score possible.
Actually, this may not be accurate. I've been thinking of some better mechanics for this lately, that we've not had a chance to talk about yet.
Did I understand you correctly when you mentioned that high scores can lead to content unlocks? That would be awesome.
It's actually mission completion that leads to that, but high scores are intended to lead to something else if we can manage it.
What happens if you fail a mission in the campaign, does that mean you have to redo it?
Missions are meta-objectives like you see in Tiny Wings, Jetpack Joyride, 10000000, and so on. Does that make more sense? You have several available that you can work on at any given time, and you either complete them or you don't. You have to get to the end of a campaign for them to score for you, so whatever their completion state is often something you have to maintain until the end.
I think you guys are making a huge mistake by not adding some kind of "lose" objective or game-state.
Hmm. I suppose that if one side runs out of town centers or populace we could make the campaign end. That would fit with the whole "prevent genocide but encourage war" theme, heh.
It doesn't have to be complicated, the winning/losing scenarios could be: If 1 faction held 4 places on the map, or had x amount more money/forces than the other, or had a certain amount of units on the opposite side of the map, or dozens of things like that. Obviously I can't know until I try it myself (I plan to play the alpha if I can), but from what I'm reading it seems like you may be alienating a big part of your playerbase if you don't include pvp and some kind of simple lose scenario.
Most of those sorts of things are pretty ripe for abuse, because you can curtail that sort of thing too easily. It is
super easy to cripple one side so that the other is way ahead. But that's not your goal. It's also not that hard, in the main, to avoid having them absolutely stomp each other out. The extremes aren't really huge threats, or hard to accomplish. It's the razor-thin middle ground of excellence that is super hard.
Honestly I get what you're saying about Valley 1, but I don't think the same thing applies here. I mean, yes, I wanted to have a fail state also. But when you look at something like Triple Town, that doesn't really have a "you lose" sort of fail state either. It has something where you no longer can proceed, but you _have_ to reach that state in order to finish the game. Skyward reaches that state after a set number of turns.
All that said, I get the semantic argument here, and I could see this becoming a sticking point with people not familiar with the game. The simple rules I mentioned ought to be good for the perception of the game without actually making it any harder.
In terms of an advanced way of having a fail state without making it hard on novices... well, we could make it so that there are "score gates" that you have to reach in order to proceed past each given round in the game (not round 0). Either those could be customizable (so you choose a higher gate and you get a better score multiplier at the end if you succeed), or they could be something that is automatically set by the rank you are currently at. Though I don't really like that, as that could make the game just impossible past a certain point for some people. Having the gates be self-set but encouraged for high scores is probably better.
Still brainstorming... if we felt like it, I guess we could even have something like "Edicts" that are either specifically chosen or randomly rolled (like AI Types in AI War) that you must conform to, or lose. So things like being an expansionist and having a certain number of town centers at the end of each round. Or being really warlike and having a certain number of kills at the end of each round. Etc. And if we did two Edicts per game, like in AI War, there could be lots of super interesting (and super challenging) combinations there.
Hmm, that's like three interesting ideas that would layer on top of the existing mechanics. Josh and I will have to discuss them.
Did I mention that Josh (tigersfan) and I are co-designing this game? Thought that's a good thing to mention, as he's commenting here also.
