anyone interested in creating a new game please email me at
shapiro.brian@attbi.com
btw, Falconius you said to email you but I couldn't because your address wasn't available
I'll repost some of the ideas:
i dont know how easy it would be to put together a project to create this game, but I'll list some of my ideas--these were basically already listed in that discussion thread.
they incorporate much from other strategy/simulation games I've played over time, like simcity, imperialism, deadlock, caesar3 etc. and one of the main focuses in my thinking is to get enhance realism by ridding the game of selection by list box options for technology, governments, etc
one of my ideas was to base technological research based on resource queues . so as an easy example (not really for the game), 30000 cotton gathered = cotton gin . this way the direction of the culture is based on the starting location more integrally, cultures with many spices might tend towards mysticism ; etc. and at one point this is effected by printing press, internet , etc. a marxist model where culture is based on production . also it gets rid of the 'choose next tech' nonsense .
but more importantly, it makes gameplay more unique.
my second idea is to have a small radius around a city which resembles a sim city map with residential industrial and commercial buildings, they cater to the environs and might be specific but which the player doesnt have to really worry about, as he doesnt in sim city. however, growth depends on other factors, so if growth is slow the player has to build industries manually, which then sparks private development ; but at one point the idea is that everything gets done privately automatically getting out of player control. but , anyway, the player chooses build industry on a wheat area and a farm is built, or it appears automatically, depending. these are harvested and held by the city, and of course traded along the network. sort of like the game deadlock , except working much better. this would also take care of the desire to have multisquare cities quite nicely. the borders of city-state areas (what they would be) should end at natural borders like rivers and mountains.
an example of this is say nothing will develop if you dont have a certain set of improvements built, but then once theyre built the economy is already set in place where resources are available to the city-state in general and things happen themselves
the third idea, which is sketchy, is then to have a clock for each city with then a meter on each worker for finishing tasks (that looks like the meter in the sims, etc) and then a meter on armies that works like the clock cycles in turnless with the game running semi-real time except divided so efficiently that it acts almost like a turn based game. (so for instance, an absolute turn for each city)
units should naturally form into armies which join columns, and then move around the map in a non square-by-square basis.
ive had other ideas but right now i dont have a full memory of them;
one thing i thought of at one time was to base victory completely on absolute happiness; but the only way to achieve complete happiness would be either world peace, through conquest of other cultures or through diplomatic means; or by engineering the society.
unhappiness in a city would create partisan units of new factions to come up and maybe take the city under revolution to the control of a new culture
also the game would start where the player has control over a small tribe (saxons, etc),that would before conquest probably have to extend diplomacy and join territory with other tribes; each individual section maintained throughout the game as provincial areas.
all of these different ideas, the strong ones and weak ones, are supposed to not only add greater realism but also greater atmosphere to the game. i imagine the player seeing his starting town teeming along the banks of some river , with farms and industries shown on screen developing with it. he finds and joins alliances with other small tribes. as the empire grows, the less its necessary to micromanage it, and the more its suited for national wars.
