Joystick has an article claiming D3 launching Feb 1

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/07/best-b...ry-1-2012/

Will belive it when I see it!


CB-13

Players keep out OFC.

[Edit by T-hawk for mouseover spoiler reasons. Look downwards for the original post.]

[COLOR="Yellow"]The Occasionally Updated Play Order:
[/COLOR]

Bobchillingworth < JUST PLAYED

DaveV < UP NOW

Selrahc < computer can't handle the [strike]truth[/strike] turns

Dantski < too many units!

Nicolae Carpathia < skip until further notice

Thoth < ON DECK

pindicator

Brian Shanahan







Anyone interested in playing a strange & possibly amusing EitB SG using Perpentarch?



Basic idea is that each player does whatever the hell they want in their turn, writes up a summary in spoiler tags in the SG thread, and then passes the save onwards. Players are forbidden to tell each other what they're doing & can't read each other's reports until the game is finished. Obviously the intent is screwed more towards just having fun rather than trying to prove anything

WTF?

This game has been going for over 4 months?

And we don't have a thread we can bash each other in?

You guys suck.

:neenernee

Decided to run some stats on this :

Lets assume a 6 figure unit with 4 shields against ranged (e.g. regular swordsmen) :

Firebolt :

25 mana for a str 25 attack. On average 7.5 will hit and 1.2 be deflected by shields. 6.3 wounds, 1 figure dies. 5.3 wounds carries over, 1.2 gets deflected, 4.1 left. 2nd figure dies, 3.1 carries over, 1.2 deflected, 3rd figure dies, 0.9 carries over.

So on average 3 figures die for a 25 mana spell...not that good, especially on a dirt cheap unit like swords men.

Fireball :

25 mana, str 9 fireball hits each figure. On average 2.7 hits, 1.2 deflected b shields, 1.5 hits for all figures. Whole unit wiped out.

A learning SG for three players who have started to learn FFH on their own, but wants to improve faster. Lots of discussions and some thinking ahead! The turnplayers are:

Brian Shanahan
Haphazard1 (from turn 180)
kjn
Hart (on leave since turn 180)

Leader: Capria of the Bannor
Difficulty: Emperor
World Size: Standard
Game Speed: Normal

Raging Barbarians, Living World, Wildlands, and All Unique Features

For those playing around, at turn 100 our cities changed names:

• Torrolerial became Bologna
  
• Vallus became Paris
  
• Trinity became Oxford
  
• Tentatio-onis became Salamanca
  

• Choice of map, with savegames
  
• Calendar or Animal Husbandry?
  
• Calendar or Mysticism first?
  
• Turn the Zeroth
  
• Our first dotmap
  
• Lucky Scout Is Lucky, with savegame
  
• Turns 1 to 25, with savegame
  
• Turns 25 to 45
  
• Graphs, saves, and the future from turn 45
  
• Our second dotmap
  
• Turn 65 save
  
• Turns 45 to 65
  
• Our first micro spreadsheet, with quiz!
  
• Turns 65 to 79, with savegame
  
• Turns 79 to 90, with savegame
  
• Thoughts for after turn 90, and some C&D
  
• Turns 90 to 100, with savegame
  
• Turn 100 warrior build crash program, with savegame
  
• The crappiest Pink Dot, ever
  
• Turns 100 to 109, with savegame
  
• Turns 109 to 119, with savegame
  
• Turns 119 to 129, with savegame
  
• Turns 129 to 139, or How to not do C&D, or A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
  
• Graphs and savegame
  
• Turns 139 to 149, with savegame
  
• Savegame for turns 149 to 159
  
• Report for turns 149 to 159
  
• Turns 159 to 170, with savegame
  
• Hart the dotmapper
  
• Turns 170 to 179, with savegame
  
• Turns 179 to 189, with savegame
  

Noticed that to hit bonuses seem to screwed?

E.G. Equiping an axe with +2 to hit gives no bonuses, neither do magic weapons, and i dont even know if buffs like holy weapon work...

So I've been thinking about design of a Civ-like game for a while and had an idea about changing something we take for granted. This is something that would vastly benefit slow MP games like we play (if done right).

It's pretty simple (and not a new concept in general) - everyone plays their turns at once (simultaneous pitboss style), but everything you do is just an order, and it's not executed yet. At the end of the turn, all orders are executed, essentially simultaneously. (Though there would be a global ordering of types of things, e.g. maybe normal military moves are the first thing and building construction is the last thing.) There wouldn't be any of the Civ pitboss crap where players EOTs are processed one at a time in a random order; the game would be designed around this turn system and the order things happened in would be well-defined. (Here's an example to show it's possible: for wonder ties, whoever has the most overflow out of it wins the tie. If there's still a tie, the civilizations have a strict ordering of first to last in wonder ties and there can never be two players using the same civilization.)

So OK. The premise is you play your turn, but it's just submitting orders. Then when everyone's done, the turn resolves. What implications does this have for designing the game?

A lot of things in Civ IV essentially do this already. Tile assignment, research choice, build choices for example. (Yes, in Civ IV an opponent can see what choices you've made here before the turn rolls, but that's the easiest thing in the world to change.) Those things are not heavily affected. What is heavily affected is unit movement. Here are some things we are used to doing in a single turn that with a direct translation would take multiple turns:

* Move a scout one tile, see what it reveals, then move it another tile.
* Fly recon with an airship, then decide what other unit moves to make.
* Attack with a unit, see what the battle outcome is, then maybe attack with another unit.

And most importantly, how exactly do you attack anyway? What happens if one unit tries to move onto an enemy and the enemy moves away? What's going on, and also where are my battle tactics!?

My idea of how to resolve this would be to make combat/movement more strategic as opposed to tactical as it is in Civ IV. You don't have a hundred units, you have a couple dozen armies. The things you do with your armies are stuff like advance in a certain direction, engage, flee in a certain direction, intercept, stand ground, fight and then fall back. And it's just 1 vs 1. Armies are not super numerous, they rarely die completely but rather lose strength and are forced to fall back, you can only have one per tile and this is OK because they're actually going to be even sparser than that. And armies don't need to be able to move that far in a turn. So: since there's no big stacks of units fighting each other and all dying we don't have to worry about what havoc doing that essentially blindfolded would cause. And instead we have the problem that combat couldn't possibly be interesting enough, right?

Well here's my other idea, and it's also not a new one. We do something like MoO, and make your armies customizable. I.e. you choose the force composition from among your available war tech, and you make some choices about formation/tactical styles. And of course not all your armies have to be the same, and you can upgrade/retrain them while they're not fighting. (This costs production.) On top of that, essentially we are talking about units that will persist for a long time, longer than most Civ IV units, and we can have them gain experience and be customized that way too. (Or maybe you can think of each army as being led by a general, and your generals don't have to be all the same.) So there are a lot of opportunities to put thought into combat, even though when it actually plays out you're only making a few tactical decisions per turn as opposed to deciding what order to attack with your giant stack of units in and how/whether to promote each one individually before sending it in.

Summary:
1) True simultaneous turns without a realtime aspect
2) Time-delayed orders
2) Fairly simple army movement on the strategic map
3) Relatively few but heavily customizable armies

Thoughts/ideas?

As title, i want to try making some small changes, like modding Serena to have a wand slot instead of hte useless sword slot...