Master of Magic 2 Wishlist For Slitherine

[vicwaberub]

Example: simultaneous orders, then simultaneous execution, all your issues are solved.

That's what the card game I didn't like did. Making decisions blind is not acceptable for me as a concept in a strategy game.
Except in this genre that's not an option. 

The Dominions series use this system and is a very deep strategy game.

[Arnuz]

Example: simultaneous orders, then simultaneous execution, all your issues are solved.

That's what the card game I didn't like did. Making decisions blind is not acceptable for me as a concept in a strategy game.
Except in this genre that's not an option. 

The Dominions series use this system and is a very deep strategy game.

For example. And there are many other systems out there that allow simultaneous turns. But you're never going to convince this modder that change is good. Armies close? Block them and check for initiative. Bam. Solved the wall of text.

Basically, whatever the flaws you might imagine a not yet done system to have, it'd much more be worth their while to fix them - assuming there are any - and get the game to work with deepmind then to try and come up with decent standard ai. No game will ever manage that, old school ai will always need to cheat to win.

Deepmind wins against StarCraft Pro players. The devs would have to make it cheat to lose against the crowd. Now that would be a truly "impossible" difficulty setting...

[Seravy]

Even in CoM the AI isn't allowed to behave like a human in some aspects because it would be too unfun. Spell Blast, Disjunction, and all of the diplomacy system being a few examples. Diplomacy uses the concept "the human can do anything they want but everyone else is bound by the rules/treaties". That doesn't work with multiple human players. So an entirely new concept of diplomacy is needed, that's a lot more restrictive on human players and multiplayer friendly. And this is just one example. We are drifting further and further away from a MoM sequel and closer to an entirely different 4X game that has nothing to do with it. You can't try to close a 25 years gap and still call it a sequel, it's a too big jump at once. That becomes a completely different game. Maybe better, maybe not, but definitely not a sequel.

Starcraft is a "click faster" game. Sure the strategy also matters but not having to deal with human reaction time and input devices gives the computer a massive advantage, making it a bad example. Is there a complex turn based game where an AI is better at a human? Real time games are an entirely different kind of animal. (also, is it viable to use that in the game? I mean, will it run on a random user's computer? You don't want to require internet connection for single player against AI opponents, that's a disaster...)

[vicwaberub]

Example: simultaneous orders, then simultaneous execution, all your issues are solved.

That's what the card game I didn't like did. Making decisions blind is not acceptable for me as a concept in a strategy game.
Except in this genre that's not an option. 

The Dominions series use this system and is a very deep strategy game.

For example. And there are many other systems out there that allow simultaneous turns. But you're never going to convince this modder that change is good. Armies close? Block them and check for initiative. Bam. Solved the wall of text.

Basically, whatever the flaws you might imagine a not yet done system to have, it'd much more be worth their while to fix them - assuming there are any - and get the game to work with deepmind then to try and come up with decent standard ai. No game will ever manage that, old school ai will always need to cheat to win.

Deepmind wins against StarCraft Pro players. The devs would have to make it cheat to lose against the crowd. Now that would be a truly "impossible" difficulty setting...

Deepmind should solve problems perfectly. We want to play games. That means: We want win and we will win. The AI is for our entertainment and our exciting and narrow victory.

[T-hawk]

How am I supposed to attack something if they might receive a move order this turn and the two armies miss each other when the move is executed?

The board game Diplomacy has exactly this, from 60 years ago, concurrent orders and resolution. It works fine, in this case the attacking unit just moves into the space that was vacated. The underlying principle is that you're really attacking or defending an area rather than a unit.

[haphazard1]

I want to add my support to Seravy's point about not hiding information from the player. How much gets shown in the main layer of the UI is a separate issue -- UIs should not be too cluttered -- but the info needs to be available if the player wants to drill down for it. Strategy games should be about making interesting, meaningful decisions. And to do that the player needs information.

I also think that decent AI is a must. Unless it takes only a short amount of time to play the full game -- a few hours at the very most -- getting a group together who can consistently play to keep a multi-player game going is tough. So most players are going to be playing single player, and that means AI opponents who can actually play the game and provide a decent challenge. The game mechanics must take the need for effective AI into account -- anything the AI can not handle needs to be removed or modified, no matter how cool the designer thinks it is. (Hello, 1UPT Civ games, I'm looking at you.)

Testing, lots of testing, is very important. Including AI testing -- something like Sullla's Civ AI Survivor would be a very good idea. Make sure your AIs can expand, attack and conquer a rival, defend themselves from an attack, and actually reach a victory condition. Preferably all the victory conditions which exist in the game, if there are more than one. AIs should actually use all the major features in the game, not ignore some of them. (This is usually more of a problem with expansions, but sometimes occurs in initial releases.)

I hope to see something good come out of Slytherine and the MoM IP. But I worry that we will get yet another game that has the name but none of the flavor of the original.

[Arnuz]

....You can't try to close a 25 years gap and still call it a sequel, it's a too big jump at once. That becomes a completely different game. Maybe better, maybe not, but definitely not a sequel.

1. Yes they can. They bought the rights, they could do a my mini pony-farm simulator merge and call it mom. They won't, because that'd be bad business, but don't for an instant think that they won't change the ridiculous diplomacy algorithm for the whims of internet change resist lords. And that's not just good business, it's good for the game: the issues you've brought up are easier to solve when you don't need to invest a lot of money in ai that will be dumb nevertheless.
Example, balance. Randomise 10^10 wizards, make them fight at all difficulty levels: the fights run in parallel on cloud machines, total cost 30 bucks per cycle, total time 1' and analytics of the result come for free.
Tweak numbers to balance spellbooks and retorts. Redo until the analytics show variance less then 10%. How does that compare with the poor attempts at balance you've done? I'd say pretty well, considering that they resulted mostly in forcing your subjective opinion at the cost of losing all your users...

Starcraft is a "click faster" game....

2. Google up the related article, it's pretty interesting. They gave the ai an artificial click limit just to account for the obvious remark you make, and in later attempts they also simulate the human interface. That's a science experiment, you're not going to find holes in 5' of internet armchairing.

Deepmind should solve problems perfectly. We want to play games. That means: We want win and we will win. The AI is for our entertainment and our exciting and narrow victory.

No problem, just don't select the impossible setting and the game will give you an advantage. There's no excitement in beating dumb.

[Blake00]

Simultaneous turns converts MoM into a different game... and that game already exists and has several sequels.

Drastic changes like that are exactly what will turn a lot of the old fans away from a remake or sequel. I've started threads like this across multiple forums and the recurring theme is that most people want MoM with a fresh coat of paint. They don't want the wheel reinvented.

If you want simultaneous go play AoW3, if you want no zoomed in battles go play Warlock, if you want extremely diverse factions go play Endless Legend, if you want.. well I could keep going on and on as the MoM formula has been twisted in many directions over the years.. whether it be Sorcerer/Elemental/FE, Worlds of Magic/PQ, Eador, Dominions or others out there odds are for nearly every game changing suggestion people throw at a MoM remake it already exists out there and by changing MoM into that it then becomes that instead of MoM.

And TBS is not some long lost 90s concept. Every year there are multiple TBS games coming out lol.

However all that being said the newer Civilization games added simultaneous turns for multiplayer but kept the single player game turn based so if they want to do that with MoM then that at least won't affect me as I don't play multiplayer lol.

[Flagris]

Just registered to repeat here my post from GOG forum in the MoM remake thread.

God, literally every legendary game (game series) has already been dulled and dumbed down, ruined and turned to standard modern nonsense in latest years.

Just get your hands off MoM, please. Slitherine won't cope with it. None of modern developers won't. And there's no need of it, really.

[Seravy]

lol owning the rights and putting the name on it won't make it a real sequel.  It has to actually be a similar game with similar game mechanics and philosophy.
Look, this isn't about resisting change, but if you're going to make a completely new fantasy 4X game that has nothing to do with this, why buy the rights and call it Master of Magic 2? That defeats the purpose and will make the fans angry. The game will get worse reviews than it could if it had any other title. "Master of Magic 2" is a title that will have an astronomically high expectations.
Sure, make a multiplayer fantasy 4X game with concurrent turns, modern diplomacy and whatever else. But please, give it a different name. Or at least a name that implies the change in direction. "Master of Magic : Multiplayer Edition" or something. But is there a need for it? There are, like Blake says, many fantasy 4X games out there with different game mechanics. They probably do those game mechanics well enough. But a MoM sequel is desired exactly because MoM had a huge potential as is, and that potential was ruined by basically releasing the game in an incomplete state. AI that can't use half the things in the game, diplomacy that doesn't work, thousands of bugs, complete absence of game balance because the company didn't survive long enough to actually make that work better, and so on. (In MoM 1.0 Magic Immunity protected from normal attacks made by any summoned creature and ranged units could shoot twice. They managed to patch a few of these most obvious holes by the time they reached 1.31 but the game's full potential wasn't realized. Not even 20% of it. And that 20% was still enough to make it a game remembered for 25 years. We want to see that potential realized, that's the whole point of it. )

Example, balance. Randomise 10^10 wizards, make them fight at all difficulty levels: the fights run in parallel on cloud machines, total cost 30 bucks per cycle, total time 1' and analytics of the result come for free.
Tweak numbers to balance spellbooks and retorts. Redo until the analytics show variance less then 10%. How does that compare with the poor attempts at balance you've done? I'd say pretty well, considering that they resulted mostly in forcing your subjective opinion at the cost of losing all your users...

Seriously, this level of artificial intelligence doesn't exist yet. The day that thing becomes reality, will be the day I stay in bed all day and let the AI write my forum posts :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial...telligence