PrimeJunta

Frankly, Osvir, I think you're just adding complication for the sake of complication. Those mechanics aren't transparent. The player's experience of them would just be that the rules keep changing for no obvious reason, or that there are more variables to keep track of. That's not clever; it's just bad design: confusing, un-fun, shoddy. The mechanics as originally proposed are simple, understandable, have both a tactical and a strategic dimension, and permit a broad variety of tactics, strategies, and character/party builds. That's where the beef should be -- the classes, talents, spells, items, and so on. Keep the mechanics as simple and transparent as possible while allowing maximal variety in those.

Going over this whole thing again, I honestly think the only fly in the ointment is the naming. If "Intellect" was renamed to something that more obviously suggested its damage-enhancing function, that would go away. (Ferocity?) I also wouldn't object to Strength -> Body, or something else that defused the D&D-born assumption that it does enhance damage. The mechanics themselves sound great, and I don't think any of the changes suggested here (including mine) are material improvements. Edit: As stated before, I don't care all that much about the names though. Leaving them as-is will impact my enjoyment of the game not at all.

Funny, I thought the Fade was one of the very few halfway tolerable parts in the game. Blessed respite from fanservice companions, for one thing.

An original setting. Something that's not traditional western fantasy, space opera, post-apoc, or weeaboo.

OK, then drop it. Action speed is actually pretty powerful already so I don't think removing it would nerf Speed. I'm starting to see why Josh would rather get rid of attributes altogether...

Move Deflection from Speed to Dexterity? Edit: Man, this is trickier than you'd think.

@Sensuki, I like the way you're thinking. I think "Speed" would be a more descriptive name for "Dexterity," though, going by your mechanical effects. If you wanted to keep more D&D-ey names, you could rename "Perception" to "Dexterity," since the effects are similar. Here's my reshuffle of the attributes, still going with the "six stats with no dump stat" design goal – POWER – Damage, Healing DEXTERITY – Accuracy, Criticals VIGOR – Inventory, Health, Stamina CONSTITUTION – Resistance to hostile effects, Fortitude defense SPEED – Reflex, Deflection defense, Action Speed RESOLVE – Effect duration (reduces negative effect durations on self, increases caused effect durations) Personally I'd just merge Vigor and Constitution and leave it at five stats.

Based purely on the stat names, I'd assume "power" or "might." And I would think it felt "off" especially "might" and especially for ranged weapons; I'd be less confused about wands and spells. However I think "intellect" feels more "off" than either of those. I also don't care all that much about what the stats are named, and quite like the sound of the proposed mechanics.

How did that work out? I haven't got around to a good game of Numenera yet, so I'm ignorant of the system. Very well, IMO. I especially like the Effort mechanic; it gives tactical in-the-moment decisions a whole new dimension. I'm not sure how well Numenera rules would translate to a cRPG, though.

I've been involved in a few community projects, and they usually fail. They can succeed if there's a single charismatic, visionary, and determined community leader who keeps things together, and convinces everybody else to go along, while accepting a limited amount of community feedback. The dynamics are much like a developer-led Kickstarter, actually, with the community leader playing the part of the developer. I.e., if you have a really kickass idea, I say make that high-concept document, and pitch it to the community first to see how it's received. If it looks like it'll fly, find the talent who's willing to make it happen, tally up how much it'll cost, draft a realistic plan for making it, and then kickstart. The community involvement can be as democratic/anarchic as you want. It will be a hard sell. It will be easier if your talent includes people who have done this before a few times. Additionally, the project will almost certainly fail (i.e., never complete, go drastically over budget/over schedule, or have its scope cut beyond all recognition) unless you have experienced people on board. So make sure you do.

I thought DXHR sucked. The storyline was such a betrayal of everything DX stood for. The only sympathetic NPC was the capitalist, you were a good little toady all the way up to the final ending, which let you choose between continuing to be a good little toady, siding with a lunatic mass murderer, or committing murder-suicide on an industrial scale. The gameplay was kind of OK, but the people who wrote it have no clue what DX was all about. Even DX:IW did that better.

Numenera only has three stats (Might, Intellect, and Speed) and is IMO better for it.

@JerseyP I think you can make your big, dumb, strong fighter. He would excel at tanking. The high STR combined with the fighter's damage soaking abilities would make him extremely difficult to dislodge from holding a position. That's a classic combat role, and very well suited for the "dumb brute" concept too, even if someone cleverer does have more effective nut-punching skillz.

@Kronojon, you have scads of options. Lots of games have built-in controller support. That doesn't mean all of them have to.

Woah, today's patch did something to the AI. Definitely more aggressive and meaner. It even made a decent attempt at a naval invasion of one of my settlements. No more picking off units one by one, it hit me in a coordinated wave. Turned into an actual battle!

I'm actually only seeing "it would be too much work." It would. There have been pretty good explanations of why it would be too much work. I'm not seeing the "pro" camp address these objections much. Seems they prefer to ascribe all kinds of unrelated motives to the "con" camp instead. I know, less work that way.

Enemy campaign AI is surprisingly good IMO. Battle AI is... I would say OK in battles on open maps, but limited in other ways, especially at settlement assaults; defending against that is pretty much a guaranteed Heroic Victory if you have any troops in place at all. So that does need work. I don't find it all that important actually because it's fairly rare to run into that situation; if the enemy army hits an undefended city you might as well auto-resolve (and lose) anyway, and if it's defended the garrison is probably big enough that the AI won't attempt to storm. You'll only get a settlement assault worth fighting on the battle map if it's a province capital, or if you have a navy in place to provide just enough power to give you shot but not so much it'll deter the attack, which isn't all that common. There's some other AI dopeyness in there too, for example it doesn't appear to account for dismounted cav units, and mounts aren't on transports when doing a naval invasion, which leads to really silly situations, like war elephant units, minus the elephants, marching right at heavy infantry and subsequently getting slaughtered. Battles on open terrain are fun and the AI does do stuff that's interesting enough to make things, well, interesting; for example it attempts to do flanking maneuvers and such. And it's of course much faster at coordinating things than a human player, which makes combat against barbarians quite challenging since they have such good charge bonuses, and the AI will do that all at once. I played the bejeezus out of the first RTW, and even more out of the Rome: Total Realism mod. I miss some of the realism aspect of RTR, in particular cultural conversion is way too fast and you can build up your own culture's training camp in a settlement as soon as you get it, so that whole business of eventually accumulating armies made up of a core of own-culture units mixed up with a rainbow range of auxiliaries isn't really there. So it's not perfect by any means. But it's certainly not the disaster (now) that the initial reviews and fan response make it out to be. IMO as always.

Or could it be :gasp: that we have actual, substantive objections? Shocking idea, I know. If you read this thread carefully, you might even find some!

@Nepenthe ah, yes, well, I was referring to the civilized world. :ducks:

The problem is, I do not like any TB combat I tried in high fantasy so far. Best TB combat in a cRPG is for me by far Fallout. Simple, yet still requiring tactical placement. I would say that Age of Decadence has a decent TB combat as well, although it's not a party based game Arcanum TB was abysmally bad for me. ToEE while capturing the rules well, it just felt too tedious for a computer game. Huh. I thought Fallout's combat was pretty much a disaster in every possible way. Threshold effects turning it into insta-kill (either you, or the enemy), late-game was "aim for the eyes", companion AI getting each other or you caught in volleys or grenade effects or running into idiotic spots, enemy AI basically consisting of zerg rushing you, etc etc. AoD isn't horrible for what it is, but IMO turn-based is actually a pretty poor fit for a single-character game. It's pretty easy to manage just one character so you don't really need the extra control turns give. On balance I prefer RT systems for single-character games, regardless of perspective, and TB for multi-character ones. :moment of silence for Arcanum: As to ToEE, again, I didn't find the combat system tedious at all. Some of the encounters were, for sure, but that's a problem with encounter design, not the system. I think the main problem with it is for people who aren't familiar with D&D; that system is overwhelmingly complex if you're dropped into it completely green, and ToEE does not make any attempt to soften the blow, e.g. by introducing the mechanics through some kind of tutorial thing. Also with D&D you have to know what you're doing when character- and party-building or you'll turn out squibs. We already know PoE won't have either of these problems. So yeah, I do still think TB would've been a better fit. We'll see though; I like what JES has been saying about it, like the slow-motion mode, AI, and passive abilities, so it might actually play really well.

Rome II Total War. I didn't follow the hype at all (didn't even realize it was coming out), and only jumped it at Patch 7, so I missed all the angst about it. Apparently it was badly broken on release, and some hyped features weren't in at all, which caused a certain amount of upset among the calm, collected, and rational set of human beings known as 'gamers.' Lots of outrage going on in the forums still as a matter of fact. I, however, am having a hell of a good time. I figured out how the mechanics work and am back to playing on Hard, and this is definitely the best TW yet, no question. Specifically: Campaign play. In all the previous installments, it was just dopey. The AI was doing really dumb things based on extremely local conditions, which made campaign play dull. That's way improved. Diplomacy in particular actually means something: it's possible to pursue an actual policy of, say, forging a chain of alliances along a border to secure it, while leaving other borders without such alliances so you can expand in that direction. Yet it's not trivially easy; you actually have to pay attention to the relations between your neighbors, pick the ones to befriend, and build up on that to strengthen ties with their friends. Conversely, if you suddenly do a U-turn and stab them in the back, things will get ugly fast. This makes the whole thing much more interesting in my book. The AI also plays the campaign map much more intelligently, sometimes even springing nasty (i.e., nice) little surprises. Example: I had two legions close enough to support each other on an enemy map, hoping to entice it to attack in the open. It did, but it first used an agent action to slow down one of the armies so it couldn't support the other, and then attacked the other one. I was suddenly seriously outnumbered. I won that one on the battlefield – just – and it was a lot of fun. Combined-forces assaults. Navy battles are kind of broken (they tend to turn into clown-car free-for-alls with half the ships sunk really fast), but combined-forces assaults on coasts do work. Navies become a real strategic asset; you can raid unprotected coastal settlements, or when working together with land armies, add more pressure to them. That's a whole new dimension to the battles, and a good one. Cover and concealment. Terrain topography matters for line of sight. It's suddenly possible to plan battlefield ambushes, hide flanking groups behind ridges, and so on, and then spring them on the enemy. (Doesn't always work of course.) Building tree and economy. The usual dumb "build everything you can as fast as you can" method doesn't work. Your food or public order consumption will outstrip your food or public order production, and your empire will collapse in famine or rebellion. Instead, you have to actually plan what to build and where. (This could be deepened, balanced, and polished a bit, but it's already much better than the previous TW's). Dynamism. The factions – especially on Hard difficulty – are quite active, and produce unpredictable results on the map. It feels much more like a living world than the previous iterations. I've also had zero crashes and performance is excellent. There have been occasional bugs but they're more in the annoyance department than real showstoppers; e.g. sometimes the diplomacy screen gets "stuck" so you can't get out of it, and once two of my provinces suddenly stopped growing for no reason I could tell. I haven't looked closely enough at the animations to see anything badly wrong with those; there are some cosmetic things e.g. with routed units running off the map in neat queues, that sort of thing, but that's about it. A lot of the rage is about the family tree (not implemented) and politics (which is thin on the ground and strangely random), but I don't particularly care about either; in fact I think the main problem with those may be that (I believe) they were hyped a lot before release and don't measure up to the promises.

@Nepenthe, Cthulhu is in the public domain.

@Darkpriest, which party-based high-fantasy cRPG does turn-based combat better than ToEE, in your opinion?

Yeesh. A bunch of lily-white Orange County hipsters making a blaxploitation space opera? Bad idea.

Put another way, actually, I'd probably back any single-player cRPG Obsidian would produce. If 20 clams is the base price for the electronic version of the game, here's how much each of the options on top are worth to me (ones not listed are 0): Original IP – 20 Turn-based – 10 Cyberpunk – 5 Dieselpunk – 20 Steampunk – 10 Alternate timeline – 30 Saint Christopher of Avellone as Creative Lead – 50 Josh Sawyer as Lead Designer – 25 George Ziets or Eric Fenstermaker as Lead Writer – 25 each ...other stuff I haven't thought of, about 50 maybe You can tally up what that would add up to. I can imagine throwing a few hundred at something that is an exact, perfect fit to my somewhat weird tastes, but I'm not sure what that would even be.