Thanks for the info. It sounds like it's going to be a great year for StarDock and it's customers .

Age of Wonders II

Can't wait to see the new fantasy strategy game.

Did Society get canned? I thought that was the next project. Not that I mind, since I'm definitely pre-ordering the fantasy game.

I was worried that this 4x project had turned in to Societies...Wasn't too excited about that, as I don't do the MMO thing. Really excited to hear more about this new fantasy game. I'll pre-order like I do everything else...

Thanks for the update Brad. Vocal as my frustration with Sins has been, you guys are still my favorite gaming company (after all, you didn't develop the thing) and I'm sure to preorder that 4x fantasy game when you open it up.

Huh...never saw those posts. I'm enjoying Sins quite a bit (a lot, really), but I'm not farting rainbows like most people over on those boards. I was beginning to think I was missing something...

I probably don't know enough to answer this but aren't most or all TB games 4X? I have heard that the new game will be a take off on Masters of Magic, a classic TB game that I never played but I assume it was 4X.

About tactical battles, could you make sure that it doesn't play like Rome: TW? I hate that game so much...

What I would like to be able to do is, program my armies to use the strategies I develop. If the battle is different than the last 100 battles I fought, I would be interested in fighting that battle, otherwise I would rather that my armies follow my strategies I developed.




Will this tweaking include balancing the different civs? I find that the Yor have difficulty managing their economy without the ability to build as many economic structures as they want. I've got used to them. I build charging stalks to increase my taxable population, and build efficiency centers, and maintaince grids. However, the situation is bad enough that I consider the "Recuitment Center" a valuable economic structure with its +10% bonus to economy.

In any case, I would find it helpful the Yor got some economic structures to fill in those tiles I leave empty to prevent my maintaince and spendings from draining my economy to nothing. The morale bonus from the charging stalks can only do so much. Morale becomes nearly nothing once population become 25 bil.

Society is a separate, long-term project. It's currently on hold for a couple of years until we have the appropriate personnel and infrastructure in place for an MMOG.

Well, make sure that - you know, when you have a title and such - you get a website up for this new game as soon as possible. This way we can get down to the important business of wildly speculating and preemptively yelling about stuff in the forums before realizing that it's going to be the next awesome thing in gaming.

In a way, I don't want Stardock to do an MMO, too much chance of failure due to the 800-lb gorilla in the market, and a bunch of hyperactive chimps as well.

I honestly can't wait for Stardock to break out of just their 'strategy' type games and apply their vision and quality to some other genres. I have an absolutely phenomenal design in my head for a multiplayer-style FPS game that would mesh beautifully with Stardock's devotion to overarching strategy (thus far at least).

The theory behind the game is that both (or more) teams are placed on a map of enormous proportions. Each team is given an irreplaceable, portable spawnpoint that, if destroyed, will cease their spawning (and therefore lose them the game). Players can equip themselves in a variety of ways and use certain equipment - amongst that equipment are vehicles, power generators, base defenses, etc. Basically you evacuate your undefended starting area, and then are to ideally occupy one of the dozens of abandoned buildings / fortresses in the area. You need to build up your own base, defend at home, locate the enemy, and it's pretty much sandbox play from there. You can take a stealthy role and forgo external defenses for cloaking devices and radar scramblers, or go all-out and 'tech up' to more advanced weapons of war, including artillery.

The biggest problem I can see is that strategy gamers WANT more cerebral gameplay, which is what GC2 and SoaSE gave. FPS gamers tend to have shorter attention spans and are more spastic for pretty explosions and a high score at the end, though that's perhaps because 'cerebral' FPS gamers haven't had an FPS that took any brains to play in about 8 years.

This vision for my dream FPS game has been influenced by a mod that attempted something vaguely similar - for what it's worth, the mod had a ridiculously dedicated playerbase that was utterly addicted to the strategic gameplay it offered. Other games have attempted rough iterations of the same thing - some mod for BF2, Natural Selection - they all were actually rather successful, but there's always been, in all these games, too much focus on the player and less on the team. Commander modes in Empires mod and NS put the power in one player, which meant the game could literally be decided by who was commanding. By putting the power on each person you end up with a much more willing and cohesive team.

Stardock used the success of their applications to jump-start their gaming direction, so maybe it's not too far 'out there' to think that this may happen someday.

I just hope you are making a multiplayer engine (turned-based as mentionned) compatible with GalCiv2, to bring multiplayer to this wonderful game without putting aside the single-player development you are doing. This sounds like the best of worlds:

1- People who don't want Stardock to focus on a multiplayer addon won't complain, because the multiplayer engine is being developped for the new game.

2- People who want multiplayer will cry of happiness

Tell me I'm right...