Is the strategy stages going to be rts or turn based?
According to our current ideas (nothing is set in stone yet) itās most likely going to be RTS with civ-like elements (I.E. using ācity centresā in stead of all kinds of different buildings like in AoE). This way you can even take control of individual units and mess about a bit.
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So more like empire earth and rise of nations?
Well simply put, we donāt know for sure yet.
However, I just looked Rise of Nations up and it looked a lot like the same idea of Empire Earth and Age of Empires where you still need to physically construct different buildings instead of just āaddingā them to a city like in Civ, which is not exactly what I meant. The end of the Awakening Stage is more like AoE, but later on it gets more like a sort of RTS-version of Civ to make it easier. (For both the players and the devs) For further reading check the Society Stage page on the wiki. It is a tad outdated, but the general outline remains.
It would be jarring to move from real-time gameplay to turn based gameplay. And I donāt think turn based gameplay would suit Thrive that well. So I think that basically rules out moving to turn based gameplay in the strategy stages.
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Iād personally like to see an RTS with pause option, allowing you to micromanage whenever you want to without running out of time with bigger kingdoms,
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Yeah I agree with hh that moving to turn based would be a bit odd.
We were having a bit of a discussion the other day about how much detail itās worth showing in the later stages. Thereās a spectrum with being able to walk around any city any time and see all the āpeopleā and vehicles etc on one end and a very abstract strategy game like CK2 or Stellaris on the other where whole armies are represented by a single unit and the map is very simple.
Thereās a tradeoff that the more detail you want to represent the more time it will take to make the game, and also being able to see everything in 3D is pretty cool.
So how about total war but in full rts grand strategy?
One issue with merging those two genres is how long it would take. Battles in total war can take 30 minutes but in a grand strategy game you might have 200 battles over the course of a campaign, that would mean the campaign takes 100 hours which is pretty long.
For example if we were representing 2000 years of history in 10 hours say (which would make the stage feel super long I think) then you canāt really have so many long battles as they would take up a lot of that time. In a total war game you might play for 20-50 years max.
Another issue is the amount of 3D modelling required to make units. Creative Assembly has a large professional team of modellers working fulltime. If we went down that road it could take years to get an ancient world modelled, though maybe more people will show up in the future.
I think we should not try to 3D model (almost) anything in the later stages. It should all be procedurally generated from the stuff from previous stages. Of course the level of detail needs to be lowered in the later stages, but I think that wonāt be too difficult to add to the generation. What Iām trying to say is that I think that the 3D graphics part wonāt be any kind of bottleneck in the later stages.
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I get the idea that terrain, individuals and mounts (like humans and horses etc) could be used from previous stages. What about sword, bows, guns, cannons, tanks, buildings, roads, bridges?
Itās a long way off so maybe itās not worth thinking about too much.
I think what heās saying is there wonāt be 200 types of swords and helmets to model (as in many history-based games) because they will be procedurally generated. The game itself would create them and introduce plausible changes in design as new technology becomes available. Seems workable for many items, although one possible hurdle would be adapting them to a speciesā unique biology (just how would a race with six arms want to use a bow and arrow?).
Making a system which procedurally generates 3D gun designs is harder than modelling 3D gun designs. One of the first steps to making a good procedural system is often making a bunch of examples by hand so you can get an understanding of the rules around what you want.
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Sure, but that would be less work than, say, modeling fifty individual variations of a gun.
I partially agree.
However if youāre committing to having 50 models of guns then I renew my point that the amount of modelling in total would be huge.
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I expect there would be thousands of possibilities. But even some kind of mixing and matching of parts would satisfy me.