There's going to be some exciting announcements regarding the writing.  

You like torturing us poor, sick folk stuck in class waiting for the teacher to finish drawing a huge diagram, don't you?

As long as gamers have the ability to add and/or change to the existing spells and technologies the game will have massive potential !

If you're adding quests, will there be a Quest Builder as well?  If so, will it be available during the beta?

Out of curiosity how many languages will be supported in total?

Brad,

Thanks again for feeding us voracious info-mongers.  All this sounds really good.

Couple comments on quests:

1) Very important to allow heroes to quest as well as the main avatar; perhaps have "big" quests that require the avatar.


2) Also important is to allow for quest "strings", where successful (or unsuccessful!) completion of one quest is required for another to begin.  One example:

Quest where a big nasty dragon sends a message demanding that your avatar come to the dragon's lair to swear allegiance (with a suitable sum of gold).

- if you go and placate the dragon, a quest may come in the future with further demands, or perhaps an offer for an alliance

- if just nuke his sorry scaled behind off the map, you find a piece of some massively powerful artifact and get a quest to get the other pieces

- if you just ignore him, the bring-gold quest ends in "failure" which starts a new quest: if you don't come to the dragon, the dragon will come to you!


Thanks,

Keith

Considering that I really really hate those goody two-shoes in GalCivII, I now have another reason to play the Fallen.

But I find it more curious that the Yor seem to have been meat once, before they became their glorious metallity.

I forecast a lot of "kingdom of your end" puns.

Professional writers are good. Should add a lot of depth to the world and make the quests interesting, a feature many quest-related games seem to be missing. However, let me go on record as saying that at some point, I want my sovereign to be sent out to gather six rat tails for the local bartender's special soup. A little situational irony never hurt anyone.

The Yor are not in Elementla in any form. The Yoren are not related.

This sounds awesome, thanks for finally throwing out some nice details to us!

100 spells are much more than I would expect. It doesn't need more than it, after all the spells need to be balanced and quality is preferable over quantity especially in this where spells are so important in the game. Better less that are cool (nicely animated) and usefull than tons of useless skills. I hope a big part of them will stand has ultimate ones (or usefull till late game), instead of only a few. I mean, that allow for different late game strategy instead of just a few ultimate ones, because then it would be progressive.

By the names model of each faction, if there is any, It looks like Izen should a Kingdom while Ithul an Empire. 500 quests also looks very fine, much than I would think especially because they are optional. Those numbers impressed me. The Technology system seem to be as free or open as the system that will be used to make units, in which you choose the names and the itens you want, so might be also nice and probably to be a combination of gameplay style. Looks like you can go for as many points as you want at your own risk of not improving the other ones or the player point distribution to be very tweakable. Just guessing tough.

re: spells, I'd be interested in a spell 'forge' where you craft new spells.  Something players can do to create new custom content.

Spells break down into two components:

1) Special Effects (audial/visual)

2) Mechanics (gameplay and ruleset impact)

(note to self, and to others... did I miss anything?)

Special Effects:

Each of the 5 schools may have a common or set of common effects to represent the audio and video component.  A player may then overlay additional effects to provide sight/sound variations between spells of the same school.  As a simplistic example, perhaps all Fire school spells have a reddish video component and an animation that is reminiscent of fire or smoke - and a base sound loop of some bonfire or other.  But a player may then overlay addition color or sound effects to provide some unique flair for his/her newly 'forged' spell (Atomic Fire Bunny - Rank I).

Mechanics:

In many games (or at least those that I have experience with) spells - despite seemingly endless variety - spells/skills/feats/etc. tend to be fairly limited in possible impact.  A fireball spell may do an initial amount of damage over a radius, and targets may then experience damage over time effects, with the damage being of 'fire' type (to provide for any resistances or mitigations the targets may have).  Lightning bolt spells are very different thematically speaking - but they still deal damange.  The effect is essentially the same type of spell (damage dealing) though perhaps the two spells vary in their degree of damage and damage over time impact to a target.

I make this point to provide a conceptual foundation for the idea that the game's 'spell forge' (or out-of-game toolkit) contains a pool of pre-created spell effects.  These spell effects are assigned to spells as desired.  So, if someone wants to create the above example (Atomic Fire Bunny - Rank 1), we've covered the fluff of animation and sound, but now we want to determine what kind of in-game rule or mechanic is impacted by this spell.  In our spell forge, we assign to our new spell:

* a damage type - useful to determine what, if any, target damage resistances or mitigations come into play

* a damage variable or possible range of damage (conceptually, we can call this 'hit points of damage')

* a range variable - is it a melee or ranged attack (or some other range related mechanic)?

* damage over time value?

* non-damage effects? (e.g., modifies target movement rate, to hit combat chances, adds a poison effect, reduces morale, etc.)

* required resources - do you need gold, mana, some number of widgets to research and/or use the spell?

There aren't that many ways to affect a target of a spell - as long as those are defined and exposed to our theoretical spell forge, we can create a fair amount of customization and variation for the player community.

I'm interested in custom spells also, but I suspect Aesir's "Mechanics" list is too small. GalCiv2 finally got a Custom Tech Tree Editor, and it covers about 40 categories of technology. Admittedly many of them are not likely to have analogs in an Elemental spell category list, but the items Aesir lists so far seem to be just basic combat spells. If we get to build our own spells, I surely hope that we can customize global ('world wrecking') spells as well as our own magics to affect commerce, diplomacy, citizen loyalty, farmland productivity, etc.

The basic distinction between special effects (UI) and mechanics seems important to keep in mind, though. I'd very much support a fairly simple set of options on the in-game presentation side if it meant we had a pretty wide range of underlying functionality to play with.

If the plan is to have custom spell design possible within an active game, I think this kind of stuff would be a good candidate for a third major parameter. In the tabletop RPG Champions, basic superpowers like an energy blast or telekinesis can be modified with Advantages (raising the cost) or Disadvantages (lowering the cost). For example, to make a fireball, you add an Area of Effect advantage to a basic energy blast. To make that fireball design cheaper, you could make it harder to cast (costs more mana), or give it an activation roll (you can't always be sure it will work).

Awwww, maan.. You suck.