If Empire really is a brand new engine, that would be true.  As far as I know, they haven't come out and said they rebuilt it from scratch.  They've definitely modified it heavily, but you can do a lot of modification.  Just look at what Valve did with Half-life.  They took the Quake engine, modded the shit out of it, and put out a game that looked far better while maintaining excellent stability.  They then took that same engine and made countless modifications over the years, eventually becoming the titan of the first person shooter that is the Source engine.  It's not the same engine, but it's not really a new engine either.  A technicality perhaps, but it would explain his statement.  Most strategy game engines are either modified versions of their predecessors, or engines from another genre entirely.

Can you make more complex than Spore yet just as accessible?

[quote quoting="article"]
I’d like to see the Elemental engine be able to be used in lots of interesting ways.
[/quote]

As in making First person shooter ?

As far as the Empire Total War engine goes, I would say it is the same base engine that was used for previous total war games, it just has a few more features and updated graphics. Of the coding from the previous total war game, I would guess around 50-75% of the coding remained unchanged.

What I think more companies need to do for their strategy games is adopt the zoom scalability so wonderfully captured in SoaSE and GalCiv 2. In total war, you can only see part of your empire at a time, and on the battle map you can almost never see your entire army at the same time. Most strategy games have the somewhat small ability to zoom in/out , and so it feels like playing your game in a box with a low ceiling.

Time to be a negative nellie and scream about how this will fragment the player-base and end up preventing people from finding others to game with.  Of course, I still play the V&K Middle Earth mod for Diablo II... 

man, I have to say a carcassone mod would be quite a site to see.   What a great board game.   While we are at it, we could have a settlers of catan mod too

Well, disregarding balance issues for submitted content, I think people just need to be less picky about what they play.

The greatest support you can give me would be bears and a variety of stock mounts.

Zeneroth

reply 18

quoting article

I’d like to see the Elemental engine be able to be used in lots of interesting ways.

As in making First person shooter? 

I have been a long time fan of Stardock and I am very much looking forward to Elemental.

Even though I have every expectation that the base game will be a blast to play, I am excided by the stated goal of mod support. To me mods to a game add a huge amount of replayability and enjoyment to games, sometimes even more than the base game.

The two best examples of this for me are Team Fortress and Fall From Heaven 2. Fall From Heaven 2 is a total mod of Civ 4 (and based on the devs stated interest in civ, I really hope you guys have played it). It turns civ 4 into a dark fantasy world and adds in spells, real religions, changing game world (hell literally can take over the world), and many other changes. The mod was only possible because of the huge amount of support that Firaxis built into civ 4. This allows the modders to not just modify some config files here and there, but to write new python scripts, and even new c code and custom dlls. The access level given to the modders is amazing.

I mention all of this because I would love to see a similar level of mod support from Elemental. While only a few dedicated fans would make use of it, many many other players would be able to benefit from what they come up with.

Since el presidente has posted on the FFH2 forums and shot the shit with the designer, I'd guess he's played it.

Now that would be interesting.

You could easily make a set of creatures / spells that mimick that game. (One of my favorites, by the way. And it's getting remade... archonclassic.com

This is good news, in particular after learning that there wont be any fantasy races in the basic game. But if Stardock would like to make some extra money (to use for developing further games)  I for one would be willing to pay 50-100 $/€ for an expansion with several factions of elves etc, so that you could really play your D&D campaign or Silmarillion that was referred to at the start.

BTW, Archon was soo cool!

The greatest bugfest in gaming history?

Just kidding, too good to pass though. E: TW's a great game (or has become I ought to say).

Seriously though: The modding community is more often than not what makes great games truly memorable. Anyone remember Half-life 1? No? How about Counterstrike then? Or Warcraft III/DotA. Or the Fall From Heaven mod for Civ IV. Great games all, but the modding community extended that greatness to a point that few developers in their own right could have hoped to achieve.

Wot's that?  I recognize HL1 and War3, but what's counterstrike?  DotA I remember because Demigod was 'like' it, but whats counterstrike?

(Slightly more honest note:  If I hadn't played at this video arcade once where they did a lot of DOTA and counterstrike, odds are I never would have encountered either...)

Counterstrike was a mod for the original Half-life.  It started off very primitive, but over 1999/2000 it gained a lot of cool functionality.  Valve later distributed it as part of the Half-Life: Game of the Year Edition.  Counterstrike: Source is a mod using Half-Life 2's engine (called Source), but it was developed by Valve and was not free (unlike the original).  If I recall correctly, though, Valve hired some of the creators of Counter-strike.  It was like a mod community's dream.

I think I lost more time to Counterstrike my senior year in college than I did to any game other than Diablo II.