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Since nobody else has brought up this topic yet, I thought I would throw out a few ideas of my own to get the ball rolling.
I loved MoM, and would love to see a well done sequal to it released some time.
Some of my ideas are pretty simple, others are a bit farther out in left field...
1. More victory conditions
Not exactly the most original of ideas for improving a TBS, but hey, its worth a shot. Having ways of winning that favor the explorer and peaceful perfectionist players would be nice.
One way could involve searching the dungeons and ruins for pieces of a powerful artifact that when put together might act like the Spell of Mastery. There would have to be a good number of those pieces around, spread across the maps of both planes. They would have to be immune to item teleporting and block hero teleporting, so once discovered, the hero would have to travel overland all the way back to the Fortress town to return that piece to the treasury, or contiune carrying it with them, thus taking up item slots, and risking loss if the hero dies. It would be especially interesting if the more pieces the hero carried the more obvious it was that they had 'em and the more everyone else on the map would go right after them.
Another victory condition might be quests from the gods. Missions given from above or below to do certain tasks. Complete enough of them and victory might be handed to you on a divine or infernal platter.
And these are just a couple of ideas for victory conditions, I'm someone else could think of more.
2. More customizations for each race
There was some customization for each race, but I think there could have been more of it. For the most part, each race just had buildings that they couldn't get, some unique units, and maybe a few other specials. My idea would be to try making each race more different and unique. More fitting with what that race is supposed to be like.
It could be done through a combination of having some special building(s) that only available to that race, maybe some more variety to the the units, and a bit more effort to making each race different.
One example that just hit me is the Nomads. This may sound weird, but to me it seems silly that a race called the Nomads would settle and have towns. I don't remember how far into the building tree one could get with the Nomads in MoM, but here is an idea. Instead of building real buildings, a Nomad "town" is just putting up different types of tents and other portable structures. A special ability that the Nomads might have would be to uproot the entire "town", move it somewhere else and replant it in the new location. You've settled a new village, and ten turns later you decide you don't like the spot? Thats fine, as a Nomad, you can always move the whole town. Or perhaps if you're really crazy, you actually decide to plant a "town" or two right next to one you are trying to capture. The uprooting process should probably take at least several turns of "deconstruction" time, and the "unit" that appears for the move would have to be among the slowest around. The "towns" would probably also need limits on how often they can uproot, and an upper limit on their size that is not just terrain dependant(or perhaps, being nomads they just don't get as much food from the land as other races could). It would definitely be different, and make the Nomads much more Nomadic than just a few building restrictions and some special units.
If combined with my #3 idea, this could work especially well.
3. Race relations
Selection of your initial race did not really have any effect beyond determining what buildings and units you started with. You could always capture towns of other any other races and fully utilize them later. I thought it would be interesting to have that selection make an actual impact on how fully you could utilize races other than your starting one.
For example, if you started with the High Elves, you might be able to get the full range of buildings and units from Halflings, only be able to get basic buildings and units out of Dwarven towns, and if you capture a Dark Elven town, it is automatically razed. Humans might be able to get about the same out of every other race, but that would be only slightly better than the basics. And to really stretch the idea to its fullest, perhaps the Klackons, being hive oriented and so different from everyone else, can take over a town only by killing off all its inhabitants and settling some of their troops in their place, converting it to a Klackon village. (Of course some balancing would have to be done on the growth of that conversion, to prevent the Klackons from being able to swarm across the map too easily). And a converse to this would probably have to be that any other race that takes over a Klackon town would always raze the town with no choice for taking control.
Another suggestion for this might be inclusion of some spells and/or artifacts that allow better control over various races. So one might allow you better control over Nomads where another might affect Lizardmen. How much more control could be open for debate, and should probably still depend on exactly what your starting race is.
4. Seperate building and unit construction queues.
My reasoning for this one is (to me at least) simple and logical. Most of the man power that goes into building mills, temples, and towers is not the same man power that would go into forging spearheads, shields and swords, or the man power that goes into wielding them.
Yes, there would have to be some play balancing in modeling exactly how fast construction of buildings and units would occur, and it would have to be slower than the original (or other TBS games) to compensate. However, part of that could be done by having two seperate types of builders to adjust your construction speeds, so that along with the farmers for food, you might have light and heavy builders for units and buildings respectively. This would naturally tend to balance out the seperate queues a little all on its own. Reason being that if you focused a town on heavy construction to get a building done faster, its unit production would be at a virtutal standstill, and vice versa. The one exception to this would of course have to be ship building, as it would be appropriate for that to take up the entire industrial focus of a town.
I also thought another touch that could go along with this would be to have unit construction cause an adverse affect on town population. Ie. if you build a unit, your population is actually going to decrease by an amount appropriate to the unit under construction. The early, weak units like the spearmen might take away less population than the later stronger units. For most units it wouldn't have to be a huge number, though a settler unit should be. But it could be something that might add up to significant numbers if a town is balanced to zero or near zero growth, and its industrial capacity focused on units. Crank out too many units too fast and your town has shrunk a size. Unit damage healing could also be tied into their supporting towns population. As the unit recovers, the town experiences a lower popultion growth. I suppose you could even allow the population to jump back up when a unit is disbanded, though I would say that if a unit is disbanded in a town different from its original, there should be some negative effects on town happiness for a while to represent letting loose all those soldiers somewhere that isn't home.
I loved MoM, and would love to see a well done sequal to it released some time.
Some of my ideas are pretty simple, others are a bit farther out in left field...
1. More victory conditions
Not exactly the most original of ideas for improving a TBS, but hey, its worth a shot. Having ways of winning that favor the explorer and peaceful perfectionist players would be nice.
One way could involve searching the dungeons and ruins for pieces of a powerful artifact that when put together might act like the Spell of Mastery. There would have to be a good number of those pieces around, spread across the maps of both planes. They would have to be immune to item teleporting and block hero teleporting, so once discovered, the hero would have to travel overland all the way back to the Fortress town to return that piece to the treasury, or contiune carrying it with them, thus taking up item slots, and risking loss if the hero dies. It would be especially interesting if the more pieces the hero carried the more obvious it was that they had 'em and the more everyone else on the map would go right after them.
Another victory condition might be quests from the gods. Missions given from above or below to do certain tasks. Complete enough of them and victory might be handed to you on a divine or infernal platter.
And these are just a couple of ideas for victory conditions, I'm someone else could think of more.
2. More customizations for each race
There was some customization for each race, but I think there could have been more of it. For the most part, each race just had buildings that they couldn't get, some unique units, and maybe a few other specials. My idea would be to try making each race more different and unique. More fitting with what that race is supposed to be like.
It could be done through a combination of having some special building(s) that only available to that race, maybe some more variety to the the units, and a bit more effort to making each race different.
One example that just hit me is the Nomads. This may sound weird, but to me it seems silly that a race called the Nomads would settle and have towns. I don't remember how far into the building tree one could get with the Nomads in MoM, but here is an idea. Instead of building real buildings, a Nomad "town" is just putting up different types of tents and other portable structures. A special ability that the Nomads might have would be to uproot the entire "town", move it somewhere else and replant it in the new location. You've settled a new village, and ten turns later you decide you don't like the spot? Thats fine, as a Nomad, you can always move the whole town. Or perhaps if you're really crazy, you actually decide to plant a "town" or two right next to one you are trying to capture. The uprooting process should probably take at least several turns of "deconstruction" time, and the "unit" that appears for the move would have to be among the slowest around. The "towns" would probably also need limits on how often they can uproot, and an upper limit on their size that is not just terrain dependant(or perhaps, being nomads they just don't get as much food from the land as other races could). It would definitely be different, and make the Nomads much more Nomadic than just a few building restrictions and some special units.
If combined with my #3 idea, this could work especially well.
3. Race relations
Selection of your initial race did not really have any effect beyond determining what buildings and units you started with. You could always capture towns of other any other races and fully utilize them later. I thought it would be interesting to have that selection make an actual impact on how fully you could utilize races other than your starting one.
For example, if you started with the High Elves, you might be able to get the full range of buildings and units from Halflings, only be able to get basic buildings and units out of Dwarven towns, and if you capture a Dark Elven town, it is automatically razed. Humans might be able to get about the same out of every other race, but that would be only slightly better than the basics. And to really stretch the idea to its fullest, perhaps the Klackons, being hive oriented and so different from everyone else, can take over a town only by killing off all its inhabitants and settling some of their troops in their place, converting it to a Klackon village. (Of course some balancing would have to be done on the growth of that conversion, to prevent the Klackons from being able to swarm across the map too easily). And a converse to this would probably have to be that any other race that takes over a Klackon town would always raze the town with no choice for taking control.
Another suggestion for this might be inclusion of some spells and/or artifacts that allow better control over various races. So one might allow you better control over Nomads where another might affect Lizardmen. How much more control could be open for debate, and should probably still depend on exactly what your starting race is.
4. Seperate building and unit construction queues.
My reasoning for this one is (to me at least) simple and logical. Most of the man power that goes into building mills, temples, and towers is not the same man power that would go into forging spearheads, shields and swords, or the man power that goes into wielding them.
Yes, there would have to be some play balancing in modeling exactly how fast construction of buildings and units would occur, and it would have to be slower than the original (or other TBS games) to compensate. However, part of that could be done by having two seperate types of builders to adjust your construction speeds, so that along with the farmers for food, you might have light and heavy builders for units and buildings respectively. This would naturally tend to balance out the seperate queues a little all on its own. Reason being that if you focused a town on heavy construction to get a building done faster, its unit production would be at a virtutal standstill, and vice versa. The one exception to this would of course have to be ship building, as it would be appropriate for that to take up the entire industrial focus of a town.
I also thought another touch that could go along with this would be to have unit construction cause an adverse affect on town population. Ie. if you build a unit, your population is actually going to decrease by an amount appropriate to the unit under construction. The early, weak units like the spearmen might take away less population than the later stronger units. For most units it wouldn't have to be a huge number, though a settler unit should be. But it could be something that might add up to significant numbers if a town is balanced to zero or near zero growth, and its industrial capacity focused on units. Crank out too many units too fast and your town has shrunk a size. Unit damage healing could also be tied into their supporting towns population. As the unit recovers, the town experiences a lower popultion growth. I suppose you could even allow the population to jump back up when a unit is disbanded, though I would say that if a unit is disbanded in a town different from its original, there should be some negative effects on town happiness for a while to represent letting loose all those soldiers somewhere that isn't home.
Sayyy! That's not that bad of an idea! see if Infro can put out a little bit of time for a "Greed" edition, like the Myst masterpiece or some such. then they could put quicksilver to work for a couple of years on a true sequel.
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