Gold, Guns and Glory: Q&A

[Comrade Tribune]

Welcome! This is the official Gold, Guns and Glory thread.

***Please post Questions, Comments and Critique in my other thread on this forum. Thank you!***

Q: Why Another Civgame?

Short answer: To put some class back into the genre.

Long answer: To counter the trend towards McDonaldization in computer games. Only 10 years ago, computer strategy games were aimed at the better educated in general and hardcore strategy gamers in particular, not primarily at the kid market. High complexity was considered a must by such people, and not something to avoid.

As the Civ series has some sort of flagship function in the genre, there is a real danger of CivIII starting a low quality trend all across the board by its buggy release, unbalanced gameplay, the omission of mandatory features such as Multiplayer and, most of all, its aim for simplification and watering down complexity to the intellectual level of 8year olds.

I do not know if that trend can be stopped, but at least it should not be supported financially, and a quality alternative should be offered. I am confident that some of the projects in the Alternative Civs section, including this one, can provide for such an alternative.

[Comrade Tribune]

Q: What are your design priorities?

My design priorities for Gold, Guns and Glory are, in this order:

1) Unprecedented Historicity

In short, no impossible or implausible things should happen. All models should be designed with realism first and foremost in mind.

2) More Content than ever seen before

A game format that will allow for a near unlimited amount of Units, Installations, Cultural Attitudes, Inventions and Discoveries, Resources and Strategies.

3) Comfortable Multiplayability

Multiplayer not as an afterthought, but as a feature that is fully integrated into the game design from day one.

[macaskil]

I suspect no two people can agree on what units etc to have or what their capabilities should be - so - the main requirement is CUSTOMISABILITY.

If you have this, players can create their own technologies, units, rules, terrains and civs.

Obviously you can use civedit and civcopy to do this in civ3 but I barely have time to play the game never mind spend ages creating graphics and animations.

So, we need

1. a "game engine" that provides the framework for the game-play. Unfortunately this must be hard-coded but as far as possible values such as %age chances of battle outcomes should be adjustable by the player.

2. a big library of animations and graphics in a standard format - buildings, units, terrain, "urban sprawl" etc

3. a spreadsheet- or database- type tool for defining rules, units and other objects.

Of course it is possible to produce a game of sorts by abandoning graphics altogether and going back to the old-fashioned text game (there was something called "Hammurabi" I think, many years ago). I suspect an Excel spreadsheet with macros could do this - but who wants to play a game like this? By the way, MS Project can be used to do a neat Tech Tree!

[Comrade Tribune]

What you are talking about is a kind of "Civgame Construction Set". This is an interesting idea, and I would like to see someone do it. In all fairness I should admit, however, that customizability is not currently among my top priorities. The reason being that no one has ever seen a game that had both A) highly refined balancing, and B) high customizability, and with this project I lean toward A).

A Reminder: ***As this is the official Gold, Guns and Glory thread, please post Questions, Comments and Critique in my other thread on this forum. Thank you!***

This is to keep this thread short, so people can get info on the game without being forced to read the entire discussion!

[Comrade Tribune]

Q: What is the time span covered by Gold, Guns and Glory?

Gold, Guns and Glory will cover about 3.500 years of history, most probably 1600 BC to 1900 AD. There will be 500+ turns, starting with 10y turns in the Iron Age down to 1y turns in the 19th century.

This period will be divided into 10 Tech Levels (Eras), namely: Iron Age, Classical Age, Dark Age, Early Medieval, Late Medieval, Age of Renaissance, Age of Discoveries, Age of Mercantilism, Age of Enlightenment, Industrial Age. Each Age will give you quite a few new Units, Buildings and Discoveries.

Being up to date will be more important than ever, because the power of military and economic innovations will tend to increase geometrically. The more modern Empire will always beat the larger Empire, BUT a monopoly on any Discovery will be very short-lived, because it won´t cost much of an effort to steal your neighbour´s Inventions. Blitz victories will only be possible over far-away backward nations that haven´t been long enough in contact with you to steal all your techs (Spain vs. The Actecs).