Task Force leaders

[RolandtheMad]

Does anybody remember when leaders were cut? I was looking at some old screen shots and saw a portrait of a task force leader back in May of 2002.

[rhofman]

They are not completely cut. There are planetary vice-roys, up to 4 empire leaders and as I understand it each ship has it's own AI controling it. They do not have names and pictures for them anymore (except empire leaders). Apparently it didn't really add anything and it plays the same way anyway.

[RolandtheMad]

I thought the 'viceroys' were faceless and were not distinguished from each other? What I saw was old style when they had personality and what not. I am just trying to remember exactly when that cut was announced.

[Kc7mxo]

Yeah, all those aspects of leader control and influence has been cut. And I don't think I'll miss it.

Except I'm still irritated at the 4 leader help-not-wanted sign.

[RolandtheMad]

Yeah that kind of sucks but with assassinations it is a possibility that there may be a moderate turnover rate. I don`t know if leaders can still resign still either?

[Arnelos]

My guess is that because they cut out the ethos/religion system, there was no longer a mechanism to influence the individual leaders to having values that would impact their style. Therefore giving the leaders personalities would just be extraneous and somewhat pointless.

So they probably cut both at the same time or one after the other when they realized having one w/o the other was somewhat pointless.

Just my guess...

[Craig P.]

Arnelos - Ethos was never in the game. It was in the design, but they decided before attempting to code it that it would be too much effort.

Leaders were (and are, to an extent) there. It used to be that you as the "guiding force" in your empire could nudge competent leaders forward while at the same time shunting the incompetent ones into a dead-end.

This level of control was, IIRC, cut in the Great Redesign back ca. April. I'm sure the reason for it was that it was too much burden for the player without enough contribution to the gameplay. I don't think presence or absence of ethos really had any effect on that.

[CharlesBHoff]

Plus it would be too hard to program in different personal for
65000 planetary vicroy.

[Cedayon]

Originally posted by CharlesBHoff Plus it would be too hard to program in different personal for 65000 planetary vicroy.

Hmm, max 250 stars, max 9 planets each, so max of 2250 viceroys... but I get your point ... however, it's likely that they would just have had a number of fields for the viceroy's characteristics, and randomly generate values (within a certain range) for those characteristics every time you need a new viceroy.