Interesting concept? Turn based management game. Hire heroes, send them out to scout for info, send them on quests, pick up gold/fame/magic weapons, decide which team members to give them to, train the heroes skills, scout for better heroes to join the team or replace the existing ones. Kind of like a fantasy version of one of those football games which give you the statistics for the players abilties.

Has potential. Perhaps have the player manage a mercenary company? Worry about finances, training, jobs, etc. A few ideas to make it more interesting:

* Allegiances. Have the player managing an independant company of mercenaries, but have them hired by conflicting parties, eg noble houses, opposing merchants/guilds, etc. Player would have to be careful to balance these alliances, maybe play one against the other, sell someone out, get attacked by a betrayed customer, etc.
* Competition. Player has to worry about rival mercenary groups - conflicts over territory, jobs, etc. Tie this in with the alliances idea above. Other independant parties might resent interference in their areas - the local thieves'' guild for instance.
* Intrigue/Diplomacy. Have plenty of spying/intelligence gathering, etc. Information could be very valuable to the player, diplomacy might be neccessary to avoid problems with conflicting interests, gain clients, etc.

Other alternatives could be to have the player manage a merchant''s guild (medieval trade management sim) or have the player manage a thieves'' guild, the city watch, the king''s "special forces", etc.

Dude, that''s copyright infringement, I''m gonna sue you for all your money , stop stealing my ideas. (I posted something about a medival UPS management game in an earlier thread.)

I think it would be pretty cool. I kind of saw it as less of a management business thing though. You would still have the standard RPG plotline, save the world, rescue the princess, kill monsters, etc. Except more tedious quests (or all of them) could be performed by hirelings or allies.

I think the hero manager thing would work well if you were the king or general of some country riddled with problems (dragons, orc invasions, bandits, plagues that need magical healing, etc.) You could then use your team of heroes to solve various aspects of the problem. So a mage could figure out the dragon''s weakness, a theif could steal the necessary ingredients from an evil wizard to create a sword capable of killing the dragon, and your fighter could go and slay it. You may also have to deal with rival kingdoms\heroes, hero popularity and reputation (that ruthless assasin may get the job done, but the people may not trust him), and "miscellaneous" problems (one of the heros is getting a little too "friendly" with the princess.) This would be included as well as financial management, equipment management, training and hero hiring\aquisition.

LOL, Impossible . Just didn''t feel like adding all the thread references for once, life is too short! By the way what does UPS stand for?

That''s a good idea, let me elaborate on it a bit:

You have your HQ, kingdom, town, whatever, it might just start off as a little shack or something, and you can only afford 1 or 2 weak heroes to send out to the poor villages around the country-side to slay their dragons or milk their chickens or whatever, and that''s pretty much all your company would do in the beginning...the more money you can make, you can afford more heroes, like Jimbo the Construction Worker, who has a skill mastery in masonry, construction, and carpentry. Jimbo can do maintenance at your HQ, maybe add new buildings for training, or equipment production (think armoury or blacksmith shop) and you can also hire heroic blacksmiths and sell their wares to towns and cities for more profit! Jimbo could also go out and be hired as a contractor by the villages around the countryside who need their houses fixed, their plumbing put in, or their Satanic monuments built (Which might open up new employment opportunities!) So as you make more and more money, your HQ also gains notoriety for whatever deeds it may have done, say if you got hired to kill the king, you''d become infamous, but if your mercenaries destroyed the evil wyrm dragon vampire lich goat, then you''d gain positive fame. I''m just throwing out ideas in a very unstructured form, but hey, I think I got my point across.

Why?!?

It sounds like Heroes of Might and Magic!

quote: Original post by Ketchaval
By the way what does UPS stand for?

UPS is a package delivery service, I think it stands for United Parcel Service or something. I was referring to all those courier missions you tend to get in RPGs, "I need a dragon's liver, I think Jimm in Valtora has one." Instead of having to pick up the dragon's liver yourself, you would hire some other dude to get it for you so you can focus on the main quest.

[edited by - impossible on July 18, 2002 3:31:57 PM]

I think you have a pretty nice idea going. I wish I thought of it. I hope execurtion plays out to be just as good as the design.

Sound like an interesting idea, but I''m wandering, do you control the heroes directly on their quests? If not, what factors will affect the outcome of the quest?
Perhaps you could have a limited control over events, say in one quest you see a large group of zombies you could change your cleric''s role from ''heal'' to ''banish undead'', but apart from setting their AI you let your heroes get on with it by themselves.

If you get to control the heroes even partially, I''d enjoy it alot more. I''m envisioning a sort of medieval/fantasy X-Com.

- DarkIce

Maybe you could have a system where smaller, less interesting mission are carried out automatically and exciting missions give you some control over the heroes. If your send your hero to rescue a cat stuck in a tree, he just disappears for a while and comes back, but if you send him to slay the dragon you get some control over his actions. Really the whole thing could play out like an RTS, hero''s AI can be trusted to succesfully complete simple actions, but when you''re going through complex quests you probably want to micromanage.