Okay, here''s the basic concept for a game I''m designing: The game is set in one of those advanced tech/ancient look settings like in a lot of Anime series. For example, the people have computers and such but they are embedded into stone and wood, not metal casing. You rule an empire, which consists of cities, settlements, and outposts. Cities are the social, commercial, and political centers and can have the following: - Libraries, Museums, Schools, Temples, and Factories - Inns and Housing (Civilian and Military - Marketplaces, Offices, and Shops. - Recreational Facilities - Military Facilities - Defenses Settlements are used primarily to house civilians and gather resources and can have the following: - Resource Centers (farms, oil refineries, logging camps, etc.) - Inns and Housing (Civilian and Military) - Small Shops - Defenses Outposts are used to guard remote locations and settlements and can have the following: - Military Facilities - Inns Personnel Housing - Defenses You can also build roads, highways, and underground tunnels between your cities, settlements, and outposts. You must have at least one city as the capital of your empire and obviously you wouldn''t be able to buy or construct much without a few resource-oriented settlements. The capital city contains a very large portion of your money in a big bank and other cities can have banks too. You continously receive money from taxation, parking tickets , etc. The larger the population you have, the more money you''ll probably be getting. The population limit for cities will be around 10,000, the limit for settlements about 100, and the limit for outposts around 100 as well. Instead of "constructing" people as you do in many empire and real-time strategy games you will recruit personnel (non-civilians) from the civilian population. Personnel do not include workers. Each civilian is born with a certain talent or talents such as carpentry or blacksmithing and will find an appropriate job if one is available. A small portion of the civilians will be born with at least one of their talents being something military-related. These are the ones you want to recruit as personnel. If you do not initiate a draft policy then you will only be able to get personnel when they apply at a recruitment office. Vehicles (civilian and military) will be produced at factories once you make them. Military vehicles will be mainly produced in cities and not outposts. Settlements cannot contain factories and outposts will just not normally contain production facilities. The higher the intelligence of your population, the more advanced vehicles you will be able to create. You must also have sufficient resources to create them. You can have a maximum of 5000 vehicles in your empire at one time including both military and civilian. Combat in the game will involve both melee combat (hand-to-hand, swords, etc.) and small to long-range weapons (cannons, trebuchets, etc.) You will also be able to go to a special "tactics" screen similar to that found in the Rainbow Six series. There you can select from available units in the "roster," assign equipment to them, place them in teams, and set advanced waypoints, formations, and go codes. Go codes will not be issued manually by you. They will be events such as "guards have been eliminated." You can also use teams, formations, and waypoints while out of tactical mode if you don''t have time to plan an entire tactic. Well, that''s about it for the basics of the game that I can think of right now. I''ll get back to you later once I''ve had sufficient brain rest (and some food). As the existence of this post suggests, I would appreciate your feedback on my game idea. Best regards, Tony Burns

Im kindof in a hurry, but I thought I would let you know that I think this would make a great game. I like the idea of the planning/tactics screen, it works very well in R6. Also, I would suggest either a higher limit for settlements (250) or a lower one for outposts (50). Just a couple ideas.

Good luck - put a post up if you finish

-geo-

one more thing: you might limit army sizes - this game sounds like it would work better with smaller squads than with huge legions... Mainly because this would allow you to keep from fighting a company-sized enemy with a tactical squad of your own. or, you could always have the limit of your army size and that of your enemies be relative to your own population.

-geo-

Good point Anon. The army sizes will be limited internally by how the game randomly selects which civilians will be military-capable. Once the player''s army reaches a certain size the chance that a newly born civ will be military-capable will be slim to none. Also, certain individuals extremely occasionally will be born with above-average skills, usually in either intelligence or military. These I guess are what you might call "heros."

As for combat, you will also be able to organize your armies into a few basic groupings like squadron, detachment, platoon, etc.

That''s all for now. Getting tired... need some Jolt®.

All in all, the game will be like AOE 2 + Sim City 3k + a little touch of The Sims.

In regards to more technical issues, the game will be 3D third-person perspective. You will, however, be able to assume a first-person view from the perspective of any of your civilians in the game. You wont be able to control the civilian though.

Terrain-action reasoning will play an important role tactics-wise in the game. There will be grass to hide in, mud to get stuck in, quicksand to drown in, etc. Also, there will be a sort of ground fog/mist type of effect that hazes over affected terrain. This would provide a variety of tactical advantages during combat.

Everything will be to scale in respect to each other. This doesn''t mean that everything will be to scale with reality, it simply means that a man will not be the zize of a guard tower as is common in many strategy games. The world will be continous and not a set of linked-together maps.

There are planned to be 5 primary areas of the world in all: tropics, ocean (with many small islands), tundra, desert, and forest.

Characters in the game will assume attributes commonly found in RPGs. This is one of the technical issues in the game, as about 50 attributes to process for each character, not to mention the rest of the game may require more processing power than is currently available, even with the highest amount of optimization.

Vehicles will not drive themselves. You will need to assign drivers to each vehicle, and often an entire crew (for large vehicles like trebuchets and the like).

Again, all for now. Where''d that pitcher of capuchino get to...?

Oh yeah, the game''s cinematics and character profiles will be anime style.