Good to see others in the community interested in a Middle Earth game...

I''m the project leader of The Last Alliance, which is a freeware fantasy game - I think there may be some confusion about how exactly we get around the legal hurdles from the Tolkien Estate that you may be interested in.

First, the game started out as a modification, but then we found we had enough talent, time, and dedication to push for a full-feature RTS. The project was puritan in its adhesion to Tolkien''s mythology. However, we soon realized that the possibility of our team producing a game without a license (which is very hard to get from "The Tolkien Ringwraiths") was simply not there. So we came up with some innovations:

Our team was blessed early on to gain the help of some avid Tolkien-linguists who are developing new dialects of familiar languages for the game. So what elendil67 saw with "Gondor -> Condyr" was a foreshadowing of what we are doing. Since only the names of places, people, and things are copyrighted as per Tolkien Enterprises, we are developing our own languages that we will use to translate familiar names, such as Moria, Elrond, Imladris, etc.

Besides this, we are working to develop a new geography for the game-world, that will be familiar to the Tolkien-enthusiast, but original enough to facilitate our own creative impulses.

The only things we are leaving directly intact, the important things, are the cultural identities of the races, and the main themes behind Tolkien''s work, two things that can never be copyrighted, yet are responsible for the Tolkien-like feeling of the game. By cultural identities, I mean the historical derivatives from whence the cultures came from in Tolkien''s creative process. For instance, the dwarves are of norse origin, obviously, Elves are lovers of aesthetics and nature, yet tied fatefully to the men of the world, men are weak in mind, but strong in arm. Finally, by themes, I mean the conflict between good v. evil, hope beyond earthly salvation, frienship, and fate. (also common characteristics of norse and anglo-saxon epic poetry)

You may have heard the term "counterfactual history", which is more provincially, "what-if" history. It means that the historian explores what would have happened if something in history had been different. We are taking this concept and applying it to Tolkien''s mythology. You can think of our project as "Counterfactual Tolkien Mythology".

And of course, any RTS inspired by Tolkien would not be complete without campaigns and scenarios from the books, so we are going to be releasing these separately, after the game has been released (hopefully smoothly). The campaigns and scenarios being released with the game will be original, from our own storywriters.

Well enough about our project , I thought you may be interested in how a team goes about doing something like this, from what I''ve read, and I noticed elendil mentioned us in his original post.

Thanks for your time,

Adam Vana
The Last Alliance
Wildfire Games
Project Leader

Turn based! Turn based! (please)

Are you going to make the Elves cowards too? So that if the bad guys start winning then they all jump on boats and run for it


''Your theory of a donut shaped universe is intriguing Homer'' - Stephen Hawking

av_nefardec: I hope you feel better; as I understand it you have some grave personal matters.

But anyways, most of this idea has came from your project and from my re-reading of The Silmarillion. I wish I could join your project, but I am not very well-versed in certain areas (3D programming in particular). Therefore if I made the game that I am thinking of, it would definitely be a 2D SDL game. Thanks for the information on how you are getting away from the copyright issues.

I am not sure what I will do with my game (either write a friendly letter to the Nazgul or keep it secret), but I just want you to know that when your game comes out--and I''m sure it will, with all of the dedicated members--I will be first in line to download it.

Sailorstick: Hehe. That was great. But I am thinking of making it turn-based. Real-time Strategy is such a different genre. You almost begin to think it is a clickfest with strategy. I long for the days of when I first played Civilization and moved all my units and then clicked the turn button. But then I got AoK and that all changed...

What do you guys think it should be? RTS or TBS?

Thanks for your input!

I lean in favor towards TBS vs. RTS. I think TBS offers more strategical thinking, but RTS is prettier to watch. Ideally, the best of both of both worlds would be nice, but I think RTS is a little harder to do in terms of programming (since you have to handle the event handler, event processor and main game loop logic quite a bit differently. Actually, I''m having a hard time figuring out how I''m going to make my game a hybrid system...I wish I could peek at the source code for Shogun or Combat Mission.

Hmm, sucks that the license is so hard to get, but I kind of figured the Tolkeins'' would be pretty tough about giving out licenses, even if the other party wasn''t making money off of it (afterall, they want to make money out of themselves I''m sure...and freeware = no royalties).

Damnit I need to get Shogun! I want to make a completely (well, somewhat) unique strategy.

Anyone have any ideas about this whole thing? TBS vs. RTS? Ideas for a hybrid?

Thanks.

I don''t think it needs any sort of hybrid system unless you are going to make it multiplayer over the web. Games like Civ2 still keep me playing for hours on end and it''s turn based. (You can pick it up for free now too!)
I think the mistake that a lot of people make when going turn based is to make it too complicated and too much micro-management. While Civ2 is duanting at first, it really isn''t very complex when you get down to it.
If you do go hybrid, maybe you could give a time limit for a full turn based on what the player owns. Eg. give them 12 seconds for each unit, 40 seconds for each city plus a base time of 2 minutes.
So I start the game with 1 Hobbit unit and a city then I get 2m52s to make my first turn.
Later on I have 3 cities, 2 dwarven units and 10 human units then I would get 8m24s to make my turn. (I think that''s right )


''Your theory of a donut shaped universe is intriguing Homer'' - Stephen Hawking

Interesting... Any other ideas? I am also trying to think of a way to make it turn-based, but not at the same time. I am also struggling whether it should be turn-based at all. Has anyone played that Diciples II game I think it was that is a TBS?

Thanks!

Look at Master of Orion 3. The idea is to get away from managing individual units, and become a commander giving broad orders, and letting your leutenants worry about the individuals.

Have a turn based world map, with a real-time battle map. If you want to have ''heroes'' then that poses a problem, because people usually want to BE the hero...