Making a game based on picrel. Basically:
>Indirect control of "heroes" via quests & bounties as well as hero class nature (fighters wanna fight, rangers wanna explore, etc)
>Direct control (i.e. traditional RTS) of weaker generic troops, mostly there to eat shit so the heroes can shine more
I'd like to hear Ganker's input before working in more mechanics. What did this series do right? What did it do wrong? Was the sequel really as awful as I remember?
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Not Ganker. Also can you make it a porn game? I feel like monster girls and anime would improve the game.
>What did this series do right?
Everything
>What did it do wrong?
Nothing
>Was the sequel really as awful as I remember?
Yes. They should just release new missions for the 1st game or maybe create new continent east of Ardania for us to conquer. With ACTUAL new heroes (gnome champions? lol, lmao even...)
>that one dream I had where there was a mission in which appearing succubus was seducing my peasants making them destroy buildings instead of repairing them
where and when it all went so wrong...
Venn Fairweather knocks it out of the park as the advisor, in both delivery and writing. He's absolutely a high point of the game.
The general aesthetic and tone. The buildings and units are a lovely medieval fantasy, which works with the color palate. There's no edge or oppressive grittiness for the sake of "realism" or "being a more mature experience," it's just a fantasy land with some problems and a nice spot of humor.
The game knows what it is. It knows it's a medieval fantasy sim and not an RTS, and the gameplay functions accordingly. This is one reason why you should seriously reconsider allowing direct control of "weaker generic troops." If you're going to have direct unit control in any capacity, better to have it done well one way or another rather than for the sake of one type of agency which, as Majesty has proven, you don't even need.
The economy is interesting. The interactions between tax collectors, heroes and their adventuring, markets, the thieves guild, and defenses may not have been particularly deep, but it was all connected in a way that made a kingdom feel alive.
Houses feel... weird. Beyond aesthetic and maybe an unspoken sovereign morality, I just don't know what they're there for. In a game where every kingdom structure does something, good or bad, "gives a bit of tax and basically nothing else" is weirdly underwhelming.
A lack of campaign difficulty options. Fine for its day and doesn't actually take away from the game, but it would help any modern adaptation.
A number of spells do the same thing, just slightly differently. It does make sense to have "duplicates" for the healing and resurrection temple spells, they're obviously useful and lock each other out, but it's disappointing. Also, having the temple to the god of death be totally fine with bringing things back from the dead just feels stupid.
There's more good and bad, but I already wrote a FRICKING essay here and I can't be assed.
>Direct control in a Majesty game
Makes me nervous to hear
I wouldn't want my town guards to be controllable, but maybe as a magic spell you could have something like Animate Dead except you get to control the skeletons/creatures for a brief amount of time
You may want to look into Age of Mythology for interesting powers, and monsters you could add
I think Majesty would benefit from having deeper relationship mechanics between heroes, I always love seeing a bunch of different characters gather around an attack flag and fight like a party, maybe you could expand on that and have them remember each other and gain bonuses when they team up or maluses when one of them dies or something like that
Really, I think the groundwork of the original game is already fantastic, so expand on whats already there and connect more things that you think should be connected and you should end up with a good game regardless, there's all sorts of things you could do
I spend a lot of time thinking about a spiritual successor to Majesty so I wish you all the luck in the world, OP, it's one of my favourite games ever
>Also, having the temple to the god of death be totally fine with bringing things back from the dead just feels stupid.
I don't think they worship death so much as they want to master it (presumably as Krypta does), so it makes sense that they can try and hold it off while recognising that it's inevitable ("Another day, Krypta")
Even Fervus cultists don't go full Chaos, Krolm barbarians are only anprim until they need to buy weapons
control (i.e. traditional RTS) of weaker generic troops, mostly there to eat shit so the heroes can shine more
I'd avoid doing this. Having generic troops is fine, but you shouldn't have direct control over them. Instead, you could give them, general commands on what to do.
For example, ANNO 1404 handles ground combat by allowing you to build and place trop camps which host troops you have no direct control over, but you can direct with certain orders from the camp itself. The camp has a maximum range the troops can move to, so if you want to move your troops somewhere else you need to move the camp and the troops will take rebuild it there (similar to Majesty's Rangers Camp).
You could have these generic troop camps be available from having Barracks in your kingdom. While resting on the barracks these troops serve as guards patrolling your kingdom, but when a camp is made through the barracks these troops leave your kingdom and go build the camp elsewhere, where they rest a protect the general area around the camp.
>What did this series do right?
Meaningful decisions. Build orders, positioning and timing matter a lot more than turtling or clicking fast. You could argue that it makes the game play like a puzzle but since the maps are semi-randomly generated, it's less of an issue.
Flavorful lore, with some surprises like elves who love money and fun. A singleplayer game like this benefits from it even if it whether it affects gameplay or not. Driftland neglected that and wasn't even half as interesting (it didn't help that the heroes spoke in a gibberish language).
Heroes have personality. Different guilds have different priorities so the kingdom feels busier. Even a game as simple as Kingdom Two Crowns managed to make it fun to observe the soldiers and townfolk go about their daily work. Your game could include randomized personality traits and perks to make the units even more diverse - I saw that in a Flash game called Mars Colonies.
>What did it do wrong?
Weird behavior, odd pathing and glitches all around - the consequence of playing in real time (I wonder if the idea could work as turn-based). Nothing worse than getting screwed over by something that wasn't your fault. You'll be squashing a lot of bugs in your game.
Bland combat. Heroes and monsters fight by standing in place and attacking randomly and stupidly. There's hardly any cooperation between units. Tougher engagements hinge on quantity rather than quality. Do something about that and you'll have a great game.
Obviously Majesty's setting and flavour are excellent, but I think it's theoretically possible to create a good Majesty-like without being nearly as goofy. Simply because it's hard to do. I do agree with that the heroes having a mechanical personality is important. One thing Majesty does well but I rarely hear people talk about is the restrictions on the maps. By sometimes forbidding certain temples, guilds, or having something like a strict time limit, you can't just use the same strategy every time. Keeps things fresh, this is important for a game where there's limited room for player expressiveness compared to a traditional RTS.
One thing that's kind of lame about Majesty is that all the maps are randomly generated. No interesting landmarks or anything. I think some randomness is good (so you can't just cheese with explore flags) but having a level where there's, say, a long overpass where you can place towers on the side to shoot down approaching enemies before they get into melee range, or where there's a river with bridges as chokepoints, or whatever, would be cool. I imagine this was due to the engine limitations and problems with pathing, but there's room for improvement there. More research would be cool too, I want more different paths to success.
Yeah more impactful environments would be cool, and maybe you could tie that into other systems
Do you keep the forests and ensure the favour of rangers, cultists and elves? Or do you cut it down and please the dwarves, priestesses and paladins (Dauros the Order god preferring civilisation over wilderness)? And of course there's the monsters living in the forest to consider as well, but all that lumber could make buildings cheaper
>I imagine this was due to the engine limitations and problems with pathing
Generation of random maps is not trivial if you want the results to be good. You need to work with templates so that the overall structure is sensible but you also don't want to limit variety too much, or make something too easy/too hard because there are too many paths, for example.
There's already a Majesty thread
This isn't really a Majesty thread. It's a help me make a good majesty style game thread.
post progress or you are not "making" shit
I'm not OP. I just read the OP instead of only looking at the picture because I don't have ADHD.
Kinda like a reverse MOBA? I can see how you could have the heroes wander around the world, e.g. seeking dungeons, while you manage their retinues: levies, squires, scouts, medics, cooks, courtesans, etc.
Direct control should only exsists if you have a player representation character that may give moral or productivity boosts. In Evil Genius every worker and goon is under indirect control only responding to work orders, only your genius and the highest henchman can be controlled directly, maybe check out that game for some ideas, its more about base building though.
Thanks everyone for the input. I've got a ton of notes to work off of. Hopefully my design intuition isn't completely off and I can eventually put together something enjoyable.
At this stage, the game mainly revolves around the quest interface which is more complex than "click flag, increase bounty". Units access quests through quest boards that can be planted around your town. Idle heroes will gravitate towards these boards to find something to do. Once a quest's openings are claimed the heroes will set off as a party.
I'm seeing a lot of concern over the directly controlled units - enough for me to reconsider how "direct" the control should be. I'm thinking a reserve of guard units which can be drawn from to be assigned to quests as support. Mostly wanted these squads to accompany heroes as fodder to enable heroes to do cool stuff. Ideas include: priests buffing them to actually be combat threats, necromancers using their corpses to make skellies, even rogues/rangers would probably appreciate the dedicated front-line.
I think having mook fodder units is fine, I think having controllable units is fine, but I don't think they have to be the same thing. Maybe you can have soldiers or mercenaries or something, who will join heroes on quests, but don't level or contribute to the economy in the same way, so you don't care if they die.
And separately from that, having a spell that summons controllable units, or a panic button that rallies some controllable guards would be cool. I think having unit control be something you can do at ALL times is against the spirit of Majesty.
How is my thread still alive?
Guards are just villagers who picked up a stick and put on some armor. They are directly sourced from your villager count/cap, so each guard is a villager who isn't building, at the markets, repairing at the blacksmith, etc. Having guards around is essential to mitigate small inevitable incursions like sewer rats or pushing through major mission objectives, but I really want to discourage throwing them out into the wild just to kill some wolves.
The hero "gameplay loop" is like most RPGs: accept quest, go out and do quest, return to collect reward. The player's gameplay loop is mainly choosing which quests to give in order to reach the overall victory condition.
Most of the buildings in the game will enable a type of quest. For example, the blacksmith periodically spawns a mining node (and accompanying monsters) somewhere outside your town, which enables a quest to harvest that node to unlock a gear upgrade. Similarly, the apothecary will enable gathering quests to stock more types of potions. The Chapel will enable a quest whenever a hero dies: retrieve their remains to resurrect the hero (with certain penalties to be implemented).
Anyways, thanks for all the input.
>How is my thread still alive?
/vst/ is really slow. Also it's a good thread.
My idea for a Majesty spiritual successor involves taking aspects from Stronghold (and ANNO) to simulate your kingdom.
Essentially, you'd place Houses inhabited by peasants who wait outside of your Keep until there's a job available to them (Blacksmith, Farmer, Tax Collector, Guard, etc).
Peasants are essential to run a functional kingdom but are individually expendable and indistinguishable from one another except by some superficial physical appearances.
Heroes in contrast are unique from one by having different, individual personality traits, skills and needs. No two heroes would be the same, even if some mare share quirks or classes and such.
Peasants have some very limited but important needs to be fulfilled (Security, Food, Housing, etc) which need to be met, but all of the buildings used to fulfill the needs of Peasants have double usage as they are able to provide services to Heroes (Blacksmiths needed to outfit guards also serve physically inclined heroes by providing upgrades for their equipment, Farming buildings provide food for your Inns which improves the quality of the rest Heroes obtain as well as the quality of Feasts you can prepare in your Keep (to improve Hero Morale), Churches satisfy peasant religious needs but also provide holy blessings and healting for heroes, etc).
As your Kingdom grows you’re able to upgrade buildings to imrpove the number and quality of peasants, allowing you to support more complex neeeds and therefore more demanding and powerful heroes.
Unrelated but, I swear on this map the Ai preferentially attacked the rear bakery area. Is it hard coded to think wood walls = easier target? Despite obviously needing to go through a second full crenelated curtain to get to the keep.
>How is my thread still alive?
Welcome to /vst/
>At this stage, the game mainly revolves around the quest interface which is more complex than "click flag, increase bounty". Units access quests through quest boards that can be planted around your town. Idle heroes will gravitate towards these boards to find something to do. Once a quest's openings are claimed the heroes will set off as a party.
Sounds neat, I could envision a stat or personality trait differing in how they form parties or whether they think they can do it without a full one. For instance a Warrior of Discord equivalent that's so dumb they think they can solo everything.
One thing that always seemed off to me about Majesty was that whenever the heroes killed someone or explored something with a bounty flag they'd get the gold instantly. Even if they have bank accounts, how do you instantly know what they did to be able to reward them? Also, how would that explain the fact that when they die, they leave their gold in their graves? Do they carry a sheet of paper with a password on it on them? But if there's bank accounts, how come your tax collectors still need to collect the gold the old-fashioned way? Are you trying to tell me that regular heroes have bank accounts but merchants do not?
As for a possible solution, I remember that in the Might and Magic RPGs, whenever you killed a creature with a bounty, gold didn't just teleport into your pockets nor did it get transfered to your bank account. You had to claim the bounty at the town hall that gave it by the end of the month or you're SOL
They don't get the gold instantly, tho. They need to go back to their guild, pay the tax, and only then do they get to spend it. So in the end it doesn't matter if they physically looted some treasure or are eligible for a reward because in the end they get paid back home.
Soldiers should be different from heroes by obeying your order without question.
Just make them a little bit tanky with weak damage, enough to slow down enemies for heroes to arrive. Lock access to them behind equivalent of Warriors Guild+Guardhouse+Blacksmith (if player will get them from start they will just try to rush down dungeons) .
Just remember to make them interact with game mechanics, especially heroes. For example them fighting should send signals for Warriors/Paladins/Barbarians to check the place out.
They should arrive weak, but get stronger with blacksmith upgrades and maybe make their stats dependent on Warrior levels (they could occasionally wander to Barracks to raise soldiers stats to level depending on their own).
>Mostly wanted these squads to accompany heroes as fodder to enable heroes to do cool stuff.
Did you ever play Majesty 2? If not, you should take a look at its party system: you, the King, tell a group of heroes to travel together. For your game you don't necessarily have to force heroes to work together, maybe they could form parties themselves based on their personalities or whatever. I'm just trying to say if you want boys traveling together for protection or whatever, you don't need fodder to do it.
>Units access quests through quest boards that can be planted around your town.
I feel like you could be more inventive with this kind of thing, what about
>Using Inns/Taverns to not only organise quests but hero parties as well, since they're already there resting, socialising and spending money together: the classic/cliche "You all meet in a tavern..." D&D opener
>Having plazas and town squares either manually built or automatically generating for similar purposes as the Taverns, except it's a town crier handing out quests to heroes instead of an innkeeper
>Have the hero guilds themselves generate quests and/or pass yours along to their heroes; the heroes of that guild then seek out heroes from other guilds depending on what they might need and other various factors, and form parties
>Heroes that are high enough level (or are special in some way) can be called directly to the castle and asked to carry out a quest; you can send them out immediately or make them wait for a while so you can call other heroes to the party as well
>Higher tiers of Libraries could have ancient texts that point toward quests with greater rewards for greater risks: brave and inquisitive heroes could seek out powerful relics or foes, and so can the exceptionally greedy and foolhardy
>Some guilds automatically generate bounties to explore (to find dungeons, treasure, or just for the sake of exploring) while others offer money to defeat monsters (especially if their members are being attacked and killed by those monsters)
There's all sorts of things you could do
And then you tie that into scenarios, where you could really go crazy with it
Hey OP, this is a cool thread. I've been thinking about the idea of a modern majesty game since I saw it. Here's one point you might want to consider: Do you want to keep the mission-based system, or could it have a more modern 'run-based' system? I personally think that the mission-system of Majesty adds a lot of flavor to the game and the challenges are unique and fun. However, this definitely limits replayability and appeal. If you wanted to go for a run-based "roguelike" system, I think that you could look to Against the Storm for a way to design it. Against the Storm is nearly perfect in setting up a random scenario for a run that feels unique, due to a.) deep interconnections in the game's systems, b.) very wide pool of options to select (of which you only may choose a few) and c.) diverse victory conditions. Just something to think about.
Majesty has freestyle, tough.
How is it any different from what you're describing?
>I'm seeing a lot of concern over the directly controlled units - enough for me to reconsider how "direct" the control should be
I suggest to do it in two ways(both minimal control).
One is through Guard - and Outposts like in Majesty but maybe with ability to assign a flag that send a Mobile/Reserve from castle here or being able to upgrade it to house it more troops.
Other is by knightly(royal) orders. Each would have one knight with few no hero troopers that you can control through separate flags
Are there mods for non-Steam versions? I just want guardhouses to be useful for something more than slowing down big attacks for a bit. Heroes are too damn moronic to rely on them for saving your buildings.
Just get dwarves, bro
Late tech and they are not always available. It's not like I'm expecting good guardhouses to be cheap.
>I want my stop-gap defense to be good
How about instead realising it's a stop-gap defense and move on? Sounds like a severe skill issue to me: you can't properly utilise guardhouses (despite upgraded version being more than enough to stop intruders) and you can't make your heroes defend your base (which should be trivial)
No, I want my stop-gap defence to be upgradable into something good. For loadsa moneh and with prerequisites. And preferably with branches, like more/better arrows OR more/better guards.
>muh skill
I have no problems due to guardhouses being shit, I just hate them being of such little use. And I'm asking for a mod, not to create a remake with them.
>despite upgraded version being more than enough to stop intruders
Only the easiest shit rangers can deal with better and faster.
>and you can't make your heroes defend your base (which should be trivial)
Reading comprehension fail.
Build Solaris temple - they often Garrison Guardhouses and defend them
>Making a game
Why are you lying, anon?
I loved this game as a kid. I remember beating. I don't remember much from it save a few missions like a 2-headed dragon fricking up all my shit. Goldems being gigantic and fricking shit up. Paladins with a ring bought from the outpost were broken as frick. Solar warriors were fricking useless imo. Also "I'm just a gnome" T . T
>Solar warriors were fricking useless imo.
They are decent with some support and babysitting if you didn't go Dauros+Argela or Krolm.
I'd go full indirect control. It is an interesting game mechanic to control weaker troops and not control the hero, but it doesn't make sense, it doesn't seem like a serious game, just some experimental thing.
Also consider Putin and Prigozhin. In order to keep Wagner fighting in the Ukraine, Putin has to keep his loyalty, he has to set limits and laws on what he can and can't do, he has to maintain a balance of power. so that none of his "vassals" can take over. This game of thrones politics shit has potential.
As a ruler you do not decide where every house is built and ever position every soldier goes to. Rather you influence an AI that does that for you. You are an AI wrangler. And the AI might switch up on you if you're not careful. You have to develop a system that works and keeps them under wraps.
so it's an auto-battler and an auto-builder
It's a good idea but games like this it's the art, the sounds, the voices, ect.. that gives it the old charm