Questions and Thoughts regarding Eador Genesis.
Yeah, I played it. Yeah, it is worthy of the praise. But...
1. What are the design decisions regarding all sorts of scaling (level, progression, difficulty, reward, time and effort spent, etc)?
2. I saw a few people mentioning AI "cheating" by having artificial/abstracted extra resources, combat, territorial expansion, units level ups and so on. Thats the impression I got, that the AI always have an easy time and you are always on a strict limited schedule at wich you need to achieve certain things with your character power and economy and that somehow the AI is impervious to all the challenges and complexities involved in a very suspicious and unacceptable way.
3. Im curious about asserting every aspect of AI in every difficulty level, so I wonder if there is any method for that (removing fog of war, being able to see enemies entire units, entire garrisons, entire economic, the choices its making, the results of its battles and so on). Any way for me to scrutinize what the AI is doing from turn 0, at every difficulty level? I dont care if its some debug, developer, hack, cheating tool. I just want to see the engine working under the hood to make sure Im not getting some Maxwell demon in the second law of thermodynamics.
So far it seem like the same game breaker design as in another russian little gem Space Rangers 2: the world scaled based on character total value on equipments and so on. Being followed by the rain, running in a threadmill type of thing. Inability to mitigate the difficulty through progression by artificial design hooking it up to provide a scripted constant difficulty/balance breaks the game, rendering every action and choice and effort ultimately fruitless.
For Eador, it doesnt matter if a single guy did it and if its better than everything else in the last 10 years on its genre.
If the designer doesnt know the basic premise that nothing should revolve around the player character/avatar, then he has no business designing a game. No abstractions. Everything has to be simulated and independent from the player. Organic, not artificial. Balance has to be situational, rather than artificial "cheats" or "scaling" behind the hood. For all I care, even Risk against the AI provides more strategic value than this, if its the case of scaling/cheating.
You have 50% of the complexity based on game mechanics, units, items, spells, terrain, choices, economy expansion and those are truly great value, if Im playing the world "solo", or against human players. But if Im playing against the computer (the campaign) then you take a huge dump in the other 50% by making the AI opponents cut corners and play by different rules.
On another hand. 21 pages of posts and nobody made a comment about the authors view of the cosmology of the universe and the underlying messages, meaning, thematic, narrative derives from an almost extinct perspective/belief system wich I dare not mention. On the opposite, you play anything "mainstream", watch any video, series, listen to any music, turn the tv, everything you do and you get a completely different view point, or heavily twisted than the one you get in Eador. Its truly a pure, uncorrupted, indie title. People would get killed literally and figuratively for much less social/religious commentary than is present in Eador. Noone read the artistic expression of the author and his underlying message with the game?
