Please share your thoughts on the upcoming D&D RTS here.

Well, I do not like RTS, but I will buy it if it is D&D. Which settings?

BTW, first member post in forum. :D

EDIT: Dumb me!! You said it in the front page. :doh:

I dont mind RTS, so long as it's done well. I'll play the sdemo, then make up my mind.

I'm going to take a bet that this game will be nothing all that great, but that may just be me being pessimistic. I'll try and keep an open mind, though I can't see myself actually buying it

hmm.. i think this will end up as another warcraft 3 spin-off with some D&D rules mixed in. don't have much faith in this title, especially considering the horrible rts game war of the ring these guys made, a weak attempt to copy wc3 essentially

yup it sounds like another Warcraft spin-off. but hey, it could be a good one. So fare it sounds okay, the squad system and city building. but i would rather see a turn-based D&D game, like a M&M spin-off.

Equester, how about a D&D game that isn't a spin-off?

D&D CRPG = complexity compared to other CRPGs.
Playing diablo and such games is completely fine real time, since they're simple. Using all the options D&D offers is hard to achieve without a pause.
So i suppose it'll be limitied, limited and even more limited, until it wont be worth calling D&D anymore.
Just try to imagine playing 5 mages at a time, without a pause.

I do hope a solution/compromise will be made though, it'd be fun :)

Nah a D&D game that would be completely new, with all kind off cool features newer seen before. and a great storyline where you could really develop your characters. who wants to play that? ;)
what I meant was I would rather see a D&D turn based game, with more story and roleplay, not unlike M&M 4. but with more roleplay

Well Warcraft was pretty good. ;) Whatever this turns out to be, I'm sure it'll be great!. Looking forward to it!

Warcraft II was way better than Warcraft III. It was my favourite game for long and probably still is. At least one of the very top games on my list. Warcraft III hasn't had any comparable effect on me. Truly, just another good game, so what? I have finished it once, which took me a week. I don't even own it. Neither do I have ever played the expansion.

I like AoE2 when it comes to RTS games, so some ideas taken from there would be welcome. StarCraft has lots of merit, too, and games such as Shogun or Mediaeval, ie the Total War series, offer a great deal of tactical fun.

Ultimately, there's been a little known game Majesty. Practically real-time, but more in shape of a Tycoon series game. A building tree with a nice range of options, and heroes for hire as well as mundane guards, tax collectors and peasants. Heroes attracted (or not) to awards you offer for completing a task, earning money and spending it in taverns, markets, blacksmiths, wizard guilds and the like, getting more and more uber while supplying your treasury with gold which you can use for further quest rewards and so on. A bit boring, but quite amiable one.

Chev how can you say that, warcraft 2 was great nothing there, but warcraft 3 had a better story and more interesting races (in warcraft 1 and 2, they had the same stats and almost the same spells). And with frozen throne, you will get some very interesting campaigns. Warcraft 3 was far better than warcraft 2. :yot:

Looking at Warcraft RTS, how many options did a normal soldier have? Attack and die being one option.
Looking at mages, they had 3-4 spells and that's it. In D&D there are hundreds of spells and how are you going to lead all that withough a pause. AI'd have to be insanely good. If it does, though, you have lost a great deal of control in the game. All you have to do then is to mass produce them and send them on the battlefield. Sure, you could perhaps control them, but if you do, you lose valuable time that could be better spent on developing, building, researching...

Maybe we'll see "adventuring groups". Groups of various classes-roles working independantly as mercenaries. If your kingdom doesnt have a vast pile of gold, you'll automaticaly die, since every adventuring group has automatical acces to "save" and "load" buttons. :D

Hmmm, I didn't like the Warcraft and AoE series that much. I'm more into Command & Conquer futuristic and real tank style. I'm probably gonna try this game, though.

@Equester: Warcraft 3 will surely appear better to you than Warcraft 2 now in the present times. However, Warcraft 2 was a real bliss in its own time. It was a marvel. Warcraft 3 wasn't. Sure, it has better graphics and sound and AI and is more advanced technologically. But it doesn't stand out from other games. Warcraft 2 did stand out in its own time ('93)

Races... Races in WC2 were well made. Poor balance between humans and orcs, which is very disturbing in multiplayer games, granted. And everything being almost the same but looking differently and having a different name. That was how they were making games 11 years ago.

Races in WC3 maybe are nice, but their far from logical. Let's throw a bit here, and a bit there, you know. They could have planned them out better. D&D rules being the skeleton of all planning here, the D&D RTS will have an easier task.

Next, music in WC2 was a piece of art (the CD-Audio, not the MIDIs). In WC3 it's "only" good. And character models are awful! Awful! So horribly awful, they only consist of cubes and edges. You could learn spatial trigonometrics on them :( I really, really hope the D&D RTS will be better in this respect. And if it has a music like in WC2 from 11 years ago, I'll be set.

heh you got i point about the impact of the two games. Warcraft 2 was bigger in that way, it had a huge impact on the rts world, just like warcraft 1 had. and i know, I've completed all 3 warcraft games several times. But i like warcraft 3 better than warcraft 2, because of its difference, you can't use the same strategi with every race and in the singleplayer campaign the Heroes has a huge impact and lots of story. In warcraft 2 the heroes didn't even have special animations, which they strangely had in warcraft 1. So on some points warcraft 2 was a setback compared to warcraft 1. While warcraft 3 introduced a new hero system, new races and more story. Don't get me wrong I loved warcraft 1 and 2. But compared to warcraft 3, they just don't got the same feeling.

An AI that would work with the mages would be if you could give the mage priorites and balance them between direct damage (e.g. fireball), disable (horror), buff (bull's strength) and defensive spells (stoneskin).

You could do the same for clerics/druids with a few modified priorities: heal (cure serious wounds), buff/cure ailment (bless/remove fear), direct damage (holy smite[depends on priest alignment]), disable (cloak of fear).

You could give a mage/priest 25% for each priority and have them as an all rounder, make them fully offensive 50% to both direct damage and disable and have them blasting away with fireballs and creeping dooms or have them fully defensive or any combination. However I don't see how mages/priests are going to memorise spells in real time.

I have the Warcraft 3 Collectors Edition. It's allright, but i just got bored with the lot of it after awhile. I'll check the D&D RTS game out but i'm not quite sure i'm gonna buy it. I'm just not a huge RTS fan. Still, i'm approaching the thing with an open mind.

I wonder if they would make any Elves?
In the past RTS games, the Elves were the most weakest armies in the game, albeit their superior range and stuff like that. What new news is there?

As long as they keep away from the "Majesty" style of gameplay this should be something to look forward to

If they manage to make a RTS game and integrate the RPG elements into it as good as Warcraft III did, we have a potentially great new hybrid genre of games.

Could this game be based on the "Miniatures" ruleset? I've never played it nor read anything about it, so I don't know the differences in its rules vs. standard D&D, but I understand it allows for better control over mini-wars, or at least battles involving a bigger number of participants.

And I imagine it would be a good and additional way to promote this game, which could potentially equate to more $$$ for Wizards of the Coast....

Any idea?

I liked Majesty. I liked WC. Didn't care too much for Age of Wonders, though.

I don't know what to think of this new thingy, but I think I'm gonna like it...

I like Majesty, Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might And Magic I-III. So, yes i am relatively positive to a DnD-fantasy rts/rpg, i just hope that they don't screw it up bigtime.

Found this interview with Edward del Castillo on GameInformer (http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200405/N04.0507.1805.09688.htm). Looks like a nice balance between Role Playing and RTS.

Edward del Castillo is the president of Liquid Entertainment

[ June 04, 2004, 11:23: Message edited by: Pseudo ]

Seems cool. Just this problem about liking every character of yours. Effectively it should mean you're not going to have more than like 25 men on the field and very little dying, with every death counting a lot.
Otherwise seems really good, not the usual tankrush.

That review is anything BUT inspiring... mixing magic and technology, as the review suggests, is a very bad idea for a D&D-based setting. I can accept it in Final Fantasy games, but for me, it is the feel of the Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk settings that are important.

I guess reviews like this are final statements by the game designers that "we are never going to produce anything like baldur's gate/iwd/planescape:torment EVER, so you can just forget about it unless you fancy writing the games yourself".

Standards fall. It's one of the consistent rules of life.

Not necessarily a fall. An evolution rather. Sounds better anyway.
And mechanical income might not be a bad thing either, as long as it's made in the spirit of D&D. Dont ask em to explain ;)

Can someone please post a link to their site? So that we can check it first hand?

There's no site for it yet.

I dunno, it might be alright but as of now I am very skeptical.

I have to disagree with mixing magic and technology as being a bad thing for a D&D-based setting. Its not bad if the setting is actually designed around that in some way. The Eberron setting seems to work well from what I've read up on it so far.

No Website? Try this on for size:

http://www.rpgplanet.com/dragonshard/

I fully admit it's not the prettiest thing on the web, but our content is unmatched anywhere.