Tactica Online from Imaginary Numbers

[tazelbain]

MMO-MOM, that worked, would be Robot Jesus 2: The Search for Curly's Gold.

Maybe it would work like Starport, but we'd play until someone cast the Spell of Dominion.

[Margalis]

Tactics Ogre Advanced is a MUCH worse game that Tactics Ogre. Tactics Ogre has all sorts of great systems they ditched for some reason in TOA.

About unit effectiveness, here is an interesting question: would you rather have 2 guys or 1 guy who is twice as strong? (HP wise) In most games the answer is 1 guy, because of unit attrition. When that 1 guy has lost half HP one of those 2 guys has died, halving the attack power. It's something to keep in mind when balancing units. Usually a unit that takes twice as long to kill is more than twice as good.

[Tmon]

I think that kinda depends on what the purpose of the battle is.  If your mission is to defend a single point or to destroy the opposing army then fewer stronger troops might not be a bad trade off, but if you have to defend a lot of ground or defend and achieve some other goal then having more units is better, especially if you can concentrate the attacks of many of your units on a single enemy. 

[Margalis]

That is true. Also if the game has lots of sleep and freeze like spells 2 guys might be better than one. But in general the one is a lot better. It's the same reason focus fire is so important in an RTS, the second you kill a guy they lose some offensive power.

[Tmon]

What I wonder is if you will get the mission description before or after you accept it.  If you get it before you can tailor your unit to the mission if after then you'll have to go for a unit that is more generic.  Also in a tournement do you fight with the same unit all the way through or can you change it between missions? 

[Luke]

The main tradeoff when it comes to people is the number of actions you can take in a round (or more accurately, the number of action points available to you). More people means you can do more, which is sometimes a huge benefit, depending on how your team is constructed.

Also, more characters usually - not always, you can work around it - means more chances to put effective combos together.

Balance this against the greater vulnerability to area effect attacks when you have more characters, throw in the unit attrition factor, the vulnerability that can come from concentrating your firepower in fewer characters - anything happens to one of them, you're screwed, whereas if you have your capabilities spread over more characters you're more likely to be able to lose one without losing a large part of your firepower - and what this particular team is constructed to do, and the decision on how many characters to have becomes a tactical one in itself.

Oh, and while there are one or two abilities that can lock an opponent down briefly, there aren't a lot of ways to do this, and almost none to do it for extended periods, because for most players it's just not fun.

Tmon, in Tournaments you fight with the same team the entire way through, no changing between rounds. We're still deciding whether to give you a couple of minutes to change your team once you get given a normal mission, but we're leaning towards no, mostly because it makes the process simpler and faster.



Luke

[Descended]

Have you had to deal with any tilt in game balance yet which caused testers to lean too heavily toward specialists or too heavily towards generalist characters?

I guess I'm fishing for a sense of how focused you can make a character.  Let's say you can decide a character is going to be an archer.  You equip him with archery equipment.  Perhaps there are stat boosts and/or skills that improve your archery damage/rate of fire/range/accuracy/etc.  Can you make a character so focused on archery that if you can give them position and protection from which to snipe they can severely tilt a battle, while at the same time if said archer is caught unprotected he has little to no chance of dealing with an opponent wielding a two handed sword who has closed the gap?  Or would archery mainly be a choice of weaponry?

And now on a complete tangent:  do characters exert any sort of zone of control around them?  If I have a character with a spear standing on a bridge, can an opponent with enough movement simply run past to hand out the pain on a support character standing to the rear of the spearman?

I sure would love to see something of a mix between D&D's attacks of opportunity and X-Com's attacks of opportunity.  D&D (without feat investment) allows any character one attack of opportunity per round, almost regardless of what actions they have taken.  X-Com requires you have time units to consume in making reaction shots, but the focus was on shooting anything that moved rather than controlling movement or actions by hostiles in a space threatened by your melee attacks.  The best of both worlds would allow me to dedicated all or part of a character's turn to either taking opportunity attacks on anything that came within weapon range, or to choose a location or character to protect, allowing interrupt attacks to occur if, for example, the priest your swordsman is protecting is attacked by a hostile character within weapon range of your swordsman.

[MrHat]

So funny, I was thinking about a team based MMO, and then I read this.

Fantastic.  My Pirate band will rock you!

I really wish that you would institute Guild Halls or Guild Cities.  Let the rewards for the different missions be add-ons to your city.  Let these add ons be nothing but brag stuff.  Statues, walls, different districts, bridges; they could all be related to the different 'faiths' that you are supporting or not supporting.  Win a big battle using lots of magic? Let that friendly wizard reward you with a Leap-of-Faith bridge.  Have your little citizens run across it.

Anyways, back to vicaden (sp) induced naps.  Big bag = bad back.

[Tmon]

There's a new part of the Q&A up at http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?gameId=188&setView=features&loadFeature=144&fp=1152,864,444989125,20050627092559

Campaigns look interesting, I kinda like the idea of drafting from pre-built characters rather than building from scratch, one of my favorite formats in MTGO is the sealed deck tournements and this sounds somewhat similar.  The article doesn't say how many missions will be in an average campaign or how long they will last, hopefully there will be a range of durations to choose among.

[schild]

Dana Massey, formerly of Mutable Realms, before that a vault manager at IGN, is apparently working for MMORPG.com.

I just wanted to say that, I don't know it's purpose.

/derail

[Falconeer]

The rumour started on the official forums, probably because the homepage hasn't been updated since february.

Someone there pointed to the John Nangle's résumée, lead artist on the project. It says:

Work experience
   

August 2004-April 2006, Imaginary Numbers, Sydney, Australia

Lead Artist

§         Project: Tactica Online (cancelled April 2006)

Too bad.
I really had high hopes on this one.

[schild]

Errr. Damn.

[HaemishM]

Fuck.

[Righ]

On their forums, there is the classic comment to this news:

Well, there's always Vanguard to look forward to.

Indeed.

[Tmon]

On their forums, there is the classic comment to this news:

Well, there's always Vanguard to look forward to.

Indeed.

That sucks, I was hoping they were just taking some time away from their boards and website to concentrate on fixing some beta issues.

[Threash]

Other than warhammer this was the only game i was even mildly interested in, bummer.

[Tairnyn]

I read this entire thread ignorant of the fact that it was dated 2005. It was a cruel roller coaster ride that ended with a fiery plummet into my inner child. The last fading scrap of hope I had for my gaming life has now been added to the pile of charred and broken dreams.

[Merusk]

The last fading scrap of hope I had for my gaming life has now been added to the pile of charred and broken dreams.

Our work here is done.  Away!

[Viin]

So is this game dead or what?

The "latest" news is about new screen shots from March and the Developer's Diary is from October 2005. Wth!

[schild]

Tons of spam in those forums. :P

[Margalis]

He's dead Jim.

[Falconeer]

As stasted a few post above in this topic, the project got canceled in April the Devs started spamming out their CVs looking for new jobs right after that.

[Viin]

You actually read the individual posts? That's silly.

[bhodi]

so did I.... fuck, this sounded like fun.