Okay, here is my opinion on the points mentioned in freims mail: >Do we want to add several new factions to mainline? I'd say: sure, why not? The only thing is that they have to fit into Wesnoth somehow. Some explaining text about the faction with things like what the faction is supposed to be, where it comes from and so on would be really nice. With this i am not talking about their strategical use but mainly about how they fit into the fantasy world Wesnoth represents. This gets me back to having some description for every race that is included in Wesnoth. This would be a nice thing and could give some background and establish some more atmosphere. Of course new factions should have something "unique". I don't think it would be good to have another faction that plays completely like an existing one. As long as these points are met i am completely in favor of adding new factions and units.
> Do we allow for temporary (large) regressions in unit balance in devel? I see it this way: if we add stuff like units and factions this probably will lead to problems in balancing for some time. This is a consequence that we will have to face. Due to this it would be good if the people that are about to add new units/factions try to have a talk about the changes that could be needed when adding the new things. This talk should include at least the one proposing the new faction, the mp-devs and the scenario designers. These are the groups that have to face the results of changes in balancing so they should work on it together to make sure that the consequence of the addition is not a total catastrophy. Problems with balancing can't be avoided but it is possible to hypothetically think about them and to think about ways to fix them. > Do we want major restructuring of the damage types, abilities, etc? New races will probably need new abilities to make them being special. As long as these abilities work gameplay wise it is fine for me. I am not this sure about damage types but as long as there is really a reason for having a new damage type it is okay. I don't think one attack of one unit does reward a new damage type since every new damage type also adds a new group of resistances for *every* unit. If the resistance is 0% for almost every unit, I ask myself if the damage type really is needed or not. New damage types always have an impact on the complexity of the whole game. I would like to have a quite simple ruleset that is not too complicated. The easier the rules the easier newbies can get into the game. We already have a huge amount of rules and attributes per unit. If possible I would even vote for reducing the number of damage types. But I don't know a way how to do so right now. > Furthermore I think we should discuss what kind of "Fantasy world" > we are aiming for I think it would be nice to have a fantasy world that "feels" complete. races should fit together somehow. If we got a race/faction it should have some kind of history or description. This helps to see the "position" of the race/faction and can add some flavor to the game. I don't think we should aim too much for "reality" since we are in a fantasy world. IMO it is bad to say "we need to have this or that because in reality...". It should more or less depend on if it fits into Wesnoth. Who knows, maybe even physics works different in Wesnoth. And who is able to explain how magic would work in our work? I don't think we should stick too much to a "reality" aspect of the game. Some things are really nice to have as parallels to "our" normal world. But not everything needs a parallel or it will lose it's mystic flavor. We should tend to explain things ingame maybe a little more. Stuff like "where the magic comes from" could be worth a story about how the world itself was created. For this we could somehow invent our own version of gods and stuff like that. This helps to explain many things since that was the way it was created in the ancient times. I think one of the old day principles of "not having any religion" is not this good for a fantasy world. Every fantasy world that I know of has some kind of gods and deamons as oponents of the gods. This helps to create a fight of good vs. bad. *BUT* I think we should stick to not mentioning religions that currently are existing. I am more or less thinking about gods like they are named in the antics with the greeks and the romans. IMO it would be nice to have a real "world" behind Wesnoth. And in a real world people tend to try to explain everything. If people are not able to explain something it was created by some kind of "god". I don't know a really good reason why we should not have this element in Wesnoth. Especially since I imagine the "humans" being in a state of knowledge like it was used in our world somewhere in the "middle ages". If we do not have a religous system that works like any in our world I don't think we really offend someone but add flavor to the game. Comments? I really would love to have a little more backgroud for Wesnoth than we give in the campaigns. I think Wesnoth could work very well as pen and paper rpg, as long as we work a little on the background. Somehow what we do is the oposite to D&D. There was the system and world and afterwards there were the computer games. Why not create the world after having the game and including the world itself a little more in the game? Greets, Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
