Battle Realms Sequel Thoughts/suggestions

[Eiszahn 0]

I found about a possible sequel and wanted to share my thoughts and suggestions with you guys so we could discuss and improve on it. The following is a mail I sent to Ed which posted the blog entry about contacting him for suggestions and stuff:

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Hello there Ed,

I heard about the TCG about Battle Realms you are working on at the moment and as a BR + BR:WotW fan for many years I was of course really damn excited! So I read that people can send suggestions and thoughts about a new BR to this email and I really want to do this and hope you can make a sequel happen!

What I really liked in the original was that you could combine units from different buildings to create new units. I never played or heard of a game that lets you do that. You should really keep that amazing feature if possible.

Every unit had the ability to have one cool ability out of two. The required buildings for these abilities may can be used to research upgrades because in the original there weren't any upgrades for armor, weapons or anything as far as I remember (night/day bonuses + disadvantages?). That would be a nice addition. Maybe you could use a techtree with a limitation of research so you can't have all the upgrades but just like half of it.

The theme the game is set in is another plus of it. There arent any RTS games with a complete asian style (although the Wolf clan was a cool exception). Now when I saw the wallpaper for the TCG I saw a lot of pointy ears and elfen styled characters, in most of these I dont even see any relation with the east/asian style. Some look like generic fantasy characters. This art is for the TCG, I know that but it just concerned me since I dont know if a possible sequel of BR would use the artstyle of the TCG.

On the blog entry on the Liquid Forum i saw many people requesting new clans. I don't know if this is a really needed thing or has the highest priority. There are 4 really well designed clans already and I hope they will be in the sequel again! What I'd like more is one or two new training buildings for each clan, so that adds even more diversity of units and you can design units for an existing clan in the lore and not create a new one that may appear out of style. I dont know the existing lore so this point I just made may be invalid and there are lots of ideas/possibilities for new clans. But new buildings would still be really cool

What I liked (or what I like now after playing many other RTS), was that there is only ground combat. No ships or airplanes. This may be a detail but I think its relevant.

Maps, so many maps. +1 for all these cool maps.

The heroes were all well implemented, what I think is maybe a cool idea/concept is to ad mercenaries. One could maybe hired in a tavern and they change every X amount of days since they travel around.

One thing that I think was missing in the orignal was the ability to build walls. Simple palisade walls would have been cool to fence of your village. Although it was cool to not have them at times since it added more tension because you can attack from every angle.

The ressource system was simple, yet effective. I liked the fact that you had to water your rice. But that you can build buildings out of rice and water was kinda weird, maybe wood as a ressource should be added, but only to build buildings and not for anything else, I'd really like this concept. So once you have the structures you dont need wood anymore which makes kinda sense. What could be cool is a watering system for your rice you can build later on so you dont need peasants to water the rice anymore. Something like watering canals.

Thats the most important things I wanted to share and contribute. If i find a place to post this online somewhere and discuss it with other ppl I will do that.

Please tell me what you think of it and what the current state of development is (I know its really early but I'd like to have any kind of info about a BR game )

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(End of mail)

So what do YOU think?

Do you have any other suggestions? Maybe reasons why some of my ideas wouldnt work out or be bad?

Cheers

PS: I also posted this on the offical Liquid forum but I think here are more ppl actively reading and posting

[Sinophile 41]

I don't think ships/planes/wehicles fit in with the tone of the game. The game was about wars between clans on a small island rather than against civilisations and the max size of your army was 40 men, which is sort of like the output of a town.

I always thought the Serpent clan was by far the most badass and awesome clan, with Lotus coming in second. Dragon and Wolf clans were boring. It seemed that the creators were getting lazy when they started naming their units *something* one or *something*er. They should've mde the other clans just as likeable as the Serpent.

[Eiszahn 0]

Yes, vehicles would be weird in BR. Serpent was my favourite too, they just got the look and design of it so well. I kinda liked the Wolf clan, they had nice designs as well and it was like a nordish clan from a more european styled theme. I hated Lotus though. Just because they were so evil not because they were badly designed. I think they just represented the evil side of the eastern mythology/lore from BR. What was bad though was the Big pink ball shooting unit, the witcher or how he was called (I played the german version so I dont know the english name ). It looked lame and was just stupid.

I was thinkinh to prevent just maxing your army with the final unit and the best ranged unit there could be bonuses for certain unit combinations in an army. For example if you have 3 or more crossbow dudes in your army they get a small bonus on something. Or a crossbow dude with one of these firethrowers so they get automatically fire arrows. If such bonuses could be added there are even more possibilities to compose an army.