It's almost certainly too late to add maps designed for 8 players. There would need to be both new RTS and new Campaign maps. Maps designed for 8 players would likely be too large for 2 players, and 2 player battles is where the fighting mostly takes place.
While it bears some resemblance in single-player, I'm not sure that this is intended to be a 4X game. It's two weeks until release, way too late to add in additional mechanics like Diplomacy or Trading.
4X games are a genre of strategy video game in which players control an empire and "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate". The term was first coined by Alan Emrich in his September 1993 preview of Master of Orion for Computer Gaming World. Since then, others have adopted the term to describe games of similar scope and design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4XSo lets see the main feature of this game is the single-player campaign in my opinion, which does make this a 4x game. However they remove a lot of the features for multiplayer, but it still is a 4x game.
Also i did say that i know that they cannot implement most of these until release and that i hope that they will implement some of them in the future after release in one of my posts.
-If the zealots, imperialists, etc. are factions or races, they need to be more distinguishable from one another, by different tech trees, or the very least different looking units. However if theyre merely teams, why not call them team 1, team 2, etc. Also if theyre teams, please add a no team option in there. So that IF you add bigger maps for 6 or 8 players they won't have to be teamed up if they dont want to.
I don't think I follow. If you don't want to be on a team with another player, then pick a different team and presto you are on your own team. If they're playing 2v2 and you want to play a free-for-all, play a free-for-all.
Since there are 4 "factions" if they do add bigger maps for more players, the no team option will allow them to play free for all matches.
-Why is every unit a machine of some description? Air units i understand. But why is every ground unit a machine? It would be nice to see infantry in there and they could be different depending on what country you fight in.
The scale is such that individual people would be too small to reasonably see.
Your army is composed of a mix of races:
Humans are Troopers, Shaman and Zeppelins,
Elves are Transports and Hunters
Dwarves are Grenadiers and Ironclads
Imps are Warlocks and Imp Fighters
Undead are Devastators and Bomber Balloons
Lizards are Armours and Juggernauts.
It is possible that the single-player campaign might have race specialized units, maybe as part of the faction arc, but I doubt it.
My problem isn't with the units already in, nor with the effects and abilities they have it's with the fact that all of them are machines. Sure its fine that there are so many machines, since it's part of the story, but why is everything a machine? I mean weren't there any infantry in that age? Did every single soldier have a tank? That sure would ruin the economy. Not to mention it would use up a lot of manpower to build all those tanks. (no offense intended by this).
Also infantry would be cheaper, less effective units, used mostly as distraction and cannon fodder, or as a last resort defense, or attack force, when you are low on recruits. As i've said, this would add more depth to combat. They would also do well when capturing points, since theyre cheap, so you can concentrate on attacking the enemy base with your other units, while the infantry captures points.
-Random encounters (with a settable slider) Adding bandit raids, thieves and such to the game. Would make things interesting.
That doesn't seem to fit at all - especially for multiplayer. You want to lose because the other player beat you, not because a random number generator decided you took losses from a random bandit attack.
They could make it work, also without random encounters, "long" matches would get stale while random encounters could shake up things a bit. Also i understand what you are saying, hence the settable slider, with which you can set the random encounter chance, or disable it altogether. Also there are loads of games with random encounters that pulled it off quite well in multiplayer.
-Building forts on the strategy map in a country(didn't really think this through fully) could have an effect like:
.add a fort to the map during battle with large hp pool and mounted weapons
.add 50% more armor to your units used in that country during battle
.units in that country do 50% more damage
.can shoot 75% further
and so on
(one of these or a combination of these perhaps?)
Forts would make frontline countries more easily defendable.
Note: only a number of forts can be built by a player, for example 1 maybe 2.
This game is designed for a more offensive playstyle. That makes a bit of sense given the size of Campaign maps. There are a lot of RTS matches, which they generally want to be over much faster. Making defense harder to crack would slow RTS matches down a lot. People might only play one or two battles in a campaign before they got tired. Even now I can't finish a campaign without saving.
Interesting, so far the most it took me against 3 ais was about 50 mins to kill em all. After destroying the first ai i became so op that the rest died fast.(on hard difficulty) By the time i reached the last enemy, i had 265 cards of which at least 45 were mercenary cards, and an army so big that it had 90%+ chance to win against everything. Tho true, pvp might last longer. I'd really like a chance to play defensively.
