Placid wrote:
3) UllerPSU's commented in his opening post that MA:PR has the potential to grab some RTSers. It does. Related to this point, I think it is very important for a map editor to be released for MA:PR, along with as many other tools as possible. Why? Because games live much longer lives when there is a community keeping them going with new modifications.
Yeah. I mentioned this before. A good map editor is critical to forming a strong and long lived on-line community and that equates to more $$$ for the game's producers. I'm sure it is too late in the dev process for MA:PR, but really the game should be modifiable, too. Look at the Steel Panthers series of games. Those have been around forever and are still going because 1) it is a really great game and 2) it came in the box with map editors and the company supported people modding SPII and SPIII.
MA has item 1 (great game) but is lacking 2. If it could be modded (new models for units, change unit stats and a bit of behavior) then mods could be made to fit all kinds of time frames and scenarios. Imagine a map that looks like the Eastern US circa 1850 and units like infantry, cavalry, cannon, trains (can only travel on roads) and cities that look like 19th centuary America named things like Richmond, Atlanta, Washington, etc...or one that looks like Europe circa 1910...China in the 1940s...the possibilities become endless.
We did this with Warlords III. I made a map that looked like the game board for Conquest of the Empire (Mediterrainean, Europe, Near East, North Africa at ~200 A.D....or CE for the politically correct) and modded the units and army sets to be appropriate to the Roman Empire. It was a cool map. Others did similar things with other time periods. The Warlords III community survived for several years past the initial release. It was activily supported by the developers just like this one is.