What Engine?

#1 Torque can be used to make any genre/style of game, depending on the ability of your programmers. A6, Blitz and Dark Basic can work wonders as well, as long as you have people who know how to make them work accordingly. I've seen some amazingly strange things come out off all of our communities that no one had thought could previously be done with the engines.

There are quite a few titles in the NA line. Is the one you're talking about NA Online? If so, then you've noticed the turn to MMORPG in the world of NA. I was hoping for a much more strategy oriented game and let my subscription falter because I hate MMORPG's. NA: Internet is what I was really looking for. While it is a change, the core Romance of the Three Kingdom (RotK) games are more along the lines of the older games (though I would like to see them revive the Ghengis Khan franchise). If you want to order them, you can find them here (knowledge of Japanese is REQUIRED as they are heavily text-based and use an older dialect than most modern Japanese games in dialogue segments).

If you're interested in using similar environments, then you should check out The Outlaws of Marsh and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You'll notice that The Outlaws of Marsh contains the stories of the 108 Stars (of Suikoden fame). This is also the setup for the 108 Stars strategy title.

Creating a strategy game will take you about 2-5% of your time for programming the core engine and creating the art assets. The remainder will be balancing the system. Unless you have an extreme eye for detail, then I'd dissuade you from starting with even the basics of a Koei-styled strategy game. Their systems are extremely detailed, and if you've played through the many iterations of RotK, you'll understand how seemingly minor tweaks to the systems can generate an extreme wealth of possibilities for you to test and debug.

*edit: fixed links.

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#2 (continued)

Now, if you want to start small, I'd recommend a simple resource management game. Start out in peacetime with three cities that have a variety of import and export needs. Work out a simple trade system of supply and demand. Once you have this system worked out, you have the basic wartime system of supply and demand as well. Get food to your troops or they die and you'll lose control of that region. Get wheat to town 2 or another trader will and you'll lose your marketshare in that city. Both similar concepts with the same base system, but tweaked according to necessity in the gameplay for the specific situations.

For a simple resource management game, you don't even need graphics. Just have a text print-out of the data. That way, you can figure out how to organize it for when your game idea expands exponentially. And that way you also can work on the core gameplay without worrying about art assets (which Koei's strategy games have ignored until quite recently in favor of gameplay...unless they were being approved for release in the US through the Sony approval process).

Since you're new to game development, are you also new to programming concepts in general? If so, then sitting down with a book on C/C++ such as Absolute Beginner's Guide to C or Beginning ANSI C++ or C++ Primer Plus will get you up to speed and give you the basic programming knowledge necessary to flow out your control structures and statistical logic for the core gameplay. They will also give you a head-start for working with the core Torque code should you decide to use Torque. The logic that is taught will apply to A6, Blitz3D, or Dark Basic as well, even though you'll have to learn the syntax of their flavor of BASIC or C.

Don't know if that helped or hindered, but I needed a break from developing lab configs today so you just got a brain dump.

#3 Hehehe. That was ALOT of info to absorb, but you definitly helped. I agree that NA Online was a huge diappointment. I got all excited when I found it on the search and then realized that it pretty much went the way quite a few games seem to be going these days. It was such a fun game.

As far as the enormity of the project itself, I never really sat down and analyzed the complexity of the overall system. That was something I'd figured I'd tackle when I got there. I certainly didn't factor in the programming aspect though. I used to know how backin the day, but I decided it wasn't my cup of tea and I walked away from it and forgot everything I knew. oops.

Anyways, I thank you for your help. I may take this on in the future following your suggestions. Thanks

#4 Good luck with it