"1. Doomsday clock speed. I was thinking of hooking the Magic slider at the game setup to this. You would get less magic from the shards but the SK would get a less doomsday for breaking one. This would allow the player to have a great deal more say over the pacing of doomsday."
I'd rather see this tied to difficulty but that depends on the goal of difficulty and the magic slider. I see difficulty as a way making the game feel easier by monsters having less hitpoints and the SK getting threatened less quickly. I couldn't certainly see magic becoming more potent and that changing the doomcounter. It would be another way to throttle or increase the speed of the game. A lot of the game ratches up based on when you get spells and skills.
By the way, I've played at least 10 games and I still get lore and (already forgot the name) for skills. I'd rather it just be magic but I also wish the skill counter was not tied to mana and magic research.
"2. Empire building. This is a really good discussion because really, that is the crux of the argument for the game: Is the game about your EMPIRE or about the Party of heroes you're putting together? I.e. where should the focus be."
You've personally talked about the game being about creating the biggest doomstack and kicking the SK's butt. I'd rather the game be about gathering allies and taking down the bigbad. Truth be told, I've found building cities up to be a rather tedious process and simple. There's really no real advantage to building a city up. You can get a boatload of logistics with one city. You really only need that doomstack to function. It's hard to build up more than one group of adventures due to limited XP on the board (unless the SK is attacking you).
I've mentioned in other posts that I wish cities and especially towers were built up like Fallen Enchantress. It would certainly give more reason to have a city. As it is,
"3. Expansions. We have 3 expansions for this game planned over the next 3 years or so. What goes into them will be up to you guys. I can tell you that Sorcerer King is the beginning of a series and not the end of one."
As I see it, right now, the game is about you finding allies and kill the bigbad. To me, an expansion could change it so that the other so-called minor races could defeat the SK too. I'd be an interesting wrinkle if time was spent showing that the minor races will fight the player and SK if you don't convince them to be friends.
The other one would be to create a more interesting EMPIRE secondary game but I think that would be best served with minor races being able to compete more.
"4. Early game setup. One of the things I'd be interested in hearing from you guys on are "advanced setup" options for hard core players. Since I write the code that woul dhandle this, I would be delighted to put in interesting things here. So based on your hours in the game, what sorts of things would you want (besides Doomsday adjustments which I plan to handle through the magic slider)."
a. Monster HP increase
b. Limit of one hero
c. Hero dies and he doesn't return
c. Army cap number
I'm not hardcore and wouldn't purposely make the game much harder I'd think but those above might be thing people might be interested in.
"5. Re Crafting vs. Finding. There seems to be a slight preference that works like this:
I should be able to craft up to great things. But AMAZING things should only be findable and rare. Would this represent your view?"
Except for the Tinkerer, that sounds like my view. It shouldn't be hard to get chain shirts. In fact, I wish things like swords and armor dropped off humanoid monsters. It'd be cool and save me time equipping my doomstack.
