Several ideas/questions

[Zajoman]

1. Predefined production map. What do you think about having a map that has all cities' production predefined and cannot be changed in any way? Meaning players are not able to buy production, they can only choose what a city offers. I mean, this should only be a special map, not a general rule to all maps. The result should be that on this map, there would be cities with different levels of importance, from regular (low income and/or producing low tier units) to highly important (high income and/or producing high tier units). I think a map like this would play a lot differently than any regular map with standard rules, and it might be fun.
2. Zone of control. In DLR, I never liked how enemy stacks could go around my units without any possibility to block them from going behind my frontal forces if there were no true choke points in the map. Many a time an enemy stack just waltzed around my dominant hero guarding a road, razed a city just a few squares behind him, and smiled at my face with malevolence. This forces players to overprotect cities and further makes field battles rare. Zone of control is a well functioning concept, although from a very different type of TBS game, Battle for Wesnoth, which is played on hexes and there are no unit stacks. It simply means that whenever a unit moves into a square (hex) adjacent to an enemy unit, its remaining movement is terminated. What this does in practice is that you can create reliable front lines that your enemies cannot simply waltz through, but have to break through (by fighting, obviously). This makes defending cities (villages) viable without the need to have strong garrison in every relevant city. For a game like Warlords, this would need to be well thought out and tweaked a good bit, but might find good use. I'm not sure what side effects could this create, and I'm definitely not for turtling games.
3. Single player. Do you plan to add single player scenarios, campaign, story telling?

[piranha]

1. This should not be too much problem to create. I think it is a good idea too.

2. I haven't played a game like warlords with FOW, but I have played a lot of starcraft on a pretty high level online where there is FOW. I'm not sure that you can compare starcraft to warlords but in starcraft which I started playing when it came out most people were not so good in the beginning. They wouldn't scout other bases, or what the enemy was up to and they lost to the better players who did that. Some people find it boring when they construct a perfect defence barrier and someone just fly in units with dropships and destroy their base without touching the defence. But that only shows that that the other player out smarted the defending player in my mind. After all the goal is to win and if someone will fall prey to a cheap trick than he needs to learn to protect himself vs cheap tricks.

While I haven't seen warlords with FOW yet at this time I have the opinion that if you want to be good at this game you will have to learn scouting and thinking what your enemy could be up to and try to spot him coming before its too late.
I want to add a patrol option to units which will set them in a mode where they will just move from one coordinate to another without the player having to micromanage that unit each turn.

I may be wrong about the scouting part in this game. It might be harder to do it with so many castles compared to 2-3 bases in starcraft. We will have to see. But if it turns out that the best way is to keep a lot of units just standing home to guard all the time then I agree that it isn't fun.
A zone based game mode could probably be created, but that will have to come later when they normal part of the game is completed. But we have ideas for new modes too so we are open to cool ideas for sure.

3. I want to create a single player campaign but again, this will happen 2012 or something like that . There will be so much work to make a campaign, just creating a fun AI in java script is something I have no idea if it can be done. If our game is successful, if we can spend more time on it and less on normal jobs then we want to make all fun ideas that we can think of with this .

[Zajoman]

Thank you for answering, piranha.

2. I've played Starcraft a good deal, too, following the Korean pro scene and that. And yes, I think that very few concepts from that game can be compared/used in this game. I haven't played an online Warlords game with FOW, too, so I'll just wait how it plays out.

3. Okay, so your focus is definitely on multi player. And I think it's good. It's definitely more important.