Matei

My name is Romanian or maybe Yugoslavian, I am from Canada though.

Safety Zones: How will you prevent people from dragging out the game forever by hiding here if these are available? It sounds like it could create problems. This would be better as a power/ability thing (more in TLA though), like Cheasefire in AoM. Rushing: IMO there's nothing wrong with rushing if you provide sufficient ways to counter it (i.e. people shouldn't be forced to spam and rush with one unit type in order to win, but early raids with balanced forces should be viable). The way I think about it is this. Say that the game is set up so that nobody ever attacks anybody else for X minutes, either because of rules forced upon them or because it's much more worthwhile to spend that time developing and advancing "ages". Then all players will be trying to basically gather as many resources and expand as much as possible during those X minutes. Now on every map, there is one and only one best way to do this, depending on the resources. So all the players will try to learn to execute that "build order", and the first X minutes of the game will just be about running through a memorized sequence of steps. That is really boring. The real interesting aspect of playing the game comes when people interact with each other, becuase that's when strategy and adaptability instead of memorized steps come into effect. So you should enable people to interact with each other as early as possible. There can still be expanding an empire-building - both RoN and AoM are about setting up or taking over "settlements" at different places on the map, which really gives a feel of empire-building - but there should be conflicts possible as early as you want.

You didn't try multiplayer in the demo I guess, but if you're interested in making a game with good multiplayer, you should really look at the Quick Setup feature of AoM. In addition to hosting/joining game rooms from an in-game interface similar to the MS Gaming Zone ("Advanced Setup"), in AoM you can play "Quick Setup" where you select a game type and the ES server matches you with other people playing it. You can select Supremacy, Death Match, Lightning, etc as game types, and you can choose 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, ?v? and 2vAI for the players; the map is always a random map chosen from a set of "more balanced/faster paced" random maps. People are matched based on level, and all games except those vs the AI are rated. There are usually so many people on that the system finds a game for you in less than 1 minute, it's really great when you want to find a challenging/fun game quickly.

Personally I think the magnifying glass should be bigger, otherwise pretty cool.

Yes, my real name is also Matei. It's a rare enough name that I managed to use it as a username on most websites .

This is Matei from AoM Heaven and Woad Creations. I decided to drop by here and say hello, after talking to several people (Cheezy, CodeOptimist, etc). Both your games look very good . Unfortunately I'll be starting exams in a week and a few days, so I won't be around that much, but I'm interested in what you're doing and I might like to help out later. (I know C++, C#, Java, and some general algorithms/theory as well as a little bit of 3D programming).