Homework 3

The game I'm looking at for this exercise will be Sacrifice. Published by Interplay and developed by Shiny entertainment.

This is a real-time third person strategy game that puts players in the role of a wizard who can summon creatures and cast spells based on which god they decided to ally themselves with.

The progression mechanics in the single-player campaign are very clear and visible to the player. The player does 10 missions for any god they choose. Based on their decisions, they will get different spells and creatures for each mission they complete. Creature types you get are stronger in stats like damage, range, health and abilities, and spells you get are progressively stronger, although cost more to cast.

Now that the basic progression mechanics are explained, below is a chart explaining all the resources I thought were relevant, and their relationships to each other:

This may seem complicated, and I'm planning on explaining this graph to the TA in detail. Although in basics, each colour represents a string of related resources. For a simpler example, Mana and Souls are directly related to creatures, as both resources are required to be consumed in order to get a creature. Each colour represents a direct link, or otherwise some sort of relationship between a group of resources, as several resources are often linked together for similar purpose.

The central resource, as can be guessed, is the amount of souls you have. Everything related back to souls in the end, as this is the deciding factor in a victory or defeat. Without souls, you can't do much of anything, as your wizard doesn't pose much of a threat to an entire army. Most, if not all, resources are there to help you acquire new souls, or protect your souls (creatures) from capture. A very important thing to note is that this is a zero-sum resource. Every single soul gained is taken away from the tallies of another player. This makes this an extremely important resource, but yet is given too much control over the outcome of the game.

Changes
As stated before, souls have a tremendous impact on the outcome of the game, much more so than any other resources. The grasp souls have over gameplay can be quite unbalanced at times, as losing one encounter early on can cost you the entire game. This is amplified by the fact that most later missions begin with heavy assaults on your army very early in the mission, most of the time when you are not yet ready.

One way I would improve this is make souls more interchangable between players, so there could be hope for retaliation when you've lost your first battle. The resource relating to this is time. There needs to be less time to acquire the resource, because gathering souls takes quite a while. For the player with the upper hand, he can afford to spend the time required casting the spell, and waiting for the soul to get converted. However, the player that is frantically trying to re-build his army has absolutely no time to both rebuild and recapture the souls that he has lost.