Imagine Arcomage...

[GreatEmerald]

...With a Command-line Interface!

Code: Select all

Quarry 5                                                                Quarry 5
Bricks 14   / \                                                  / \   Bricks 14
            | |                                                  | |
Magic 5     | |     Shift - Switch Enemy Wall with your          | |     Magic 5
Gems 14     | |     Wall - 17 bricks                             | |     Gems 14
            | |                                                  | |
Dungeon 5   | |                                                  | |   Dungeon 5
Recruits 14 | |                                                  | | Recruits 14
            | |  |                                            |  | |
            | |  |                                            |  | |
             80  20                                           20  80
Brick Shortage - Each player loses 8 bricks - 0 bricks
Lucky Cache - +2 Gems, +2 Bricks, Play again - 0 bricks
Friendly Terrain - +1 Wall, Play again - 1 brick
Miners - +1 Quarry - 3 bricks
Dwarven Miners - +4 Wall, +1 Quarry - 7 bricks
Work Overtime - +5 Wall, -6 Gems - 2 bricks

> Play Lucky Cache

Quarry 5                                                                Quarry 5
Bricks 16   / \                                                  / \   Bricks 14
            | |                                                  | |
Magic 5     | |     Lucky Cache - +2 Gems, +2 Bricks, Play       | |     Magic 5
Gems 16     | |     again - 0 bricks                             | |     Gems 14
            | |                                                  | |
Dungeon 5   | |                                                  | |   Dungeon 5
Recruits 14 | |                                                  | | Recruits 14
            | |  |                                            |  | |
            | |  |                                            |  | |
             80  20                                           20  80
Brick Shortage - Each player loses 8 bricks - 0 bricks
Lucky Cache - +2 Gems, +2 Bricks, Play again - 0 bricks
Basic Wall - +3 Wall - 2 bricks
Miners - +1 Quarry - 3 bricks
Dwarven Miners - +4 Wall, +1 Quarry - 7 bricks
Work Overtime - +5 Wall, -6 Gems - 2 bricks

> Play Miners

Quarry 6                                                                Quarry 5
Bricks 19   / \                                                  / \   Bricks 14
            | |                                                  | |
Magic 5     | |     Lucky Cache - +2 Gems, +2 Bricks, Play       | |     Magic 5
Gems 21     | |     again - 0 bricks                             | |     Gems 14
            | |     Miners - +1 Quarry - 3 bricks                | |
Dungeon 5   | |                                                  | |   Dungeon 5
Recruits 19 | |     Rock Stompers - 8 Damage, -1 enemy           | |  Recruits 8
            | |     Quarry - 11 recruits                      |  | |
            | |  |                                            |  | |
             80  12                                           20  80
Brick Shortage - Each player loses 8 bricks - 0 bricks
Lucky Cache - +2 Gems, +2 Bricks, Play again - 0 bricks
Basic Wall - +3 Wall - 2 bricks
Sturdy Wall - +4 Wall - 3 bricks
Dwarven Miners - +4 Wall, +1 Quarry - 7 bricks
Work Overtime - +5 Wall, -6 Gems - 2 bricks

>_

That's just a mock-up, of course But it shouldn't be hard to achieve with the code used in my Arcomage project. That's something to think about!

[tolich]

Ah, this is too slow to type all these 'Play <insert card name here>'..
As you can have only six cards in hand, number 1..6 is high enough to say which card you want to play. Additionaly, -1..-6 could mean 'Discard card 1..6'.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, I thought about that as well. Especially since with multiple deck support, there could be cards with identical names.

[BMJedi]

I wish you could go to Las Vegas and play Arcomage for real money!

I would totally book a trip and go to any hotel that had a fantasy theme and real Arcomage tables!

I've never gambled before in my life, and I think I'd keep my bets very small and play for fun only if I ever tried it, but wouldn't it be fun?

I've often wished you could keep playing for game money inside the game, and lose money when you lose. Somebody told me once that the one-time win was hardcoded and couldn't be changed, though.

There's an arcomage-like co-op game somewhere online, or there used to be. And I saw a link in another thread where some guy was trying to develop a way to play the card game in real life using physical cards and wooden or plastic pieces for the resources, towers and walls.

3DO missed out on a chance to make some profit. I don't think they ever realized what an addictive little minigame they had created. They should have released a handheld and console version.

Part of the appeal is the rapid-fire playing of cards and having conditions changing very fast, though, so any replication that cuts out the speed of play will not be a very good replication.

[hatsforclowns]

Funny, I always played it fairly slowly. Damn rushers!

EDIT:

Standard 80x25 terminal. Text and background colours could be used to improve clarity and overview.

Turn 1: Player 1

Code: Select all

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    ArcoMage                                    |
|                                                                                |
| Player 1                                                              Player 2 |
|                                                                                |
|   t[ 80]    ----  --                                      --  ----    t[ 60]   |
|   w[ 20]                                                              w[ 30]   |
|             ####                                              ####             |
|             ####                                              ####             |
|   q[  5]    ####                                              ####    q[  5]   |
|   b[ 15]    ####  --                                      --  ####    b[ 15]   |
|   m[  5]    ####                                              ####    m[  5]   |
|   g[ 15]    ####                                              ####    g[ 15]   |
|   d[  5]    ####  ##                                      ##  ####    d[  5]   |
|   r[ 15]  __####__##______________________________________##__####__  r[ 15]   |
|                                                                                |
| Player 1                                                                       |
|                                                                                |
|   [1] Brick Shortage           0b       p*(-8b)                                |
|   [2] Shift                    17b      x                                      |
|   [3] Rock Stompers            11r  !   e(-1q 8%)                              |
|   [o] Sturdy Wall              3b       p(+4w)                                 |
|   [5] Dwarven Mines            7b       p(+4w +1q)                             |
|   [o] Lucky Cache              0b    *  p(+2b +2g)                             |
|                                                                                |
| [#] Select [Spc] Play [Tab] Discard                 [F1] Objectives [Esc] Menu |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Turn 2: Player 2

Code: Select all

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                    ArcoMage                                    |
|                                                                                |
| Player 1                                                              Player 2 |
|                                                                                |
|   t[ 80]    ----  --                                      --  ----    t[ 60]   |
|   w[ 20]                                                              w[ 30]   |
|             ####                                              ####             |
|             ####                                              ####             |
|   q[  5]    ####                                              ####    q[  5]   |
|   b[ 15]    ####  --                                      --  ####    b[ 15]   |
|   m[  5]    ####                                              ####    m[  5]   |
|   g[ 15]    ####                                              ####    g[ 15]   |
|   d[  5]    ####  ##                                      ##  ####    d[  5]   |
|   r[ 15]  __####__##______________________________________##__####__  r[ 15]   |
|                                                                                |
|                                                                       Player 2 |
|                                                                                |
|   [o] Friendly Terrain         1b    *  p(+1w)                                 |
|   [o] Basic Wall               2b       p(+3w)                                 |
|                                                                                |
|                                                                                |
|                                                                                |
|                                                                                |
|                                                                                |
| [#] Select [Spc] Play [Tab] Discard                 [F1] Objectives [Esc] Menu |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Structure

• t — tower
• w — wall

Production

• q — quarry
• m — magic
• d — dungeon

Resource

• b — brick
• g — gem
• r — recruit

Card, Action

• o — played
• x — discarded

Card, Attribute

• ! — cannot be discarded
• * — play again

Card, Affected player

• p — player
• f — friendly player
• e — enemy player
• p* — all players
• f* — all friendly players
• e* — all enemy players

Card, Standard effect

• + — increase
• - — decrease
• % — damage
• ? — conditional
• < — less than
• > — greater than
• = — equal to

Card, Special effect

• x — swap walls
• h — take half of enemy losses
• d — discard and play

EDIT:

Ugh...ugly lists

[GrayFace]

I'm with 3DO in not realizing addictiveness of the game. Playing it 15 times per MM game is the perfect number for me.

[GreatEmerald]

That's an interesting version, too, although I'm not keen on the short notation. Also the menu and such are pretty difficult to do, as opposed to the readln() way of my original idea.

[hatsforclowns]

That's an interesting version, too, although I'm not keen on the short notation. Also the menu and such are pretty difficult to do, as opposed to the readln() way of my original idea.

Ever heard of ncurses? Can be used with cygwin or mingw on windows. You could probably get quite far with conio.h as well.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, I know about New Curses!, but it would mean adding an additional requirement. Although to be honest, I think splitting this to a frontend and a backend would be useful anyway. Then people could write their own renderers and such.

[hatsforclowns]

Yea, I know about New Curses!, but it would mean adding an additional requirement. Although to be honest, I think splitting this to a frontend and a backend would be useful anyway. Then people could write their own renderers and such.

It has certainly proved successful with nethack

[Xfing]

Strangely enough, I have never found Arcomage addictive in the least. It's more of a nuisance for me than anything else, actually. It's a very fun game in its own right, but I complete the sidequests related to it very last.

I have no idea whether the standalone 3DO Arcomage game has any more cards - if it did, I would be inclined to check it out.

[GreatEmerald]

The official standalone one doesn't, but check out MArcomage - they have an entirely different set of cards that are interesting, and anyone can contribute to it. My Arcomage Clone will also have support for MArcomage cards.

[Tress]

I didn't found arcomage addictive. Sure it;s fun but more than 14-15 games per relatively long rpg is more than enough. Playing it as something more than side quest would be made imo. Also in almost all cases either pc dont know right tactics, or house have rigged card deck that deals them crap.

[SkeleTony]

I thought Arcomage was one of the most brilliant card games ever created myself. I have loaded up many a M&M 7 save just to play Arcomage for a few hours.

[GreatEmerald]

I recently realised that this idea is much better than I initially thought it to be. Splitting it to a frontend and backend would be very worth it, because that will allow it to be included in MMX fairly easily, and CLArcomage, as I call it, is perfect for debugging code without needing to worry about bugs/unimplemented features in the frontend. Plus there are many internal reasons for that as well.

[GreatEmerald]

And now I'm basically done with it! For any Linux users, you can try it out right now here:

https://github.com/GreatEmerald/Arcomag ... comage-dev

Launch clarcomage/bin/clarcomage and it should be good to go. You control the starting options from libarcomage/lua/Configuration.lua.

For those on Windows, you will have to wait until I recompile it on Windows or compile it from the source yourself.

A few things I can say about it - first off, I know the UI is not very user friendly. Unfortunately, there is no ncurses wrapper for D, and it uses special things that D can't handle, too. Plus, it wouldn't be cross-platform. But if you have any suggestions about how I could improve the current UI, I would be happy to hear it.

Also note that when you are asked for a card, you must enter its number that is given near the name of the card. The input there is quite finicky due to the way D handles it, so make sure you enter the right thing, or else you won't be able to delete what you input and thus make it impossible to continue the game. As for when it asks for a yes/no answer, everything is considered 'no', unless it is 'yes', 'Yes', 'true', 'True' or '1'.

Also, the AI is incredibly good in my opinion. I always have a very hard time beating it now, if at all. It has a hard time beating itself, too. It basically all depends on luck, unless you make some stupid mistakes that the AI can utilise. It's funny how I used a card that lowers my wall, thinking that the AI will probably do something stupid like shift the walls in my favour, but then I remembered that the AI is smart and would instead use that lowered wall to annihilate my tower - which it did. Another time the AI used a combo of Strip Mine and Copping The Tech, although that was probably accidental because I didn't program that behaviour in.