here is a post I made in the stickied "Road Map" thread that got some positive responses:
grumblefish wrote:Forget new armies, what FOG needs is a campaign mode where the player's army persists over the course of several battles.
Right now, the game has no worthwhile single-player at all. The game furthermore cannot simulate any ancient campaigns unless the user literally creates a new scenario map for each stage, and plots it all out himself.
Slitherine has made games with persistent campaigns before, where the units can develop over time and new ones can be brought on board. Just look at Great Battles Medieval or Legion Arena for examples. Those games had real, enjoyable single-player modes. Those games brought out the strengths of computer gaming. Was Panzer Corp a success for Slitherine? What did gamers like most about that title? Was it that they got the digital equivalent of a bag of miniatures, or was it that they got to use and develop those miniatures over the course of a persistent, interesting historical campaign? Look back to Fantasy General; I actually went replayed that game a month or two ago.
FOG really fails to take advantage of the PC's strengths. When you play a game on the computer, you usually have dynamic campaigns and storylines that a player can just jump right in to and enjoy. FOG doesn't have any of that; instead, there are only single-battle scenarios, or user-arranged tournaments that are designed and run outside of the game itself. Those things play to the strengths and weaknesses of a table-top setting, but this version of FOG is a PC game and as such has other potential that needs to be developed.
If Slitherine wants to make a new expansion pack or develop this game, they should be happy that they've ported over a table-top experience, and look ahead to bringing out what the PC does best. Make FOG a PC game with historical campaigns and rpg elements. If sales are a problem right now, it's possibly because the current expansion packs don't bring anything fundamentally different to the table; you have more miniatures, but that only appeals to a certain, limited segment of gamers. Seeing as you apparently don't get enough attention from those gamers alone, why do you continue to focus solely on them and not make FOG a more diverse game?
Throw in persistent historical campaigns and rpg elements and then you'll get a lot more attention; plenty of gamers like single player campaigns, especially when they're historically accurate and have well written storylines, yet you've left that section of the market out in the cold. I assume gaming sites aren't interested in writing articles about how FOG will have a new chinese miniature army in an upcoming expansion pack, but I bet they'd be interested if FOG was including a campaign set in the warring states period, where the user plays through a 12 mission long, multi-branched, well-researched, persistent campaign to unify China.
To keep with the Chinese theme,
“There was a farmer of Song who tilled the land, and in his field was a stump. One day a rabbit, racing across the field, bumped into the stump, broke its neck, and died. Thereupon the farmer laid aside his plough and took up watch beside the stump, hoping that he would get another rabbit in the same way. But he got no more rabbits, and instead became the laughing stock of Song. Those who think they can take the ways of the ancient kings and use them to govern the people of today all belong in the category of stump-watchers!”
宋人有耕田者，田中有株，兔走触株，折颈而死，因释其耒而守株，冀复得兔，兔不可复得，而身为宋国笑。今欲以先王之政，治当世之民，皆守株之类也。
You caught your first rabbit by doing a great job of bringing the FOG tabletop experience to the PC. I'm not going to call you stump-watchers yet, but if you want a new spark of success then it's not enough to just release more miniatures over and over again.
If you make FOG a real PC game, I will buy the expansion. If you don't, I won't buy the expansion.
I would add one more thing: it would improve single player if you didn't have to watch the computer take its turn. In multiplayer, I don't bother to watch my opponent's moves; I just want to sit down, look at the field of battle as it is, and then make my moves. I have no desire to watch the computer move 40+ units down the field.
