I have been hearing the idea a couple of times that some people would like to play master of magic as a sandbox game. I don't know much about sandbox games, I know that mine craft is such type of game and there is a huge fad around it. There is also project spark demoed at e3 that could be a kind of sand box game. I trying to see if the concept of sand box could be applied to a master of magic video game and/or board game.
Sandbox games seems to fit more for the wanderer type of players that will play games with a lot of freedom and lack of objectives. Those kind of games would like games like The Sims, Grand Theft Auto.
The main element of a sandox game could be the lack of objectives, since the players define their own, and the fact the gae never ends. Personally, I don't really like games that never end, I prefer have an ending and start again, that play indefinitely.
So an idea could be to have a MOM game with no objectives but that would feel flat. So I was thinking more about a game where you do have objectives, but you have no competing players. So only the real player can "Finish" the game, the other factions are only there to entertain the player. That could be something interesting, because sometimes I hate racing against the computer. (In my current game, I have "Nodemastery" (power x 2) and some AI manage to have 5 times more power than I do).
One of the interest of the sand box games is the lack of artificial intellegence. In fact, there will be an AI, but it would be more a minimalist AI which would be more event based, a bit like an RPG, rather than a strategic AI that needs to know how to win the game. I was thinking lately about the kind of strategy video game I could make that have little AI, and it used a more RPG random encounter structure, rather than a strategic structure. So in this case, the same concept could be applied of MOM.
The concept of sandbox could also be used to playtest my board game in design as a single player game Since I was thinking to use non player puttet factions in my game.
So besides the non-competitive objectives and the advantages of a thin AI. So you have any other ideas that could be imported from a sandbox game and implemented into master of magic without breaking too much the master of magic experience?
Of course, those kind of games are mostly single player games.
heroes of might and magic has some similarities with mom but it's more focused on the heroes than the civ building.
I was thinking of using an event based system as a substitution to AI. Even for my board game idea, the non playing factions could be resolved with an event card that affect other players.
That could be an easier way to implement AI for non-player factions. I could make various deck of devents according to the personality of the faction.
Note: In my board game, there is always 10 factions, some are played by players while the rest by an AI. But since it's a board game, I am somewhat limited in what an AI can do. So this is why event cards could be interesting.