The Game of Moria is an RPG where you have to eat. Then you get so many turns according to food value of what you ate, less if you're using speedup items. No weather though, it's a dungeon crawler. Night and day happen on the surface/town level, so you will sometimes find the shops closed. It's top down text mode so pretty much all the graphics are in your head. It takes a bit of getting into but if you've played Rogue or similar you'll pick it up right away.

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-08-23, 22:00:

shamino wrote on 2021-08-23, 19:10:

I don't just want to save up gold pieces for some huge weapon, I want to also be thinking about where I'm going to get my next meal, and strategize how I'm going to "move up" in the world so that I can survive more easily. As that is accomplished, I'll then have more time and resources to expend on secondary goals.
I don't necessarily want survival to be difficult (I know that would be polarizing), but I also don't want it to be trivial or omitted from the game. 😀

I haven't tried this yet but the Climates and Calories mod for Daggerfall Unity tries to do more or less that.

This literary playthrough of the game makes use of the mod alongside many others, producing what seems to me like a very in-depth roleplaying experience, of course in this case complemented by the author's excellent imagination 😀

Looks interesting. Daggerfall is a game I still need to get into. I'm inclined to play the original DOS version but Unity is probably really better, especially if it's more moddable.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-23, 23:02:

The Game of Moria is an RPG where you have to eat. Then you get so many turns according to food value of what you ate, less if you're using speedup items. No weather though, it's a dungeon crawler. Night and day happen on the surface/town level, so you will sometimes find the shops closed. It's top down text mode so pretty much all the graphics are in your head. It takes a bit of getting into but if you've played Rogue or similar you'll pick it up right away.

It would be cool to try a text Rogue type game also.

I remember one game where the food aspect was overly difficult (to me anyway) - Ultima 2. I never got anywhere in that game because I was spending every penny I had on food and still dying of starvation. It was an overbearing issue with getting started in that game, but I know lots of people were able to handle it.

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-08-19, 15:37:

I never liked the day-night cycle in Warcraft III, which I guess is the first game I ran into. Admittedly, back in the 90s as a school kid I fantasized about "my" fantasy RTS that would be much inspired by Warcraft II, and imagined there would be separate torch- and lamp-bearer units for in-game night-time. But the way this is implemented in Warcraft III felt somewhat forced, in part because it does not affect anything besides unit sight ranges and some Night Elf abilities. I mean, no characters ever go to sleep or something, it's just a cosmetic & part balance feature. UPD: I remembered that most creeps sleep at night, but again this feels like a slightly odd mechanic than anything.

Wake creeps will attack your reinforcements. This significantly affects gameplay. It makes it especially difficult to rush on certain maps. You must use waypoints. I would guess that most casual players don't know what those are. It's sad to see expensive units like Taurens arrive at the battle already half dead because they had to fight with creeps along the way.

shamino wrote on 2021-08-24, 15:46:

Daggerfall is a game I still need to get into. I'm inclined to play the original DOS version but Unity is probably really better, especially if it's more moddable.

It is my understanding that the latest versions of DFU made a lot more progress towards a faithful recreation of the original mechanics and even looks (the latter being optional). But vanilla Daggerfall works fine in DOSBox, although a few community patches and fixes are recommended for a smoother experience, so you can try both. When I last checked DFU -- a couple years ago, mind you -- the combat worked noticeably different, somehow (you still hold the right mouse button and move the mouse to swing your weapon; it just somehow did not feel the same as the original for me). But when it comes to mods DFU is king, and there's already a lot done by the community to improve and in some cases completely overhaul and substantially expand the experience.

Errius wrote on 2021-08-24, 16:31:

Wake creeps will attack your reinforcements. This significantly affects gameplay. It makes it especially difficult to rush on certain maps. You must use waypoints. I would guess that most casual players don't know what those are. It's sad to see expensive units like Taurens arrive at the battle already half dead because they had to fight with creeps along the way.

You know, I never really got into Warcraft III skirmish, even less so into multiplayer. But even with these strategic implications it still feels like a game mechanic instead of an attempt at realism. The players' troops never sleep anyway, so for example you would not be able to stage a night time surprise attack at the enemy camp while they're sleeping. It's only done once in a TFT Undead campaign scenario IIRC.