Frogboy

[quote who="Yalbik" reply="45" id="2785873"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 43 The short answer is: yes. The battle scene on the box is a screenshot from a beta version of the game that we nerfed later on for balance and memory consumption. The battle scene came from a test of the quest of Sarog's Egg and its aftermath. However, with v1.1 moving towards using population as a resource again we can effectively have much larger armies. But epic confron

[quote who="metalfacekevin" reply="30" id="2785429"]Well, no. The answer has not been given. I've never played Total War, so that reference is lost on me. All I want to know if the dragon battle with the flying soldiers in chain mail will be possible in this game. If the scope of that battle is not currently possible, will it be possible in the future? Yes or no would suffice. Frogboy did say they were rushing to get multiplayer out because it's on the box.

Ooh. Karma.

Hi Arstal, a. Yes, you would indeed get them back. b. Right now, we are leaning towards counting each unit as using a specialist supply to encourage "bigger" armies and allowing us to reduce the training time per unit. c. Right now, specialists are purely based on population. d. We are trying to address this concern with item B. e. There's no specialist production per se. The idea is that in any society, N% of the population can be specialists. &n

ThinkProgress: Your post is excellent and was one of the ones that we put on the table while we were thinking about how to get back to some of our original design elements.

It's specialist supply. Not specialists. And they're global. There's nothing to manage about them. They're not people per say, you're just deciding what you want to do with your population. I found my kingdom which gives me a capital. The capital provides 5 to my specialist supply. I can then build a merchant, workshop, arcane lab, study and each one will use 1 of these. Moreover players can, like in our original design, construct multiple merchants, workshops, a

The issue with mega armies (they're not really stacks since they fight as a single unit) is that we don't want that to be the only way to play the game. It should be a strategic choice to do so. The problem with the organized talent was that it made the mega army strategy the best one by far. in GalCiv, we limited fleet size based on the player's logistics ability. The idea was that the player had to make a strategic choice as to whether to spend their resources researching mean

Next week is the intention.

[quote who="lord ebonstone" reply="70" id="2783394"]Unless you're charging $30 for these, they're patches, not expansions. I still expect two free $30 expansions as an apology for this disaster of a game, the fact that I can't return it to you because I chose to buy from Amazon, and my general feeling of wasting $70.[/quote] That's a pretty entitled attitude to make. My suggestion in the future would be to wait for a demo. That's what I tend to do. I can only say that we're

This really deserves a journal entry on its own but... 10,000 years ago, humans were mostly hunter/gatherers. Agriculture changed that. With surplus food came larger populations which could support specialists. Specialists were people who could defend the village from barbarians, the priest who could help the city get along with "the gods", the people who made pottery, jewelry, metal works, as well as the people who could sell them. Currency allowed people

Some good points there as well. I'll talk to the team about this.

I'm enjoying Civ V. The main thing I hope they're able to address is the time between turns which is probably very doable in an update. I got into making games in the first place because of Civilization. I'm not surprised that it's had some technical issues, I don't think people (or the press -obviously-) have any real understanding of how ridiculous the current PC gaming platform is. With Windows XP, there was only 1 real video driver model for the video card make

[quote who="Sethai" reply="63" id="2783237"]there have been some great posts on settlement magic and combat mechanics already, so i won't repeat anyone here. personally though, i wonder what specialist slots are and whether the game needs them. personally i believe this game has tow many reesources already. i personally don't really see the need for crystal and elementium to be separate resources but that's just me. question in point: if mana maintenance is coming in for

[quote] I think you & the other developers really need to go play Civ 5 for a day, then go back and play Elemental, because right now as of 1.08, Elemental is unbalanced & boring, I don't see anything in what's listed that's going to change that. There's nothing listed that expands the RPG or strategic elements. I've never seen an expansion pack announced, where new content and gameplay elements wasn't clearly defined. What you are calling an expansion pack now seems like litt

[quote]I hope you're writing down the criticism you didn't want to hear in beta and are considering that as well now.[/quote] Let me address this because I've seen it come up time and time again. The issue isn't that we don't listen to people or users. When designing a piece of software you have Scope. Time. Cost. Let's look at what I do on Stardock's games. Think of me as "super modder". I don't write the core systems. I make use of them to do things like make AI or c

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="46" id="2782913"] Quoting Stuie_acs, reply 43Even simpler than that would be: Defender moves first; attacker better be ready for whatever they are gonna throw at you (or else you shouldn't have attacked). That only reverses the problem of instant annihilation in the first round. It's neither fun nor "tactical" if a defending stack becomes unattackable. Instant win for the defender is not preferrable to instant win for the a

The reason Elemental got terrible reviews is because it deserved them - it was not compatible on over 30% of PCs out there. That's a gigantic number of machines. At the end of the day, Elemental has averaged 3 out of 5 in reviews. Broadly speaking, Elemental lost 1 star for some poor design choices and other game related issues and another star for technical issues. While Civilization V may have some technical and performance issues, it's no where near what

My suggestion would be to create a new improvement rather than try to mod an existing one. For example, in my modded version (for my own play) I created a Throne Room improvement that can only be built once but provides 1 food and 1 gold.

In v1.09, we are looking at letting the defenders go first. This isn't a "Final" solution to it but it's a fairly straight forward change that alleviates this a bit.

Here's the issue at hand and the corresponding hole in the current system: Players should not be able to get something for nothing. During the beta, we used to allow players to build an unlimited number of buildings or 1 per level and this created a runaway economy. The imperfect solution chosen in the end was to limit many buildings to only 1 per city. This creates the issue that if you have something for nothing you have an incentive to "spam" cities. &n

Use your order number on the page to get the goodies. :)

Just for the record, I read this thread about twice a day with my engineeringbnotebook open with pen to writevdown various concepts proposed and think about how they would work in the engine and how well theydvinteract with other concepts.

For marketing reasons we can't go into great detail on what's in the expansions. The bullet points are justvexamples of what we are doing.

Here's our schedule for updates to Elemental for the remainder of 2010. This schedule is subject to change and will be refreshed as we near the end of the year to detail updates for 1Q2011. v1.09 Memory Optimizations AI Updates Bug fixes Performance improvements Minor balance tweaks Due: September 30, 2010 v1.1 New Magic System based on a shared mana pool. Refresh of all magical s

Yes. It's up.