Frogboy

I don't see a scenario where Civ V "fails". There are lots of people like me who will be buying it first day. Civ V will outsell Elemental by a wide margin regardless. Master of Orion 3 outsold GalCiv by a wide margin too btw. Unlike MOO3, I am confident that Civ V will be a really good game. But I don't think most people are going to buy one or the other. And at the end of the day, our motivation at Stardock is to make an outstanding game an

We're looking at letting people get into beta 1Z. Depends on whether we end up delaying the beta tomorrow.

The AI in Elemental will keep being improved like the AI in Galactic Civilizations was. The original GalCiv II AI was not nearly as good as the AI in Twilight of the Arnor. I can't say at this early stage how well the AI will do against co-op mode. Right now, the specified MULTIPLAYER modes are: 1 v 1 2 v 2 FFA --- the above are handled via Impulse::Reactor's matchmaking -- Custom Games (up to 32 players playing on a custom

[quote]It would be cool to see you and Stardock making a Civilization-like game after Elemental, Frog. Or perhaps you modding Elemental to a Civilization game when you take your break[/quote] I'd be more inclined to make a Civ mod for Elemental or something when modding. I personally envision the long-term success of Elemental heavily tied to there being a LOT of free content available for people who bought the game. I would have made a lot more stuff for GalCiv

[quote]You could implement it by allowing units to have a melee and a ranged weapon equipped when you create them. In tactical combat, they'd have the option to use their ranged weapon, or move (and try to close to melee range). Or you could save resources by not giving them a secondary weapon at unit creation.[/quote] One of the reasons you don't see that is because in most games, the developers tell you what units you have to play with. In Elemental, players decide what weap

[quote]have a sword we need iron , copper ore, etc.? Cool, this makes me feel a lot better about this [e digicons]|-)[/e] I sure hope stockpiling is re instituted. Also I love the idea of a world wide marketplace like tormy was saying earlier. I'd like to see caravans coming from separate nations with excess resources of theirs, priced out based on their rarity in the world.[/quote] Stockpiling of non-perishables is in. If a city mines ore, it becomes availabl

Since it's all data driven, we can stack up as many different types of attack and defense to any type of equipment. For example, taking cities where the city has city walls requires siege equipment. A bunch of sword guys can't just conquer a city in that case. But SAURON could. (A lot of our internal debates come down to "what would sauron do?") which means having a staff that is a weapon but also counts as siege equipment too. Now, I don't know what will

[quote] Civilization 5 is the Civ 4 team including Sid and Soren. [/quote] No it's not. Soren is at EA now. I think Civ V will be awesome though. But I'm not worried about Elemental's success.

This hasn't been discussed in awhile but I figured I'd let you know how things are being implemented: All weapons have four values: 1. Attack Rating 2. Damage Type 3. Range Value 4. Combat Speed Modifier Examples: Club (3 attack, blunt damage, Melee, None) Dagger (2 attack, piercing damage, Melee, None) Doom sword of Eternal flame (4 attack, piercing damage, Melee, none) (3 attack, fire damage, Melee

[quote]Now are we screwed like in civ 4 : "Need horses ? Too bad ! You can just build warriors and archers" ?[/quote] Not quite. In Civ IV, they had the concept of strategic resources that you either had or you didn't. What we are discussing here are resources that go into a pool. You don't control your own horses? Then you'll need to buy some. The key difference being that there isn't that much abstraction here. If you need A horse, you will use up A horse

viex - keep in mind I'm videoing it running inside the debugger.

For what it's worth: Scale from 1 to 10: 1 = Couldn't care less 5 = Care some 10 = Absolutely crucial Single Player: 10 MP over Internet: 5 MP over LAN: 5

I like this idea.

Roads and caravans matter because as a practical matter, you won't be able to compete economically if you don't build a trade network.

If Stardock started dictating to others what they may or may not do I'd quit and start a competing company. People should decide what is and isn't acceptable through their free choices. Not corporations.

Some quick Q&A: Re: Workers. Pioneers aren't workers. They're similar to Settlers except that they only build a single "improvement". Re: Unit construction. Metal being a global resource, players decide how much metal they want their units to use when they design them. When they go to train one, it consumes the metal when it's built. Metal is infinitely stored globally. I don't know how many other history buffs there are here but those that ar

Not in yet, but will soon.

BTW, one key difference in Elemental and galCiv is that in Elemental, we will be providing AI parts in Python. So after release, it won't just be me doing it. I am hoping the community will be interested in collaborating with me to keep enhancing it further than I could alone.

I'm writing the AI for Elemental. Single player is Elemental's focus. While I am sure some people will play it multiplayer and we will make sure it's a good experience, my primary motivation is to provide a good single player game.

Relative prestige determines how fast your towns fill up. When you start getting wars going, having a net prestige of 1 (meaning 1 new citizen per turn) is going to be quite problematic. Improvements that provide "jobs" in the generic sense are what tend to provide prestige. Part of the underlying game is about fighting for a very finite # of people. Moreover, if there are nearby enemy cities that have much higher prestige, you can see your cities losing out to

There are labor camps and such that reduce the amount of time it takes the to build things.

[quote]Elemental has never been stable enough for me to do any serious testing. Only with the latest version have I been able to play more than a few minutes before CTDs, and then couldn't reload. Reloading still doesn't work. I'm wondering how many others have the same 'luck'. (rhetorical question -- there is a limited number of testers -- how many enjoy sufficient stability to effectively test?)[/quote] Precisely. And this is specifically why we have th

I think some of you guys are worry too much about some of this. I've been designing and producing PC games for almost 20 years now. Certainly the beta group is a non-random sample of people. And we aren't forced to obey any vote if we feel it's unreasonable. Here is how it's going to go down: We will put beta 1Z out. We will read the forum posts. If the game is fundamentally unstable, saved games don't work, etc. then there won't even be a vote as

lol. We just mean significant game mechanic changes.

Basically, at the end of the day, the question boils down to: Do beta testers believe the game is ready to go into the multiplayer beta.