Frogboy

If saved games aren't working for you, I would vote no personally.

It's not a legal agreement or something. Basically, it's a question of whether players think the game still has 2/3rds or less of the way to go. It doesn't need to be fun. It doesn't even need to be particularly stable. But it should start resembling a game with game mechanics that allow a player to play and eventually win the game.

[quote]you do not have an internally combat system already?[/quote] We do. The system supports lots of attack modifiers and defense modifiers and such. We just don't include any so that we can see what ones we would actually want in there. In my mind, combined arms is crucial to the game's success. In Elemental, how you set up your armies should matter. So somehow, between now and later, we have to make sure there are very definitive mechanics for archers

What we ended up doing is weaseling on the issue entirely and deferring it until the combat phase of the beta (beta 4). As a result, code-wise, every type of weapon and defense has potentially many different types of attacks and counters. Then, when the combat beta comes up, we can decide which types of attack types and counters we actually want to have in there as opposed to looking at it theoretically.

All that nice stuff is just #ifdef'd out of your build. It's not that we're evil. ..okay yea, we're evil. But we just want to make sure the game can stand on its own and not rely on pretty graphics.

1G is long gone internally. In our build, we can build gardens on turn 1.

Cikomyr - We're going to do both. We're going to have pioneers units that can go out and harvest resources (ala asteroids in galciv2) except the resources go into the global pool. Of course, they're pretty vulnerable if they're not protected by a city but it's one of those "interesting" choices.

They're quite different but let me focus on the big ones: GalCiv is more about macro management. You're running an entire civilization. MOO 2 is more tactica. Your ships go into combat and you control them. Your planets have populations of different species that have pros and cons to them that you can make use of. MOO 2 uses star lanes to navigate so you can have natural choke points. GalCiv has open space so the focus is on con

Okay, I'm trying to distill the ideas presented here. So here's what I'm seeing: NET food becomes a global resource. That is, I build a farm and it provides 50 food into my global food resource. When I build a house, it consumes food. So a hut may require 1 food to build. City population thus becomes decoupled from local food making housing interesting and fun. If for some reason (farming outpost gets conquered or something) and your glo

Here's where we see it: We're 29.5% of the way done with the game (hence the versioning 0.29.5). We believe the game will likely be released before the end of Summer (which ends September 21st) but we're content to push it back if we necessary as long as is necessary. We consider the sovereign and faction creation parts of the game to be the furthest along. The rest are about 1/3rd of the way. I think Beta 3 will show up in May but it will depend on you g

Very helpful. We need to update our forum tech to support surveys.

Great stuff. Let me try to add to all this: 1. Perhaps we should make food production more like in the original design. That is, food becomes a global resource. 2. Housing is NOT going to go away. For one thing, it's "boring" right now because it's largely just a required step for every city. It's not housing itself. It's anythign that doesn't really provide the player a choice is something that should be eliminated. 3. Another reason housing isn't going to

Good discussion. So let's talk about what housing is meant to accomplish in Elemental: The idea is to provide a mechanism of deciding which cities should contain your population. Right now, the weakness I see is that farming (food) is too connected to a given city. As a result, we have the problem where a farming village can't feed a distant city as you would have in the real world. So the question is, how do we have the mechanism for deciding which cities cont

@Moose. Yea, that's my inclination too. It's just the suddenness. There's Impulse articles pretty regularly and have been for awhile now. This just started this month. Maybe there's just some unhappy people.

Valve is also planning to port their games to the Mac. It makes sense that they'd port Steam too so that they can sell their games to Mac users on their own service. Afterall, Blizzard does the same thing via Battle.net (though with less fanfare). If I had a library of titles that used a single engine that I could port to the Mac I'd want to have a service to make it easy for mac users to purchase. What Valve is doing makes good sense to me.

[quote]There are a few people that have had a bad experience with Impulse. Perhaps they are just spreading the 'gospel' from their own point of view.[/quote] Certainly. But why now? What would they care about Impulse::Reactor? It's not even available to the public. It's not even for end users.

There will be no Impulse for the Mac any time soon. I like the Mac. I have a Mac. But it's not where I think to do gaming.

[quote]So, does that mean that we will see games that use SteamWorks like MW2 and more recent games here?[/quote] No, that would be aiding the creation of a monopoly.

[quote]It's been my impression that I have been allowed to keep these two threads running in this forum mainly because I've been able to keep the flaming to a minimum.[/quote] Yes. Mumble's threads have been allowed in the Off-Topic area because his threads have generally been about thoughtful discussion and not simply "Look how stupid my ideological opposites are".

[quote]Question. Does this represent a specific change in policy or at least a change in the enforcement of this policy in regard to the Off-Topic forum?[/quote] This thread was made 4 years ago so no, it's not a change in policy.

Again, if you want to make far left or far right political posts, do so on one of the political sites.

[quote]SO Brad, did you get to meet Sid Meier? Or do you know him already?[/quote] I'm afraid not. I'd love to meet him. I'm friends with Soren Johnson (designer of Civilization IV). Elemental's river system is Soren's design back from when he was still at Firaxis (another reason why we love to Firaxis guys).

There will be a 64-bit version of Elemental it appears.

[quote] My only critisism I have with the whole game is the way some of the heroes are depicted with their stats, etc. as if on a trading card. Is this necessary? Is there a card game in co-development like the book for Elemental?[/quote] No card game in development. We just like the concept of info cards. Sins has info cards too. We just decided in Elemental to spruce them up cosmetically.

Yes. You can purchase and download it via Impulse. http://www.impulsedriven.com