Frogboy

Something I forgot to mention: A military unit requires a food resource to support.

It's all public.

Spells aren't technologies. They're spells. Different mechanism.

We made one internally but there's still a bunch of fixes we want to get in. As a forum troll, here's the way I would put it: It's November. The time of instability needs to go away now. So we're spending extra time pouring through the code to clean it up so that we can integrate the new features. Stability first. Features second.

It's coming.

[quote]-snip- I would liek to suggest a fourth tech color - grey. And I think that it should be used just as it is used in an MMO (when an opponent is so far beneath you that killing it does not give you experience. My suggestion is that 3 or 4 (or whatever you guys deem appropriate) tech levels beyond when a tech "goes green" that it goes grey. It can still be selected when a breakthrough is made. However, each tech on the grey list has a 10% chance of being "auto-developed" each time you ma

[quote]so I like to Micromanage... this game isn't for me?[/quote] Yes. That's exactly what I said. Not being able to manufacture swords in one city, ship them to another city, and then have the local barracks then equip the soldier is the same as saying that there's no way to micro manage anything... Because isn't that the only option here? Either you're personally forging iron ingots into swords to ship off OR it's been completely dumbed down into a console game.<

What we want to do here is present different ways of doing tech and let people play it and decide. I know it may seem otherwise but implementing different game mechanics like this is not time consuming.

Yep. Agreed.

Before I get PM's, I'm the designer of Elemental and I work at Stardock so I'm NOT flaming the game itself I'm trying to make it better. The research screen in Elemental is not fun. It's work. It's work to use. It adds nothing to the game other than feeling like it's necessary. I think a lot could be learned from Master of Orion. I like the idea of researching an AREA of tech and when a milestone in that area is reached, a screen pops up and the player can choose the bre

Population grows based on the prestige of your city. The people come in from the wilds to your cities.

We are thinking of relabeling the stat "Strength" or something like that rather than HP since it does lead to confusion.

[quote]Not a bad idea, but I don't think I've ever seen HP linearly to rate of fire, and I've played many, many games from PC to pen and paper RPG's. If this is the case, I'm pretty sure that calling this combined stat which represents life units and rate of attack "hitpoints" will certainly confuse people. So if I get you right, attack score is more like a "penetration" score.[/quote] Correct. Attack and Defense are related to equipment. What we loosely ca

Yes. You're in left field. You are making assumptions about the battle system that simply don't reflect the game.

[quote]Well, this is fine if it's a one on one duel between two soldiers. Are you saying that HP doesn't just mean hitpoints, but also means number of attacks per round? [/quote] Yes. HP is an abstraction for the overall value of the unit. Obviously, we could create a half dozen other variables that have the same value as HP (and in the game it's just represented by a heart icon anyway). We have a speed variable already so HP is not strictly speed

[quote]I understand what HP represents, but assuming that a better unit can't swing a sword better to kill units faster is utterly bewildering. And once again, I don't ever see a soldier doubling or trippling their base attack score without spending the entire game in constant combat. Master of Magic had a perfectly good way of allowing non-hero units of gaining attack power, defense, and HP without throwing the game into disarray. Why can't it be done now?[/quote] W

[quote]Making a unit stronger with HP will have the same effect as giving it more attack or defense... but only if you auto-resolve every single battle. But aren't there going to be tactical battles? Isn't that a major focus of the game? If an elite unit can't kill stuff faster or bigger monsters faster you are losing a collosal aspect of experience gain in its relevance to tactics.[/quote] This makes the assumption that tactical battles are handled in symetric

[quote]I totally agree. HP is the last thing I would want experience to affect... Being more experienced means being more efficient, able to pull off better attacks, find weak spots easier, and block/defend/parry better. It does not mean being able to be stabbed through the heart twice as many times before dying..[/quote] HP is an abstraction that allows a more realistic simulation of a battle. You take your elite soldier who has 1 attack and 1 defense and g

Monolithic armies won't make sense in Elemental because there can be many different factors involved here such as: Mobility Range Quantity vs. Quality Terrain handling There is no "best" unit. There is merely the unit that is best adapted for the particular circumstances of a particular battle. What good is the army of 500 super elite warriors if they're going to be outflanked by 10,000 peasant horse

[quote]If arguments about dragons and tanks are going to rule the day, we can always just come up with creative reasons why robin hood could hit a dragon or tank. He might be able to fire an arrow down a turret barrel of a tank for fire it into the one weak scale or eye of a dragon. Likewise, a trained spearman knows to jam the tank tread or barrel with his spear rather than jab the tank directly on its armor. Regardless, these kind of arguments don't

[quote]Ouch, so am I correct in assuming that this means a spearman--- having seen 1000 victorious battles and slain 1000 other spearmen--- would gain tons of hitpoints but still only have 1 attack and 1 defense unless he is upgraded with better weapons? It seems a bit counter to one's intuition to the point of being outright bizarre, even as a game mechanic function.[/quote] I am not sure how the world's best spearmen are taking out a tank. Being really good a

I think some of you may be over-thinking the battle mechanics necessary to effect a satisfactory outcome. Let's take a dragon who has say a 20 attack and 10 defense. Its minimum defensive roll is going to be 10% so it will always get a 1. Now, if you have a really basic archer its attack and defense might be 1 attack (bow and arrow) with just a shirt (0 defense) with 1 HP. His arrow won't pierce the armor of the dragon and thus no matter how many

In Elemental, the tank would win 100% of the time against the spearmen because they wouldn't be able to penetrate the tank's armor. Let's use a hypothetical value here: Tank: 50 Attack 25 Defense 20 HP -------- Minimum Defense roll: 2.5 Spearman: 1 attack 1 defense 1 HP 100 Spearmen would be 1 attack, 1 defense 100 HP (due to 100 of them). All 100 spearmen die.

Battle Options: 1. Instant Resolve (army 1 and army 2 meet, one is destroyed instantly). 2. Auto-resolve. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and plays out automatically). 3. Player resolved. (army 1 and army 2 meet, it zooms in and players can give orders. At any time they can have the computer take over to resolve it). Tactical battle options: 1. Weight of action. This determines the consequence of each action and determines how long battles wi