Frogboy

[quote]Yeah yeah, we know how you feel about your oober doober dragons. The important question in my mind, though, is whether an exceptional number of mundane, say, archers, can kill a powerful dragon. I would certainly hope that 1,000,000 archers could kill a dragon. [/quote] A grasshopper can't kill a man. A million grasshoppers still couldn't kill a man. How would the million archers kill the dragon? It would depend on whether they can penetrate the

In a battle with a dragon, whether we're talking 50, 500 or 1000 even the formation used would merely determine the order in which the dragon kills them.

Continuous turns: Think Balder's Gate style battles.

If necessary, I'd make Elemental take 3 more years to finish. But it's not looking like it'll be necessary to do any pushing. The "Game" stuff (game mechancis and such) are pretty trivial to put in. What makes modern games take a long time are the assets and engine development.

The dragon in both.

[quote]I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If each city automatically produces metal, then what are the caravans doing? Do they bring extra metal if you place a big enough order? What happens if you cancel the order while the caravan is in transit? Do those resources disappear? Go back? Continue to their destination? If there is no such thing as local storage then the only option is for those resources to disappear.[/quote] You don't place an order. It's fo

I do think it's possible to have your cake and eat it too in terms of the economy. For example: I don't think you have to have a resource inventory in order for distances to matter. The way we are looking at having distances matter in economic terms is through the caravan system. The caravan delivers goods from another city. The distance of that city will obviously matter because the caravan has to obviously travel there. These caravans are automatic, require no

Yea, I should emphasize here that we don't plan to push it. Originally, we were going to release the game and do the modding in post release updates. The big change in our development focus has been to make the modding more central to development. The other big change and the most important one in my mind was the decision to extend the beta so that we could let people have more input into the process. That meant pulling out all the actual engine stuff and leave onl

[quote]I appreciate the insight. I am all for "it's done when its done." And it sounds like when the gameplay is where you want it things could come together for the finished product really fast. I was just wondering if August 2010 is even a target, is there a target, if it is what your gut feeling is. The impression I get is, it's too far out to even really be looking at dates, that's fine.[/quote] Based on what I see internally, I think we could make this upcoming Sp

We'd need to incorporate #Elemental or something into our twits.

I just thought of a good example of the importance of engine to a game: Take Caesar IV, a great game and use the Elemental beta cloth map and you can quickly picture how quickly the game could be changed. :)

It'll be done when it's done. :) That said, game mechanic stuff is trivial compared to the engine work. In GalCiv II, I routinely made dramatic changes to the AI or economy or what have you in-between updates (as some long time GalCiv players know). For instance, we could implement one combat system, decide we don't like it, and do a different one in the next week -- as long as the actual mechanics don't make their way into the engine. Hence, the ugly looking beta. :)<

See: https://forums.elementalgame.com/367385

The new engine will be used for years to come on lots of new games. :)

I think I agree with you guys. Resource storing = bad idea. Let me talk to the team.

I've seen this too.

[quote]Definitely one of the direction PC gaming is headed. With piracy as an issue, more success has been found by going with the pirates instead of against. I know League of Legends is doing this and I'll be curious to see how that goes. On the flip side, Quake Live (being free) is now considering adding monthly payment for premium content (ability to host own servers, etc) because being free has its drawbacks. In being free, you have to be VERY compliant with your customers.<

From reading through the comments I'm glad to see people are starting to really understand the objectives of the beta program. When you guys pre-order the game early -- paying money -- and get these early betas the game is obviously not "fun" or even close to it and won't be for months. But, the beta program ensures only those who are seriously interested in this type of game in the first place are involved. Over the next few weeks, we'll be debating and discussing a gre

Cephalo: Contact us. We are hiring.

I don't think you guys can mod anything right now because the data is streamed from the servers.

I suspect long before beta 5 we'll be making mods. I plan to make mods and release them myself long before beta 5. Mine won't be total conversions or anything. But I would like to see if I could make a third race or a new alignment or something.

Originally the modding was going to be integrated post release. But one of the big changes is that we didn't want to treat modding as merely some niche feature but rather as a totally different way of looking at the game. Look at what's possible with Civilization IV for instance. I want to be able to access all the gameplay stuff via Python and then use that to be able to do whatever I want. But obviously that takes time but it also means we can be a lot more flex

ETA of next beta is late Fall.

Sycraft has created an Elemental Beta Wiki that you can check out here to get information on how to play, changes, etc. http://elementalbeta.wikidot.com/start Kudos to Sycraft taking the initiative on this.

Very interesting! What I'm picturing is something like this: The player chooses their kingdom or empire first. The next step is that they pick their sovereign. The sovereign they choose merely sets up the defaults for that sovereign. So the things they might change would be: Magic related abilities (various abilities for magic) Dynasty related abilities (abilities related to producing a family) Governing related a