Seboss

[quote who="AlexFury" reply="13" id="2974170"]Get it to at least as good as Master of Magic was for overall theme, playability and ease of use[/quote] Easier said than done or so it seems.

One thing is for sure, it took Stardock 10 years to build up a reputation as a respected developer that cares for its customers and PC gaming as a whole, and it all fell apart spectacularly in a couple days. I don't really blame the RPS users and other Stardock/Wardell detractors. With Stardock sounding really self-righteous with that whole Gamer's Bill of Rights business (shortly followed by the Demigod failure), the overly ambitious claims over Elemental with the result

I can't say I agree with all your points, but this is a well thought out review. Good work :) [e digicons]k1[/e] Sadly I agree with your conclusion, MoM is still the champion of fun in the fantasy 4X category. However, I'm convinced Stardock realize that and have a good picture of what need to evolve in the game to become deeper, more challenging and fun.

Spiffy website. The jQuery tooltips got a little wonky on a couple occasions here (FF 3.6.9) and sometimes the data for the global map fails to load but otherwise it all looks and works pretty good. I'm all ready to get my ass kicked now :D

Very insightful posts here. I work in the non-game software industry and I always thought the only development method the game industry knew was "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks". Seems I'm not close enough. Game engines such as UDK, Gamebryo or Kumquat are different story though.

[quote who="seanw3" reply="11" id="2762124"]I am so happy i am going to go outside and extend my lifespan by exercising![/quote] Don't overdo it, you could get opposite results.

[quote who="Istari" reply="8" id="2762039"]We agree too. This week you should start to see the release of web based XML tools (first for reading, later for writing) for manipulating and seeing how the XML works together.[/quote] This is insanely great news Istari. Thumbs up!

Agreed. It would be a shame if a game so moddable with such great tools was not backed by good documentation. If such documentation exists - or if one could be created in a reasonable amount of time - it would be a great asset to the game and the community. Reverse engineering can be fun for a while but first hand information will always be more productive and lead to more robust mods.

I demand that the cursor leaves a trail of pretty flowers. Otherwise, I demand a 100% refund.

[quote who="BlackRainZ" reply="19" id="2760465"]I can understand what your saying Seboss, but I don't think the journals were ever intended to be that way. Think of when your doing a journal. It is more of an account of your day, your feelings, etc. It is not an informative step by step documentation of something.[/quote] Yes, I realize that. But it's only natural that people read too much into these journals. And either it's intentional or not, the devs journal are uber effective hyp

[quote who="Rune_74" reply="13" id="2760436"]Um, and you know what the facts are opposed to what they write? Curious response there.[/quote] I never suggested devs are lying nor that I know better than they do, and I don't appreciate that you insinuate that. I think the devs journals can be very colorful but sometimes not so informative. The latest dev journal is a good example. The Avatar comparison - while it may tingle in a good way the anime fans out there - is not v

[quote who="Rune_74" reply="10" id="2760425"]I for one enjoyed his dev posts....I really don't want them to stop.[/quote] We all do. It's just that some of us would like them to be a little more... factual.

[quote who="Kardiophylax" reply="2" id="2760399"]All communities devolve into this over time. It is the nature of the internet and is the reason many, I daresay nearly all, the big name developers out there do not interact directly with their game's community. [/quote] I'm afraid that the sad truth here. The more developers share with the community, the more the community feels entitled and expects their opinion to matter. In our case, things got totally disproportionate. <

[quote who="Istari" reply="17" id="2760315"]He's just talking about making the magic in the game more back and forth and less direct damagey.[/quote] Sounds good. I understand references to Avatar and a Song of Fire and Ice makes these dev journals a little more exciting, but most of the time I think they're little more than distractions and even lead to misunderstandings like the one that happened in this thread. I would suggest to be more on point. More buff/debuff/de

Good post, I agree a 100% with these suggestions.

I'm sorry it had to come to this but I can't say it's a big surprise. Sure Elemental has some issues which mainly boil down to [i]featuritis[/i], but it shows that it's a work of love. I'm sure all staff did an awesome job and everybody on the forums and irc have been super nice. As a modding platform and software in general, Elemental is pretty solid and I'm sure Stardock and the modding community will come up with great additions and changes to the game. I'd like to expre

Welcome back mister. While the game might still not be in top shape - although it really improved in a very short time - I've been mostly having a lot of fun with the XML resources as I'm trying to figure out what options are available to modders. Kudos for making the game so open and moddable. Despite the design shortcomings and engine bugs, I'm fairly sure you guys built a pretty solid platform. I hope the python API project didn't sink too deep in the priority list as I'm really looking fo

All this XML horror makes me wish for the Python API. But hey, it's great that the game is already so moddable. Thanks for the tutorial Gnilbert!

[quote who="tevans6220" reply="8" id="2743998"]Point #7 is a little of a hot potato for me. I respect what he's saying but I feel the 1.0 version is the one that should be reviewed.[/quote] And that's exactly what Frogboy actually said.

[quote who="Supreme Shogun" reply="5" id="2742275"]You cannot guarantee on a completely random map that a shard will show up. Or 2 of 1 kind, 13 of another, and 4 of a third, and zero fourth kind of shard.. Now lets cut to the chase, you'd be ok with it if you had picked the color/shard that 13 showed up and extremely sad/upset if it was the zero kind. [/quote] Good point. SD could make sure shards have an equal probability to show up in the random map generator. But

[quote quoting="post"]Time to redo the current schools of magic. I’ve got a revolutionary idea – let’s use the Shards to determine what magic you are able to research. In other words, if you want to research Fire Spells, you have to have a Fire Shard.[/quote] If memory serves, that's pretty much what Stardock was aiming for at first except you needed a Shard not to research but to cast a spell of the corresponding school (remember the pr

Fantastic job Icecrown. Would you consider putting up a quick tutorial video for beginners? I haven't played much with the particle editor so far and I'm still a little quizzical to say the least.

You guys did a great job during these last few days. You certainly deserve a few days break :) But don't keep us waiting too long for more updates :D

Some early dev journals gave some details about the initial vision Stardock had with tactical battles (search for 'continuous'). I never really got what they were thinking about with the "continuous turn-based" thing. And remember battles were supposed to have thousands of soldiers on the field simultaneously. Then reality kicked in...

I wonder why they went for the current simplistic "player gets to move all his units" model. I understand they had little time to turn around after the real-time with pause thingy got canned, but the current implementation of tactical battles is the worst/naive system I can think of. Any argument in favor of the current implementation against a combat speed/initiative order à la HoMM?