emmagine

baldurs gate was not real time. There was an arbitrary time limit after taking an action before you could take another action. That action could be cast a spell, attack with your dagger, drink a potion, use an item, etc. The movement of your character was not tied to this "turn" which gave a much greater appearance of real time vs turn based. Starcraft is real time. as fast as you can select a unit, hit a hotkey, and target an area things happen. after a un

I do not think the idea of no penalty while defending would be good.. It turns your sovereign into a very abusable tool. A very powerful unit that doesn't actually die. You could attack enemy weak units, or just stick him on defense in your town, forcing a war of attrition upon your advancing far more powerful opponent that is entirely unrealistic. A few ideas to alleviate the concerns I have. When your sovereign dies, it takes a

I'm not familiar with the site you want us to use to post the dxdiag file. The game shut down after taking my sweet time about a game (several hours) and finally attacking one of the neighboring settlements. when I tried to attack what I think was his soverign, it just moved me into the same square. After that, I tried to move off of him and back on, and the game shut down throwing an "out of memory" error. In fact, it gave me two.

I'm currently studying to be a paramedic, after a career running my own business. I made enough to not have to do it anymore, and got out because of exactly these kind of headaches. It isn't just about having to blindly hire people, other things like how difficult it can be to fire someone once they are hired. And yep, you do drive a nice car, or in my case sack aside substantial amounts of money in order to retire at a young age. That isn't what stresses you out t

thre are a ton of ways to beat the scenario. rushing to dwarves and building a couple of those towers where the bear men come in, a wizards tower, and one guard tower fortified me from them just fine. Priests of krypta are bad to the bone. Particularly if you recruit them from the northern and south eastern temple plots, as there are lots of undead there for them to turn. the dwarves themselves are very tough. I did build one temple to agrela, but I didn't find

I always find the points of how similar our dna is to ___________ interesting. Heck, our DNA is 88% the same as a bananna.

I think that is where we have had a communication error. Yep auto generating tech trees is a much better way to put it. I never wanted the core techs to be hidden. They should be visable. The upgrade techs, and the fancy extras should be hidden. Core techs (fixed tree placement, visable.) - bowmen, calvery, farming, etc. Advanced techs (variable tree placement, hidden until unlocked.) - crossbowmen, heavy calvary, irrigation. Excentric techs (

I think a part of what I'd like to see in the research isn't quite making it through. I would not want my research to be "get a random tech". Instead, I finish researching long bows level 5 (my choice), and suddenly have an option for 25% range increase on long bows that is totally random. It doesn't sub the range increase in for what I already got. It just gives me an extra little side tech out of the blue that I could chose to research. Secondly, I'm researching shor

I agree with you on the time is money front. But not so sure where you are getting "notoriously unreliable". To my knowledge there has never been a non-morpg game that has undergone anywhere near this length of a beta, let alone a public one. Secondly, I cannot think of a single game that attempted to alter anything based on the qualities of your starting location. It would be a nightmare to code for sure. And no, you don't wind up with a no strategey at all ef

I was under impression that the difference was more in graphics for aquisition, and the real difference lay in the type of spells each sort had. deah = spells that cause death decay destruction etc. Life = spells that heal, buff defenses, resurrect, grow, and otherwise protect. Was I mistaken in that impression?

And I don't want to play a game where some guy wins because the RNG decides it likes him today. I can get that experience by rolling dice. With random spell research this is already going to be a problem. But the replayability it will bring to a single player experience will be huge. With the proposed 1 year beta, I would suspect there will be plenty of time to test the tech trees to the point where no one is going to get screw

I like the idea of a base line tech tree, that you can research "short bow" "claymores" "large axes" "crossbows" etc. Or in another branch perhaps "copper, bronze, steel" etc. Off of those tech trees could be the random techs, that modify their base components. "range increase for short bows" combined with a lucky "speciatly short bow training center" for example might have you utilizing a short bow long after your oponents are working x-bows, and never hav

Diminishing returns in gaming typically means each level of a skill gives you less benefit than the last. What you are describing KellenDunk, while technically accurate means every leveling system from every game I ever played had diminishing returns. takes 2x as much xp to get from level 3-4 as it did from level 1-2! So yes, this is a diminishing return for xp gained, but it is not a diminishing return of the level, or in this case skill.

You have a lot to read so I'll keep my comments short. My only concern with the timeline laid out, is how everything meshes. I think you might do better with a more complete product earlier in testing, and then a very long period for the last phase. Either way, it does sound as though you are pressed to meet your current timelines, and I think the community as a whole are just excited to be able to finally take part in the development, and see what you have so far. <p

master of magics combat resolution was actually very good. It produced very predictable results the vast majority of the time, while allowing for that one off chance to give you some hope that just MAYBE you might take that big nasty thing out with whatever you could throw at it in a dire situation (granted, the AI didn't offer enough of a fight to grant dire situations. but multi player it did)

haven't there been more recent ones where they showed a much more chaotic looking battle? or am I imagining it? If this is obviously the route they are going, I don't see the reason for the big debate? Saying that they get 8X the benefit is misleading. If you gave a great wyrm 8 +1 dmg buffs, it had a much more drastic effect than giving a squad of spearmen a single +1 buff.

I think you misunderstand the game mechanics of MoM. giving +1 atk to a squad of pikemen didn't give you +8 atk. It gave each figure +1 atk true. Each figure in a stack rolled to hit, and had a 30% chance to hit. modified by + hit modifiers, or - hit modifiers. Then as I recall, it's attack strength (swords) were rolled off vs the defenders strength (shields). It was not an attack made at the sum total of the attack of each individual figure, it was one attack pe

I don't think you'll see cookie cutter builds at all. I think the idea is, you will not have the same resources from one game to the next. One game you may be able to outfit an army with steel swords, the next..... you just don't have that option. Bows perhaps for your real damage, and clubs for infantry to keep them off your archers long enough to do the deed? That's not even adding magic into the mix. Since it doesn't look like you'll be making spell book pic

thats one of the points of elemental though, the same way it was in mom. Not all wizards buff equally. Some aren't going to be doing any buffs at all. What will be an optimal unit for you in one game, very well may not be in the next. If you don't have things that prompt charts to figure out what the best way to build a low cost ranged unit for your current build is, then you wind up with the problem that people are citing here. To put it in MoM terms, &n

I have to agree about the whole "don't stress about multi player" thing. It is one of the things I love about gal civ 2. I wouldn't want to be stuck as the Yor trying to fend off a Thalian rush in a medium sized map in gc2-t. Would I like there to be a multi player option? Absolutely. If I were playing against my 8 year old son, I'd just give him the Thalians, teach him their basic strat, and make a real challange of it :) But if they had taken the time to "ba