Sethai

confusingly, your combat speed is the size of your AP pool rather than action cost. the whole system will be changed soon anyway though.

awesome guys. this is just what the game needed: a separation of the ideas of weapon role (technology) and quality (magic). it's pretty much how i would have done it. like someone mentioned, i would have preferred the emphasis to be placed on weapon reach and turning abilities rather than damage types (ie, spears get first strike against enemies in front, but can't counter attack units attacking from the flanks), but that's largely minor. the damage thing seems like an attempt to

[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="22" id="2912599"] I'd much prefer a tactical squad-based strategy game. [/quote] yes, that's why i'd lean towards a baldur's gate or nwn2 style game. stardock will never be able to make the next fallout or oblivion anyway. hopefully they can do this without imposing rigid class systems on characters. nwn2 is a good example of how you can do this (with multiclassing and prestige classes, it is effectively classless in al

it's just a provisional date. what is more encouraging is that he is simply talking about the books more in his blogs. i do agree there is a feat of it going the way of the wheel of time. i actually enjoyed that until heart of winter. but even the last book, although it fealt far from reaching a conclusion, still had great character development and lots of new, unexpected and important things going on.

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="18" id="2912179"]What? I hardly ever see any Western RPGs out any more. [/quote] yeah, you've basically got the bioware games, which are now highly linear and the bethesda rpgs which are first person (not everyone's taste) and pretty much force you to become a one man jack of all trades. both are highly consolized, heavily focused on production values and have very little depth to their character development systems. even dragon age

[quote who="Rebell44" reply="340" id="2911851"] 1. People (users) would vote themself money - just look at Greek government (and USA is getting close to that situation with their 1.7 T$ deficits). This works very poorly (from PC gamers perspective) for most gaming related public companies - their decisions are mostly short term based - for example EA, Ubisoft, Activision etc. 2. Who has billions $ to buy Steam from Valve?[/quote] point 1... first i simply fe

[quote who="unacomn" reply="26" id="2911412"]Actually you can point your ship at a planet and go there, but the distance is very big in space, so they use jump gates. In X2 I've crashed my Argon Discoverer into Argon Prime(the planet), even with SETA it took a long time to get to it, and all I did was burn up and explode in the atmosphere. Travel between systems without jump gates, even with maximum SETA, could take months in real time, so count yourself fortunate they have jumpgate and j

i've had a lot of thoughts myself recently, given that most of the other games out there aren't exactly what i want. i'm putting this as a post so as not to distract from the premise of the OP. as much as i like elemental's art style, the story doesn't grab me much. at best it seems to be traditional high fantasy but less recognisable elements like elves and orcs, and more fallen and umberdroths. it works great for elemental as a device (making a load of different

if anyone is interested, i have created a thread to discuss the idea of a stardock rpg (and by association modern RPGs generally) in the pc gaming general forum https://forums.elementalgame.com/406844

so, today's elemental blog post contained another subtle reference to the idea that stardock might be making an RPG, or planning to make one. personally i think it's a great idea; there are few studios putting out great WRPGs these days, but sales are still high, so it seems like demand exceeds supply. and those that are coming are being increasingly consolised, or have the joy of creation stripped out in the name of streamlining. i personally don't consider choosing betwe

there's nothing wrong with monopoly in the name of convenience if that monopoly is accountable and doesn't act as an obstacle. some people call it standardisation. the DVD, CD and BlueRay are monopolies, as is the shape of a power socket. it would be chaos without them. what is needed is to make steam independent of any given developer or publisher. i guess what i'm talking about is a public movement for gamers to buy steam off of valve and have it's business run

what does the rebalance mod do? does it fix the annoying way that all the factions have the same three ships, only slightly more powerful all round than the previous faction?

for a sandbox game that is supposedly about freedom, i think it's pretty lame not being able to simply point your ship at a planet and just go there, rather than having to use gates to jump from one predefined situation to another.

largely, i agree with crass_monkey. in sheer technical terms, elemental is as graphically powerful as it needs to be. strategy games don't need 10 billion poly models. even huge budget games like The Old Republic have realised that it is not always worth pushing the envelope any more. but i do think there are good arguments for questioning the dogma that everything that isn't an idie or retro tital should be sold at $50 (£30 over here). if a friend had asked me, immediat

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="1" id="2909959"]Yes, it gives environment bonus/penalty.[/quote] to what?

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="74" id="2907663"] I will say that sovereign customization is an exception to this and I do want players spending a lot of pained time trying to pick between a bunch of cool abilities, and unable to pick them all. But that topic will be covered on another day.[/quote] that's fair enough and i can see your line of reasoning. i think it is possible to avoid a bewildering array of choices without resorting to randomisation, but i won't press the

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="66" id="2907458"] I don't know that I want a player mapping out one units trait progression so precisely. [/quote] i don't mean to sound impertinent, but why? some players (not me) just love to game the system. the old neverwinter nights boards were full of impassioned debate over how to build the perfect archer. randomising traits won't stop them from doing this, it will just slow them down a little and annoy them. better just

ooh, this is good. i'm intrigued by the random element, but it could work. balance isn't everything in rpgs, but choices need to be competetive with each other and it's better to do that by making them balanced enough that i can let my heart decide. randomising to avoid that balance just seems like a cop out. if you want to have some more powerful traits then that's fine, but you'd do better limiting them with trees, quests, buildings and achievements rather than the crude tool of randomisati

there is a spell that can turn cliff into beach if you don't have any already.

[quote who="joasoze" reply="11" id="2904739"] Quoting AlLanMandragoran, reply 8I think a cross-tree dependency might work wonders, i.e. a player can't rush all armor techs without requirements in other trees. Just an opinion. Doesnt this just force you through a longer chain at the start to get better weapons. Now you need a few more things to get better stuff, but you still have to go there to compete. [/quote] exactly; you're not making the trees more b

agree with both.

[quote who="xaltotun" reply="7" id="2904660"] 3. The ability to craft magic items. [/quote] on a related note, how difficult would it be to add a "Craft" button to the merchant screen, that allows you to buy things for your sovereigns using resources instead of gold? it would then be very simple to add magic item crafting recipes to the store - these would essentially be items you could only buy with resources (including midnight stones or whatever). <p

@Dsraider, i would really love to see the maritime side of the game get some love, but there's so much cool stuff that can be done there (as you mentioned) that i think it's better left to an expansion, and done altogether (and really well), rather than in drips and drabs in patches. too many unbalanced, unintegrated mechanics in the game already.

i would really like some more of the spells to be put (back?) in. as essential as all the other stuff is, i'm starting to get bored seeing all the same stuff over and over again. what happened to the fire giants and elementals i could summon? i can't seem to find them anymore. in my last game i actually managed to research every spell in the game i wanted by the midgame, using only the research from my arcane temple (ie, no scholar buildings). some more quests would help too. 4 man mi

it's actually incredible how quickly this game goes from impossible to pushover once you grasp these basics. get food, grow your populations, build lots of studies, rush food, housing, equipment and party techs. game won. i think that says an interesting thing about this game. i'm not sure if it's even a matter of "poor design," or anything like that. the other tech trees are not that bad and have some very cool (and powerful) stuff. the problem is more that the warfare and civics tre