Pnakotus

There should also be the RPG-standard 'compare this item with the one I have currently equipped' tooltip, and allow the player to change hero in the shop without clicking out.

SotS UI is a UI so terrible turn length and required micro blows up once you leave the early games. The one thing SotS2 has to do is make a UI that is workable and decent; using it as an example of good UI is mindblowing. That said the Elemental UI has room for improvement. I'd like to add a prevalence of tiny, tiny buttons in ribbon-strips for no reason - when making a 'unit card', the pose and background selection is tiny and shows

RPS balancing is a different issue than randomness. Civ4's combat sucks because Civ combat always sucked because integer + random means who knows who's going to win. RPS balancing means you often have very contrived and forced counters (sometimes very hard counters) so that you 'need' xyz units to fight abc units or you lose. What they have in common is they're popular because they're conceptually easy. I'm hoping Elemental is less random and more logical than either

Now Stardock have said they count on people making custom races, which is good; custom races are great stuff. However, GalCiv2 has custom races, but the things like styles, avatars etc were added later and are quite hackish. The 'xyz custom race style' STILL previews as 'xyz base race it was based on', even years later. The race-select screen has an icon for every base race, and another for the last used custom race, with other buttons for loading races. Is

Martok, really? I'd been told the AI tends to suicidally attack you for no reason less, and will ocassionally even keep trade deals going for more than a few turns... which is a great leap forward if true. Sadly, it sounds like it might be an exaggeration. Kryo, players who use new or unusual strategies aren't cheating... they're sploiting or glitching. Properly managing your economy is 'cheese' and having the right units for the job is 'unbalanced'. &

In addition, it's worth remembering that any developer should pretty much ignore forums. Listening closely to 'fans' (ie, incredibly narrow sample of one type of possible customer) generally leads to crap. Thus, whatever morons in youtube comments are saying today, it's not really relevant. The mobility of different kinds of customer in the market is an interesting topic, especially since 'omg whut is teh best gamez' sort of thing you find on forums basically ignores 99% o

I'm very wary about this. First, the diplomacy in Sins is really bad and needs changing. That's fine. But 'diplomacy tech'? Diplomacy ships? Cluttering up the game more isn't necessary to fix the mission-based diplomacy (hell, allowing the player to accept missions or propose them would pretty much instantly fix the diplomacy as it stands). Yet Another Tech Tree and single-use ship doesn't sound like a good direction to go. Entrenchment was grea

Bah, the quote button doesn't work. :) No, I haven't played Empire (I got tired of buying broken CA games some time ago) but I have heard that the diplomacy is much improved. From what I hear it's still sub-GalCiv2, but it's a step in the right direction.

Do you mean the tactical battles or the strategic stuff? They're both horrible but in different ways; even on VH/VH you could defeat fullstack armies losing 9 guys if you knew what you were doing, because the AI never adapted to what you did (and the combat mechanics were broken, which didn't help). Every battle, same tactics, same result. The strategic stuff on the open map was pretty poor (you built a fortress where? you refused what offer?) but really comes back to CA try

For me, 'good AI' doesn't mean 'plays to strengths in fixed way' or 'follows preset gameplans' or 'has extra knowledge or resources'. 'Good AI' is that which is able to make sensible decisions, 'intelligent' decisions. Every half-baked RTS has AI that can beat humans, using prefab strategies, omniscience, bonuses, reaction advantages, mutlti-tasking, etc... but games like GalCiv2 have AI that make decisions - sometimes mistakes - in a reasonable way. I've never had a game of

I think it's safe to say that AC was simply very inefficient. As noted, many older games had very, very bad netcode, with poor error tolerance, high lag sensitivity, unnecessary data movement, etc. Modern games are often far superior even as they are more sophisticated. With regards the Stardock servers, I doubt I'd ever want to use them anyway.

Sacred 2 has a lot of pretty terrible elements; the horrible voiceacting (although I think the over-the-top Inquisitor and Shadow Warrior VA is pretty funny) and the nearly non-existent story that only bothers to tell the player whats happening around halfway through. It also has no respeccing and totally worthless tooltips; the 'customise your moves' idea is good, but when you have a choice between 'make it damage more' and 'make it damage more often', with no numbers, it's totally imp

Oh yeah, the costs should still increase in a linear way, so that to catch up to 'swords 27' is non-trivial. But rather than having endlessly diminishing returns of +0.0002 bonus, just use the difference as a modifier. This also would mean that getting swords 27 when everyone has armour 20 probably isn't worth it, as the bonus/cost would be bad at this point. Once everyone else reaches swords 24, it's more worth it.

This is probably a dumb question, but does adding it to your cart and 'buying' it (since it says it doesn't charge you until release) count as 'pre-ordering'? I pre-ordered Elemental in this way, but there is nothing to indicate I actually have a 'pre-order' (no preorder icon on Impulse, no key, no email, etc). For all I know I'll just get charged on release day and recieve no pre-order benefits. EDIT - It'd be pretty funny if people didn't get Majesty Gold

This is why the karma system is meaningless; someone can be lucid and recieve karma for good ideas, and then openly troll for days and... have the same karma. If you posted heavily, you could constantly alternate between being ignorant, obtuse or offensive and then reasonable and your karma would consistently go up. The posting in this thread is literally trolling, but his karma will not decrease, and next time someone likes one of his ideas it'll go up. :)

Can't you solve the scale problem by basing the bonus off the DIFFERENCE in techs? Instead of 'sword 27 = very slightly better than sword 26', 'sword 27 = effective vs armour 27, less effective against armour 28 and very effective against armour 26'. In this way, techs are like 'skills', and it doesn't matter how good your armour is - only how much BETTER it is than their weapons, for a floating bonus different for everyone's tech level without needing a system whereby it's nearly

Just post more. More posts = better chance of someone clicking +1 = more karma! Throw out more ideas at random, because if one of them is right everyone forgets the rest of them being wrong and gives you karma for your 'insight'. It's the forum game! :)

It shouldn't, given how the karma system works. :)

It seems pretty unlikely they're going to demand anything remotely near 1Mbit/s up. That'd probably cut off about 60% of the western world and there's really no reason they'd need it. The point regarding bad press is that there are many limits that already exist in PC gaming like memory, GPU, etc. Games still let you TRY, even if it sucks, and Stardock is even mad about scaling so that anyone can play their games. If Corridor Stroller 2: Shotgun Massacre had a popup

I wonder how much time would need to be spent on the AI in a gridless combat system to make it challenging or intelligent? The battles have always been the best part of TW games, but the AI has always sucked. We've all killed full-stack enemy armies, over and over, using the same tactics and lost seven guys (particularly bad in Rome). They left tactical combat aside in GalCiv2 because making the AI not suck would have been difficult and I imagine the MoM/HoMM style combat th

Don't forget QA and technical support that needs to be provided somewhere along the line. That said, PC developers porting to console often run into problems with the level of reliability required on console - it's okay to release a buggy mess and patch on PC, but this will not float on console. Sure, you can patch, but the market has a totally different expectation and a buggy game will lose sales in the critical first days/weeks.

Define one dimensional thinking, and then define 'five dimensional thinking' and how this leads to 'AI must cheat and get invincible armies and mega-bonuses to make GREAT GAMES because some nameless person on the internet says so based on nothing'. Clearly, '5th dimensional thinking' means no critical thought or logic at all! Back in the days of M.U.L.E., the 'game' was like Monopoly and about competing with your friends huddled around the same computer. That's a very diff

This thread needs more links to pirate software?

Frankly, regardless of whether someone wants MP or not, saying your game has 'MP... if you pay enough for your connection' is going to leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It's probably begging for negative press, too.

Yes, and they've sucked for 20 years. This is not relevant to your outrageous claim that you need absurd 'AI get giant invincible army when player is winning' to make a 'GREAT GAME'. Hell, CA games do that already with magical materialising rebel armies (that would take the player many turns to recruit) teleporting down from the Freedom Star. How FUN that is! But I guess since you're apparently a recognised troll and haven't addressed even a single point, this is par