Pnakotus

Top selling != is good, sorry. And if you think CA games have good diplomacy or AI, you're living on the moon. They're FAMOUS for their horrible AI. I'm not seeing how 'more difficulty levels' is relevant. Finer graduation of difficulty is a good thing, surely? The statement that you need to have cheating AI with handicaps to 'make GREAT GAMES' is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Got any, or just more tota

If the idea is that if you win enough, the AI get's random giant bonuses/advantages to level the playing field, the idea is bad. If the idea is 'copy the 'kill all players AI' from a Total War game', the idea is bad. If the idea is to punish players for winning, the idea is bad. GalCiv doesn't have this problem. Only a game with poor victory conditions (or stupid 'kill all players' diplomacy) could suffer from it. Whoops, that means CA games! :D I

Sadly 'scenes' doing 'releases' love to enforce their 'rules', regardless of whether it's relevant anymore. Hell, if you're doing bundling (which is a good application of archiving) there's no reason to apply any actual compression at all, or to use any given format over another. Windows supports zip natively, so if it's for ease of download, put your pile o' files into an uncompressed zip for single-file download and forget about it.

It's not really 'hardware', just 'performance'. People trying to play modern games on crap connections ARE really annoying (at least in latency/throughput critical games), but if they're saying '128kbit/s up means no multi for you' they're just going to piss a whole lot of people off.

Oh we've got a live one. I bet he checks hashes on everything he downloads too. OVERWHELMING RISK OF TRANSFER ERRORS! :) EDIT - By 'standarised way of sharing' he means 'the piracy SCENE enforces meaningless rules out of conformity'. Turns out hashfails on individual blocks are detected and discarded by the client, as already mentioned? :)

In a turn-based game, I really can't see upstream bandwidth being a big problem (beyond any mod element exchange system, which may be what they're talking about). Some games are latency or bandwidth critical, but I really can't see Elemental being a game like that.

Seriously. What's more annoying is that almost everything available is compressed in some way, which takes xyz seconds/minutes to decompress... and generally isn't actually compressed much at all. I downloaded the new vps for Freespace the other day and they're compressed... and some of them are seriously two meg smaller, yet it takes a step, an extra piece of software and time to decompress it. It's absurd. I keep an archive soft installed for this reason only; if Win

I'm just talking about the decision process, not the facts. After all, Starforce was able to scare/bully smaller developers into using their horrible DRM with horror stories of piracy and mirages of extra sales through this kind of reasoning. Regardless of whether piracy is really the big deal the overblown scare stories like to portray it as, the attention it's given is going to colour the actions of decision-makers. And if it's as easy as 'make it for console instead', esp

7zip is only low compatibility because it's relatively new; the 7zip format is better than the RAR format, and 7zip works with both. 7zip is also free. Being free means it's gaining penetration relatively fast - it took many years for rar to take off (and it never really pushed zip out of the space anyway). 7zip has also had a 64-bit version for some time, and is extraoridnarily lightweight. Not seeing any real reason to use WinRAR. We all used it back in the d

It's pretty easy to say that when you're not the one making million-dollar decisions between developing for a platform riddled with piracy (whether or not, and to what degree, this really reduces profit is another question) and one without. I agree that developing for the 360 is probably easier, but this is probably not the case for the PS3 (and I've heard many cross-platform titles run into problems porting to the PS3). The solid frameworks (fixed hardware, network infrastructure

Is there a reason to use WinRAR over 7zip?

Wait, is this really about how evil it is to move away from PC gaming when it comes to RETRO PLATFORM GAMES? Oh dear. Turns out more and more companies are focusing on console platforms. This is news, it's not a terrible curse to damn evil directors to hell. It shouldn't even be surprising. The argument that if you start developing games for platform abc means you can never choose to focus on xyz more profitable platform is childish. Aside from ni

The SE series - as has already been said - has some interesting ideas and a satisfying level of complexity... totally obfuscated behind a worthless UI. There are a few ideas worth taking - like complex treaties, actual trade etc, being better than GalCiv2's - but much of it is so different in tone to Stardock's games as to not really work. Of course Stardock can make effective UIs (even if you have to poke them about it) and doesn't ship unworkable bugfests (er, except De

You'd think 'raise/lower' and 'change climate' would be all that's necessary; you can't make a river just by dropping a bunch of water unless the terrain is cooperative.

Let's hope it lets you authenticate pre-exisiting installations and doesn't break win7 archive compatibility for no reason? My ISP loves the current 'lol redownload' philosophy, and I'm pleased to have half a dozen Impulse games running and authenticated on my machine that Impulse totally ignores and won't update. :) The new store is going to be a big improvement, but the real problem with the current store is less UI and more the servers involved. Each game shouldn't real

After the eighty-ninth time, I think the reaction would be 'ho hum, tower of time, let's see five archers and two guys with maces, oh look I won, how thrilling'. Once you start randomising the content and events around things, guess what? It's not story based anymore - it's INTERESTING instead. I would find seeing the same things regularly at all quite boring, and I have no interest in my games being hijacked into 'another amazing event around the Tower of Time' I do

That's an interesting sentiment - adding a toggle would be hard. You'd think making certain game elements optional would be pretty easy (aside from critical mechanics, anyway). I've often thought that in many cases - particularly 'realism' - many features should always be optional, to prevent driving away certain players. For instance, I wanted a really complex econ model, because I've hated simplistic crap for twenty years of Civilization. Obviously this isn't

Yeah, as a business they're not interested in selling more copies of their games...? Saying such things is ridiculous. They make neat games, but as others have said there's no reason why having crap graphics makes your game better, and a great game ten people play isn't a worthwhile investment of millions of dollars. There is a reason GalCiv2 outsold GalCiv1. :) I have to agree this isn't really applicable to Elemental, which alr

The implementation is certainly complete balls, but if MS didn't suffer from serious inter-division competition it'd be a good idea. They recently made it an external app (finally), but it doesn't actually let you do anything. They've got it so hopelessly wrong you've got to wonder where all that funding went. EDIT - Oh, sorry for not posting an unsupported one-liner.

And you're in the very small minority. People can still play StarCon2, but it's hardly making anyone any money. If you want to compete in the market, you need to meet market expectations. Talking about the tiny group of people who honestly don't care about graphics (or whatever) isn't really helping - unless the game wouldn't appeal to anyone else anyway, which is patently false. Stardock games are interesting and complex, but they're not glorified spreadsheets like (s

Shhh. Let's see if anyone asks for them to implement Games for Windows Live (which would actually be pretty cool) before we break out too much realism. I'm replacing 'steam overlay' with 'MSN' or 'AIM' and giggling at the idea that it should be implemented in game by other developers. Remember, steam is 'how you stay connected to your friends when in-game'! :D

It's even less appealing if the ridiculous pre-rendered silliness is full of things you can't actually do in the game.

Thankfully it will have an interface, unlike DF, so this possible detail will be usable by mortals. :) That is the kind of dynamic scripted stuff I certainly thought of earlier in development; I'm concerned that it'll be -too- specific to whatever story the campaign has, while I'd prefer sandbox to be totally divorced. I actually really hope the scripted stuff works as you describe, since Brad has been eager to get that kind of dynamic story event thing going for a while. &nbs

My concern was brought about by an more recent journal, the 'Elemental Story Update' on 6th August which you quoted above. Brad talks about the story (for campaign mode presumably) and then says that the 'scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into'. The scriptable content system is good (it drives the quests, world events, and other things I imagine) because it mak

Aesir Rising - I don't know how to link directly to dev journals (I imagine they're in the forum somewhere but the software really hates Chrome), but the journal dated July 23 (the Elemental FAQ) involves a reiteration of the statements I had in mind regarding units. Q: Will there be priests? A: We do not include pre-built units. What players choose to call their units is up to them. However, a channeler can cho