That 5000 character limit sure was annoying. I had already written my quest and when I pasted it, it was at -13587 characters. Pruning it was quite a job, but I suppose it's main point is still the same. Though it is a lot more unreadable and I had to cut almost all of my glorious fluff-text away. Oh well.
Congratulations and all that unacomn. Would be interesting to know the number of votes the winner(and everyone else for that matter) got. What was my own place? Maybe it'll be revealed. To brag a bit, this is actually the second Stardock contest where I have been part of the winners in. I was one of the winners in the Dark Avatar contest too, quite a while back. ;)
I don't quite understand the complaints. If anything, champions are far too powerful. The normal units can do nothing against them. For example, this is a high end champion: [url] http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jpnurmin/snathiChild.JPG [/url] This is a regular champion: [url] http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jpnurmin/powerfulkids.JP
[quote who="IROKONESS" reply="44" id="2645151"]I think this is playing with fire!!! Everything created by man will always be a sub par human. The word slave comes to mind. What of sentient beings. How long before their lives would be considered as such, or even be considered. Lord knows our poor little animals have a difficult time of it. I don't think human kind is ready. [/quote] Humankind will never be ready if all that is done is waiting. Cloning a
I would strongly advocate the cloning of Neanderthals. And other hominids for that matter. Not only would they give great scientific insight(as Demiansky said), but they would also provide a great spark for the ultimate discussion of what it means to be human or sapient. And perhaps from there, even sentients would get their rights. And even your basic Homo Sapiens would benefit from that. It could, of course, go very wrong, but because of that, there should be several world-wide inst
Having played the game through a few times, I can say that I find it quite glorious. But this is mostly because I'm very rarely affected by poor graphics, interface or such "pointless" things. What affect my enjoyment of the game are the story and how it mechanically works. Now, Alpha Protocol is average at best, mechanics wise. The stealth and combat aren't anything superb. The minigames aren't too exicting. But what makes the game so good to me, is precisely it's main sellin
The concept is indeed sound, but I fear that it'll be hard to come up with a meaningful(not tiresome) mechanic for it. If your units get morale penalties that accumulate, it sounds like you'll end up micromanaging the armies. As one army gets low morale, you send it home, and send another army to replace it, effectively still continuing the war. Unless the morale effects are global. But would that really work? If you are fighting against two nations, where one war is going really well, and th
Perhaps I'm too much of a humanist, as I was trying to rationalize my opinion with words, experiences and assumptions instead of hard data. I tried to explain why I felt it was a bad idea, but I obviously failed. Essentially I don't like the idea, because I feel that those who do not trade the parts for the stuff, will never be able to enjoy them. And enjoyment is the main thing the game is about, I think. If getting the parts is so unlikely that you get one part per 20 games, and you need mu
Everything is an opinion, especially here. That's why we are trying to see which opinion makes the most sense and why. Opinions are the basis of enjoyment. I will clarify on the "forced" part. It means: I don't want to play five billion games to enjoy building the Star Golem. This essentially forces me to play MP games where I must trade parts with others. Because otherwise I would never see that Star Golem. Simple as that.
Me as well.
Personally I love the idea the OP presented(very similiar ideas were mentioned in the other LGT(late-game-tedium) threads). As usual, there's a simple solution that most people would enjoy to this. Make it optional. A simple checkbox that allows you to have "victory point based ending" with a set time limit(say 300 turns), and a "concrete victory ending" that ends when you complete one of the "real" victory conditions. Though even if it doesn't make it to the final game,
Frankly, that sounds like a terrible idea to me. If a game(map) has one piece of some super-artifact, the same game should also have the other pieces(though not easily obtained perhaps). If a part of the game is robbed from me(yes, I did say robbed) because I prefer not to play multiplayer games or collect achievements or whatever, I would be quite incensed. The whole "collection" frenzy that has afflicted games these days is a very bad thing in my opinion. It detracts from the game i
You might also consider that these Wonders were actually part of the landscape itself. The great Earthblood-Well, from which magic and honey pours forth would be a place people would very likely build a city near to. Practically the city(or cities?) that are near enough to such a Natural Wonder, would gain the benefits from it, without building anything. Thus making them unique, and because you actually find them instead of building them, perhaps even a bit more likeable.
Why the decision to drop Wraiths and Magnars? Though I suppose that since the humans aren't too different, it'd be strange if the Fallen were.
Suppose the casual player chooses a premade faction and such, he doesn't need to know about the races. They just need to be under the surface. But when a player wishes to make his own faction, then they can fiddle with the race as well, with the customization generator thingie. I would love there to be more customization, especially regarding races. It would certainly make the game more fun.
To rationalize the use of gold early on in the setting, you might simply say that it has an inherent alchemical value as well, making it a useful trade good, because everyone can use it to do some minor things. That way it doesn't just have the abstract value a goverment gives it.
Civ1 had this mechanic. It always annoyed me, but now that I think about it, it is quite brilliant, since it forces you to attack forts you would otherwise just ignore. I'm all for any ideas that make battles at castles more frequent.
Food does indeed move magically from one city to another. Because it's MAGIC, caused by the Sovereign. Joking aside, I most certainly can accept any excuse if I get enjoyment out of it. The problem is, that if the excuse is flimsy, my enjoyment is not guaranteed. I'll reserve other thoughts until 1Z.
It pretty much depends on how much can happen in one turn, both with movement and production. If it's 1 month per turn, then I expect that things happen really slowly(Like Marathon on Civ). But that's only feasible if the turns themselves are short(probably because you get new stuff so rarely that you just press the turn button 9 times out of 10). A regular civ-game on normal speed might take some 350 turns. Supposing Elemetal had games as long(frankly, a supposition that isn't based on anyth
My greatest fear regarding the resources is that they are too plentiful in a sense, leading to a lack of specialization for the different nations. If you have an iron mine, but you aren't at war, you'll just stockpile the iron, trading it to other lands for horses as well. Then, when war approaches, you'll just field a large number of knights. Indeed, that every nation in the game would do the same. There wouldn't be a nation that has a huge amount of horses, but no iron, leading them to make
FFH is Fall From Heaven 2, a mod for Civilization 4. And there are dwarves and the like in Elemental. Just read the civilization descriptions. It even says "In another world, these people might be called dwarves." So while they aren't called Dwarves as such in elemental, for all intents and purposes, they are dwarves. Though I guess it might just be a placeholder description that's ironic, who knows. ;) But anyway, I agree that it sure would be nice if terrain suited an empire
While the concept sounds nice, I fear the implementation would be so difficult that it would be meaningless. Let's consider two ways you could handle it, the MOO2(really good) way and the MOO3(really bad) way. In MOO2, you had a very simple, but varied way the population affected things. You conquer the Klackon homeworld, which has 10 bugmen living there. The bugmen are good at producing things, so naturally you'd put them to work in the industry-line. You can send the bugmen
While I haven't played Rome: Total War, LGT is a huge problem in Total Wars overall. You just always press the auto-battle button, because the battles are quite meaningless, and frequent. You just want to conquer the allotted amount of cities to get over it, because every turn there's around 3 battles involving over a thousand people each, battles that ultimately mean little. Don't know if Rome handled it differently, but I hope Elemental won't turn into that. It's usually a problem i
[quote who="onomastikon" reply="26" id="2580181"]Thanks! Tiavals, I think both of those methods are good; I had suggested something like the "prestige" victory condition last year (On Victory Conditions), was thinking primarily of Star Chamber however, because I hadn't seen SI, about which I have heard mixed things. How do you like it? [/quote] Well, I love SI. It's a truly glorious game in multiplayer. Singleplayer isn't very good though, since the game is very heavily bas
Well, there's always the Total War method, which means that as long as a unit is garrisoned in a place, instead of roaming the field, it's upkeep is free. (The problem in total war was that it was only 4 units for a huge city, and 1 for a small one, making it pretty useless. Though I guess cheaper is good).