This has been beat to death, over and over, and SD has made it clear that they have a vision for what they want cities to do, and all the discussion in the world from us won't change that now. Just wait for B4.
Linked without further comment. http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/122/1223192p1.html
Beta, as in beta carotene? What do you have against orange, seanw3?
Snarky and uncalled for.... :) Sincerely, ~ Winnihym
I was thinking of precisely that, DBG; the point of this spell is to knock one competitor down that's going to go down anyway. I'm thinking the cost to do this has to be such that you've already won the game, it's now a matter of mopping up, and it's a fast, easy way to mop up. Alternatively, limits could be placed on it so that the deal could be no more than 1000 points difference, or the spell fails. You could force 1000 gold, or diplomacy point
Just a suggestion on a Sunday Morning: The spell Geis (geas): Cast on an opponent Channeler, forces the subject to accept any diplomacy deal offered that turn. Huge mana cost. After the spell wears off next turn, the subject has a -50% diplomacy shift towards the caster. This spell fails if the target is currently at war with you, or will not speak to you (due to low diplomacy rating).
I'm not sure how this came to be (legitimate preview or bootleg beta violation), but there's a gameplay preview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYp0ftWWAC8
An interesting point in here. Is population really a resource (ie, a number that grows with time as people come out of the wilderness to join me/others?) If that's the case, if I increase my recruiting rate, does that mean the other factions recruitment rate suffer (since it's a finite resource)? Does killing off a rival nation release all that population into a recruiting frenzy?
Watching the way Brad plays EFE has me wondering if we've given up on the idea of trying to control city spam. His AI does it (my last game had me taking over 20-25 small, poorly developed, and barely defended cities to win) and he himself does it. The first thing coming out of a newly built city in his video wasn't anything to encourage growth, production, or defense, it was...another pioneer. So, do we not hate city spam anymore?
One of the biggest issues with snaking is the cheesy tactic of using city snakes to teleport units. Insert them one tentacle, take them out a different one on the same turn. Snaking to resources I'm less concerned about, though it's still a little funky. So, maybe make a "city gate" tile that's buildable and takes up one tile on the map? You get one city gate for free with the city hub, but then you can only have troops enter/exit the city through city
Actually, Kalin's thing might work, or at least contains the seed of an idea. One of the neatest factions in FFH was the one that allowed your cities to be 3 tiles out, instead of 2, so you could have HUGE cities, but at a cost of how many you could have. Since we're also watching the faction differentiation discussion starting to form, this could be a good mechanic to implement. However, one of the things that would have to be figured out is what constitutes
Crux, I get it. In fact, if you look back at my posts from three years ago on this topic, I was an ardent defender of putting multiple tile cities out there, and argued strongly that there should be as much gameplay in planning your cities as in planning your armies moves and what armies you'll field. To do that, however, requires some interaction between tiles, so that you have a "guns or butter" like choice as you plan and build cities. It's become clear to me, ove
There's no gameplay mechanic for tile placement OTHER than to snake cities to rivers, forest, and special tiles. If you don't like that gameplay mechanic because you think it's gamey or cheesy, then get rid of the entire mechanic and go to one tile. Having "one tile around the city" doesn't do anything for gameplay, and one tile per level doesn't do anything either. Give me a big roman numeral I through V floating over the city when I hover over it,
9 tiles is actually the 8 tiles surrounding the city hub, at least from what I can see of the screens above. That's 4 subtiles per tile, or a total of 36 possible build points. That may still be too many to drive city specialization, I don't think I've built 36 independent improvements yet.
Update: Turning off all particle effects and setting the AI to normal (I was using the lowest setting, just to race through the tech tree unhindered to see what's what) made it possible to finish a game, 299 turns. Holy cow, Ceresa is a pain in the glutes. She had to have about 20 cities to my 4 starting cities. All of them small, poorly protected, and underdeveloped. When I started steamrolling, she sent armies after my (undefended) resource nodes, b
not who I thought it would be. :) http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/secrets-toyour-success/happiest-jobs-america-173044519.html
Hey, no worries, Seanw, but thanks for the concern; I've reported the crashes I had, but I find it unplayable because I can't get past around leather armor/2-3 medium size cities before the crashes hit. Its something endemic to the data, because the autosave files, when reloaded, crash in the same spot. I'm all for helping in the Beta Test, it's what I signed up for, not gameplay. There's little more that they can learn from me at this point,
Recall that for a small percentage of us, the game isn't stable enough to play, as of yet.
It's my sense, HF, that EFE has a much tighter design space to match Kael's vision. Releasing the design tools early means that the original vision is clouded upon release. You're an excellent, thoughtful mod designer, Heavenfall, and I love and appreciate your work. I'd be happy to let YOU have the mod tools. I just don't think that a general release to the user community is smart; there's too much potential for gameplay breaking mods to be out
I can see releasing it early to stress test the actual tool, but I don't think it's in SD's best interest to release mod tools early to actually create content.
There are relatively low level spells in the magic tree called "escape", that allow the caster and their army to retreat from combat, in exchange for some mana.
[quote who="relmich" reply="3" id="3106837"] I agree. The game is quite engrossing in its current state. In my opinion all it really needs is some AI work and bug tweaks. [/quote] I wouldn't know. :) As always, your call, Brad. Here to help.
No patch until at least the 22nd? Not even a stability patch for those (precious few, apparently) of us who can't play the game past the first hundred turns or so? I get that it's a beta, and it's not here for my entertainment, but I can't really help with the balancing/tweeking that seems to be the majority of the work now. I feel like the beta's passing me by.
MOM solved it with free moving enchanted roads. AOWSM solved it with teleport gates between cities (that the AI understood and could use, too).
Think about what 1% crash rate means, Progress. One time out of every hundred someone who owns the software tries to use it, it crashes. Let's say there's 100,000 units of a piece of software sold. Let's say each of those users tries to use the software 3 times a week (a really low number). At a one percent crash rate, that means there's 3000 crashes a week. If even one percent of those users get on a message board and complain about the