Winnihym

I'm pretty sure seanw3 was joking. No one currently has the beta other than Stardockians.

I'm not a modder, code is not my language. I don't think I can contribute to the community there. I enjoy, and would love to contribute to the community through designing new unit figures (although not the stats; that's the job of a good modder like Heavenfall). I don't have access to Maya, however, and I doubt that I ever will, given its pricetag. I've learned Blender, though, and it's a great powerful program that has a lot of community suppor

In all the things that make a game immersive and great, I'm sure this is a small factor. But as I read the second book of the Game of Thrones, I'm struck by how important the names of places are; the Trident, the Wall, the Neck. Locations on a map that gives a sense of history and continuation to the world. When EWOM was in its infancy, one of the things that was discussed was getting to label the cloth map with such things, so that geographical places could have nam

You kids and your fancy color graphics and 3 FPS. In my day, we had to trick the screen into giving us green and red by only lighting up every other pixel. Which we did with "peek" and "poke" statements. The screen updated once a minute. And we were happy, goddamit!

Sorry, seanw, you're right. In addition, I'd like to compliment the letters "Q", "Z", and sometimes "Y". I'd also like to compliment Silvio Berlusconi for my new favorite quote of all time. When asked if he was faithful to his wife, he replied, "I'm often faithful to my wife." I'd like to compliment the complement of people who work at Stardock. And Homophones.

I'll second Steven's comment above. All of Stardock's folks have been genuinely good, mature, and helpful people who've been unbelievably gracious with their time and their efforts towards making the best game they know how to make. I'm optimistic about having Kael and Jon working together, and I think the design and function of Fallen Enchantress looks great so far, I'm also excited about the immersion that will come from having a good fiction author full

Hunh. It seems to me that Stardock is pretty much running a dark humor smear campaign against their own product already. If "it will suck and give you cancer" isn't bad press, then I can't see how "it will be like Elemental" can be considered bad press. Yes, I know they're saying it tongue in cheek.

Just like in D&D; a death (and resurrection) costs 1 point in constitution; or one level. :)

What I proposed before for rebellion I still stand behind. We are looking for ways to blunt the ability to keep SODs together and moving within an enemy's lands, and I think needing to break it up to provide garrisoning is a good one. My money's on the possibility that FB was able to steamroll because he left every city he took almost completely undefended, and moved his SOD completely intact from one city to the next. If he had to leave half of it behind for a

Depending on how far down the line the implementation is at this point, you could have a mechanic that the city is "in rebellion" for a number of turns equal to some equation based on population, it produces nothing. Instead, it takes a certain number of occupying units (based, again, on the population of the invaded city) just to maintain order. If that city is attacked again (by a liberating force), the occupying force would have a certain number of units in the army removed fro

Question was, how did you do that? Did you have a bigger army? Better balanced army? AI left cities/resources undefended? How well were the cities developed? How advanced was the AI tech? Magic deployed to better ends? When you play a better player in chess, you figure out what the other player did right against you, and then try to emulate that the next game?

The system Derek outlined sounds very similar to Master of Magic's economy. Each city has farmers, workers, and rebels. Each farmer can produce 2 food, and maybe 0.5 production. Workers produce no food and 2 production. Rebels produce nothing, but consume food. Each person consumes one food, rebel or not. So, for a city size of 10, you'd need 5 farmers (barring any bonuses). The other 5 could be workers, so this city could (in theory) produce

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a great example of how spatial reasoning skills, honed in 3D games, was applied to a real world problem, with excellent results... http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle-161920724.html

Hunh. I didn't know he was one o' them poisonous, spitting frogs.

One of the things to manage growth instead of having the decreasing returns with increasing # cities is to let us set growth by setting additional farmers over the minimum number needed to feed your population and armies. In MOM, this excess went to gold, at a rate of 1 food for 1 gold. Here, it could go to increasing growth. Since small cities won't have a lot of excess food (or will kill their production if they do), it's a strategic choice to focus on growth over

[quote who="Jarod Silverstar" reply="11" id="2994634"]Population is local and a city’s population is broken into Farmers, Workers and Rebels (we may change the name for this last one, Dissidents? Angry Hobos?). Tempted to say Tea Partiers, but maybe you should just go with Slackers. Then again, HORCon is an idea. Habitually Offended Resource Consumers. Though I am sure somebody can come up with a better acronym. p/s: Food And Mate

Thinking about it a little more, this is also (unsurprisingly) a little like MOO2; farmers, workers, scientists. Any thoughts of breaking the populace into 3 categories, instead of two? How does this mechanic feed research? In MOM, that came essentially from nodes and buildings; is there a similar mechanic here? It might be fun to have farmers/workers/researchers/angry hobos, and then split researchers into mundane (tech tree) and magical (spells).

This is really encouraging; I like the farmers/workers/rebels thing from MOM a lot; great mechanic, and I like that terrain locally matters initially, but won't be the driver for growth, like it is in Civ. It keeps us out of the whole "workers/improvements" mechanic, which is good to see. I love the idea of having to take population to make an army; it was one of the things MOM missed, and provides a great additional mechanic. I'm interested; if I build a unit in t

From where I stand, interesting combat starts at interesting choices for unit design. And interesting choices for unit design starts at interesting choices of city planning, which arise from interesting, flexible choices in economy planning, which arises from interesting, diverse, unique technical and magical research trees. One faction should be allowed to research "religion". That lets them build a church, which prohibits slavery as a technology from being available, whiic

[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="245" id="2976847"] Quoting Souls-Stream, reply 243 Amen ! I hope they're really listening to the kind of stuff we want to see and that they will come back to us with very good news. I'm such in a hurry to read what they will say in their next news and what they think of our comments and how they will decide to modify the game accordingly. I don't really want news about the game yet, I&#

Okay, Frogboy, fair enough, I know that the real resource limit is time to implement design, and time to refine engine. There was a great post over on the escapist about this very subject this weekend by the good folks at Extra Credits. Out of curiousity, how old is the Kumquat engine now?

@Campaigner: Well, depending on your definition, you've either called me the Pilot's Operating Handbook (POH), the partial concentration of hydroxide ions (pOH), or a sound of disgust or disbelief (Poh!). Or, a misspelling of Pooh. A. A. Milne would have your guts for garters... :) Winnihym's been my only online moniker for almost 2 decades now; I picked it when I was in the Everquest. They Winnihym were the wild, intelligent horses of

@Campaigner: If you haven't found it, I recommend Master of Magic 2.0, a code rework by Aureus in 2008. He took away most of the worst abuses and imbalances (including my beloved, precious flying invisible warships, the bastard). Overall, it's a much better game, and the AI now handles things much better (which he handled mostly by letting all settlers be water walkers). You can still abuse the AI, but it's much, much harder now at the hard and impossible

I've had the same feelings, Das; I'm sympathetic. At this point, I think the radio silence we're seeing from Stardock is in preparation for PAX in a few weeks, I hope we'll see more after that. I think that's also why they rushed out 1.3; to get Brad off WOM and designing AI for FE. At this point, FE will be the thing that either marks Stardock as an actual game company, or if they're just a software company who managed to be a one hit wonder

We're still facing the problem of wanting to be an air wizard, making picks in that area, and not finding any air shards near you. Since there is now at least a mechanism (as you describe) for changing one shard into another, is there a possibility that we can morph the elemental shards like the life/death shards? Maybe through quest, or having to be attached to a city, or some other mechanism? There is a good array of spells, but I was struck, again, by the similarity