LOLCHRIST

The technology in Spore took a lot of time, money, and manpower. I'm sure they can achieve a lot, because the creator in Galciv 2 worked well, but I wouldn't expect them to replicate Spore's astonishing level of customization. Although imagine your Spore creatures in fantasy game. Maybe I shall have to make a Bisnapper faction: twin jawed, carnivorous wasp-ostritch thingies. I hope the scaling will allow for races as a whole to be on different scales: giants being swarmed by f

I think we may have Windows 7 by the time Elemental comes out. I am using Vista 64, and have not had problems with old games. I have however had a couple of problems with not being able to find drivers for some devices. I was able to find alternative drivers for my wireless and bluetooth adapters, but not for my digital TV tuner (thanks a lot Nebule Electronics).

Settler rushes a must? Really? I usually like to start with a work boat.

Sounds good. I am wondering, at what point are the modding / community sharing tools going to be released? I think it would be excellent if there were already a functioning mod community come launch time.

Regarding the diplomacy system, I know Galciv II (sensibly) borrowed from it, but the Civ IV system is still the best one I've seen. The way civilizations group into factions based on religion is great, and really keeps the game alive: you may be the strongest civilization, but if your alliances are too poor you could still get overwhelmed. The transparent overlay is also very useful, especially with scores so you can see who is powerful. There've been a few Dwarf Fortress mentions on

I second that. All the scaling will be for naught if your dragons don't have armies of infantrymen to trample over.

I think it may be a bit difficult. Weather is probably something you want to animate in real time, but the game is turn-based. So, it could be a bit jarring when the weather changes.

It is fairly common practice for pre-orders to be discounted, since you know you've got this quantity of sales already in the bag that you don't have to worry about. Then again, there's still the discount coupon from the Stardock company report. Which comes to, sure enough, $5.

Will there be the battle to take control of the nodes? That was one of the more fun parts of Master of Magic, I thought. An early opportunity to have some fun against phantom beasts and gorgons and the like. Actually, I always thought it would be fun to be able to recruit an appropriate elemental garrison for a node once you'd captured it.

For now, copy your text, refresh the page, paste it back into the box and it should work then.

I loved flooding the world in Alpha Centauri. I guess it could start as an effect restricted to your territory, but there could be a more expensive way to make it start spreading out. On a related note, Stardock's races all appear to be land based. I'd love to have some option to build, fight and explore stuff underwater, even if the specifics are something we have to mod in. Also, building inside mountains, so I can make some sort of hellish tribute to D

Ow, the exchange rate, it burrrnnnsss usss. Pre-ordered, but had to settle for the digital download only.

I am wondering, if I ordered the boxed version and then moved house, would I be able to change the address for my order?

Might be nice to have some collaborative community races going on.

It's a good idea. I'm not an artistic type, but if there were some opportunity to get some creative writing in there I might go for it, and I suspect plenty of others would be keen as well.

Sega Megadrive games were £35-40 I think, but I never could get my parents to buy me one. Instead, a Commodore 64 with a bazillion games was acquired second hand. When I got a PC a couple of years after that, games were £30, then very briefly pushing up to £35. Now I buy online, they're mostly £25.

I like the art direction too. I like the fact that we can call it an art direction. Stylized beats realistic for computer games in my opinion. One problem I often have with old games is that you can't actually make anything out, but this varies from game to game depending on the quality of the art much more than the engine. Possibly also the colour blindness issue. There are even some modern games where I can't really see stuff (like people in COD4...). Anyway, it looks clean, colourf