Valiant_Turtle

Elemental's approach to cities is somewhat unorthodox in the genre. I like it, but it throws several genre assumptions out the door. The more I think about it, the more questions it raises. I thought it might be good to really consider what issues and questions this raises, even if we don't have the answers. Most of the issues that I'm thinking of relate mostly to defense and just what is so special about that initial city square (if anything). Here are some of t

Diagonals also cause interesting problems for city walls, which are currently rather odd. Medieval era cities were typically much less squid/snakey than modern ones just because of the need for walls. It takes a lot less wall to enclose a square than it does a squid. It's also better for transportation and infrastructure reasons. If "across town" means a days walk then some services will be hard to get to. Elemental's approach to cities is pretty interesting, b

I'll certainly be playing multiplayer, if I get to play with/against the Frog and other devs so much the better.

You may be right. I believe the only thing that has been said for sure is that you current Essence limits how much mana you can use in battle. It sounds like it functions somewhat similar to magic skill in MoM. It may also be the limit on how much mana you can have, but my impression is that it's not the case. I know that originally we were going to have separate mana pools coming from each type of shard. We could see them in the first few betas as bars a

I'm not certain that there is a cap to the amount of mana you can have, at least not as it's being presented here. You get X mana each turn from your shards and can store far more than X mana, so it won't be a matter of restoring 100% of your mana every turn, you just gain X. Battle mana will probably draw from this, but my guess is that unless you keep a high essence and sling lots of spells you will generally have plenty of mana for fighting and it will only slightly delay your

According to what BoogieBac posted in the thread below they are hoping to support multiple maps (Shadow Plane, Underground or whatever) for mods at some point, although it may not be available at release. https://forums.elementalgame.com/371885

If other sovereigns can give me quests, then I should be able to give them quests as well, but why would I want to do that? If there is a valid reason for me to do that then I'm fine with it. If there isn't then I don't want AI sovs giving me quests just for the hell of it. If the AI can do it, then I should be able to do it as well, and have some sort of reason for doing so. I definitely don't like most of Krotho's quest ideas above. They are basically just th

I guess my fundamental concern is that I want player actions and choices to be more important and more interesting than whatever events and quests the RNG comes up with. If a story was written about a game after I play it I want the things that stand out to be things I initiated, not things the RNG inititiated. Jason (and Frodo) were characters in a story. I don't want to be a character in a story, I want to be the author of the story.

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="3" id="2485260"] Why should they be totally avoidable ? Would totally avoid fights ? Or succesion system ? Or magic ? [/quote] A quest is something that one chooses to do, not something that should be forced upon someone. I think the whole concept of someone "giving" you a quest could stand to be re-evaluated. Put cool stuff on the map and let me go see whats in it-if I want to. So far I haven't seen anything that makes the s

To be honest this seems to be pushing quests a bit too high up in importance for my comfort. This is fundamentally an empire building game with questing elements as one method to help build your empire. It should be entirely possible to completely ignore them if I want to. On the other hand, if I've invested heavily in Adventure techs I think I'd feel a bit cheated by a free-for-all quest that anyone can do. I have to admit that having "adventuring" techs seems

I didn't zoom out quite far enough, but the bottom of the area is completely blocked by mountains. With sea travel or a way to cross mountains this might be viable, but it's somewhat borderline. If I was planning on plaing pretty agressively it would be very secure, but in most cases I wouldn't think much of it. Map Random Seed: 1261097290 <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/vturtle/folders/Jing/media/6cd145b3-8545-4375-bae3-

While everything sounds great, this sounds the greatest: + LOTS MEMORY LEAK FIXES (Memory Inspector prev showed over 4000 leaks after starting up title screen and closing, now shows only 6) With luck I can finally remove most of the buckets I have below my computer to catch all the leaks and put my Rubber Boots back in the garage.

I agree as well. I'm fine with not having it in the game, but I'm really hoping we can mod it in. Can't do a MOM mod without it.

[quote who="Denryu" reply="76" id="2473118"] I think most of us get that, but there is now no building the ultimate fire resistant army. I totally get that all one type of damage is how Master of Magic did it, and I think that it was probably my favorite game of all time.[/quote] It doesn't mean at all that there is no building the ultimate fire resistant army. How many types of damage does D&D have? Primarily 1 (HP), although you can take stat damage or level dra

I'm not worried yet. I'm starting to see that they expect this game to be BIG. I'm not sure that trying to figure out resistances for thousands of units on multiple fronts versus multiple opponents is likely to be lots of fun (definitely a little fun, but I can see other approaches being more fun). With that many units in play, they are really putting the Strategy back in Turn Based Strategy. I am a little concerned with the lack of information regarding elemental ma

[quote quoting="post"] Limited Numbers This is tied into the concept of broad decisions. Players should never ever ever ever ever be able to fit everything they need into a single army. Forcing players to specialize encourages supporting forces, and allows for players and the ai to deploy forces designed specifically to counter their army types. Negative Example: HoMM (all of them) -- Everything you need can easily fit into a single force, and individual units

The creature models issue would require a lot of work, but I don't think there will be any other real problems there. I personally don't mind giving up traditional turn based combat at all, although I may be in the minority here. The other planes issues might be a big deal, we really don't know the limits of modding yet. It might be quite easy, it might be nearly impossible. I'm hoping it's not a big deal as I suspect that it would be desired by a lot of mods. Ho

The balance problem will definitely be difficult to overcome, especially since I believe all of us want to have a very expansive list and still have a reasonably balanced multiplayer. A possible solution to this would be to simply have several pre-defined sets of Sov options sorted into overall power level (low / medium / high) and any given multiplayer game could limit the maximum power level allowed. Ideally there would still be some options left free to choose under all circums

In some ways it's hard to answer this until we have a better idea what we will eventually be able to do with our Sov. Right now he's mostly just a very powerful unit that I think everyone keeps him on the move exploring and planting cities, unless we stop to heal up for a bit. I'm hoping that there will eventually be good reasons to keep him in a city. Perhaps some ritual magic or summoning will require him to be in the city. I'd like to see a small bonus to an

Here's the flip side of your argument: I see my enemy has a fire mage and expect that he will try to get in range to fireball my ice troll. I have my swordsmen move forward so they can intercept. Suddenly it's not my turn. Your fire mage walks up right around my swordsmen and fireballs my ice troll. It melts and I am sad. My swordsmen had plenty of move left and could have easily blocked your puny fire mage and sliced him into mage-steaks. Traditi

Here's a link that may help on the graphics front: Tom's Hardware Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart They maintain a reasonably complete list that helps when you are trying to decide which graphics cards are better than the other. It helps alot when comparing NVidia to ATI/AMD. If you are going to be gaming at all on this, then you really do want to focus on the graphics c

This game is crying out to have a collectors edition with a cloth map! Those were always the best loot to include in a special edition. I'm not sure what world the map would be, unless there is a special default map available. That worked okay for SMAC. It could even be the one they are currently playing as the Pen and Paper version in the forums.

[quote who="Scorpiana" reply="5" id="2461297"] I can't see how you'd find this too RNG dependant. Player Aaa might have those spiders close by, but player Bbb can expand more easily and get too unlock the 'Expansionist' research much sooner, or might have a Mine close by which player Aaa hasn't. If you want to make everything the same for each player, where is the fun in that?[/quote] I agree with this approach. It really depends on how powerful the unlocka

I just had to dig out my old Rolemaster Elemental Companion to see how many elements it includes: Lesser Basic Elements air cold light vibration water Greater Basic Elements gravity heat dark inertia earth Compound Elements electrical fire ice wind Super Compound

I do agree that this is a bit of a problem, but I'd rather see scouts come out sooner rather than create settlers. I don't think just giving the sov the ability to bring back the land is that great because unless I am very far afield I'm going to want to creep cities toward the resource rather than spend essence. Part of this is just personal preference as I think I'll be a bit of a stay at home sov myself. Another possible option would be an early game familiar of some ki