Archonsod

Found my first boat, but it seems impossible to disembark once you're on them :( Don't think the AI will use them since they're a goodie hut spawn.

Free companies is interesting, what I'd like to see is the ability to turn monsters/summons loose (at which point they become a neutral army). I remember you could have great fun in Alpha Centauri with mind worm units by sending a horde into the middle of another faction's territory then turn them loose in the hope they'd devastate the faction. Risk being you could end up with an ultra-powerful horde of highly experienced mindworm units on your doorstep, assuming of course they di

Part of the problem for me is that the heroes are split into adventuring types and governing types, but they both rely on the same way to get XP. So you're pretty much forced to drag an administrator along with your warrior to get him to level up. It would be nice if the governor hero types could get XP from actually governing rather than either having to wander off on adventures or sit in the adventurer's guild. It also makes little sense that killing a bunch of ogres m

[quote who="Sethai" reply="5" id="3077152"] But surely we can agree that a player who minds his own business, should not be attacked by monsters that he can't possibly defeat, even if he focused his entire economy of pumping out spearmen as quickly as possible (which is, given maintenance, not that easy to do). That these tough monsters "dither" around your territory is a red herring: they will eventually attack you. The "when" is just a matter of luck. [/quote] I thin

Heroes might be immortal, but since there seems to be a good chance of them picking up injuries when they fall in combat it's not that big an issue. Let your hero fall once too often and they'll (literally) be too crippled to be much use.

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="1" id="2995427"]I can't stand the idea of "warrior-monks" who chose to fight without weapons. It's not real world. Cant your warrior monks use staffs, spears or pullarms, and use no armor and have purchased advanced skills in dodging or avoidance and staff combat, or something. Punching and kicking just doesn't seem realistic to me. [/quote] Last time I checked people weren't capable of pulling fire fro

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="3" id="2995901"]Some land would be worth more than other of course, resources, rivers, passes, etc. I just hate Culture or Prestige. What the hell is that really? What is the real world equivalent to those? It doesn't seem realistic. I think the US produces a lot of "Culture", celebrities, movies, TV shows, but does that change our national borders? Does prestige? I don't think so. Wars do. Ap

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="2" id="2901956"] Used in a formula for spell-casting time, it would make a fine complement to Intelligence as a damage-modifier. Its original use in imbuing champions also seems like a suprerior tradeoff/constraint to mere mana maintenance for spell-casting champions. [/quote] I'd rather simply use the spells themselves to determine casting time, anything which makes the spell lists more interesting. Not sure on es

Yeah. I find the Steam overlay invaluable in New Vegas. Largely because I can read Gamefaqs without having to quit or minimise the game ;)

[quote quoting="post"] By the very nature of DLC, the content available in DLC must go down, meaning less bang for the buck. If only five hundred people buy the DLC @ $5.00 you will have (at most) 2,500 dollars to spend on its development. [/quote] Not unless you're getting a loan to pay for DLC development, no, you generally develop with the money you actually have and hope the returns justify it. If you can spend money you haven't got yet then I'd love to know which ba

Yep, you now have a global mana pool.

[quote who="cephalo" reply="9" id="2899677"] I totally agree. DLC like anything else has to be planned for. How do you not gimp the base game? [/quote] You don't have a base game, what you have is a modular game with each module costing separately. It's how you make it cheaper. For example, rather than sell a single game at $30, you split it up and charge for each component. For example, you could split the game into a single player and a multi player

[quote who="troglyte" reply="23" id="2893141"] I guess what I like about the ZOC is it keeps units from casually strolling past enemies to get into a flanking position. If there is a break in your line big enough for one unit to pass, do you really think the two on either side should let him past to get to your archers? I can agree it doesn't make as much sense to have AoO for moving out of ZOC, but it could be used to exploit in the same way as moving through. I also see it as a retreat

Realism is pointless. Turn based combat is in itself an abstraction so you're forced to abstract further. A better guiding idea would be what makes for a fun and interesting game. Particularly since it's supposed to be a war of magic .. @OP Good ideas. Only problematic one is terrain. I'd agree it should be more influential on the battle, the problem is it's a fine balance to strike. Making it central incurs a risk of a player losing a battl

[quote who="Supergulo" reply="28" id="2889650"] They invade, they murder, and most likely do other unspeakable things too.[/quote] Key thing to note there is that the lore is thus far presented entirely from the Kingdom perspective, thus when the Empires are attacking they're invading, murdering and looting; yet when the kingdoms attack they're merely liberating the land from tyranny. In terms of whether the Empires are actually evil it's no

Can't say I've ever been a fan of the old stand alone expansion thing. One of the points to the traditional expansion is you can use the resources already installed on the machine, which keeps it smaller, quicker to install and generally far preferable to having to install the whole damn game again. Plus it always makes the previous games seem pointless. Unless you're going to radically deviate from the original game (in which case surely what you have is a new game using the old setting/engi

I'd like to see more "rainbow" spells. At the moment the only spell that makes use of multiple shards is the mastery spell, which is a bit of a waste. At present, if you can grab more than one shard of a single type then you can pretty much not bother with spell books outside of that element, unless of course you intend to go for a magic victory. Although another idea borrowed shamelessly from Magic the Gathering would be to have elements which naturally combine. So you could ha

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="9" id="2846916"]I had a whole thread about it and another big argument about the incest. Don't start saying incest is bad, a lot of the forum trolls on here are for it, I assume because as basement dwelling troglodytes, the only contact with women near their own age is their sisters.[/quote] If you look at the OP's screenshot the family tree is sufficiently large that you would be marrying cousins - something Royalty is rather famous for after all.</

The problem is heroes are too powerful rather than the equipment, they're a viable military in their own right. It's too much like MoM, the only reason to train military units once you have a decent party of heroes is to act as garrisons. I think perhaps some kind of bonus to groups when attacking single figure units would be a solution. Heroes would still be a viable force in the early game, but once factions started hitting the group techs they'd be reduced to more of a supporting r

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="27" id="2845300"] Quoting TheProgress, reply 26 You've got to be kidding me. I figured that the population was split into male and female and that by choosing that trait we'd be able to build larger armies more quickly. I think there was a time when it was even considered that it could impact the growth of your population. But only considered very slightly. Why does it cost 1 if it's just cosmetic? Placeholder of something that was not

[quote who="Cerevox" reply="2" id="2845252"]Dude, its simple. You research everything. And then you get no new monsters because monsters don't spawn after turn 100ish, and like 2 new quests that no one bothers doing, and it reveals like a dozen new mines, all in enenmy territory. Or just ignore this entire section, because teching in anything else is far far more useful.[/quote] I dunno, I find the 2 - 3 new food sources you get incredibly handy. I just wish you could s

Yup, makes no sense to look at weapon balance without considering the actual cost of researching them. It takes a minimum two picks to get leather armour, whereas a spear is available after a single warfare tech. In this respect, the items are balanced when you can say a player with (X) picks from the tech tree has no inherent advantage over a player with the same number of picks, only situational ones. The other thing to consider is that the disparity will widen over time, since players are

[quote who="davidjc_af" reply="7" id="2845519"] Making positioning much more important. [/quote] The +% bonus various squares grant to their occupiers don't already do this?

A really easy way to have as much time as you want for any victory you want is to take a sovereign with the terraforming tech. Just turn your borders into a nice little moat and the AI won't ever bother you.

[quote who="Redwind85" reply="37" id="2844265"] but this also just made me thing - why on earth is all the metal in the world gone ? - fair enough that the world food supply has been wiped in a cataclysm - but that metal also managed to vanish ? [/quote] Surface deposits tend to vanish rapidly when near any advanced civilisation. Once they're gone you've got this highly laborious process of having to learn to mine, which includes such essential technological leaps