Archonsod

[quote who="Soletestament" reply="21" id="2709845"] While it makes little sense because our first unit literally is called peasant that they don't rise up.... [/quote] Erm, yes they did. The rising of the North against William, the Great Rising of 1381, the Peasant's War of 1525, the Maid of Orleans herself. And those are just peasant uprisings, there's numerous occasions when Lords rebelled against a conqueror or their rightful monarch with the aid of their peasantry. The thi

Yup, my party of archers with longbows regularly clocks 64 damage against most opponents. Alone they're lucky to do more than 3. From the Beta I think Elemental feels a bit more like Lords of Magic than MoM. Not that that's a bad thing by any means.

Alpha Protocol's achievements aren't persistent :P It all depends on how you get them. If you have to do something to earn the trait then it's an achievement, if I need to loot six dungeons to get the dungeon master trait then you can still call it an achievement.

[quote quoting="post"] You take a guy, give him the best armor and weapon you can afford and that is it. There is no trade off beyond money. [/quote] That can be a big difference. Particularly when you're looking at recruiting parties and larger groups; it's no good having the best weapon and armour if it's costing 900 gold to train a three man party. Plus of course you've got to decide between a two handed weapon for the additional attack and les

Birthright : The Gorgon's Alliance. Was a cruelly overlooked gem of a game. Oh, and the original Stronghold. Not the castle building sim of recent years, but the D&D kingdom management sim. That was fun.

They already do for the Empire, at least in a sense of Yithril bows only being available to one faction, demon swords another. Maybe they'll stick with that; Kingdoms get bonuses to things like research and resource income, Empires get special tech or equipment.

[quote who="Tridus" reply="27" id="2704647"] The system makes no sense in a sandbox. The whole point of a sandbox game is that starting it is hitting the global reset button from the last game. Carrying bonuses in doesn't do that at all.[/quote] Why do they need to persist over multiple games? In fact, why make them persist over multiple characters? It could add a nice touch to the dynasty system to make achievements earned by the current sovereign, and lost on tha

[quote who="Paradoxical" reply="4" id="2704600"] This seems very risky, and would give a magic focused player a very very dramatic economic advantage, meaning it would give them advantages in almost everything else over what a less magic-focused player could bring to the table. [/quote] They'd be trading that economic boost for being able to cast spells, in effect crippling a magic focused sovereign in order to do it. Every resource square you create is going to be anothe

[quote who="RaptorMenace" reply="3" id="2703833"]If that is true I haven't noticed any difference in world difficulty. I keep getting a ton of roaming bandit groups that easily destroy my cities even in the beginning of the game on novice.[/quote] I think that's because the default spawn rate is set far too high for them, although saying that last time I played (with the world difficulty on easy) it was a good hundred or so turns before I even saw a wandering NPC party (I actual

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="18" id="2703700"]NEVER should an achievement change any portion of how the game is played, or how strong/weak your position is. [/quote] Why not? As long as it's taken into account it can work well. Take a look at Alpha Protocol for example, achievements replace what most other games would describe as perks. A similar setup could work quite well in Elemental as a means of adding a little more RPG depth to the NPC area. A big gap

My pet peeve for the Xbox online style achievements are the easy ones. Or rather the 'awarded for playing the game normally' ones. The recent Total War games are a good example; you get an achievement for starting a game. The only real use for it is to go look at the Steam stats and note 10% of owners haven't received that achievement :)

[quote who="MooiNiet" reply="171" id="2703612"]It might have gotten lost in the thread so I will ask again: I pre-ordered the CE quite some time ago. I live in The Netherlands. How will it be shipped to me / when can I expect it (i.e 2 weeks after release or ....) Thx[/quote] IIRC they're using UPS. Shipping to the UK usually takes between 3 - 7 days with the standard UPS delivery, I can't see it taking that much longer to reach you (I have

I think the World difficulty controls the number, frequency and type of the wandering parties (bandits, spiders etc) while kingdom difficulty controls the factions.

Nah, I've got an intel and I still get them. Could be quad core though, I wonder if adjusting the affinity might help.

What about making spells take a certain number of actions, so a simple lightning strike takes one action while chain lightning could take three. You're then giving the player a tactical choice as well as having a mechanic to control the more powerful spells; do I shoot off three quick cantrips and try to take out the weaker bandits, or should I gamble on a slightly more powerful spell and hope it can take down the strongest bandit. To make it even more fun you could even theme t

Maybe use caravans instead of pioneers, so the resource is literally shipped into town. I don't mind it as is, but it would be nice to have some means of controlling border growth beyond building snake towns. I don't see city spam as a problem; given how quickly the cost to found new cities rises after town five I generally wait until someone else sticks a city nearby and then conquer it.

How about a starting spell / ability which deducts one or two essence points to create a gold mine, iron mine, horses/wargs or fertile land. Perhaps with more powerful versions available with magical research (i.e. at level 2 you can create libraries for 4 essence, and perhaps a level 3 which lets you generate wheat or even shards for 6 essence). It would be a neat way to overcome the vagaries of the random maps to some extent, like when it sticks you on an island with a single

I'm already wasting more time playing Beta 4 than anything else. To be honest if they just fixed the memory leak I'd be happy with it as is :)

Not strictly true. You get a medal rating (gold - bronze) depending on the length it takes you to finish the battle. Earning gold in some battles unlocks bonus missions on the campaign map. You don't fail for going over the time limit (in fact you can take as long as you want), and you can always go back and re-fight a battle to unlock the bonus mission (which is usually a necessity, since during the campaign you'll want to search the map thoroughly for as much booty as you can grab, once you

Have a couple from this morning, in the latest one the game had been going on for two hours so it was a few hundred turns in, and starting to get somewhat unresponsive. Vista 32. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9636002/Elemental%20Debugs.rar I think it might be the garbage collection not working. 9/10 if I quit in the middle of a game and then try to start a new one I get an appcrash error, which I suspect is down to resources not being released somewhere

[quote who="Reianor3" reply="19" id="2682041"]Is there a chance you can work on getting Tactical battles go really fast? There's a problem... Tactical combat is nice and all... as long as you're playing alone. In MP that might be a problem. And while auto-resolve is an option, tactical spells need tactical combat... [/quote] It'd only be a problem if there's nothing else you can do while waiting for them to finish. As long as you ca

[quote who="ddd888" reply="29" id="2682693"] the concern was abot a lvl 1 using a "high" spell to kill a lvl 10 [/quote] As long as the same spell kills a level 100 character when cast by a level 10 that would be fine. It's more to do with progression than ability though; spells currently scale on int so we have more effective spells for higher levels if you increase int; of course if you dump everything into int then you'll be just as vulnerable as you were at level 1; whic

Architectural themes would be nice. Rather than have everyone looking identical, you could have a list of four or so different themes to apply to a faction which would alter the appearance of buildings. So for example a Classical theme which has a lot of columns, statues etc, or a Desert theme which has minarets, arches and a general Arabic flavour. Adaptable buildings would be nice too. Ditch the four tile housing improvements for example, and just have a single "Resid

As I understand it the Sovereigns are imbued with magic power, but not necessarily proficient wizards. Hence why it costs essence to restore the land and not magic points; the sovereign is sacrificing part of their power to restore the land rather than casting an actual spell as such.

[quote who="cephalo" reply="26" id="2621796"] What do I get from Steam? I'm sure that Civ 5 will have 'Achievements'. This so that after a game of Civ, I can quickly verify that I am not history's greatest emporer, but in fact well below average. That is so fuuuunnn!!! [/quote] Have you seen the Steam achievements games are using lately? I managed to complete around 50% of Napoleon by playing the game normally. Admittedly, given CA's quality control of late perhaps having an achi