Kuloth

Ohhh... Dammit, this game keeps costing me pants.

Posting this in general because it's not really a Bug report (which is what you want in the beta forum) or a new idea. So aside from the stability problems and the obvious fact that 90% of the gameplay isn't implemented yet, I'm afraid the beta completely fails in its attempt to be Not Fun. I have thoroughly enjoyed playing it! Which is ludicrous, it's very broken and there's not much to do, but it's abundantly clear to me that we're onto something good here. Things I

Have noted a lot of bugs in the beta, ALL of which have been reported. However, I can add that the game appears to have at least one memory leak. On loading and starting a game memory usage begins a steady slide up to 1GB or more after about an hour of play. At the moment there are enough crash bugs that this isn't such a big problem, but once those are sorted we're going to hit the wall hard and fast on memory usage, IIRC XP32 will crash out at 2GB... I don't have much in the

Hehe, great birthday present for me (it's Sep 18 in Australia now), thanks Stardock! Unfortunately I will be busy partying like an idiot tonight so wont get any testing done until tomorrow :(

That's REALLY coming along nicely :)

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="5" id="2365044"] Iirc, neither MoM or MoO1 had race customization at all ... but I know what you meant, cool Seriously, I can't wait to get the faction customization in. The plan ATM is to give the player X 'customization points' that can be spend on the 3 major parts of your faction: the sovereign's stats, the civilizations stats, and your magical preferences. You can imagine the HUGE range of possibilities with such a system...it's going to be nuts

Of the three, I prefer soft 75, is there a soft 50 option? ;) I do notice the details change between the pictures (taken over different times) and perfectly identical frames would be a better comparison. I like the feel of these images. From this far out the art style doesn't seem so "nerf" to me as some of the other images. It looks a little more serious and with the fog, kinda foreboding - good. Regards, Kul

In all honesty neither particularly grabs me. I've never been a fan of the "artistic" look over the "realistic" look, especially these days, but it doesn't matter much as graphics are about 5% of the reason I buy a game. It's also pretty clear that this is an experimental stage of the engine (the lighting effects remind me of playing around with direct3d myself years ago) and I'll be quite interested to see how much improved the final product is. I loved Vanguard's attempt to go for t

To take it to an extreme, build castle design into it ala the ancient "Castles" game. Or to be more reasonable, I love the modular upgrades thing, and I like the possibility that turtling could become a viable strategy to some extent. After all, fortresses had massive strategic significance in medieval times.

Having spent many months in the Vanguard beta and watched a whole series of great ideas, ranging from promising to outright brilliant, be either watered down to nonexistence or rendered useless by the tragically unstable and underperforming game engine, I'd say a Stardock beta sounds like heaven. Hell, watching the game *release* with the stability and performance problems still in the engine, sell 220,000 copies and then the playerbase shrink to 35k in a few months... THAT was agony.

Good. Throw in separate training and research for units for increasing sight radius and for decreasing your detection radius (stealth/sneakiness) and you're in business. Watchtowers on top of mountains seeing furhter? Cool. Scout units perched on hills in enemy territory? I love it.

I have played MOM on my 30" dell. It looks like a fingerpainting - hilarious :) Also hilarious is that even with gigantic pixels and ancient technology, it competes handily gameplay wise with a lot of modern stuff. And while I'm here... I didn't make it into the alpha either it seems. Disappointing, but not very. My input is likely to be most useful (if at all) when Tactical combat is in and we can see how the strategic and tactical layers of the game interact. <

I think start with two dozen pre-made ones but have a balanced system for creating more and leave it to the players to create more. I will likely create several in my first game, backstory and all if there's an interface to do it.

Syntactically yes, but if supply is in, why not directly effect supply rather than have some arbitrary "command points" and hard limits system? Artificial limits are less immersive. I'm all for commanders who have no training or experience with large armies receiving penalties while commanding them though, and/or for commanders to have a wider radius and higher strength of +morale effect on the battle field as their experience goes up etc.

I agree, and already discussed it, many months ago :) https://forums.elementalgame.com/332690 See reply 6 https://forums.elementalgame.com/333849

Yes. More dedicated development time with player feedback and the flexibility to change large areas of code without the playerbase whining when you break something? Priceless. Being able to try crazy ideas out, and not just hit base-levels for complexity for tactics and strategy but see how far you can push it... over a period of months of development with player feedback? Awesome. Absolutely go for it! I would love to spend a year in Beta, the end result I'm certain w

I use Zalman coolers, on the lowest setting they're inaudible and have excellent cooling performance. If I recall they have a few models that cover your CPU and socket. http://www.zalman.com/

I'm guessing later today. Of course I'm in Australia so later today could well mean the 25th or the 26th, depending on how many kangaroos I'm riding. I just hope I'm in it... knowing it's going on without me will drive me... slowly... insane...

Ah, if only the Vanguard engine team had mastered LOD and a few other old technologies (threading, background loading anyone?) the MMO landscape could well be very different. It's unsurprising that stardock understand the impotance of these technologies.

I must admit I used to dream about a game where you start as one person and form or take over a kingdom and then it switches to a whole new level of play. I like this idea a lot. It was actually really engrossing in hinterland to be developing my character, my party and my town all at once while exploring the countryside and adventuring... this sounds like the massively scaled up Nth degree version of that, and quite frankly bring it on. Like a lo

I have two questions. Are you separating experience and training in terms of recording them for a given unit and their advantages? What's the morale system you intend to implement? :) Regards, Kul

I'm firmly in camp 1. The world has enough "dumbed down" games. You're Stardock, I rely on you for my complication fix. Camp 1 delivers a Stardock game, camp 2 is more like something EA would go for. Maybe you would discover "mass market TBS" but more likely you would discover "TBS players like complicated games". cheers Kul

[quote who="lwarmonger" reply="15" id="2085604"]Still no word on morale and whether troops will break and run yet! Still hoping and waiting.[/quote] Also interested to know this, although I'm pretty sure the game is going to be great with or without it. It would certainly be more realistic and tactical than MoM battles were, but they were plenty fun as it was. cheers, Kul

omg those graphics are AWFUL, I hope they're not the final version! Sorry, had to be done ;) cheers, Kul PS that post is totally 40% update 60% teaser :)

[quote quoting="post"] Improve my email communication skills. How I communicate online is very different from how I am in person even though I use the same words. Standard losing weight goal: Get down to 165lbs by my birthday. Keep future house project on schedule. Spend more time with my boys. Write a fantasy novel for publication. Put more effort into being a better husband. Spend more time with friends (George, Sherry,