My vote will always go for standard turn, for both multi and single player. Putting some work into minimizing how much needs to be done hands-on each turn will be of greater benefit than designing some weird hybrid system. Even in simultaneous play, if turns take 20 minutes each you're not going to be able to finish a game in a reasonable time anyway.
I have no intention of "engaging you in honest debate" because I have read the preceding two pages, and you have proven yourself incapable of such a debate. Ask Jonnan, if I think I can convince someone of something, I'll jump in with both feet and a clue-by-four.
[quote who="Melchiz" reply="144" id="2343902"] Quoting WIllythemailboy, reply 143 Nice cop out. Anything you don't feel like answering, or simply can't answer, is just not important enough for your limited time, right? Considering that I have to stand up against a tag team of ideological allies, it is quite time-consuming. It is difficult to debate an opponent who is outnumbered and afforded no courtesy, yes? Also, you call m
Exactly the effect I had hoped for. Thank you.
[quote who="Melchiz" reply="49" id="2343889"]WIlly, did you bother reading the entire thread? Also, lighten up. [/quote] Yes, I did. And I'll lighten up when you get a clue. Looks like we'll both be waiting a while.
[quote who="Melchiz" reply="141" id="2343878"] Quoting cuckaroucha, reply 139 By the way, good debators don't leave anything unanswered. So here's the rapid fire of stuff you ignored: Not everyone has the luxury of spending limitless time penning responses to forum posts. I participate in these discussions between writing emails and revising reports. I apologize, but I cannot and will not respond to every comment directed at me, especia
[quote]You're missing the point. Just becuase something violates our physical laws does not mean that it is magic. Magic is one of many supernatural elements, including psychic abilities, actively-involved dieties, and spiritual/ghostly phenomina, to name a few of the more common ones. A world could work on these principals, yet still be without magic. An old Swicord thread defined magic as "whatever the world/story creator says it is", and if the creator says that extranatur
[quote]Why can't the AI close the trade and rip you off? Sure, it may warrant a declaration of war on your part, but perhaps you are not in a good position to do that? If the AI is able to extort bribes out of you, why can't it also scam you out of deals as well?[/quote] As i said earlier, only if the player has the same ability to abuse the AI in the same manner. [quote]All of you complaining about AI abuse would have some ground if this was a multiplayer game, but I think mo
At this point I'm all for abstraction, at least at first. I'd much rather set a slider and forget it than spend a part of every turn screwing with spies, counter spies, training new spies, retasking spies, ad nauseum. Especially for the first parts of the beta just screw the espionage and come back to it later. Any espionage system is going to please only a fraction of the users, piss off a similar size fraction, and leave the rest ambivalent at best, resenting the time sink at worst. <p
[quote]More importantly, the mundane aspects of the game need to be firmly based on science. Now this I don't get. Just because the game doesn't classify it as actually magic, doesn't mean it has to obey the same laws. I could easily see forging or farming or medicine working on humors or elements or tiny gnomes or whatever. Just as long as it makes sense.[/quote] They *could*, but they probably *shouldn't*. The basis of the game is that channelers are helping ret
[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="51" id="2334401"]Speaking as a proto-"Swicordian", I just have to say that while some sort of linear, "Legal" framework is necessary to keep the game world in some sort of casuality (but more to "justify" strategic mechanics), having those laws be overly reminiscent real-world physical laws would suck a lot of the fun escape vaule out of the game. The no-free-lunch situation could be explained in all sorts of ways that are not exaclty the laws of thermodynamics (a
[quote]I think I'm getting it now. You're not understanding that my 'problem' is an aesthetic one and we are apparently disagreeing only on the kinds of explanations we want to see wrapped around the game mechanics for magic. I know plenty of fantasy literature has all manner of medieval, Renaissance, and Roddenberry-style 'physics' in it. But, from an unabashedly subjective POV, I want Elemental to be a deeply magical game.[/quote] We're just going to have to disagr
Ironically, the third quest in the chain is "kill off all other major civilizations" [e digicons];P[/e]
[quote]No, because offer-counter-offer doesn't always have to narrow down to a price in the middle. The AI could instead decide to raise its price if you show a lot of interest in it. It could also lie and promise things it doesn't have in order to trick/cheat you.[/quote] Only if the player has the same options. [quote]It could even turn around and deal it to somebody else at a price you're unwilling to pay.[/quote] The GalCiv system already has that option. If I don'
[quote]Well, the way I break it down is that something is "unscientific" if it does not conform to known physical laws. I realize that this is not quite the correct terminology, but it's short, efficient, and understood by most people.[/quote] By that definition, the following things were at one time or another considered "unscientific": orbital mechanics, quantum mechanics, organic chemistry, gamma ray bursts, plate techtonics... I could go on, but I think the point i
[quote who="ChongLi" reply="36" id="2333308"] Techtrading should be disabled and you should not be able to see what he got. And you should sure as hell NOT be able to micromanage the trade until the text turns green! You should just send a proposal and then the A.I either accepts, denies or gives a counterproposal (100 gold more and it's settled or "can't have that city what about this little farm over there instead..?") You should go back and read the rest o
[quote]It's kinda hard to forget about it when you leave a grumble like this. Any chance you're feeling up to helping me understand what I'm 'getting wrong?'[/quote] Quite simply, you are missing that science is a means of viewing the world, not a definition of what you find there. If some "magical" force was found to be behind quantum physics (and really, can you tell me there isn't?) scientific knowledge would expand to fit the new information into existing frameworks. Likew
[quote]The simulation is more of a rough estimate to avoid throwing away its units against an army it has no chance of beating. The AI should really only attack when it knows that its units have an almost guaranteed win (greater than 75% chance of winning).[/quote] The AI should also recognize that there are situations where kamikaze attacks to force attrition on a superior enemy is sometimes necessary (but it needs to evaluate when attrition is worthwhile or not). Losing one battle i
I love how Eurisko supposedly came up with some sort of groundbreaking strategy in that situation. I guess the "real" competitors forgot the first thing about the contest: that is was indeed a contest and not some sort of reality simulation. Any fool should have checked the extreme ends of the force mix; both the swarm and the floating-ball-of-steel single ship solution. God knows I have in plenty of situations. Maybe the program did a better job of it, but almost certainly there was other en
[quote]You're over-complicating things. In chess, the relative positioning of every single piece on the game board is extremely critical. One piece can mean the difference between victory and defeat.[/quote] You are overcomplicating chess. The binary there/not there positions of pieces are far easier to program for compared to swarms of units that are diffuse in defense, but can concentrate for an attack in one turn. [quote]Other things, like examining all of your units statis
[quote]To be fair though, humans don't play TBS games that way either. In chess yes you have your 32 units and 64 tile game but the restrictiveness of the rules allows you to look a few turns ahead. People do not do well at TBS games because they can calculate all the possible or even likely moves that hundreds of units could make 5 turns in the future. They do well by looking at the big picture and broad stroke (while looking for IMPORTANT details but certainly not focusing on every detail)
[quote]A supercomputer from a decade ago is slower than today's laptop.[/quote] True, I hadn't looked up the specs on deep blue. 30 cores sounds big, until you realize each one was only 120 MHz. [quote]Chess may be simpler than a game like MoM or Elemental, but the total number of different strategies is far greater (in the millions). Most of the strategies boil down to a few combos here and there.[/quote] At most 32 units moving inside a 64 tile gameboard. The nu
People tend to forget that they have far more processing capacity between their ears than any computer running the game will ever have - and the 'software' running it is highly optimized to make stategic decisions. [quote]The key thing about designing an AI is giving it a huge library of strategies that it can draw upon. This is how computers are able to dominate the game of chess. The AI being designed by scientists is a general-purpose AI, something far more difficult and complicate
From what we know so far, you need to defeat an opponent's summoner to truly beat them - and I just don't see any way to beat an enormously powerful wizard through spy tricks. Weaken his civilization to erode the support it gives him, or force him to expend essence to hold it together after you sow discord, yes those I see likely. What I don't see is a sudden "oh, you got one of sauron's agents promoted to be Gandalf's personal secretary, so now you can control everything he sees and does" st
I'm with psychoak on this one. There is simply no way to put something this involved in the game without making a micromanagement nightmare on anything but the tiniest maps. It's the same argument as true tactical ground combat in GC3 - it might be fun a few times, but it shouldn't eat half your game time. Every suggestion so far will result in people quitting in frustration before the game gets out of beta. Anything but a very abstracted system is a game breaker. Give the DL spy syst