Austinvn

I'd like to see rare resources that allow unique buildings/units empire-wide. Current rare resources give a boost to the food/prestige/research/etc of the city they're built nearby, which - don't get me wrong - is a good idea and makes city placement a little more interesting, but you could do more with resources. Like forest tiles of a rare wood - yew? - that if you build a lumbermill over it, provides a small supply of the yew resource to make a slightly-better-than-normal l

So, can buildings actually consume resources (i.e. provide negative production)? I'd love to see a "black market" type building - or call it whatever you will - to provide access to a rare resource you can't otherwise get, but at a substantial gold cost. For example: 4 tiles, produces 1 ore per turn, -10 gold per turn. For when your military desperately needs metal, you don't have a natural source of it, and other players aren't quite willing to help equip your armies so you can conq

[quote who="Sushikawa" reply="29" id="2649986"]I'm a little disappointed with the 1 or 4 square rule. Why cant we have 2 and 3 tile buildings [/quote] I seem to recall (don't quote me on this) someone from Stardock saying that they originally intended to include 2 tile buildings, but it turned out to be too much of a pain from a coding perspective.

[quote who="LordPixie" reply="5" id="2648334"]I'm having the exact same problem too. As Zamul mentions, it seems to alternate from bad to good on game start. (For what it's worth, I'm loading an autosaved game) Oddly enough, if I turn off advanced lighting, by dropping the slider to zero, the graphics get worse! Here's an example: --LordPixie[/quote] Yeah you don't want to touch the slider, you need to un

[quote who="wjt47" reply="4" id="2648374"]OK guys, I got it to work! I created a shortcut to Elemental on my desktop and under "Properties" I added /w at the end of the Target line (after the last quote). This opens the game in a window. Good luck![/quote] You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar, a shining paragon of mankind. In other words, I was getting the same problem (running XP) until modifying the shortcut to start in windowed mode. E

Basically, there will be (optional) separate tactical battles; when two armies meet on the strategic map, a new tactical map opens up where "simultaneous turn based combat with tiles" occurs. Unfortunately we know relatively little about combat, it's going to be one of the last features implemented (just before modding tools). Most of what we do know comes from this post , which is interes

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="57" id="2647418"]Im not sure how you would "mod in" an all archer faction ... unless you mean new equipment and tools to counter the use of mounted units vs your archers. I mean, you could simply build all archers and it would be an all archer society. You design your own units. So ... you could have heavily armored archers, lightly armored archers, long range archers, short range archers, invisible archers, and magically enhanced archers (mag

[quote who="Anomander" reply="5" id="2642347"]The Game is definitely coming along from the first time I fired up the BETA, looking so much better... Frogboy so far I note your vids all follow a similar trend. Clicking tiles, throwing down building icons, noting NPCs, recruiting and stat referencing. For me I still dont see the immersion factor yet, I dont even feel the fantasy element....it currently could be any RTS game I've played. Example: When NPC 'cards' become merely that...

Yeah all the rare resources are rather awful at the moment. They're really not worried about balance until Beta 2 though, I'm saving my myriad of balance complaints for the moment it's available.

[quote who="arstal" reply="53" id="2639854"]Plus, we got the preorder beta and you guys aren't needing cash, so I am 100% fine with a 6 month delay.[/quote] Definitely ok with that, especially as we'll be beta testing and getting new features in and seeing better and better AI during those extra 6 months.

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="49" id="2637407"] It's got room for snow-capped mountains and forests. It has room for hills. Frankly, I'd like to see the generator have a tendency to surround mountains with hills (foothills). It'd make the world look more believable. Not the end of the world, of course, but it'd be a nice touch.[/quote] Definitely agree. Especially since Brad's videos show us that the engine is capable of giving us everything from tiny bumps that barel

[quote quoting="post"]By contrast, having the AI intelligently colonize an island is a matter of 60 to 80 engineering hours.[/quote] Give yourself more credit, if it merely took one guy working for two weeks, I'm sure that more TBS games of the past would've actually gotten this one right :P But seriously, if you actually pull all that off - an AI that can deal with rushes, adapt to resource-sparse conditions, colonize islands, etc., and above all an AI that can

Well, that's good, but.. I still see a problem with having hundreds of metal stockpiled, the technology necessary to make all this awesome plate armor and longswords and such, able to train a platoon infantry wearing about 60 pounds of iron each - and yet my sovereign's running around in the leather he started with, because there's no way to outfit him with the same equipment I can give to new units. Having new armor available for gold in a shop is better than not having it at all, but really

[quote who="dsk2293" reply="61" id="2636492"] But can't you just up the LOD a bit on the highest settings? I can live with the "style", but I'm having a hard time with the undetailed big patches of grass I see in screenshots like this. Why can't it be more like in this combat screenshot, which looks quite good. And can the engine not handle small hills? Just tiny details like that will make the game more attractive to look at. Gameplay can be fantastic, but if all I

[quote who="Raven X" reply="30" id="2629793"]2-A. If the world is being built in 3D, then Why exactly can't each battle map Actually mirror the terrain on the strategic map? Is it a memory issue or what? Have each world map drawn out in 3D, then when a battle takes place and the camera moves in for the battle just have the battle map be a piece of the strategic map only enlarged to actual scale. Shouldn't be That Hard to accomplish as I can tell you some other games that do ju

[quote quoting="post"]WINNER. TAKE. ALL. This is the part where we want to hear your opinions. We do ask that you keep an open mind on what we ultimately go with. My opinion is that the attacking player has the onus to finish the battle in N turns. After N turns, the attacker morale starts to go lower and lower at which point the defender can come out and make mince meat out of them. The question is, what should determine what N is? Or should we allow retreating? Should we a

[quote who="TCores" reply="16" id="2628286"]I'm not sure how you can contend it's even a good idea on paper to have 9 players who spend the majority of their time in the elite sections of a game dictate the direction of the game for the majority of paying customers who aren't part of that elite. The level of social metagame the members of the CSM are at is leagues beyond what most players experience.[/quote] I agree completely, and that's exactly what's wrong with Democracy. /

Yeah, the housing/food balance is a little off. It works well at first, but then you get to a point at around city level 3-4 where you're building nothing but houses/farms and even destroying old improvements for more houses - sure a city shouldn't be able to do everything, but it should be able to do something other than spam houses if it wants to hit level 5. Forget about building any kind of resource collection (like a mine or shard), you'll have no room at all left for gold or re

I don't object to turn/tile-based combat on principle, it's a great way to represent small scale battles, particularly RPG-style ones where the focus is on a few powerful units (champions, spellcasters, dragons, etc) and not a thousand foot soldiers. But I do worry how well it'll scale up to massive army vs. army clashes in the late game. Those thousand foot soldiers may get to be micromanagement hell if you're moving individual units one by one from one tile to the next, telli

[quote who="LeBlaque" reply="9" id="2627409"]In sum, do people feel that the feedback provided by Brad&Co. on Elemental has been sufficient with respect to WHAT they are implementing from the beta team? Is there evidence of this?[/quote] I don't think any beta tester can answer this until we see Beta 2 - what we're playing with now is such a small fraction of the full game, we haven't seen implementations of many features, and most player suggestions apply to those as-o

Just to be clear there isn't "no" AI, but very weak AI, little challenge - a punching bag for testing game mechanics against. Still, the AI does try, it expands a bit and sometimes declares war and sends hordes of peasants at you. It doesn't really do research or unit design or diplomacy or magic or much exploring/adventuring however, just produces some fodder for you to destroy. My understanding is the AI will be gradually improved throughout Beta 2, partly based on tactics seen in m

Prefer the frontline warlord sovereign myself, but here's hoping all the playstyles mentioned here (and more!) will be viable in the final balanced game. It'd be great for replay value if it wasn't a bad idea to leave your sovereign in your capital, and receive a worthwhile bonus for doing so (superior administration or whatever), while your champions and children do the adventuring for you. Even better if you don't have to lock your sovereign into a specific playstyle by the choices

[quote who="Sir_Linque" reply="6" id="2624575"]During Beta 1 the game hasn't felt remotely like what you described there. You're putting a lot of expectations to Beta 2 now. The concept is spot on though, the game you describe in this post sounds wonderful. In the betas so far however it has felt exactly like the 'generic build cities and grow an empire' game you described. Fingers crossed.[/quote] In all fairness, even in the very first version of Beta 1, Elemental was on

Makes you wonder what other surprises Frogboy (and therefore, by extension, us) are unaware of. "By the way, we already remade Archon as a quick test of the modding tools, what do you think?"

[quote who="kapeman" reply="8" id="2617385"] Quoting Labtec_au, reply 1Essence also determines the Mana level for casting spells How do you generate mana? I'm stuck at 0 of 100.[/quote] Mana is based on essence, mana will regenerate only if you still have essence, spend all your essence and you're out of luck (until you level up and buy more of it). If you do have essence, keep in mind that mana can take a while to regenerate, s