SavageBananaMan34

Looks good!

A Song of Ice and Fire has no Elves or Dwarves or blah blah blah and is more epic than just about every other fantasy series ever made. Believe me, you can do a lot with just humans.

There's no way that Elemental will have the technical graphical prowess of King's Bounty. It probably won't have the same level of exploration as King's Bounty either, for King's Bounty's worlds are all hand-crafted and fine-tuned to create an optimal adventuring experience. In Elemental, main focus of the game is empire-building, not playing through an RPG quest.

Looks like you ditched that weird HoMM 5 style grid as promised. Good to see [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

Starcraft 2. Honorable mention Super Mario Galaxy 2 (yes, I know it's not on the PC).

You know what those games have in common? Either the dev team is too new and inexperienced, or the game's graphics took up a huge amount of development time, or both. E:TW was one of my biggest disappointments ever, and you can tell that they spent too much time and money simulating water and making cool ship death animations. Disciples III looks fantastic, and like HoMM 5 (without expansions), it seems like way too much time was spend making appealing gra

I believe that the best way to maintain cohesion in Elemental is to focus all quests on the player's relationships with the other players and/or the overarching "cataclysm story." Either the quests should be focused directly on rival factions, or the quests should be significant enough that multiple players will be involved in the same quest, either competing for a goal or working together to resolve a problem. The example quests do not follow this model, but let's

Great list, but you're right about your gross omission of Super Mario Galaxy [e digicons];P[/e]

I'm interested, and have the beta. I also probably have time; when are you thinking of doing this?

Don't you mean beta 1B? Hey man don't flame stardock if you don't even know the beta schedule [e digicons];P[/e]

No way is that screenshot what the final battles will look like. Brad keeps mentioning X-Com; that crap looks like HoMM.

It's actually a very good reason not to implement things - as Brad often says, you can have a lot of features, but features that are too difficult to balance or have the AI use well aren't features at all. However, I agree with you that this should be moddable.

But some buildings can't be stacked, so to speak. Units can be. You can build 100 "love charm" soldiers that do nothing but boost population and stick them in each newfound city you create to get it rolling. The whole mechanism kind of abstracts the game and makes it less fun (my perspective, of course) and less logical. Like for example in Civilization you can't just build twenty theatres in a city just to get some huge culture bonuses flowing.

Because these units would be more expensive than normal units, you'd have to balance the extra maintenance costs vs. the benefit of the unit being stationed in the city. This leads to bean counting, so you'd have to be very careful when implementing stuff like this. These units would become kind of "mobile buildings," unless the bonus was small enough to only be used circumstantially (like when the unit is passing through a town), but then what's the point? I think these kinds of bonuses are

Late fall? That's actually reasonably soon. Good to hear we'll be seeing the game with all its major features in action within two months.

I'm almost positive that it has been long decided that units will be FULLY customizable from scratch. Heroes are characters you have to attract to your city, so there will be a more limited customization aspect for them. I don't think there's much left to debate here.

Resources should not be able to restrict a player from building whatever unit he wants, but should have extremely significant bonuses so that players playing at a difficulty that matches their skill level will have to build units that they can "back" with resources.

Mop up is not just boring but also very anti-climatic. Many players want to live out storybook-style adventures, clutching victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment, not securing a victory half-way through the game. Things like the master quest or ascension victory from GalCiv 2 accomplish this (in theory). In reality, nobody attempts to secure an ascension victory without already dominating militarily, and probably similarly the average player will not attempt the master quest witho

printscreen takes a screenshot, and it sends them to your Elemental folder under "My Games" in "Documents."

Awesome, Awesome.

I don't see why PCs couldn't become vassals. I certainly hope this will be possible.

Yea don't worry too much about these kinds of suggestions just yet. When Beta1a starts we can start with these types of posts.

Anyone not get an email yet? I'm dying here. [e digicons]8O[/e]

Is there going to be a way to keep archives of all the old builds of Elemental as new ones are released? It would be awesome to go back in a year and play a match of beta 1 Elemental, not to mention how much can be learned from having the resources to so intimately monitor the progression of a game.

HOLY HELL YES!!!!!!!!