DGB246

hmmm I don't know about this one Winni, it could be really abusive - if I understand correctly, this means you could ask them to give you all their cities and resources and they would have to accept - flipping it around, I would hate it if the AI did this to me and I'd probably concede the game right there. I think they could take your concept and tone it down to a relationship boost or the perceived value of your offers is 50% better etc - but forcing the AI to accept any off

Hi Seanw3 to my knowledge you can have a ginger sovereign but you can't change the hair colour of trained units, just the styles - therefore our ginger friends are sorely underepresented [e digicons]:P[/e] - while I'm on the topic I must say I'm outraged by the distinct lack of ginger headed smiles in the message tools

When I said seriously, I meant that they might introduce different ethnicities to appear more PC

@ Polistes I realise that but I worry that Brad and co will take it seriously

Brad, Derek and other Stardockians please don't compromise your creative vision to satisfy the whims of the PC brigade - that's going to be a losing game because those people are never satisfied - even if you did introduce different ethnicities they'd start whining and moaning about racial stereotyping and the fact that you havent included other random groups such as one legged pygmies and ginger people. I suggest you just give them editing options and ignore them after th

Seriously!? How pedantic and nitpickity can you be? I hadn't even noticed that you can only choose white skin colour for the troops, thats how minor it seems. Your accusation that Stardock is racially biased is ridiculous, if you want to edit skin colours for troops why didnt you just put in a request for that feature, I'm sure they would do it as it seems easy to implement. Instead you jump to calling them a bunch of racists; a total overreaction if you ask me - I'm guessin

Thanks for posting this Brad, Beta 3 looks like it will be great and I'm keen to try it out. I've been very busy these past couple of weeks so I havent had any time to set aside for elemental but I will definitely squeeze in some time for Beta 3 when you let us try it out. BTW some of these new spells look seriously badass - flamewave and the tsunami both look awesome :)

Tasunke, that's the point that I'm getting at - you have outdated scores thrown in with current scores and the goalposts are constantly shifting with the tech and rising expectations. We also don't have the same volume of strategy games being made compared to FPS etc so there are less games to compare against too - which makes these scores (particularly for niche genres) really subjective and ambiguous - the random scores that have been thrown out by us on this thread help

Game scores are so open to interpretation even with finished games - I'm sometimes sceptical about them tbh. Take Shogun and Shogun 2 on Brad's list for example; according to that list Shogun 2 is only 2% better than the original - that's outright nonsense. The new game vastly improves on the original in every way and I know that I wouldn't be able to go back to the original now - yet the game has a whopping 87%! OK maybe at the time it was released the ga

@Nick-Danger I don't see FE as a Civ clone (at least not at the moment) - definitely feels more like HoMM to me

Hi Unmbral, I just skimmed over your post (it's late here and I'm tired) so please forgive me if I missed something but these are a couple of things I've noticed from diplo in the beta 1) it feels just like WoM - other players are like jackals and they will attack/bully you if they sense weakness - so if you have a low power score you're at risk of being attacked 2) AI attitudes and modifiers are clearly shown via the diplo page - which is

Metacritic reviews are for finished games so I don't really understand why everyone is sticking scores on FE at the moment - seems pointless to me. I think a better approach is just to ignore the scores for now and assess the betas on their merits and compare them to previous betas and WoM. On these grounds I think the game is making steady progress and the early indications for the next beta are showing further significant progress. I am also greatly encouraged that Brad, De

If I see some threads about FE on other sites I'll make sure to big-up the game and highlight some of it's good points. Also, if I see some people talking crap about the game on those threads I'll make sure to challenge them too. I don't spend alot of time on threads but I think the game deserves recognition for the progress it's made

Slings would be a good starting ranged weapon I think as that can be made with just a piece of cloth although it takes alot of practice to use a sling well so that should be reflected in the labour time - it takes alot more skill than just swinging a stick

Totally agree Brad, relearning all these skills would be hard and they are fine as techs in the tech tree IMO. The same goes for the modern world; most people in the developed world don't have basic survival skills because we don't need them - but if you dumped the average guy in the middle of a rainforest with nothing but the clothes on his back I think he would have a tough time. It's one thing having an awareness of something (like swords), it's totally differe

Civ 5's unit AI isn't great but I find that game hard on the higher settings anyway - I use the CCMAT mod and maybe that tweaked the AI. The game really punishes you for capturing lots of cities quickly so I find it's a bad idea to keep warring and the carpet of doom can be a real pain in the ass for expansion too. Sure, you can set up choke points for strong defence but moving through mobs of enemy units can be difficult. Civ games have never been great on wars, t

OK a few random thoughts on these 2 games: I actually like the Civ5 economic model and city management - this is an area that works really well in the game in my opinion. The game also has a bunch of incentives for building tall empires instead of wide ones so IMO both are totally viable and both civ4 & 5 allow lots of city specialisation too. Sulla dismisses global happiness as pretty much irrelevant but whenever I play civ5 I'm constantly hitting happiness limits and yo

I personally like Civ5 but it came in for criticism from some long-time Civ4 fans and while I understand this point of view I feel that Civ5 is still a good game - it just shows that every game has its critics. Sulla created an entire webpage explaining why he dislikes Civ5 - it has some truth to it and serves as a useful counterpoint to the mostly positive reviews that the game has had - check it out if you want:

I'm really excited about this game, it looks amazing and I loved the original games

I like your ideas for the Trogs and Quendar too - it's good that you steered clear of describing them as outright evil and again they come across as relatable - the Trogs are a bit like Spartans/Klingons while the Quendar seem more venal and duplicious (like Ferengi actually)

Kudos Tasunke I can see you have put alot of time and effort into creating flavour for the factions so you get +1 karma from me. Just out of curiousity, the Resoln true death apocalyptic cult thing reminds me of Os-Gabella and the Shiem; was that one of your sources of inspiration? I also like how you have distinguished between the ordinary 'stubborn' wraiths and the higher castes - the ordinary wraiths seem basically like decent people who you could have some games of

Hi Tasunke, doesnt Brad have some fluff written already for the factions? Some interesting fluff is always good (FFH was brilliant for that) but I think Stardock's got that base covered already

Chain armour gives cutting defence and plate armour gives blunt defence and leather armour gets no extra bonuses. I think some of the monsters might get extra defences against some weapons too (that information might be in the infopedia)

OK with regard to blunt and cutting weapons some armour provides extra defence against one or the other (the armour will say something like +4 cutting defence) - its to reflect things like a hammer being much more effective than a sword against something like a gargoyle etc I also have my own question: Can you zoom in and out of a map using a laptop touchpad? I know 1,2,3,4 give different camera views but I've tried things like +/- and page up/page down to z

Wow, just checked this poll after a few days and I can see that computer AI is right down on the list of priorities - does that mean that people are generally happy with the AI as is? I feel the AI is coming along but there's more to do yet