lambdaman

I believe there's some sort of limit on my army size (the rule seems to be "six units per army", as best I can tell), but I find it hard to figure this out from the in-game UI. (1) It doesn't seem to be written anywhere in the interface. I think this is important enough that it should be indicated somewhere (either with the army statistics, or maybe more subtly; e.g., by only providing as many "slots" in the UI as there is room in the army). (2

In order to see how common a hero or city trait is, I currently need to mouse over it. I think this information should be a bit more visible -- maybe in small text in the lower-right hand corner of the trait button?

That's the last one, right? Maybe I can finally start reading it...

I don't want to do your homework for you, so I'll just suggest that you drop the fancy algebra and look for some concrete counterexamples. With any luck, the answer will make itself obvious to you, and then you can prove it algebraically. :)

Right now seasons are just UI flavor. I think it would be cool if they had some gameplay significance. To throw just one idea off the top of my head, you could have each faction get a different combat modifier in each season (probably grouping them into "summer preferring", "winter preferring", and "neutral", to keep things simpler).

Wasn't there actually a roguelike where prolonged exposure to magic would cause you to mutate randomly? Dungeon Crawl, maybe?

[quote who="TheProgress" reply="2" id="2844509"]WAD = ?[/quote] Probably Working As Designed.

[quote quoting="post"] So, why not display food that way? List the amount of food being used, and the amount of food production available total. It's simple, intuitive, and consistent in the UI, and there has to be some kind of code written to display this already as population uses it! It gets the user thinking about food as what it really is--a capacity--rather than a resource in the sense of the others. [/quote] I think this is a g

I'm curious about the term "lockdown" -- I've always heard "freeze" or "feature freeze". Is this a gaming industry term?

[quote quoting="post"] Founding a new Kingdom offers a maximum population of only 5 people. It is actually possible to run into a conundrum where you can not build any Workshops, and/or Huts by accidentally building the wrong thing initially. (Such as a Study or Arcane Laboratory.) - This forces growth to halt unless you hit a lucky goody hut. Maybe a pop-up letting newbies know this would prevent the initial "WTF Moment". This is easily recreated by simply s

[quote who="AlLanMandragoran" reply="2" id="2834521"] I did some more thinking about this. In GalCiv2, initial blitzkriegs were limited by both ship range and the technology to invade colonies was pretty high up the tech tree. Neither of those limitations exist in Elemental. Thus, the AI doesn't have time to build up their cities or armies to offset the human zerg attack like they could in that game. Somehow the limitations provided in GalCiv2, which helped make those games epic on the h

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="51" id="2832520"] Quoting Trojasmic, reply 48I see one "fixed a crash where X happens..." in the list so far... have we been able to find the cause and fix other crashes yet? I don't tend to document my crash fixes and I've been the only one doing them in the past few days due to the holiday. But I've nailed a number of them. I'll try to be more vigilant about it. It's just that crash fixes are boring.[/quote] That's what comm

One quick comment on the new population system. It looks like the population is listed as #assigned / #total, right? So if I have 100 people and 5 are assigned, the number I see there is 5/100? I would strongly suggest instead showing #available / #total. All the other numbers in the resources tab show your available resources, not your committed resources; this one should too. Also, has anyone considered doing s

I wrote a huge [quote who="GW Swicord" reply="17" id="2821686"]So far, elements are colors and essence is barely necessary.[/quote] I wrote a huge reply expanding on this. Then I accidentally hit "reload" and the forum ate it. :-( I wish this forum software saved drafts... Basically, my point was: look to Magic the Gathering's color system. MTG has five colors, and each one has a strongly established "flavor", backed up by a

[quote who="Gatt9" reply="128" id="2763091"] Suffice it to say, Gaming Journalism is very very dead. Gaming sites are just mouthpieces for the big companies, designed to look like free press. Personally, I'm *really* tempted to enlist some people and gather documentation to present to the Government arguing either payola or fradulent advertising by pretending to be Journalism. It's just way out of hand today.[/quote] You wri

The other day I got an expected notice that packages had arrived at the apartment office. I stopped by to pick them up, and the girl said "oh, I think we have two." "Two?" "Yeah, I'll get them." She came back with two near-identical boxes, one a bit larger than the other, both with a return address of "Stardock Systems". Cue the sinking feeling... So, yeah, apparently when I tried to upgrade my order to a Limited Edition, I ended up orderin

Ok, I imagine new spells are not quite top priority, but since I went and typed this up I might as well post it. At the very least, maybe some of these notions could make magic more fun. This is a notion I had for a new book (and new school of magic). If I had time I'd try to mod them in myself, but I don't (and it sounds like the mod tools aren't capable enough yet anyway). So I'm releasing them into the wild instead. If a modder pick

[quote quoting="post"] A soldier with only a warhammer can attack twice for 24. A soldier with a broadsword can attack three times for 10. Not only is the warhammer going to be more damaging, the damage is much more frontloaded, allowing them to avoid a lot of retaliation strikes by simply killing the target on the first hit. [/quote] Also, you may have left this out as "it goes without saying", but the way that defense works makes it vastly bette

[quote who="RevikZael" reply="11" id="2745759"] The EWoM mechanic of having four people fight as a unit with exactly four times the attack AND defense of four similar separate units does not work. Just do the simple math - four units with 5 attack and 5 defense don't stand a chance against a unit with 20 attack and 20 defense. Not "they'll get beaten by", but "they will get steamrolled". The four-party unit will fight at full strength, even with 1 hit point left.&nbs

Right now there's a huge difference in the dynasty component of the game between playing as a male sovereign vs a female one: females get to marry Janusk within the first few turns of the game. He doesn't have the greatest stats, but stats don't seem to matter much with your dynasty anyway. I don't think that it should matter so much whether you choose to be male or female, and I think from playing the beta that it was not intended for it to be so easy to get marr

One game I had a city that was stuck between a forest and the sea. I used Raise Land to make more flat surface to build on. So that should work -- but if you're hitting the 50 tile limit, as noted above, there's no hope for you. Sorry.

[quote who="sagittary" reply="10" id="2744473"]The same applies to every other resource in the game. For instance, if you have a farm and that's the only thing the city it's linked to is producing for you, there's no reason to level it up to level 2. The benefit you get from irrigation is canceled out by the cost of the hut.[/quote] Although note that leveling your city will give it more influence, which is important if you're trying to absorb some resources just past y

I think per-level city abilities are a great idea with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, they were pushed in towards the end of beta and it shows. In my view, the problems are: UI: as has been written elsewhere, being forced to choose new city abilities at end-of-turn is annoying, particularly when you can't remember what the plan for your city Resferahahare was and it's hidden behind the enormous popup. The "meh" factor: once the fun of be

Another thing I just saw, possibly related: I ordered a mounted unit to move, and it started galloping in place forever. I only managed to stop it and get out of the battle by hitting the auto-resolve button.

Sometimes there are huge pauses in the middle of a tactical battle between an attack and the retaliation. I mean like ten seconds or more where all the units just sit there doing nothing and don't respond to orders. The game isn't frozen (I can move the camera around, idle animations play, etc). It seems like this mostly happens with units that have horses -- that might be a clue, or it might just mean that I have lots of horses. On a similar note, I'v