lambdaman

The big problem here is that a pioneer claim that it costs 0 gold to found a city, when the actual cost seems to be about 100 gold. An annoying add-on is that unlike everything else in Elemental, you can found a city without having the necessary gold in the treasury. This lead to a situation where I was almost 100 gold in debt, with an income of 1 gold per turn (the only available money resource being just outside my border, and my border not able to expand until

Due to a cash flow problem, I found myself with only one city and no units, so my sovereign was hanging out there playing defense against the horde of spiders spewing from a nearby spiderweb. One turn, after clicking the "end turn" button, I got a notice that my city had been conquered -- with my sovereign, alive and well, looking rather embarrassed in the ruins. I was watching the city when it was "conquered" and no enemy unit moved into it. The only things nearby

It could be worse. The AI could have learned to make puns.

This is how GalCiv2 did it, and it worked great there (IMO). Having most of your units customized except for a few that have fixed attributes/abilities is kinda weird.

[quote who="Zazimire" reply="4" id="2678814"]Does anyone know how to become a modder? I don't see the tools like the SC2 came with? -Jeremy Sr. thought it would be a good thing to clarify here too.[/quote] Wait until beta 4, when they release the modding tools?

Soooooo, does this mean we'll be able to stealthily cross mountains to surprise the enemy? [e digicons]:D[/e]

"Software development is never finished, but sometimes it stops." -- me, just now.

What if we could cast spells, but leave them in abeyance pending a trigger condition? e.g., say I have a mountain pass that I want to defend. I cast "fireball" with the trigger option, and set it to go off the first time an enemy unit enters the pass, targeting that unit. Or maybe I cast a temporary area defense spell and set it to trigger when an enemy army approaches my city. Or I cast a healing spell and set it to trigger on my sovereign when their

Having played around with the latest beta, I really prefer having my units stay the same size relative to the background. I found the alternative (Magic Sovereign-Gro!) kind of disconcerting. Maybe a less pronounced scaling would be better; I"d have to try it to see.

[quote who="Hound" reply="4" id="2665976"]I agree that big obvious things should be big and obvious also in the 3D view. But small things like a dropped purse shouldn't be visible at all. Those should just be a random find without being able to spot them from 5 tiles away.[/quote] No, please, no pixel-hunting in my Elemental!

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="8" id="2665942"] Having an overview of the kingdom/your spells on one screen and the world map on the other would be convenient. Spells with the current spell selection system - maybe. But that's changing. Kingdom info never needs to constantly be displayed.[/quote] I have yet to play a 4X game where there wasn't some important informational screen that I wanted to cross-reference either with another report or with the world

Fourthed.

If download size is a concern, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a live indicator of how big the XML has gotten on the screen. (if it's expensive to create the XML, do it in a background thread and show a spinner while the size is refreshing) You could even have some sort of "look over here" animation to call attention to it when the XML has gotten too big.

When I run Elemental in fullscreen mode, it uses my first monitor and ignores the second one, which continues showing the desktop background. Even if it's not possible for the initial release, are there any plans to add multi-monitor support to Elemental? This is another area where PCs can do something that consoles can't, and a good chance for this game to shine. I could go on and on with ideas, but frankly, I would be happy if I could just pull up the king

Instead of requiring you to pick some units up-front and letting the AI control the rest, how about this variation? On the first turn, you assign orders to each of your units, as usual. On each subsequent turn, you pick a fixed number of units. You can modify the orders of these units. Units that you don't pick continue to enact the orders you gave them on previous turns. This gives you some of the benefits of

One quick thought here that I haven't seen mentioned (I have to run). In my experience, one thing that makes tactical battles take so long is that I feel like I have to look at every single unit each turn and decide on their moves. I wonder if introducing some sort of "command point" system would help with that. For the sake of discussion, here's a sketch: At the beginning of the first turn of combat, you give orders to each u

[quote who="teflonrabbit" reply="21" id="2623794"] Quoting BoogieBac, reply 10kochujang: One of the big debates over here...CVS has been our version control choice for years, but SVN is looking to be our next tool of choice once Elemental hits the shelves. Since you're switching off CVS so late in the version control ballgame, you should really just skip straight to git. Branching on svn is way more painful than git, and testing local features and merging in remote branc

[quote who="Lord Cobol" reply="50" id="2622529"]So, they should program in the language I've been programing in for the last 30 years?? Guaranteed no need to worry about those two things You get one guess what language I mean.[/quote] (is-odd :reason (believed-that (extinct-speciesp 'lisp-programmer)))

[quote who="Darvroth" reply="18" id="2617551"] Point taken however it has the same end result for the human player; the AI behaves in a manner inconsistent with the nominal ralations the human has achieved up to that point. From my perspective if I know up front the AI will act inconsistently what is the point attempting relations at all?[/quote] It sounds to me like Frogboy is just saying that, e.g., when the AI goes to evaluate your military strength to determine

I hope you guys have some sort of test suite so we only get to experience new and exciting bugs, not the same boring old ones from the last build. ;-)

[quote who="Tormy-" reply="39" id="2596034"]It should be close to perfect at least...we're going to test multiplayer in BETA2 afterall...If the game locks-up occasionally, it will be impossible to complete a multiplayer match. I am going to test 0.3 again today, maybe I will find more lock-up related problems...even tho in my current game I am at around turn 300 against 3 computer oppoments, and no lock-ups or CTDs so far. I am happy about this. [/quote] That

Does this mean that we won't be able to starve a city out any more by laying siege to it, since the magic food faries will teleport shipments past our lines?

I'd like to play multiplayer ... if it has good support for a disconnected "play-by-email" style. It doesn't have to actually involve email; I just want to be able to log in once a day (any time), queue up my moves, and then have them executed when the turn timer expires (probably once a day). Immediate execution might be palatable, but I'd have to see it in action, and I'd still want the turns to be forced to a slow clock. The people I want to play with are busy and many of

I tried removing Elemental and reinstalling it, just in case my installation had otten messed up. No luck.

Just to nail down the network hypothesis, I ran a network trace on the router while trying to start Elemental. No traffic showed up while I was doing so (not even an ARP or a DNS request).