Burress

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="6" id="3366464"] I like how your example of a failure of capitalism in need of socialism is corrupt government... Your robot factory example is also very bad. You can't just buy a factory and get free money. You would have to compete with every other factory and that means that you run the risk of losing everything unless you run your factory or company better then your competition which in turn means you provide more to society and all s

I think it has to get worse before it gets better. When automation reaches a breaking point where it causes crippling unemployment, and the advantages of owning automation resources amount to paying electric bills instead of wages, society will force owners of automation resources to redistribute their wealth as income to the whole of society. More socialist institutions are the answer to wealth inequality, and rightly so. When wealth is an incentive toward productivity it is a social

Azunai_, I don't think that Nick-Danger's damage results from his melee units are consistent with individual attack values for single figures. For instance, Nick-Danger reported a 40-90 damage attack from a melee unit with a combined 190 on a defense unit of ~500. That is (190^2)/~(500+190) = 52. That is consistent with the attack of the total group counting, which was what I thought it was all along. The distinction makes a drastic difference in many circumstances, so i

I see now, the AI gets defense multiplied by about 12 as part of the difficulty bonus. But since attack is squared, high values will still score damage. It makes sense now. Thanks!

Nick-Danger, how in the world does the AI get an army with 1000+ defense? I don't remember the damage formula exactly, but it doesn't seem like they could be damaged by any weapons.

I didn't mean to imply that passive traits and filler traits were synonyms Phazonfreak. I think if a passive bonus exists as a full level-up option, then it must have noticeable gameplay effects. If you play any modern RPGs, this tends to be the rule. For instance, in Skyrim, a passive bonus may be healing spells +50%, +20% weapon damage, +20% armor protection, certain spells cost 50% less (any of these might work here too). Each time you use these things, the gameplay effect is noticeabl

It is a shame this game has been through most of its release sub-80 on Metacritic because of that one review by an amateur outfit, which wasn't even up to their standards and they are going to change. That is bad luck.

The uninteresting cobblestone is a different psychological mechanism, that is variable rate reinforcement. That is what keeps people playing slot machines, in this game it is what keeps people going to goodie huts and makes them excited about looting lairs. It is the unpredictable chance that some big reward will come next. The levelups are expected reinforcements which we see ahead of time. We don't want to be able to see that the next batch of cobblestone is empty ahead of time,

That is kind of you Parrottmath. I was aware of how to do it, and I tend to mod the game to how I enjoy it anyway, but it is thoughtful. People are different and this is a generalization, so I wasn't saying this holds for everyone, and probably doesn't hold at all for people not interested in RPG elements. I am a computer scientist, and I love math, philosophy, and psychology as well. I was thinking of some quantification of fun, with different systems/art/gameplay ele

I hate bumping my own post, but I made numerous revisions to the original post, and I just want to say it is in it's final state now (barring me noticing a grammar/spelling error).

Think about this. Let's say you cheated on the Mage tree and gave yourself summon1, prodigy 1 & 2. Now you level up, you can go necromany for a tactical summon, you can get the ice elemental for a strategic summon, you can go evoker to increase your damage, or, let's pretend prodigy 1-3 are where Prodigy 3 is and it is one huge increase to spell mastery (maybe a spell thrown in too), which moves on to the turn-reduction trait. You level up and ALL your choices have an impact on th

I may have made my case too shrill in the past, but I really wish the devs would consider what I am saying. I know I have a point here. 4. You are dead-on. Chains of passive bonuses, chains to get to other chains, chains to reach off-shoot skills, these are all fun-killers. Any level-ups that are just a barrier to reach another level-up throttle the thrill of leveling-up. I think leveling up can be rarer and skills can be combined, and the game will be more enjoyable. If necessary, to

[quote who="chinesetalberts" reply="6" id="3364647"] I don't think so; at any rate, all four of the affected heroes aren't using it. More and more, I'm thinking it's a bug. It's like I put too many champions together and got a big penalty, but when I split them up the penalty didn't go away.[/quote] This needs to be checked. I know most people here rarely "cross the streams" to begin with, so if the XP split penalty sticks after you break up yo

I tried this out last night and it works pretty well. You definitely have all the mana you need for whatever spells you want. It seems like the fire line would be the quickest, giving you early attacks to level-up your sovereign to throw lethal fireballs. I was greedy and wanted to wait for annointed by fire, and also use horrific wail and the skeleton horde to run a one-man show. I picked Warlock and Staff of Souls, but went with death and water for magic schools. I wanted everything and thi

I apologize joeball123, I realize now he posted a specific strategy which you were responding to. I was only considering the strategy as a general idea to exploit. In my mind I was considering vague ideas of using scouts to poach distant shards to build up mana for damage spells in the early game. I wasn't thinking about winning an insane/insane game (I am not that competitive), but it would seem quite easy to kill a challenging-expert AI early with unlimited mana for AOE spell

I understand that is the way it works now, but there is no reason it has to work that way. It is not much work at all to pull data in the order I gave in the post above, just change the logic of where you open the data files from. Stardock would have to rewrite the code to do this, but it would be just about the easiest thing in the world they could do for modders, if some other consideration wasn't stopping them. (the mod menu I suggested would be UI, so I don't how much work that wo

JoeBall, I think you are missing the fact that the strategy is to use Arcane Monolith to depopulate the entire map of shards, shards you would never have made use of. If you wouldn't have had it to begin with, then it is 150 mana profit for nothing and the AI can never use it.

[quote who="BlackRainZ" reply="2" id="3364454"] I doubt this will happen. As of right now, only certain types of mods can be placed in the mods folders, others need to be placed over game files to overwrite them. Also, unless the game becomes more moddable, I doubt we will see a huge amount of mods even though there are quite a few things you can mod.[/quote] I am not sure what the technical and security considerations are with using the Workshop. It seems like the issue of over

*Redundant post, I thought you were talking to me at first.*

This is a very clever strategy. I don't think the flesh-bound tome itself is overpowered, since the shards have to be in your zone of influence, but using arcane monolith to sweep the map of all shards is wild. Using the roads like you do amounts to an epic movement buff as well. Maybe a cooldown on consume (10-20 turns) would fix the issue with the first two traits? What about having roadbuilding be slow, so that roadbuilding units move only one movement per tun? That seems like

I would never have used or created a mod for Torchlight 2 had it not been so easy. I have no idea of the numbers, but as pure speculation some games that are extremely popular probably attract a mod-user population of maybe up to 50% (thinking Skyrim here). I doubt this many would use it for LH, but that is also because I suspect at some point the Steam population playing the game won't be very active, and especially during sales people sometimes barely play the games they buy at all.

From your chart a 15 chain hit should happen once every half a million mauls. That is strange you have seen multiple 15 hit chains, maybe the formula isn't working that way? At the point the two sequences diverge, we are already dealing with about 1/6 attacks, and the probability of longer chains is an exponential decline from there. It doesn't seem like it should make much of a difference, unless the formula isn't working right.

Wow, I can see why you have to rely exclusively on units on insane. I was not expecting them to be so useless, but since you are always behind the tech curve on that difficulty, it makes sense. I don't normally play an unmodded sov outside of challenging/hard, but if the AI was already significantly up the tech tree in the early phase, I don't think there would ever be a sweet spot where heroes would be effective. On the lower difficulty levels, the lack of HP boosts mean

This is a bit off-topic, but it seems you hit the problem pretty thoroughly in your main post. I am curious, have the AI heroes ever been a problem to you? I know my sovereign, depending on build, may do the majority of damage in my empire. If I am going to use a hero, bother leveling it up with its own army, it will generally be able to do something significant. I have never seen an AI champ/sov do anything signficant in a battle. I keep capturing sovereigns, high-level sover

[quote who="GFireflyE" reply="3" id="3364467"] I have no intersest in having this game utilize steam workshop.[/quote] Why? What is the downside?