Denryu

As far as the city name disappearing - WHEN the full game map is included (and I realize that is months away yet) it would be cool to have the feeling of zooming into the cloth map and the cloth map gradually dissolves (including the names) and over a few clicks of the mouse wheel resolves into the actual gampely landscape. I think Galciv2 handles this fade between strategic and tactical maps very well, of course they don;t have words on the tactical map of the galaxy. Playing lcoth map

I just love how people get online and become armchair programmers, armchair marketing specialists, etc. etc. I'll leave that stuff to the peoplr whose ability to make their house payment depends ont heir ability to make the right call as to "what's important". Eye candy is fun - I won't deny that. But this idea that it is some fundamental piece of being able to produce an excellent game - it's the equivalent of saying a great book has to have pictures, or needs to have a

OMG, I just had the most AMAZING idea for a scout feature. I need to think on it a while and will probably start a separate thread when I have some details worked out. Trust me, as someone who has never been into the espionage part of most games (a couple have done it pretty well), this is unique, it is powerful, and in my mind it fits the EWOM world. The idea I have would not need to be the entire espionage system, but it could be a VERY cool, powerful feature in it. (Personally I th

Thanks for the clarification Boogie. I challenged the claim that all enemy units used essence in the "esbionage" thread - which it looks like this has morphed into - but was blown off. As someone with a dozen or so years of programming experience (very little object oriented, sadly) I'd also just like to clarify for Scoutdog that the changes to the hero object would not be large at all. The three changes you claim would need to be made; 1. The ability to move around

[quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="16" id="2330612"] A supercomputer from a decade ago is slower than today's laptop. True, I hadn't looked up the specs on deep blue. 30 cores sounds big, until you realize each one was only 120 MHz. Chess may be simpler than a game like MoM or Elemental, but the total number of different strategies is far greater (in the millions). Most of the strategies boil down to a few combos here and there. At most

Some people are too concerned about sizzle and not enough about steak. Nothing wrong with a little sizzle to market with, but if the steak sucks word will get out and no amount of slick CGI animation will save the game. Likewise, if the trailer is adequate but nothing to get excited about but the game itself is incredible, word will get out about it. Seems like there was this little game called Portal that had NO intro movie, and no marketing, but there for a while EVERYONE wa

I could see an auction type system being loads of fun, only down side is it could be time consuming. It also implies that the highest bidder will win, which, even under my "one trade for a given tech per turn" rule, even your biggest rival will have the tech or spell in a matter of a few turns, by not selecting him to trade with you at least deny him the ability (for a couple of turns) from turning around and trading it...personally I would tend toward the highest bidder, but if that also tur

@ Chong Li, Yes exactly the AI should never let you know what it knows. Having a list of techs to trade for gives you WAY too much information into their capabilities. I also like your idea of being able to do diplomacy with anyone during the movement phase. This would kind of favor the AI players as once they got a tech they could quickly perform millisecond trades among themselves and the poor meat player is going to be able to trade his tech with only one AI and effectively

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="4" id="2330135"]Actually, as long as the AI has the power to do it to you, altering the other guy's offer might open up some good haggling options.... [/quote] GalCiv2 does allow it, and it is too easy for a human player to punk the AI. Allowing the AI to do the same thing doesn;t work because you still have to agree to the deal - the AI does not have the option to keep tweaking the trade until the text turns green, it has to make a trade that you wil

Warning - this is going to be a long post. You bring up tech trading as poart of diplomacy and there is one tactic that I use all the time that I think the AI could easily emulate and it would definitely add a depth to that element that is lacking (although it will make it hard to take advantage, but it would be worth the trade off. The tactic I use is to really push down a certain branch of the tree. I also tend to play tech-centric races with research bonuses etc. As soon as

[quote who="SavageBananaMan34" reply="2" id="2329980"]You know I'm actually really impressed with the cloth map! Could I ask that you please consider allowing players to choose to add some kind of "wear-filter" to make the map seem dirtier and faded in some places? I'm digging the look right now and it could be even better. [/quote] The only concern I would have with a "wear filter" is that the map still needs to clearly convey information. An age crease, m

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="58" id="2329326"] Spies should be heroes, that's a given. While I like the idea of rare spies and specialist spies, the idea of all spies having to be heroes is a bit restrictive, considering that in Elemental heroes will be people in which you have invested essence in, and thus increadibly hard to get, especially for a city-building player. [/quote] I don't remember that heroes needed to have essence imbued in them in order to b

[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="8" id="2329775"] Quoting GW Swicord, reply 6 I've never been a hardcore wargame guy, but how's this for a twist: instead of leadership just providing flat combat bonuses to troops, put the troop skill levels in that math. Green troops under an expert commander can only gain so much from that commander's leadership skill, but elite troops can better understand and apply the skilled leader's orders. (Yes, I'm ducking the 'logistics' side o

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="7" id="2329630"] Quoting Scoutdog, reply 5 Well, I would rather not see "epic" sounding music on the ambient map. In the tactical battles, maybe, but the regular soundtrack shoud be more subdued. Well, that's quite obvious. [/quote] You just created a coal mine! (Queue epic combat victory music!!!) [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

Hmm I see where you are going with it, that could be an interesting twist - you can either have 200 crap soldiers or 1000 elite ones. It would definitely push higher training. It almost seems that from a balancing perspective it should go the other way, seing as how 200 trained elites are going to most likely go thru 1000 peasants with pitchforks like a hot knife thru butter, it almost seems you would want to somehow present those two options to your leader unit... Don;t get me wrong

Very nasty teaser title, I thought there was actually going to be a storyline update - not an update about the story, but some little tidbit of actual lore. [e digicons]:'([/e] What exactly is an alpha walkthru? Is it just you playing thru the build, is it a virtual tour of the game you give the alpha testers, or is it a writeup of things you want the alpha testers to try - or is it something else completely?

I agree, getting the music right I think will be a huge deal for this game -much more important for an epic fantasy than for a GalCiv or a SOASE. I hope that at least a rudimentary soundtrack is put in early or some mp3 files are posted up.

[quote who="Spartan" reply="20" id="2328287"] Quoting ChongLi, reply 18 Why should you be concerned with that? Do you own stock in Starvault? If not, why does it matter to you what people think of the game? If you like the game, shouldn't that be all that matters? StarVault? I think he is concerned - justly so, that the nostalgia factor may be a huge hurdle for SD to overcome for proper evaluation of its work. In short

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="23" id="2327753"]Coming from you, that photo does not seem so innocent.......... I've noticed that GW Swicord has drastically declined his posting recenrly..... make of that what you will....... [/quote] That was my first thought. Maybe i am just a perv(ect) as Aahz would say. [e digicons]}:)[/e]

One of the great things about magic is, although it should be internally consistent to it's world or universe, there really are not and should not be any ground rules. Creating that "plausible structure" is half the fun of creating a magic system or writing a fantasy novel or making a magic computer game - or at least that is what I would enjoy!

[quote who="Zaisha" reply="5" id="2327188"]Chalk me up too for variety in races spell lists etc. I also loved that you could rule an empire with a huge variety of races and their units, not just "your" race that you started with. Alternatively you could genocide all other races away, if that took your fancy. (As it so often did with my death magic wielding Wizard and his ravenous swarm of Halflings. ) What really took it above a fantasy version of Civiliza

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="21" id="2327090"] did anyone?I counted three people. Maybe four, bit I'm not sure. I imagine that the poll caters to less serious EWOM fans, since you don't have to actually be signed into the boards to take it. [/quote] Lol, how would they find the survey if not thru the boards?

For me it was the options: there were so many different spells, dozens of traits you could assign (the one I could never do without was alchemy!) the races were so diverse, it just provided hundreds of combinations that kept the game fresh thru dozens of games! So how is EWOM measuring up to it's spiritual predecessor? At first there was a large amount of disappointment in lack of race diversity, but other than graphical similarity, the dozen races slated for the canon game could easi

[quote who="Ron Lugge" reply="5" id="2327042"] 5} Rich & Deep Campaign BZZZ! Buzzwords! Please try again! [/quote] [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

Another good example is question 1. Reading the responses to Brad's post about beta being an experience unto itself - by the posts it is clearly 90% + in favor of pushing the release back to August. My personal feeling was to take a wait and see approach and almost no one spoke up for sticking with February - did anyone? So again, did my word choice change the outcome, or did the poll provide the anonymity for people to express what they REALLY felt, rather than jumping on the bandwag