Simplicity123

Alright. Now I've played this for a while and I can say that there are still fatal flaws in this version. The main one appears to be the following: PACING. It comes up in a number of areas. Spell levels. God this bothers me. You start the game with your guy at level 1 or 2. You fight, fight, fight. And earn your way up to 2 or 3 by experience level 5. And then leveling kind of shuts down. Level 6 is hard to get. Level 7 n

I like it MUCH better than the earlier builds. Here's what I've noticed so far. Love the city differentiation. Makes things much more interesting. Still hate the fact that initiative is poorly described. Also Quickness is way underpowered. Would I rather have +15 hp or an extra attack every 10 turns? Hmmmm... I'll take the hp. One of my games I got trapped on a peninsula with a forest drake blocking my progress.

1. The effect of initiative changes should be better measurable. Use seconds/turn, so if you go from 13 init, which is 5 seconds/turn to 15 init which is 4 seconds/turn. You know what you're getting. 2. Make tile yield visible in the fog of war for explored areas. 3. Make rivers visible in the fog of war for explored areas (having them disappear is kind of weird and wipes out expected landmarks... literally). 4. Make it easier to determine whether someo

I was in a game, hit escape, went to the main menu and clicked new game. It prompted me that I would lose my current progress, and I clicked OK. Then the game "stopped working", which I assume means it crashed, but I don't see a core file anywhere on my computer. The debug.err can be found at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/70099491/debug.err <

Let me be more specific. First time playing, remember. I want a new city so I build a pioneer. I try to put them somewhere, as you would in most other strategy games, and I can't because you can only place cities in certain spots. Okay... How do I know this? There's nothing pointing me to the tiny button in the upper right of the screen. I can't click settle. Mousing over the button and clicking tile yield both do NOTHING. Beca

I haven't even played a full game yet, but I'm having fun with this. It does feel rough around some edges. For example: 1) Placing cities: At one point in my game, I had two cities and I was surrounded by vast desert areas. It felt like I had explored a lot, but my pioneers could settle nowhere. I found out out "show tile yield" by going online, but this sort of thing is important and should be made obvious to users. Also, it

Playing 1.08 so far, my initial impression is that it's far better than it was gameplay-wise. Supporting your economy with goldmines as opposed to spider organs is a big change for the better. But there's still some aspects that are off. Here's my list of what I'd like to see tweaked yet: 1) Equipment for your NPCs is completely unaffordable. Equipping your guy is one of the coolest parts of the game. It shouldn't be virtually impossible to do. Al

I see these cities, but I can't figure out who owns them.... Kraxis declares war on me. This city has a spider on it. Is that Kraxis? A mouseover would be nice. Also, if someone is a minor faction, an indicator of some sort for that would be nice too (since they can often have massive guardians. Maybe there's already some way to get this info?

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="20" id="2767010"] It also represents an example of where I was wrong in thinking that balancing isn't that big of a deal. It's been so long since I've had to make a new game totally from scratch that I'd forgotten how long in man years it really took to balance GalCiv.[/quote] You mentioned something once about the two ways of playing 4X games. Simulation of an empire vs. understandable boardgame-type rules. Here's where the boardgame guys

Civ handled this with city maintenance, which I hate, but at least it prevents city spam. Kind of a bad oversight... REX has been a known exploit for most 4X games for a long time.

I agree that the minor factions with personality would be nice. A minor faction could just be a "crippled" normal faction without a channeler. One might only be able to build one city. One might not be able to build troops. etc. And a way to play as minors then would be a nice bonus for hard-core fans. But that said, adding features like this should wait. The problem with the game that I can discern from the reviews is one of "feature creep".

I'm not sure what the point of having a minor faction that doesn't build is. Have them build, just have them build much more slowly.

That is not live which can eternal die. For in strange eons, even death is bride.

While I am a big fan of Stardock, and the way that it operates (devote time to polishing a game over a long period of time... The GalCiv model, really), reviewers have to deal with the hand they are given in terms of providing a review. The PC Gamer reviewer was a fan of Stardock as well, but he was utterly unable to play the game on multiple computers and still has issues playing it even with the latest patch. A reviewer can't just say: "Oh, well I know the reputation of th

Maybe it's just me, but the only quests I've seen so far are the ones that are like: Go here to win. Go to another witch's house. Moving to location X is hardly what I would consider fun. In any way. Every single one of those quests should die a fiery death.

Also consider looking at the way Settlers 7 indicates problems in the production chain. Icons directly over the buildings which are affected. Popups on icon to indicate more detail. In a resource intensive game, having these precise "you're having an issue RIGHT HERE" warnings can be helpful.

What do you mean they won't submit to us? I guess we'll just have to... play our music LOUDER.

Oh that's right. I forgot about them nicking him for Spore. Civilization phase.... (shudder).

To compare this situation to MOO3 would be foolish. MOO3 was a ressurected franchise with different developers. Civilization 5 is the Civ 4 team including Sid and Soren. They know their stuff and they've done a number of TBSs. It is possible Civ 5 will be a MOO3-type clunker? Yes, it's possible. Probable? No, not really. Elemental is going to have another problem if it releases against Civ5... before Civ5's preview shots were released, E

I'll add my voice to the "planes please" or at least a secondary map (it could be an underground map). That was really a key feature of MoM that set it apart and made it tactically different from the Civ games. Makes me sad to hear it won't be there.

That's fine, but if you want to change the trajectory of a large moving object, it's better to start early. I can still voice complaints at the 3A stage too. :-)

Different terrain types might help some... if the terrain mattered in some way. And if your cities had some chance to exploit those differences by some choice of your own. Right now, I tend to see vast plains and vast forests. Which looks great on a zoomed out cloth map, but it means my cities are going to be all plains. Because that's where the fertile land is. Civ wasn't this way. When you plunked down a city, the terrain around that city tended t

Beta 1B is in fact crushingly unfun. But it doesn't have to be this bad. First off, it's not going to matter if Elemental has a great tech tree, a fantastic unit design system, a cool economy, etc., if the first 200 turns of the game are End Turn, End Turn, End Turn, Find a Potion, End Turn, End Turn, Build a Farm, End Turn, End Turn... Exploration, the first X, is non-existent so far. There's just *nothing* of interest to find. With Civ

I have a good idea about how we can solve the problem of what to do when an enemy takes your resources from you. It also provides some very interesting information for the info cards and also simplifies unit creation. If you've ever played The Sims 3, you know what the Moodlet system is. It's an icon that applies some set of bonuses/minuses to your player character (or in this case, your unit). In Elemental, you almost certainly want to call moodlets something else, bu

Hmmmm... Very interesting. I wonder if this is done via the Diplomacy interface or via two opposing heroes meeting on the field and instead of a battle, you get a marriage. I wonder too what the result of sending family members into battle against each other might be. Kind of makes the "immortal sovereign" stick out like a sore thumb though... Maybe having or not having the immortal guy sould be something that is explored in the beta.