keithLamothe

[quote]Those of you worrying about complexity. Is it because you don't want to think, or because you're worried about how long it will take you to do the combat?[/quote]Neither, concerned about costs in design time, logic/ui/ai development time, and testing time. Not so much concerned about the time costs themselves as about the consequences of features being implemented in less than adequate time such that the logic is buggy, the ui is inadequte, and/or the ai doesn't intelligent

I hope he hurts bugs! ;)

If it loses the device it gets upset. They could save a lot of trouble by not supporting full screen mode ;)

[quote]So what is running the beta if its not the engine?[/quote]Hamsters.

More dev journal! *omnomnomnom* Thanks, and thanks for making this project happen; we may not get another game in the MoM sub-genre for a long time, and SD is one of the few groups capable of doing it right. And a Society screenshot, ooo...

If you get crashes make sure to get the crash log zips too, for fogbugz (unless it's an obvious duplicate of another easily reproduced crash like the load-game crash or the research-no-milestone-tech crash).

Actual crashes can be submitted to http://fogbugz.stardock.com/default.asp?pg=pgPublicEdit

I believe the design is that you can only claim resources with cities.

It's not always immediately obvious that two observed incorrect behaviors are actually the same bug.

I think the code logic for build mode says something like if(availablePlots > 0) ;// display all available buildings as normal else ; // only display the remove building button where it should be using "availablePlots > 0 || availableSpacesOnClaimedPlots > 0" or some such

I've seen that too, looks like the border plane is being clipped by the map mesh.

[quote]Yes, without damage types, you lose lots of possible counters, defences, and yes like said above, everyone gets the "Giant AoE fireball" type spell. Every time. Every game.[/quote]Is that necessarily so? There are many, many other mechanics that could be used to greatly differentiate the damage spells of the various elements and nations. But Boogie more or less said in another thread that elemental damage types plus 1 physical damage type have been

Thanks for working late and getting this to us :)

I believe this is the same bug as [0.25][Crash] While starting to research enchantment

Do you have the crash log zip? sending that to fogbugz can help.

Confirmed, immediate and reproducible ctd on switching to any tech without milestones (Enchantment, Quests, etc) fogbugz report with crash log and debug.err: http://fogbugz.stardock.com/default.asp?pg=pgPublicView&sTicket=71145_krmf

[quote]Honestly I believe even though many of us on these forums have Great Ideas to truly improve the game, the only way we'd get those included into Elemental from inception is to have a line of communication directly into Brad Wardell's ear, which sadly none of us have.[/quote] Naw, it's not that bad. Have patience, and don't take the response to any one issue as a big disappointment. As I understand it, the whole starbases part of GC1/2 started with user ideas, as an e

[quote]Whether or not they use our input is up to them entirely. We can all go nuts writing long winded posts with great ideas for game design and balance and everything else but in the end they might throw all that out the window and go with whatever simplified system they already worked out which totally defeats the purpose of our Input.[/quote] This is close to that I've wanted to say about this process. I would stress that the "simplified system" may or may not be the one th

On damage types, my memory fails me, but I'm thinking MoM didn't actually have damage types per se. A chaos spell like fireball did damage and a death spell like wrack did damage, but only if the target failed their resist roll. BUT a unit with the Bless or Righteousness enchant had bonuses to their resist roll _only against chaos and death_. Brad, are you more open to element-specific resistance? Or are you trying to avoid a resistance stat altogether? Edit:

You don't have to go hog wild with damage types, but at least some kind of distinction between physical and magic damage would help.

From MoM I recall ToHit and ToDefend stats that had very interesting effects, as well as the Resistance stat. Edit: There's also cool things like "First Strike", "Breath Weapon", "Armor Piercing", "Illusion Attack". How do you feel about that sort of thing?

Agreeing with Winnihym, it would be very good if all displayed numbers had some sort of mouseover or other interface-accessible explanation that tells you exactly how the number was computed. Basically just have a stream parameter (which may be null) or something on the computation functions and have those functions write their steps out to that stream if it's not null. I've seen game code do that before and it works pretty well and has a negligible impact on cpu time for the nu

Brad, I think we may be failing in our communication to you. If we don't get builds, discussions like this thread will happen. You inflict pain on us, we inflict pain on you. (more seriously, I do understand you, that's why I've been refraining from wading into the details on the topic)

It would be nice if there was at least some basic concept that a unit can get so scared out of their wits that they're (temporarily) not good for much. We'll have to make sure to equip them with spare sets of underwear.

Implementing multiple different economic models is considerably more difficult and expensive than implementing any single one of them; aggressiveness of barbarians is much easier to make variable, and there are probably some significant aspects of the economic model that can be made variable, but I doubt they're going to want to put the necessary effort into two/three parallel designs to make them bug-free, balanced, properly exposed through the user interface, and properly used by the AI.</p