keithLamothe

Many thanks, activating fly-swatting modules...

Kryo, FYI I can confirm that deleting familytreesubwnd.dxpack does not fix the issue for at least one of us (just reported as bug 70304). It's my alternate (ancient) laptop so I can still play fine on my primary, just fyi.

Excellent :)

Boogie, I was hoping for pretty much exactly that, thanks :) A tremendous amount of the fun in MoM was how different the game could be based on those picks, and tossing race customization and sovereign-unit buffs into that mix could really take it to a new level. Massively strong sovereign unit with strong magic and really weak followers, or a mighty civilization with an only-slightly-above-mortal king, or anything in between... cool :)

"If you’ve ever played Master of Magic or Master of Orion, you probably have an inkling of the kind of race customization we have in mind." Iirc, neither MoM or MoO1 had race customization at all ;) ... but I know what you meant, cool :) edit, also the last line: ". But they are of the same genre. The point is, even today, that game is pretty fun" looks like an artifact from a previous version of the post By the way, thanks very muc

Consistent indentation ;) Every now and then I have to fix up some old script from programmers long past, and the indentation is often completely chaotic. I just have to go through the file and reformat everything before I can even begin to make sense of it.

I'm all for a long open beta because those who don't want to wait can simply join the beta (paying for it, of course, but you can't have everything). After the initial burst of feedback I've just been hanging back until we actually have a beta to work with, I'll pipe up more when we do. Thanks, Keith

Brad, thanks for keeping us fed ;) Y'all keep saying not to take the screenshots as indicating the final visual quality, and I understand, but honestly they look wonderful to me already. I'm a bit easy to please, I suppose, but you still get a sale either way.

This (the AI moddability) is looking very good thus far. And I'd really like to pit AIs against each other in AI-only matches too, Brad. Hint, hint ;) I'll consider my custom built AIs a success when they don't get eaten by yours every time.

Thanks for the info, Brad. Particularly thank you for answering the LAN question, as we hope to play some in-house multiplayer and it would be a little silly for all our packets to be running halfway across the country to your servers and then all the way back to our house (through the same network drop they went out) and into a different computer.

Great stuff, looks like we'll be expanding the definition of awesomeness in both quality and quantity. :)

Brad, Brad, we get the point. It's going to be a ridiculously cool game... Just kidding, give us as much detail and teasers as you can ;) And I wouldn't be worried about the they've-got-a-dragon-it's-game-over problem. Sure, if they get a dragon it might be game over, or you might have just finished researching your world-wrecking spell and your armies just barely manage to keep that dragon from blasting your tower so you have time to cast the spell

A decent camp 1 UI (and AI for computer players and human-assistance) could be designed and implemented and maintained through the hundreds of changes to related stuff throughout development... But it would take what, 500 developer-hours? 1000? 2000? Remember, there's only a certain number of hours budgeted for this game, in terms of salary spent on the project. If they do a really sophisticated model for this piece it will take away from what is available for: -

[quote]If there's an internal debate on planes/moons/whatever, I'd love to see a companion thread to the one on the econ mechanics. Or at least a semi-firm dev reply to this question that's been around pretty much since the boards opened.[/quote]Indeed, this is mighty important, at least to me. I thought it had already been answered and was asking to be pointed to it, but I guess not.

@Shayde - Yes, I understood that you meant "without compromising your vision", I just wanted to bring out that distinction. Since we agree on that, the question for any proposed simplification is "is this a compromise of the vision?" And yes, many games make many things optional, like MoM's allowing auto-resolve-combat as an option. I wanted to go into more detail on my "options are bad" spiel but I try to not write a book in every comment (despite appearances). <

[quote]You want to reach the widest audience possible - so simplistic is the way to go.[/quote]It's a spectrum with tradeoffs. Widest audience possible? Then it shouldn't be TBS, for starters. On the other hand, it'd be going overboard if proper use of the interface required knowing how to write SQL queries (which I'd be just fine with personally). The trick is to find what parts of the sophisticated model are the real killers in terms of model/UI/AI complexity and f

To echo one of PeacePhoenix's concerns, take this scenario and question: Assume I have X iron mines in operation and 10 cities with 1 iron-using-building each. Assume none of my cities have any of the bonuses Brad talked about in the camp 4 proposal (roads, caravans, etc). Therefore each city is getting an equal amount Y of iron per turn. Assume I then build an iron-using-building in an 11th city (also no bonuses) How much iron does each of my citie

Brad, Thanks for keeping this discussion going. I think camp 3 is significantly superior to camp 4, for example: [quote]as soon as I build 1 Alchemist lab in any town, then any town can build magic swords at a base level[/quote] Doesn't sound fun because: 1) There's no way I can disrupt that "base level" of production of an enemy city even if he only has one city with an alchemist lab and a Aegeon crystal mine (does the mine have to be at the same city?),

Direct IP, at least, would be really nice for those of us who find ourselves in no-internet situations. Just grab a router and a few ethernet cables, run ipconfig to check all the IPs and go. Quick question: Direct IP gaming is *usually* based on one machine hosting and all the others connecting directly to that computer, right? At least I only remember having to enter the IP of the host, perhaps the host passes along all the other player IPs so it's fully P2P. <br

On dungeons/planes/underground/etc, do we have any confirmed information that there will actually be more than one map in a game? As in MoM's Myrror or HoMM's underground? Dungeons are confirmed, but do we have any info about how they are actually represented spatially or how a "dungeon crawl" is represented temporally (i.e. one turn or more than that)? The map editor looks really nice, Brad, thanks for sharing that. I'll get a good bit of fun out of just making cool

Sorry, just noticed the camp #3 update in the OP, so my most recent comment is probably unnecessary. For what it's worth, I prefer 3 to 1.

Dear Stardockians, It seems you're concerned about the complexity of one or more of: 1) underlying data/logic model 2) effective user interface to display relevant information about the model 3) effective user interface to make relevant changes to the model 4) effective automated algorithms (or "AI") to make decisions for players based on high-level player input My guess is that you're not too worried about 1, and 2 and 3 are a lo

"The transport network is abstracted." That would be good. Honestly, the resource allocation part of camp 1 doesn't sound all that complex to me, but the actual shipping of the stuff sounds like it could be a bear to manage or understand. I'd probably be in favor of an abstract "transport capacity" stat for each civ with a transport priority for each resource. The thing I'd miss then is the ability to interrupt enemy transports. Sure, you could say that

My vote is for the sophisticated model, Thank you for bringing us in on the debate; I wanted to ask for more details but figured you didn't want the hassle of unreasonable user feedback. I underestimated Stardock ;) You are right that the interface would have to be very good. My ideas may be way off, but here they are in case they help: Have map mode for "Resource allocation" where the user picks one resource ("X") and the cities are marked: <br /

Let me provoke some thoughts here. A civ/gal-civ/mom/moo-like turn-based strategy game has the following options for "story": 1) backstory in the manual. Impact on game = none. 2) procedurally generated story a la Dwarf Fortress. Impact on game = subtle. 3) player-event-based text (tech researched, building built, civ destroyed, etc) which is just static except for "insert-city-name-here" stuff. Impact on game = none. 4) scripted event