keithLamothe

Yea, the spawn thing is too artificial. Perhaps the best solution is just to require that an army bring along caravans if they want to get the cargo-sized loot. I like that better than having the caravans come from a nearby city to pick up the loot because I don't think it would be good for the devs to have to implement "lootbags" that can be on any tile and have some kind of logic that reduces the amount of loot left in the bag for each tur

Yea, people who won't follow it won't follow it. But there is a difference between a post 2 screens long and a post 20 screens long. Even if I can plow through it, if I get the feeling that it's Don Quixote tilting at windmills I don't tend to respond. A good thing to do at some point is resolve your desired mechanics into appropriately simplified models and then the individual pieces into more concretely terms of xml/c++ psuedocode. Not really for the

Battlefield spoils sounds interesting. At the very least defeating enemy caravans should result in the attacker getting some of the cargo. I don't think I like the idea of having to explicitly bring caravans to the battle to transport the spoil, though. I also don't think it would be good to just let the stuff sit there, or you could wind up with the world map covered in uncollected loot. I'd prefer something where your caravan would "

Sounds like a cool idea to have the game remember an epic battle with a monument, and I suppose a general morale bonus of some sort would be appropriate. Probably don't want it to try and do a specific unit type bonus based on what happened, though. I'd like the monument, at least, as I like the game to reflect that important things have happened.

They'll reply in due time, I'm sure.

McFungos, I thought about the action-based Doctrine/Social-Engineering idea overnight and it seems more feasible now. It would be a pretty significant chunk of work, but as Spartan said there are other requests being made that tie into the same thing. Still, there are simpler models like SMAC or EU/HOI that might serve better in terms of the devs actually being willing to implement them ;) Anyway, the piece common to all 3 models: A number of

The more I think about it, the better perma death sounds. My main concern is that it not be too easy to "gank" an avatar, particularly an AI avatar. Assuming that, the only exception I'd entertain is the "One Ring" sort of spell that represents a major turning point (and tradeoff) in the nature and power of the avatar, and would only be possible by mid game at earliest.

This does sound interesting but I wonder if it might do better in a separate thread since it is much wider scope than research. Up to you.

[quote]But maybe what I just said makes no sense and/or cannot be implemented in a video game.[/quote] It mostly makes sense, but your desire for concreteness seems pretty abstract ;) To clarify: are you wanting more chess-like strategy where being able to see and understand all potential scenarios X moves ahead is both desirable and reasonably possible?

McFungos, The "repeated actions => doctrine => +/- modifiers" idea is very interesting and would enrich the feeling that your actions shape your civilization and world. My concern is that it could be more complicated to implement than the benefit in fun-value would warrant. From your examples practically every action would have include code that applies modifiers to "doctrine" values, and even the data model of "doctrine" would be non-trivial. <br

[quote]The question is, will it work for SD?[/quote] Indeed. We only know what they tell us, and they might be doing something innovative that renders our ideas non-applicable or redundant. So I'm thinking the best we can do is hash out the ideas, come to a consensus, and post a direct proposal to SD for them to give feedback upon whenever they feel like gracing us with their presence ;) It appears that those steps are done, and we should move on to other dis

I didn't address the AI part of the implementation of the blind/category/specific idea. I think this might be a sticking point. At least, it would be the most complicated part. A few solutions come to mind: 1) just let the AI do specific-tech research at 100% and not be aware of the blind or category options - con: the AI would not be playing the same game as the humans, which is generally a big no-no particularly in Stardock's

Thanks for the feedback, SackLunch. [quote]My first preference would be to have an option at start up.[/quote] That was my first preference too, until Ash correctly corrected my copout thinking here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/329572/get;1934445 In general options like this one would consume an amount of development/testing resources that is disproportionate to the benefit of having them. Or you wind up with one option or the other (or both) being

edit: double post, it wouldn't show me the previous one

Yea, dunno how they're going to handle pausing in multiplayer... my guess is that anyone can pause, whenever they want. Other games have implemented "pause-voting" and "unpause-voting" and whatnot to try and deal with the folks who "wreck the board" by keeping it paused... but SD may not be intending to make it impossible to do that, it's just a matter of finding people to play with that possess a bare minimum of real-world ethics.

The difficulty isn't so much the inability to wipe out that 7000 man army to the last man, it's the difficulty of having to either wipe them out or deal with them staying as an organized unit and running around pillaging. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd think the realistic thing is that they'd be sufficiently disorganized to cease functioning as a military unit and (at worst) revert to the sort of banditry-sized pest that the local police forces are supposed to deal with. In other words,

Vandenburg brought up a point which moves me very much in the continuous turn direction: "removes some of the exploits and problems (and possibilities if you want) of seperated move turn battles or initiative based turn battles." "Going First" was just such a huge advantage in so many games, by the time the oth

re: 18000 Petabytes; by the time that anyone can actually afford to make a computer with 1000+ Petabytes of RAM or a cpu-cluster can efficiently deal with such a large volume of data in a high-performance game... well, maybe we'll be storing the genome structures of all those peasants ;)

Yea, I was thinking that magic research should stay MoM-like in that you pick a specific spell out of a spellbook which already has the thing it just needs to be decoded and understood.

Well, I've been a big Stardock fan since GC1, so I'll be happy to remind the press that they need to say more good things about Stardock ;)

Ok, as far as what it would take: 1) add three entries to the settings xml file: 2) add a new data type for "tech category", the only fields I think it would need are an ID and a name, but perhaps the image/graphical-resource would need to be on there for the button that will be clicked to se

My main reason for wanting layering is to be able to have a scenario (via mod, probably) with really dangerous planes where the NPCs take the gloves off but there are really nice rewards. Otherworldly, insanely dangerous places. Just perfect for that incredible stack-of-doom you've spent most of the game building. Or for the titanic channeler. But if there's no layering built into the base game, it can't be modded in.

[quote]Are you thinking only one category at a time or would multiple be possible? i.e. focus on 2 out of the four possible catigories[/quote] I was thinking just pick 1 out of like 4 or 5 general categories. It wouldn't make it much worse to allow picking multiple, but would there be much benefit?

I'm glad it looks like we've a palatable solution. Ok, let me restate the goals here: - make it fun for those who want blind research - make it fun for those who want to pick specific techs to research (myself included) - don't place undue or unnecessary burden on development/testing/balancing resources (e.g. avoid options) And a proposed solution: - when choosing what to research, the player can choose between three methods: -- Pick

To clarify I'm not saying it should go to the level of making bronze out of copper and tin, that was just the example that came to mind. Another more likely one would be something like "fire-elemental-gems + steel = fire-resistant-steel" which could then make fire-resistant-armor or some such.