keithLamothe

The dev journal on economics and unit building sounds wonderful. This may already be in the design, just want to make sure: - have uncommon map locations that yield special materials; say metal from the crater of a massive magical explosion in ancient times, or wood growing in an enchanted forest. - the special materials can be turned into mildly-buffed equipment, like armor with 10-20% resistance against fire damage, or bows that shoot 10-20% further Not

It would be cool to have certain map locations (dungeons, etc) give a bonus when your avatar is stationed inside them. A moderately powerful location could give a casting cost reduction to a certain type of magic, or a mild power boost. A really powerful location could allow the casting of a spell not cast anywhere else. Or allow you create items with a special power you can't get anywhere else. e.g. an ancient item workshop of the old gods for forging t

The difference between continuous-turn and standard turn-based... hmm, perhaps have it automatically activate the "pause" at set intervals? Aside from that, having two significantly different combat engines would be a bit problematic from a development standpoint, so it's more a matter of finding the minimal necessary modification to the continuous turn system that will fit your desires.

Hopefully the range of moddability will allow for scenarios where the PvE can be cranked up even more, such that the main threat to each player's existence is the "npc" forces and whatnot. A game where all the players ally with each other just to survive and get powerful enough to think about fighting each other for the victory... that could be a fun diverson from the standard approach.

[quote]I am wondering that why the devs are "ignoring" some threads, while in some topics not one, but more devs are replying. [e digicons]:([/e] [/quote] Don't worry, they're just busy and tend to be very selective about when they actually take the time to respond. They do read the forums: https://forums.elementalgame.com/328989 [quote]We devs scour the forums quite frequently, so don't worry about your post being buried - we'll fin

[quote]Not putting multiplayer in this game would be sheer insanity (although, people said that about GalCiv2 also )[/quote] The common error is to assume that Stardock does not possess said sheer insanity. Once you grasp the truth of that, all the rest makes sense ;)

There's some hope, as they've already got the "player-specific" quest victory thing going: https://forums.elementalgame.com/329219 [quote]3. The mechanics in Elemental are a bit different than the typical 4X game because even in terms of warfare, there are very different paths. For instance, Player A may have a huge army ready to steamroll but Player B may have an incredibly powerful sovereign who can wipe out vast armies and Player C may have built up an incred

Another idea was brought up that I should have included in the OP: - normally, avatar death = player loses - however, the player can eventually research a high level item creation spell that allows them to create one (and only one) very special and powerful item; one of its powers would be to "revive" the avatar once. The creation of this item would consume a lot of "essence", and the "revive" would cost a lot more. So it would only be available to r

Another idea that comes to mind is that the death of a channeler should have consequences for the world beyond their assets going neutral. Like if a really powerful fire channeler dies the final death, volcanos and stuff erupt across the map and make the world feel the pain. I'm not sure if it's worth the coding time (essentially triggering a minor world-wrecker spell on death) but it would add some tradeoffs on whether it's best to eliminate the guy or just marginalize him.

Sammual, yes, that would be a good approach with low development time. Having a relations system might be more than it's worth, but maybe the devs will have a better idea.

"If you could come back as your self or an apprentice the choice of weather or not to weaken yourself to empower a hero isn't as meaningfull." I'm not sure I was clear in what I said then, because I was advocating that "reviving" should use that very same "personal magic power". If you've used too much, you just die flat out, and if you haven't then you lose a large chunk of it to revive. Dying would certainly not gain you any said power.

You need a forum option for sending alcohol ;)

"Nuclear Warfare, it's for the children"? :)

Yes, thanks for the confirmation of my impression that 'the current idea for Elemental based on the GameSpot Interview ("If you die, it's game over.")'. In all honesty, I would prefer that it not be quite that way, which is why I posted this to provide an alternate idea. While options are generally bad due to multiplying effort of implementation, I think this is the sort of thing that could be made an easy enough option so that if the "no essence-revival" option is checked you j

Another discussion from the general forum... Initial Problem: If a player's avatar is killed, what happens to the player? Solution 1: that player is eliminated, and all their cities/armies/etc revert to neutral or go *boom* or something. I believe this is the current idea for Elemental based on the GameSpot Interview ("If you die, it's game over.") - con: this has made it very easy to "short-circuit" challenge by ganking AI avatars because the AI was stupid or

Ron, Yes, I later saw the dev comment about "fertile land" spots being required for new cities and that they could be either found naturally (and they're limited) or created by spending "essence" (which is costly). So it's an improved form of the "settlement sites" solution which is sufficiently improved that I like it :) Thanks, Keith

"If you die, it's game over." I'm really hoping that's not how the game turns out. At least some sort of "spell of return" should be possible, at least for the AI empires (and thus may as well be there for the human players). Of course, if you can make it so it's not easy to gank-assassinate the computer rulers, it might be interesting.

Just another voice saying: The art looks good, keep it up! :)

Preordered, spraying useless suggestions on the idea forums.

If there's a "make-your-own-unit" in-game system like Alpha Centauri, the mix-n-match would be cool. I was assuming a system like MoM or Dom3 where each faction has a set list of units available (you can mod it, sure, but that's outside the game). I may be very wrong.

1) hard limit, raise or lower by character trait - yea, sounds good. I'm thinking the most you could feasibly pull off is getting the max tier of one other faction, or next-to-max tier of 2 other factions, but nothing past that. It could be tuned. 2) mercenary units - interesting, MoM had mercs but they weren't a big deal. If they were the *only* way to get that really cool unit they would be pretty important. 3)

This came up on the general forum and seemed worth batting around here in "Ideas": Initial Problem: if a player gains control of a city populated by another faction, can they build the units of that other faction? Solution 1: yes, no restrictions (e.g. MoM) - con: leads to endgames being very similar as big players get every race Solution 2: no, they may only build units of their starting faction (e.g. Dom3) - con: it's a very rigid lock-in (if that'

Thanks very much for the info, BoogieBac, that sounds like a hybrid approach from the "limited number of valid settlement sites" approach from Kohan 2 (that's just where I encountered it), but with the nice touch of allowing the player to tradeoff for more sites.

Good ideas. I'll try to summarize and respond: 1) Prevent Massive City Spam - I don't know what they're doing about this, but having a setting that controls how far away from an existing city a new city has to be would help. Or have "settlement sites" that are the only places a new city can be built, but I'm not too fond of that one. 2) Prevent every city from having everything - They're doing something pretty interesting about this; from https://fo

I'm all for the conversion of uncomfortable amounts of kinetic energy into explosive force. The object can be large, or just travelling at a very unsafe speed, or both.