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[quote]Or you're fighting someone with ranged units, or another caster. The melee sovereign is going to have more agility and thus more defense against the ranged units at least (not sure how spell defense works right now). A caster sovereign who gets attacked is going to get completely crushed without constitution. That and charisma are useful to everybody.[/quote] But there are protection spells that a melee sovereign might not have access to. There's also a difference between being

[quote]A melee sovereign using his best ability (melee) doesn't suffer any permanent weakening due to it, and only has to focus on two stats (Str/Agi). [/quote] This is incorrect, a melee sovereign most definitely needs to invest in Constitution as well, since he's going to be getting hit. This isn't the case for a caster, unless he chooses to dance around on the front lines. [quote]Casters feel weak right now all game long (but particularly in early game where they get crushe

[quote]That, totally. If you try to make a new champion in the later game when everything is big, it's very hard to ever catch it up if the share of the XP is a tiny fraction. An even split works better.[/quote] I think Elemental is trying to skirt around this by having that adventurer research line that makes stronger champions to start for your recruiting pleasure. But that wouldn't work for your offspring, I imagine.

It's also not quite accurate. Strictly speaking, a melee sovereign who only raises melee stats will be able to cast much fewer spells per turn (and not even all spells due to having low essence) while a caster sovereign who raises his INT/Essence scores will not only do more damage with his spells, but be able to cast more per turn (and more mana in tactical battles as well). So while the melee guy hacks better, the caster guy is able to fling spells left and right. Also, only the really high

I'd throw my hat in with approving that message, however I think at this point it's beating a dead horse. Given everything still left to do I don't see them being too excited about re-doing Essence. There are a few more minor tweaks to make Essence useful beyond just giving mana, such as using it to modify the effects of abilities/spells (damage bonus, max number of targets bonus, radius bonus, etc per x points of essence), but I wouldn't expect anything big to change.

[quote]The Sins economy got reworked between the end of the beta and release.[/quote] It would be more effective to say that Advent were added between the end of beta and release :P

Uh-huh. Keep dreaming, Poly ;)

Personally I'm a fan of just an even split. If a monster is worth 100 xp and you have 5 xp earning units in the army when you kill it, each gets 20. Easy and fair. Rewarding more xp for more damage done helps keep leveling at a steadier pace (higher level units do more damage, so get more xp, but need more xp to level up), but it's also common for games to expect you to "catch up" new heroes to the higher level ones. It's really difficult for us (beta testers) to have an informed opin

You now always start out near a food tile. I'm not against letting the player know that food is tied to city expansion, perhaps by either putting it in the description for the fertile land, or just a quick check when founding a kingdom, and pop up a window saying "Hey, you're not going to be in range of a food tile so your city won't grow". However, doing a popup like this isn't exactly accurate since food is global and not per-city, so it gives the incorrect impression that each city *needs*

[quote]Modding can help sales quite a lot for expansions though, due to the longevity thing. If people are still playing the game and still enjoying mods, you've got a larger audience for an expansion then you do if those people all got bored and moved on.[/quote] In general, yes, and that's a good point. It also depends on how many expansions SD has planned.. right now we only know of one for February, and that's not enough time for any really big mod to get developed and released. T

[quote] I did however play and really enjoy Temple of Elemental Evil.[/quote] I liked it too. It took quite a bit of effort to get into, and a lot of the mechanics that most games ignore were actually well implemented in it. The main problem I had with it is that it picks up so incredibly slowly it's painful. Once you get inside the temple it's great fun, but running around in that village in the beginning made me want to stab a kitten.

Why not just download Visual Studio Express? It's free, and all the screenshots Frogboy posts with the XML files are from VS :P

Modding does not bring in short term sales, nor a very large portion of sales overall. Modding is good for game longevity, and once some high-profile/high-quality mods come out some more people may pick up Elemental from the bargain bin (or wait for an Impulse sale), but the vast majority of the full-price sales will have to come from the game built from those tools on release. The majority of people aren't modders, and don't play mods. These people are not going to spend $50 on a modding pla

[quote]well ... I'd still personally like to see (not in release but maybe a mod) large battles where Each individual soldier is a separate object. Basically, while the unit is bought together, trains together, and moves together ... each soldier is a separate object with its own attack, defense, and HP. So even a giant force of 1000 peasants, separated into 10 units of 100, cannot attack ALL AT ONCE with all 100 peasants ... instead the peasants attack one at a time onc

The dates on those files are close to a month old almost, they're basically useless as they're from an ancient version of the beta.

I proposed once instead of having personal inventories for each character, to just have a global "Kingdom Vault" or whatever, where everything you find goes. Then when you open a character's sheet, you can equip him directly from the vault. Would be a lot more convenient on larger maps where you might have tons of people running around, so you wouldn't have to look through the inventories of 30 guys to find that item you thought you had lying around. ... But, it was shot d

Obviously it would be rather difficult to fix your crashes without knowing what caused them, so you should definitely upload your crash dumps to Dropbox and post the links. The bug reporting guide pinned to the top of the forums should go over that, I believe.

[quote]That just means one would want more territories quicker to avail one self of those resources.[/quote] Which.. is actually no longer city spam, as you're scouting the map for prime locations to build cities to harvest resources. This is much slower than putting down cities everywhere you can because you can build a bunch of improvements that generate food. Expanding your territory is not spam. Spam is putting them down everywhere because their improvements generate resou

How is changing "city spam" to "village spam" a viable solution to.. spam? :P Besides, Frogboy already outlined the solution: resources play a much bigger role (meaning, your cities don't magically make stuff out of thin air), and in return you can claim resources in your own territory. No spam needed.

I think you might have meant this as a reply, not a new thread :P

[quote]it's starting to make me think the question isn't being answered on purpose.[/quote] *hands Raven a collection of tin foil hats*

I guess I don't quite understand why one would make a "I'm afraid the game won't be ready in " thread instead of "The game is lacking in currently, here's a few things you can do to make it better: ....". If you're worried about the game lacking something, wouldn't it be better to post ideas and suggestions that would make the game more complete in that regard? It's okay so say you're concerned, but without offering anything to help SD's probably lef

Mmmm, melting faces with fireballs in tactical battles....

It's wouldn't be the Elemental forums without a daily/weekly "This game is not ready!!" thread. :P They've been saying all along to not look at betas as representative of the final game.

With a special victory condition of "Death by Snoo-Snoo!".