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[quote]This came from Beta 2-B (last Thursday). So yesterday we re-did the magic system and it now works as follows: Spells do not cost Essence. Only mana. Your mana max is equal to your essence. Initial essence = to unit’s intelligence. [/quote] Is Essence ever going to be used to benefit a physical damage dealer? You used to make the example of Sauron in the beginning of The Fellowship when comparing to a Sovereign with Essence, but that wasn

Would be easier and better to figure out how to give Prestige a reason to exist in end-game (% bonus to city production per point of prestige?) rather than figuring out how to make demolishing large numbers of building quicker. As for housing, I don't particularly share your view of the problem. It's true that only x number of people are needed to level up a city, but when you recruit armies you use people from the population pool, so this kind of min/maxing is usually detrimenta

[quote]Even you must admit that it's strange to have your tagline be "you won't even notice us when you use our product!" from a marketing standpoint.[/quote] Not at all, considering a lot of people don't like Steam simply because it's intrusive, not because they don't like its functionality.

The food production isn't per-turn. You don't gain 2 food per turn, you just gain a total of 2 food. Same with all the other food-producing improvements. Also, individual people don't consume food, it's just "paid" up-front when you build a house and people fill in. Basically, this isn't a bug but how it's supposed to work.

Detailed calculation logs are fine in games where you have very small numbers of units (like D&D CRPGs where it's just your party of a few people and whatever they're fighting), but become way too unwieldly you've got hundreds or a thousand guys fighting another thousand.

At the moment, as Xtropy mentioned the AI is non-existant because a lot of things keep changing still, and it's kind of a waste to keep re-making parts of AI because some important game mechanic changed. However, in release you can definitely expect AI to be good, and to get improved even more in subsequent patches.

I tend to do that too. Goodie huts do have a particle effect (if you zoom out slowly, the glowy white ball usually in the center of the tile will stand out more), but it's not usually obvious. A more tame particle effect that either surrounds the tile or floats above it would work a bit better, I think.

[quote]Brad has stated numerous times that recruiting a Dragon would a very big thing. In beta 2B there are Drakes. And their stats are : HP 150, ATK 80, DEF 40. This beast will be hard to kill[/quote] I just hope in tactical combat this is represented in a more fun way than just lots of turns of the dragon one-shotting one of your guys at a time. :)

[quote]Having an overview of the kingdom/your spells on one screen and the world map on the other would be convenient.[/quote] Spells with the current spell selection system - maybe. But that's changing. Kingdom info never needs to constantly be displayed. [quote]Whether it is necessary or not isn't the question. It would certainly be fun to have![/quote] Of course it is. Developing support for 2nd monitor display inevitably takes development time off somethi

I can't really find a compelling reason to have dual monitor support. Other than a "world view" display, there's nothing that would belong on the second screen. It was half-useful in SupCom because action was fast and you had to constantly keep glued to The Big Picture, but this is hardly going to be the case in Elemental I think. I don't see it adding enough real value to the game/gameplay, it would just be a "Hey, dual monitor support!" gimmick with little practical funct

[quote]I think the whole game mechanic of Essence is indeed critical and is one that distinguishes this magic system. Sovereign's SHOULD "permanently" lose Essence for those exceptionally important endeavors, whether a super spell (requiring mana, essence and shards), imbuing, one-time doubling of their mana pool for a particularly vicious combat encourter, etc. The only way to regain this Essence is through leveling (experience gain) or adventuring (finding an Item, Potion, Scroll, etc.).<br

From my observations, it generally happens when a resource disappears from that bar. Like if you had 2 food and build a hut, the bar shrinks too much and the last listing pops out.

Not that it isn't a useful app, but plugging it for modding a game when backing up the game files isn't actually required? ;)

[quote]1) Are the XML files that you will be dealing with user specific xml files or do you actually edit the "canon" game files? 2) I am aware there will be an option to set "allow mods" or not in the options. My question is, say you have made a dozen mods and they all work great, and then you do something that is a game breaker. Will there be an easy way to undo the change, (aside from making backup versions of the files before putting in a change) I mean sure, you can always re-

[quote who="Aractain" reply="40" id="2665506"]The only issue I have is the same issue I had in Galciv II, I wanted a ship about the size of 8 tiles. However, your engine just scales down the size of the ship to the title based on its extents (as well as a maximum size in the editor). Damn you! Elemental looks like its going to be difficult - if not impossible - to create massive multi-tile 'stuff' on the terrain. This potentialy saddens me. [/quote] Multi-ti

[quote]Imagine, say, Call of Duty 4 with visuals slightly better than the original Call of Duty, however will hundreds more NPCs and significantly larger battlefields. [/quote] This is a terrible comparison because Call of Duty 4 is already only slightly better than the original Call of Duty, and its engine is very low tech. They just didn't put a lot of stuff in it 'cause their production cycle is stupidly short (a CoD game each year!) That said, pretty graphics are by no mea

[quote]NPCs. Playing as a Trog today makes me uncertain why an NPC from the race of men would want to sign on board. Should they just cost more? Or should they be hostile? Or what? [/quote] [quote]Interesting Choices. Being forced to spend essence to build a city is not a choice interesting or not. I’m inclined to find some other use to revive land rather than forcing users to use it to effectively build a town. That is, we’d let the player build cities on the foresaken land. That

[quote]+ If an improvement requires that another improvement already be built we do not list it in the improvement list since we've no way to express to the user why it's greyed out. (Example, the granary, which you can only build after building a farm, wheat farm, apiary or orchard.)[/quote] Not sure this is the best way to handle it. How would I know what's required for a Granary otherwise, short of digging around in the game manual or ingame Encyclopedia, both of which should not b

[quote]Suggestions and ideas on how you would like magical spells that stay in effect (do you want to require a mana cost or just have it be free? I’d rather see it be free otherwise players will have to run around dispelling things and that’s just tedious). [/quote] Right away, the best mechanic for this I've ever seen in a game is Guild Wars - impose not a mana cost, but a mana regeneration cost. By "spell that stays in effect", I'm assuming you mean a persistant buff or

[quote who="SavageBananaMan34" reply="32" id="2662982"]That diablo 3 picture is fitting for this thread. That was shown probably a good 2-3+ years before the game's release, and look at how damn clean it is. Time to work your magic, Stardock! [/quote] The funny thing is that if you look at the pre-beta pictures of Elemental (like, the ones posted before the very first beta build), the UI there looks clean and pretty and not at all what it is now. Difference is of course tha

[quote]I haven't been in a Stardock beta before, so I have no idea how GalCiv2 and SoaSE were at this point of development, but either this genre of game is developed very differently from most others, or Stardock is going to have to be amazing AND very lucky to pull it off.[/quote] Actually, SoaSE was mostly the same. Keep in mind, it was developed by Ironclad so it's mostly them who had a lot of sleepless nights getting it ready, but the timetable was pretty similar. But at the same

[quote]As a preorderer (is that even a word?), Stardock-fan and software developer, I'd just like to add to the respectful choir that sings 'Take some more time to make this a real juvel, please'. As noted by other posters, we haven't seen the whole package, and you may be holding much back on us ... but based on your notes above, Frogboy, it seems that a little extra time may be valuable.[/quote] While I don't disagree that extra time might be good, the date is already locked (market

[quote]*The graphics could use some AA. It's not terrible, but it's noticeable. I'm running a 260 card, i7 2.7gHz processor, and 12 gigs RAM, and I'd like to make use of that.[/quote] Have you tried toggling forced AA in the video card control panel? Works for most games, but some have graphics glitches with forced AA.

[quote]Also, the lack of time with larger maps is especially vexing because those are where some of the UI weaknesses of GC2 show clearly.[/quote] A very good point. After plugging the Empire Tree in this thread I went and made a suggestion post on improving the tree to make it easy to manage as the number of units/cities increases dramatically on the really big maps, since it will be our means of quickly finding stuff without scrolling around everywhere.

Happily, you're really not missing anything in SupCom 2 :P