Annatar11

Activision has nothing to do with Blizzard. Sure, Activision merged with Vivendi (which owns Blizzard) and became the dominant partner, but part of the deal includes Blizzard not reporting to Activision: [quote]2. Blizzard - New Billing, Same Independence One of the intriguing things about the old Vivendi structure was that, even when Martin Tremblay <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.

"Hopefully", "maybe" and such isn't quite the same as "Yes, we're doing it".

[quote]incest[/quote] I don't think this word means what you think it means. That said, the item variety at the moment is a bit bland, but I fully expect for it to improve as more "fun" is added.

[quote]Charging for custom maps in sc2? Where did you read that? Have never heard it at all.[/quote] I can't point you to the Blizzard post at the moment, but it's really not as bad as it sounds. Blizzard will not allow 99% of the maps to be sold. The pay-to-download custom maps will be those that introduce new graphics assets (tilesets, unit models, etc) and are essentially of professional level quality - which the vast nearly unending majority of all maps won't be :P Also keep in mi

Yeah, the campaign is played with several characters backing you up, which can be AI or other players. There's also a wave survival mode that's been getting more common after Gears of War 2 and Halo: ODST introduced them.

[quote]won't be any difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit besides the 64 getting more much needed ram, only get a 64 bit computer if you want to run elemental on insanely large maps that could take ages to finish.[/quote] Basically this. Feature wise, both the 32 and 64 bit versions will be identical. The only difference is a native 64 bit version will have more RAM available to be used, allowing you to play absolutely gigantic maps. And don't take that to mean that the maps in 32-

[quote who="Bellack" reply="31" id="2659906"]Yes I fail to see how it would be difficult to put in Hot seat. Just look at AGe of Wonders. WE are not talking about some damn console split screen thing. Be sides Hot Seat also allows us to play multipule empires at once which I do a lot in TBG that allow hotseat. Yes multipul instalations at home is fine but some of us only have one PC. [/quote] Reason #1: How do you make Hotseat work with simultaneous turns? In MP, turn adv

[quote who="Star Adder" reply="3" id="2659903"]Well. like I said I don't consider the game to be bad because it's not as simplistic as former games of this genre. Or because it might not suit my needs. Or that my needs come before those of many. Just that I'm a little afraid that it's gonna be too long winded for me to really enjoy playing it. However, if things are as ddd888 depicted my concerns might be void after all. That was the exact reason for my post. So people

Besides, acare's main problems with the game seems to be set in stone features - if there aren't destructible environments now, there won't be in 4 months either. When I saw the E3 footage of the game, I immediately thought it was just a Call of Duty clone with a prettier engine. Didn't preorder for beta, and I see that my assumption was mostly correct. I own Bad Company 2 and currently don't see any advantages of MoH over it. No vehicles, no destruction, no huge maps - it seems like they wan

Yeah, any system that scales well economically should work well. The bigger the army you want, the greater the economic power (and thus size of empire) you need.

[quote]Ultimately I see adding hotseat as added PR for the game... there is a segment of players who won't buy the game if it lacks hotseat and a good number of them will see the game at the home of a friend, while using that feature. Telling someone that a game is good is never as effective as that other person playing the game.[/quote] But this assumes spending development time for hotseat is not an opportunity cost. If they put people on making hotseat, those people won't be doing

Yep, Tridus basically nailed it.

[quote]On a Side Note, please Don't hard code the limits on numbers of how many Units and People the game can have and have displayed at one time. Some of the more Hard Core types might want to up them later down the road [/quote] Hardcode limits are rarely arbitrary. They're usually rather purposeful to make sure the engine is stable. There's a lot of competition in a game for system resources, and they do have to find a fine line where they say "Okay, we can't really have any more o

I remember some talking on IRC that there was just a chance a Sov doesn't escape. This was before 2A, so I'm not sure if it still is like that (not that uncommon to have some undocumented changes).

I thought in addition to the essence cost there was a percentage chance that a Sov just doesn't escape even if he has essence?

[quote who="Vaul_Darkhour" reply="7" id="2658685"]yeah thats pretty lame... on Ale, why not just call them 'beverages'... I do like a few bevvies.. [/quote] "Recreational beverages" does have a nice ring to it.

Not sure I like that implementation. It doesn't really make a lot of sense that capturing a farm 4 tiles away from a city captures the city. How would combat work? If farm is part of the city, then attacking the farm is like attacking the city - so what happens with tactical combat, does it make you fight against the city's walls and troops? After all, if capturing a farm captures the whole city, then the whole city's defenders should be engaged at the farm.

But they do require 4 plot spaces, which is what Sherekhaan is talking about. Nobody's going to build these things because of it, even if they were free, except if there wasn't going to be anything else to build in those slots ever.

[quote who="rebelito" reply="509" id="2659045"]Oh, let's just be honest here. Don't forget to put the crackers into the discussion. Yes, I know, it is illegal. But they exist. And this type of decision is only sweet juice for them. They will have a party with this. The problem is, many people that disagree with this decision will go after the cracked solution, and the crackers will probably have one of the biggest bot-trojan-whatever distributions in history, all thanks

Yeah, I do that. I could see a "lock group" clickable maybe on the left of the portrait list that shows up when you have a group selected. With it locked, moving any unit of a group moves the whole group so you don't have to worry about selecting the leader in the stack of portraits, then if you want to take anyone out you just unlock it, move them out, and re-lock. Makes it pretty easy and convenient, I think.

As far as exp goes, unless it was changed stealthily, then any units fighting should give XP to your sovereign, even if he isn't in battle. I used to see this all the time when I'd hire a bunch of champions and leave some for city defense, and they'd get leveled up as I fought around the map. I haven't gotten much playtime with 2A yet, though. As far as mana goes, I agree that having your mana capacity linked to essence is a bit odd. My preference would actually be to link mana t

[quote]I agree that the game should provide a lot of different options. But in my opinion, the balance of guidars should never get into such a negative balance thats very hard to overcome anymore. I'm fine if I'm zero balance leaving without option to recruit any additional champ or building a city at that moment. But a game should ever try to avoid that you get into a region where the option is to start a new game because of 2 mouseclicks. If I identify that my strategy or gameplay doesn't f

The thing that really makes cities unique though are generally only a few buildings. I mean, all cities need housing, all cities generally need food production. You can make a case that each city should have schools and research buildings and town halls and all that. There just needs to be more stuff possible to build that really pushes out one aspect of the city's function while at the same time preventing it from from doing the same to its others. And yes, a lot of this is determined by the

[quote]* Taking wrong decisions in the beginning: Currently the game allows for 'wrong' decisions in the beginning. Without starting a city and at least a small stable economy you can spend all your coins with aquiring champions. I don't know if this is a bug or not, but it happened several times that I had after aquisition a negative balance on my gold share. It takes quit some time adventuring to recover from this. The same goes for city spams - it tells you that you need 100 Gol

[quote who="Island Dog" reply="15" id="2658862"] Quoting Annatar11, reply 14 I'd flip the topic around to "Why the laptop makes my future iPad purchases uncertain". There's *nothing* an iPad does that a laptop doesn't do better, and it can't do many things that a laptop can. I think he listed a bunch of reasons in the post. [/quote] Not really. He didn't list anything important as it relates to actual performance, just pret