Fishbreath

Essence should not be an easily renewable resource (if at all renewable), and it is not a problem if channelers are incredibly powerful early-game (that just makes it more interesting than the usual grab-resources, avoid-fights, found-cities standard start to TBS games). The vibe I'm getting now is vaguely like Larry Niven's Warlock series, and that's an awesome thing to remind me of. The balancing act between keeping yourself strong, keeping your empire strong, and preventing yoursel

As a heavy user of Sentry (I build sensor pickets and station them around my planets for an early-warning system >.>), I can tell you exactly what it does. The ship stays idle until another ship comes into view, at which point the ship will be active again during your next turn--no more than that.

This idea is awesome.

[quote who="Ellestar" reply="17" id="2227712"] Anyway, let's say our empire has 50 resources out of 110. If we want even the most basic overview, we need to know current reserves, production, consumption, import, export and total change per turn. That's 50*6 = 300 numbers on the screen, nice excel spreadsheet. We didn't even start giving any orders yet and we don't know any details about production, consumption, import or export. As a bonus, we also have 20 cities. That makes it 20 sprea

[quote who="PurplePaladin" reply="11" id="2226349"]Here is a question my friends and I have: One of the biggest downfalls in Heroes of Might & Magic is that one "General" can hold/lead as many troops as he wants. This leads to the "stack of death" syndrome; everyone has one main hero that carries around 90% of his troops, and the other generals (if they even bother to buy more than one) do nothing but sit in the castle and/or are errend boys, transporting troops or weekly treasure f

Drawback #1: a dragon is an indivisible unit of force. Doesn't help you any to be able to crush one army at a time when all of your borders are beset by hordes of lesser troops. :P

Do it Civ4 style by default--borders don't overlap. Make players take explicit action to claim stuff beyond their own borders. Let everyone know when someone disputes a border.

Honestly, you're probably better off waiting a little longer. Total War games have a history of being released too early and then slowly but surely patched up to a more acceptable state. ETW is kind of in between at the moment--enjoyable, but flawed. I understand they plan at least two or three more major patches, though, and that's good. A hint--don't play a colonial power in the grand campaign quite yet. The AI doesn't do too well with crossing oceans and protecting its overseas hol

What about LAN games? I know I sold probably three or four copies of Demigod by installing it on friends' computers for a game night (after which they bought it, of course).

Here I am, on my fourth Stardock product and my third Stardock preorder. >.>