Sareln

[quote who="Nick-Danger" reply="70" id="2655177"] Quoting vieuxchat, reply 69...Why would I buy books of magic if I'm not even sure to be "able" to cast them once in the game ?"You've got to ask yourself a question: do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?" -Dirty Harry [/quote] I don't think this'll be as big as an issue to worry about as we're worrying. Worse-to-worse, we can throw mana-filtering and mana-amplifying abilities into the magic tree...

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="49" id="2654962"] You wouldn't. You're rolling the dice. But only really powerful spells are in those books. Most of the typical spells you will get from researching them in the magic trees.[/quote] So the "normal" spells will be in the magic technology category, while the super-specialist spells will be in the sovereign's books?

[quote who="bilskis" reply="3" id="2654843"]Tabs for city should be included but be defaulted to a 'Show all' tab so that when you have only a few buildings to choose from you don't need to switch but as it escalates you can (don't have to) switch to find it easier.[/quote] That would deal with my concern rather effectively. Perhaps when in show-all it could do the overlay icons like this? <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4995277/Elemental%20Beta/BuildingMenuUIChange.pn

Tabs for city building is something I want to avoid if at all possible, due to the frequency with which people will be using the screen. Basically, since city building is something we do almost every turn, we want to minimize the number of clicks, since clicks saved on that screen add up rather quickly. Tabs on sovereign creation are a good idea, especially since you only do that screen once per game.

Religion can be a fun, viable concept as long as no-one is prone to sue at the drop of a hat. Alas, people are prone to sue at the drop of a hat. If you want to see what religious variance can do for a game, go take a look at the FfH mod for CIV IV. There, religion has a tremendous effect upon your playstyle, more powerful than leader traits... Given the constraints that a AAA publisher has to work around with regards to religion, I am not surprised that they have de

[quote who="Anomander" reply="11" id="2654154"]Oh as a side note to my Army friends, apparently this highlighted omission and observation thread is not worthy of even 1 point. Nice! How do I desert? [/quote] They want you to spread the word beyond the forums, to build awareness of the game. I imagine forum activity on non-stardock forums about Elemental would still score you points :P.

[quote quoting="post"] I would like to see several additional damage types added to the tactical combat section of the game. Fire, cold and various weapon types of damage have already been included. I would like to see some Status effect types of damage added that could be either creature, item, or magic effects. Such Status effects are frequently seen in fantasy settings and add a new layer to tactical ( and sometimes strategic ) combat. The difference between them and just adding a bu

[quote]Furthermore it would be nice to be able to control the point at which it switches to the 2D map. I'd like to be able to zoom out a little further sometimes while still being all 3D and such, other times the reverse.[/quote] Cloth Map Zoom Level will do that for you, default is 90 iirc. Shifting to the left means more zoom-out before shifting to cloth map mode. And yes, it does look awesome. <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4995277/Elemental%20Beta/Element

[quote who="KellenDunk" reply="162" id="2653978"] Quoting strager, reply 161 Quoting Sanati, reply 155 Quoting strager, reply 150 That should not be allowed to happen! Yes it should. I believe it was specifically stated by a dev somewhere that at the start you should have the option of recruiting NPCs and doing quests or building up your kingdom right away. It's probably even possible to never build or capture a city and still win using only the might of your sovereig

[quote who="lavabeing" reply="39" id="2653722"]Drop box does not allow me to "copy Public Link" either.. Do you have a paid account? I had to sign up for a free account, and I'm not getting that option in the "right click -> Dropbxo" menu. Can someone from stardock look into this an suggest a free option of public links are only available through a paid Dropbox account.[/quote] Public links are avai

A fun spoils of war for capturing an enemy capital would be the immature children of that sovereign. Don't know how well that fits the world though.

The masking of information is a bit of a red flag, IMO. The idea of a strategy game is to give players a system they can interact with, information about the system, and ask them to make interesting decisions. Masking information from the player, which they can acquire simply through careful note-taking, doesn't serve that purpose.

It would be interesting to have some metals available in the mountains, rather than just on the flatlands right now. This may just be an artifact of the fixed map however.

[quote who="Philly0381" reply="15" id="2653412"]Is Open Office a good alternative, you know, for the rest of us that don't have unlimited bank accounts? [/quote] Open Office is a passable alternative if your word-processing and presentations are not part of your professional career. I say passable because documentation in Open Office is ... bad. Say what you will about Microsoft's UI choices and software design, at least with their product a few seconds of quali

[quote who="Hawawaa" reply="119" id="2653498"]I just had a thought... So right now for a city to level up you need to have the food and housing requirements. Now I was wondering if you add one more little detail. For a city to level up you need to hit the minimum number of different structures built in a city for it to level up too. What do ya think? [/quote] It feels contrived. Ideally we want the targeted result to fall out of the system naturally, rather than imposing it upo

I am curious as to the balance of gameplay between empire-management and warfare.

[quote who="Tridus" reply="64" id="2653145"] Quoting Nick-Danger, reply 61First, if both are 'illogical' go with the 'no hard cap' one. Second, remove the other hard caps. Does it make sense to have a city consisting of nothing but schools? Some of the caps make a lot more sense then the alternative. In my current game (mentioned in this thread, first page IIRC) I got my 2 cities to lvl 5 with no gardens and still have 38 surplus food. Checking my '

[quote who="Pantasd" reply="2" id="2653175"]i like the way how research works good to hear that frogboy wont change it [/quote] I think the current research system is passable, but could definitely work better with a few subtle tweaks. This particular idea with subcategory groupings doesn't actually make that huge of a change to the underlying research system, if anything, it's a building suggestion! (remove the standard research multipliers in favor of distributing typed multip

[quote]I also like the reply #9 by NatakuTDH where units can trade items with eachother.. Like armory, weapons, potions and books etc.[/quote] You can do that right now, but it's not very intuitive. When you have two units on the same tile, if you select one and go to their "items" tab, you can click drag the item to the Portrait Button of the other unit. This should transfer the item.

I think the concept is to offer a source of housing that doesn't require food production - enabling a larger city without the normally required food infrastructure. However, like most things checked-in so far, it's not balanced, just a proof of concept.

[quote]Beginning of cleanup to the tech tree[/quote] What will be the general philosophy behind the technology tree cleanup? Are we locking in the general system? Subcategories too macro? Tree structures a given? Sareln has too many questions about technology systems and should go work on something else for a moment? [e digicons]:D[/e]

Agree with comments on early mob strength, city building is tedious, and that the tech system needs to be looked at. Tech system suggestions such as typed research buildings and subcategories have their own subposts in the Elemental Ideas subforum, but we definitely need to refine those ideas more. My biggest peeve right now from a graphical issue is the borders/influence system. I don't see a very intuitive way to understand how influence circles interact with each othe

I'd like to keep the city build screen as simple as possible, personally. Too many clicks to accomplish things can get tedious after a while. If we wanted to organize the buildings in a more direct fashion, I would organize the buildings by rows. The problem is that there are some subcategories right now (metal) which don't have enough buildings to justify either a row, column, or tab. If we're worried about potential color, we could color code the menu, eg.

Play count on impulse incremented by about 20. This is actually only about 5 - 6 hours of playtime, it was a busy weekend.

I think it would be helpful to have the buildings marked with the resource they produce. Could extend to also mark (in red or something) the resources consumed. Edited screenshot attached to show the rough concept.