Sareln

Road is built with caravan traffic, units move faster along them. It takes a long time right now to establish the road. Road has two levels, dirt and paved. Picture for fun:

Characteristic: With typed breakthroughs, you could push higher chances of better breakthroughs in particular subcategories. You'd want to shift the odds in such a manner that the player notices the change. Eg. my faction trait is seafaring, so when I'm researching in the seafaring subcategory of civilization, I am more likely to have moderate and dramatic successes. Another way to do typed breakthroughs are to only

A change to the typed breakthroughs and then a diagram. Success - 1 Green Technology, 1 Gray Moderate Success - 1 Green, 1 Yellow (Orange in Diagram), 1 Gray Dramatic Success - 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Gray The idea is to always keep moving forward in the lines. Things which are grouped in a column all have the previous column as a prerequisite. Eg. Hybrid Crops & Advanced Irrigation bot

Dedicated farm cities work quite well. Especially next to that wild game slot in the middle of the map. I don't know if that's the intent, but you can indeed form a breadbasket for the empire. Trade will also enhance the amount of resources produced (at least gildar and materials, I don't know if food is included in that.)

A possible tweak to outposts is to have the produce resources, but have to carry them back to the city before they're added to the pool. Obviously this means you can't pioneer non-stream resources (like food). This would be an automatic route, like the caravans, and produce a road, as the caravans do. This will lead to more roads, but gives a good graphical representation of where resources are going. Naturally, we would need to figure out a good low-resource way for

Fixed map won't be with us forever, but here is an idea on ramping up the early city game: +1 Materials / Turn from City Squares (Per Level Perhaps?) I find materials to be the major limiter in getting markets and libraries up quickly at the beginning of the game, which allow me to start researching and growing. Perhaps a small tweak to what generates points would help this along? I'm worried about giving too much from city centers since then we encourage more city

Summarizing the General Philosophy: Research with subcategories is supposed to reflect the player telling his research minions to solve a particular problem, and his minions coming back with a solution. It may not be the best solution, but it will help solve the problem the player asked them to solve . The system falls apart if it doesn't, because players become frustrated at their lack of control, or at least, I wou

Bettick, I didn't mean to ignore you: a wildcard might work, yes, but really, we do want the player to put some thought into which subcategory they want, and I think including a wildcard would be a touch clunky.

Alright, I've finished running around the park at night with a light up frisbee, time for me to take a crack at this. Beric01, it seemed like a good idea at the time to split the threads between name brainstorming and actual functionality. Maybe that's a bit overkill, but oh well [e digicons]:grin:[/e] . If there's one thing this subcategory system reminds me of, it's the undirected research of Alpha Centauri. This was interesting, but I don't re

[quote who="Kantok" reply="4" id="2650013"] Quoting Sareln, reply 3 Yeah, I wanted to break it out of the thread and flesh it out some more. This is for names and flavor, the other thread I just started (with a huge block quote of you) is for the idea itself. Have to run! Hell, I wasn't looking for credit. Just wanted to make sure you'd seen the other discussion.[/quote] Hah, I try to read as much as possible before posting, so

[quote who="Kantok" reply="2" id="2649889"]This is similar to what we are talking about in a beta thread on the tech trees. Here I'll be back to post more in a bit. This is an interesting topic and idea. [/quote] Yeah, I wanted to break it out of the thread and flesh it out some more. This is for names and flavor, the other thread I just started (with a huge block quote of you) is for the idea itself. Have to run!

So, saw this: [quote] Kantok: Instead of selecting your research category, waiting X amount of time, and then being presented with an array of psuedo randomly chosen technology choices I'd have the Sov. select from subcategories and then have the researchers just discover something in that category. All of prereqs and technology relations would still exist, they'd just be invisible to the player. You'd still be choosing how to specialize your society.

If we are attached to not revealing the tech tree, we definitely need to give the player finer grain control over the randomness. A suggestion I saw that I think has merit is the idea of subcategories that the player would focus on. Eg. the player directs his researchers to research Civilization, focusing on Economics. With that said, we should brainstorm both flavorful and informative sub-categories. I broke out the Civilization and Warfare trees since that's what w

Right now units scale with the zoom level so that they are easily identifiable. This is good for gameplay. Could you give us a check box in option to disable this scaling behavior so we can take epic screenshots of our empires? I think it'd be pretty neat, especially combined with playing with the strategic zoom threshold slider.

Windowed mode works for me: Win7, Core2Duo 2.33, 6.0 Gigs RAM, NVidia 8800 GTS List your system specs / link your DXDiag to give them a better idea of what the problem could be.

But does it work in multiplayer? [e digicons]O:)[/e]

[quote]In fact, I'd dig it if, while researching magic (or some such thing), something goes terribly wrong (as research does) and I hit a dead end and lose the points I spent or I get the tech but the inventor dies in a related explosion.[/quote] Sword of the Stars had an implementation for this if you were "hurrying" technology. Not such a problem if you were researching something relatively benign like lasers. A huge problem if you were researching, oh, AI. Edit:

[quote]magically induced weather.[/quote] I'm inclined for there to be tactical battle considerations for weather, but it can only come about through magic. If you want to make it an attacker's choice sort of thing, do what Total War does and give the attacker 3 chances to "wait" for weather they want.

Finishing the quest, the finish text is blank (2 popups).

[quote]2. How do you paste a picture into the forum test? Tried to "paste" from Paint program but the "paste" selection is grayed out.[/quote] You can't, it needs to be hosted elsewhere and linked in using the image button (next to the hyperlink button).

Champions are pretty cool - they can level, be equipped in your towns, you can marry one of them, and come with special abilities which are quite nice (merchants and inventors especially right now since only CIV and War are in). Theoretically once Magic is in, they'll also be able to be imbued with essence to cast spells. There are a couple of issues with them I've noticed so far, lets run down the list: Recruiting : T

Took an opportunity to play some (couple of hours... maybe more :D) Beta2 today. The tech system seems to be more or less what it was in Beta1Z. However there is at least one important change which should be applauded, namely: You can breakthrough more than 6 technologies! Maybe this has always been the case and there just weren't enough techs to make it happen, but that has neatly removed the problem of stealing green techs away from the player This

Pop on over to the Elemental Ideas subforum and take a look at some of the threads on tech system stuff. Weigh in on the ideas being floated, throw in some of your own and lets get it done. I think we need more minds taking a good hard look at this particular part of the game.

[quote who="PyroMancer2k" reply="5" id="2648789"]On the what to research front I do have a question for the Devs. I know some R&D doesn't show up till later and some techs don't show up until you research ones before them. But are any of the techs restricted by the tech level? The reason is I find market places (the 2x2 +6 Gildar building) is one of the most important buildings to get up first and trying to figure out how to unlock it faster. I've figured out some i

I have duplicated an image of a character (Rilis), when I changed equipment and then moved. The duplicated image is the correctly equipped character, and the image which is where the character actually is, is the old equipment.