psychoak

Less luck dependency in your starting area, more adaptation to your environment. Sounds good to me. A few too many books in my opinion, but I don't really like the book system either. It feels inferior to the system used in Master of Magic, where you racked up a number of levels towards your desired spheres of power, and then gained strength in them accordingly. A hybrid of the OP with a more refined system for selecting initial proclivities would be n

Details, details...

[quote]I think the player should be able to destroy these Ogre huts or any other resource like this to keep the enemy from using it. If I can't use it, nobody can.[/quote] Only if you can kill the ogres?

For people not finding it in XP, check "All Users\Application Data\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic" instead of your user directory.

[quote]So I have to ask, are you just trying to be a troll or what? [/quote] I was going to just say yes, but there are too many stupid people in the world that I can't directly respond to. They're already doing most of the work from what I can tell. I wont claim programming genius or anything, but I can stumble my way through someone elses code just fine with a little time. The only part that is in any way a substanti

[quote]Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're brushing you off.[/quote] I think I was brushed off, but if I got offended over something like that I'd need to expect people to hunt me down and kill me for my own posts. It's not the most diplomatic of critiques, a feat I rarely accomplish, and I kind of expected to be ignored after ripping on one third of the existing game play. On the off chance that city mechanics get slightly less fu

[quote]But I strongly disagree with the concept of simply being able to crank out food. It's been a major objection of mine in most games.[/quote] Good, I object to it too. When I went into detail over why it's failing, I gave a suggestion of how to fix it. Population is irrelevant if all it produces is food to feed itself. You can control growth just fine limiting productivity instead of population by keeping valuable food resources limited while not

[quote]i like the current city building maybe some food mechanics change and it will work perfect[/quote] You like building one workshop, one bank, one blah blah blah blah blah till hell freezes over, in every city? I get tired of the repetition just describing it.

[quote]Actually, psychoak is being kind of restrained here. He can be much more feisty when he wants to, which makes me suspect he cares quite a bit about his basic complaint and is (unconsciously?) showing awareness of the flies-vinegar-honey thing.[/quote] So insulting! Just because I occasionally(or not so occasionally) tell someone to eat shit and die, doesn't mean I'm not aware that flies are more attracted to honey than vinegar!

Short version, I hate them, quite possibly in totality. I'm sure there's something I like about them, but I have no clue what it is at the moment. First, the attempt at limiting them via food. Miserable failure. The only thing limiting city expansion is money. You can build a garden, thus a house, thus hit tier 2, thus having research, income and production of all sorts. You have another location to run caravans, another location to produce

Tactical combat wont change small and restrictive empire. Beta, yes, but then the whole point of a beta is to test it out and react accordingly.

I always hated the way the Warlords series handled boats. Then I played everything else and decided they were really nice. If you can get an AI that does handle boats, consider yourself worshiped... If you can't, take one out of the Warlords book and give pathing onto water from harbors, stick em in a boat when they walk over it, and call it a day.

I'm a real blegh on the current implications for warfare and empire building. Small piddling armies, small piddling empires. Without vast armies, you really can't do proper combat. It takes one abstraction piled on another to mimic simple concepts like casualties reducing morale. If you don't do morale, you can't do big battles either. They just take too damn long without a routing mechanism. No good formation system either. You

I'd rather not build one garden either, or houses!

Modifiers are better when they are modifiers. Lets assume that essence remains as described, not the current mechanic, the loose description. It's your ability to use magic. Most of the complaint, while centering around a solution of "fixing" essence so that it doesn't get reduced, rather self defeating I think, is that essence is too important. Then there are complaints that Int and Wis aren't important enough.

I disagree with two points. Max and current essence. If using it has no penalty, there isn't a point in having it used to begin with. Balance is a concern, but I don't see a flaw in the mechanic itself. Using a point of essence shouldn't be a crippling endeavor that sets you back irretrievably, it implies one of two things. Essence is inadequately weighted in the leveling process, or the leveling process is itself inadequately weighted. &

/wrists Tactical and overland mechanics should not be mixed so. It utterly destroys anything resembling immersion when your archers that shoot halfway across the battlefield can shoot two battle fields off as well. :( That's the kind of thing tactically deprived games have to resort to.

Me likes. Aside from the comment by the incestuous bastard above me. :( Blood purity is achieved by eating enough veggies at dinner time to avoid clogging ze arteries with ze bacon double cheese burger you had for lunch!

Viewpoint #3: Cities are too simple, but building them is too complex. It's retarded, to put it mildly. A city with two houses? Food and shelter is abstracted and annoying. Building housing in games has always been an irritant, the more realistic the game it's placed in, the more idiotic it becomes. It's almost rational in games like Age of Empires, even if devoid of real need and just something annoying you have to get out of the way.&nbsp

A switch on armies to disable auto-engage isn't additional game rules. It's not even something you'd want to be ambush specific. You're not likely to want to auto-engage large armies from the safety of your fort. Not unless you get to attack them from it. A system that forced it would really bite. On the other hand, under a decent concealment system, armies will be more easily viewed from up close than afar. A small force trying

I'd rather be able to set units to ambush. ZOC is nice and all, but you can't have small skirmisher units hiding in ambush, or just plain hiding no matter what. You can't set up screens in front of your defenses to come at the invading army from behind and cut off retreat, or disrupt the supply lines after they pass. ZOC alone is just too simple.

Bah, the RTS combat was badass, as long as you set up rules, and assuming you ever finished a game. With "no magic arrow sniping champions" and "no merc spamming the invading army" in place it was fucking fantastic. The different uses for various units were really quite well done. Now if it had just had an AI, or netcode... All I ever managed to play through were network games with my brother. One of the best royally fucked up ga

Well, the Frog said he wanted huge armies, so... I don't see why cities need to be capped at such small populations. It looks more like an arbitrary limit they just stuck on for testing than something that will be in the release version. Improvements in food production lead to massive population booms in less than filthy stinking rich societies. They're particularly rapid expansion when much of the population is still producing that food, or running fa

I'm going to have to agree with most of the combat speed posting. I partly like it, and partly hate it. Combining movement and combat in a logical fashion so that you don't move ten spaces and have your one attack round, then not move at all the next turn, to still have just your one attack round. This is an excellently stupid design flaw to excise. I'll miss it not in the slightest. However, there shouldn't be a speed that determines how many mo

Withdrawal should be difficult. I would like tactical battles to be on a map significantly larger than the area between the two forces. If Combat takes place between two adjacent tiles, then the map should be at least 9, with at least as much distance to the nearest point of withdrawal as is between them. Harrying forces and skirmishers that fight on the move and can't be properly designed to work in a static environment are then functional.