I don't quite agree bigger maps always mean more strategic paths. You can't really try a speed/blitz strategy on a huge map. That strategic option is taken off the table due to the size of the area to be conquered. I would certainly agree that large maps offer different strategies that never could come into play on a small map.
I'm going to spread all 20 points into 1 point heros. I'm going to name myself Supreme Being of Elementalaria and they are my chosen children, the Kesselites. They in turn will eventually spawn their own 1 point children. Only the Kesselites and their descendants, being descended from the Supreme Being, will be allowed upon the land. All others must be expunged! Bwahahahahahahaaha! Yes dear, that's very interesting. Huh? No, no, don't listen
Edit: Bleh, the original removed. Pointless arguing on the internet. Clearly psychoak is the literary giant that no one else has heard of, whose understanding trumps all the critics in the past and all the authors that point to Tolkien as one the greats and a prime influence. Perhaps you could grace us with some examples of worthy authors that didn't simply "hack up other stuff"? Perhaps Brad will see the error of his ways, abandon Tolkien, and use something more meaninf
[quote]I know, I'm getting yelled at again. It's sacrilege and whatnot. For the level his work has been recieved at, he's one of the least imaginative fantasy authors to grace the earth with his presence.[/quote] Well, when you say stuff like that, you're asking to be yelled at. Least imaginative? He may not have created races out of whole cloth, but his world creation is one of the most imaginative and complete in the history of fantasy writings. Entire mythologic
[quote]Indeed. And on this point, I'd very much like to encourage some of the newer folks to check out your old thread on Independent Kingdo [/quote] Heh, I remember bringing up minor kingdoms before, but I'd completely forgotten about that thread :).
[quote]I'm also praying the limit is somewhere in the 20s. The option for more than 20 would be great as well.[/quote] With all of Brad's references to LOTR, I'd love to see unequal starting players. Maybe 30 players, but only a portion are true competitors on your level. Say, the Rohan who are large and active versus a more minor power like the Ents or Tom Bombadil, who are powerful, but players to be courted or worked around rather than full fledged emp
However, they also suggest a lack of the diversity that made MoM and the AoW series successful. So what I am really saying is that when EWOM is released we will say 'great engine' now add more 'stuff'. I want more races and I * definitely * want more unicorns. I would be willing to pay for a couple of heavy 'content' expansions, featuring little engine upgrades but lots of model assets / new creatures and races / new spells. If I recall, meaningf
I don't know that much about this stuff, but from Civ IV I had understood that as you moved stuff from C++ to Python, the game's performance would get slower and slower, since Python compiles at runtime. I wasn't clear on whether that meant the game would just take longer to load, or the game itself would actually run slower when you are playing it (or both). Hopefully, it won't be a big issue That's both true and not true. Python is inter
[quote]Tourresh wishes he knew python instead of Lua. I can't wait for all the syntax specific stuff of both languages to meld together in my mind so I constantly make stupid mistakes.[/quote] I actually read through the Python docs last week just for the coming Elemental release. If you're a decent programmer, you shouldn't have much trouble adapting. Python has some oddities with default values being persistent across method invocations, but if you think of them as similar t
Don't get thrown off by the map size. There's nothing indicating the movement ranges are going to be as restrictive as the CIV games for example. Given towns can span many squares, it's quite possible the range of movement for a unit could be quite large to keep everything in scale. An 8 player game on a large may map not feel barren at all if the scale of things is shifted. I always thought it was sort of "cramped" feeling in CIV where you'd have major population centers only 4 or 5
[quote]It still is regardless of whether the player loses [b]massive[/b] amounts of research when you take over his city. By taking over the city you just put a halt to any further researching on that tech for what is likely going to be a long time.[/quote] Where the f**k are you getting this stuff? I said nothing of the sort. And where do you get MASSIVE amounts of research? Look at any GalCiv or Civ tech before the uber end game stuff and you're talking 5-10 turns typically to resea
[quote]By the same logic I also hate losing units and buildings I'm producing. When I lose a city it should simply be duplicated and moved to some other location in my empire.[/quote] Yes, that's exactly the point. You're arbitrary separating the effort of tech from the effort of everything else. Why call it out as a special exception to the rule? Most techs took less time to research than the effort to build most wonders and even some units in both GalCiv and Civ. If you're
[quote]All I'm saying is it better not be a situation where all the research is lost and I would prefer any loss to be minimal. Losing the site itself is enough. This could probably be continued in the steamroller thread.[/quote] So, you'd be just as adamant that any progress towards a Wonder shouldn't be affected if that city is lost either? It takes turns and turns to complete a wonder, maybe dozens, we don't know. You'd want that Wonder progress loss to be minimal if the ci
[quote]Sounds nice. In most games, there is an exploit I refer to as "heart-ripping": you can go directly to the most prosperous/powerful city and take it out, then mop up the much weakened rest of the empire. This annoys me, because in real war you usually have to push far through enemy lines. However, your idea would SEVERELY limit the cheatyness of this exploit.[/quote] Exactly. Nice term, heart-ripping :). It'd help prevent that and the related uber-stack issue. You can't just dra
I'd like borders to affect an army's ability to supply. Within your borders, supply is easy. The population helps you out, helps keep you fed, and makes maintaining that army fairly painless. Outside your border, no such luck. You've got to bring supplies or forage. Go inside an enemies border and it gets even tougher, foraging isharder because you need protected patrols or guerilla forces try to sabotage your supply trains. Abstractly of course, just as some +/- to supply which in tu
[quote]It's all cool until you lose the site your researching at. In addition to the huge loss of an entire city you'd also lose a research tech that could have taken a very long time. There's no need for further penalties that are just going to make players hit the load button or quit even more.[/quote] That's a pretty serious kneejerk reaction. How is losing the research towards one item any different than losing any other thing produced in a game, like a Wonder or major exp
Oh, a second thought :), sort of related to the last. Every game I've seen has research performed kingdom wide. In reality, research is done at a location. Even in today's world of easy information flow, you don't just have your entire R&D research one thing. Usually it's one thing here, another there, etc. The multiple paths of research had me thinking that it might be cool if the number of different things you could do depended on the number of separate labs you've got to do tha
I have a suggestion that I haven't seen implemented in other games, which is prerequisite units or buildings for research. Well, I've seen prereq buildings, but not units. In a PBM game I used to play your mages could either study a new level or do stuff in the field. The opportunity cost of advancing your magic was not using the magician himself while you were doing that research. I'd love to see a little of that in the Spell research tree (or Tech as well, if it makes sense). You ca
[quote]However, the things which made MoM an epic game were not fonts and shading, it was the depth of the gameplay.[/quote] Yes, but crappy fonts can really ruin a game. You'd be suprised how much time gets spent on any software project just trying to get simple things to not suck. Not look awesome, just not suck. Even stupid crap like a build script that you've spent 2 days messing with because the OS is convinced you've got a file open from the last compile when you really don
I got it and promptly went, no, it's not for me. It looks like a deep free form space simulator, but after spending 15 minutes blowing up asteroids as my first assignment then having to try to dock 3 times before being successful, I realized it was going to annoy me more than entertain me.
[quote]mmmm...... this is quite interesting, but I feel that if conventional research was not also included, it would swing the balance unfairly in the favor of "going Gandalf". However, if it was as easy(or hard) to get a given spell the conventional way, then I certainly don't see why not. In fact, a system like this would IMHO be a much better option for Gandalfers than unit-based research, which always seemed to me to be rather contrived.[/quote] Yea, I hadn't intended it to repla
I'd love to see a tech tree driven by the old D&D "find your spells" method. If you don't know what I mean, in old school D&D you could only learn a spell if you could find a copy. Some spells were well known, so everyone had a copy and you could buy one. As the spells got more powerful though, you frequently relied on a loot drop of a scroll to find the spell you wanted and inscribe it in your spell book. Also, there was a maximum number of spells per level you could learn, so you co
[quote]One suggestion I would make though: consider an "open alpha?". No idea if that would have any cost on your end though.[/quote] Given Alpha and Beta are only 1 month apart, opening the alpha seems sort of pointless. Sounds like they want essentially a sanity check in alpha. Is it running on multiple systems/video cards, is the install not mangling things, etc. You don't want to open a beta and have 80% of the problems all be the same identical show stoppers.
Jobs eh? I wish. If you were in Portland, OR, and I knew Windows C++ instead of Java, and game dev salary was anywhere close to business software salary, and I had any game dev experience, then I'd be all over it :) Learning C++ would be easy enough. Used to use it 10 years ago and after 15 years of programming all languages sort of feel similar in ways. The hard part is I'm a middle tier guy and not much good at developing anything graphical. I can design and code engines/rules/
I imagine it's a lot like being a good QA person to begin with. Look to exercise the corner cases. Don't always move, click, etc in the same way. If you can do something on a map or in a dialog, try both. Cast spells. Multi-select things that aren't alike and see what happens. If I select the city then try to multi-select a nearby army, is that legal? Even if you don't take that kind of approach and instead just play the game and report any bugs, you'll want to stress the game by avoi