Black_Dawn_2

The concept of Elemental as a 4X engine is interesting, but I have a serious fear: I fear that the developers are focusing on Elemental as an engine rather than as a stand-alone game. There are plenty of innovative engines out there, but good games must be built on them for the engine to be worthwhile. Look at the Half Life engine. It has great physics and all, but if the whole game was standing in a room and tossing boxes with the grav gun it wouldn't be that much fun. Theref

I see you are drawing some of your ideas for victory conditions from Star Chamber that culture victory sound familiar... [e digicons]^_^[/e] I would suggest further pilfering of the Star Chamber ideas: In order to win a diplomatic victory, players need to be elected ruler of the coalition (as you suggested), but votes happen more than once, say every 10 turns. There is always a winner of the vote (tie beaker could be the relative population / territory size of

Excellent to see that the Devs are focusing on game-play over prettiness, even to the extent of keeping the eye-candy out of the Beta. Games like this hinge on the fun factor of the strategic decisions you can make and the power of the user interface to give you easy access to all your options. If Stardock gets both these things right, this will be a game for the ages. Looking forward to testing the Beta.

I like camps 3 and 4, either sounds interesting. These ideas do imply several idea about the game play which have not yet been discussed: 1) Resource "mines" and warehouses are extremely important. Players may want to create extra defense around important resources so that they are not captured or destroyed. 2) Warehouses would be good targets for sabteurs or destructive spells, as their destruction limits unit production and makes the player lose many gathered resources.

I'll pull a few ideas from other games I've enjoyed: Path of Fire / Water / Ice / Whatever: The unit is so awesome it actually changes the terrain it walks on to the preferred terrain for that unit type. Area attacks: What they sound like, any attack that hits an area instead of a single unit (e.g. "Sweeping Strike") Possess / Infect: Your unit actually goes into the body of an enemy unit and takes over. In many games if the controlled unit dies, the possessor survives

Well, I think there is a way to make espionage interesting without causing too much micro-management. You just have to change the focus of spies are used for. In the real world, spies are used for three things: information gathering, stealing technology and sabotage. <