Fearzone

I'm still playing on "challenging." I'm moving up slowly--but if you are playing on "ridiculous" you are on your own! [e digicons]:blush:[/e] That being the case, for my last game at turn 250 I had about 20 cities and one of each elemental crystal so I just garrisoned everybody and went straight to the Spell of Making, and beat the game on a large map clicking quickly through the 100 turns or so it took me to level up and research the spell. That degree of expansion is

Well, when you pre-order a game, as I did too, what you are doing is buying a game in an unfinished state that (in this case) you can try out the pre-release builds as it reaches its finished state. That being the case, what's the difference whether they released it in August still needing a lot of work or they waited until February and released it in a more polished state? Rather than losing faith, the degree of improvement seen in each successive patch and dev

Ships set to auto explore are still getting stuck a lot, most noticeable in the late game. Say I have 4 ships out there, and they have explored everything so I just set them on auto explore. What happens is I click the end-turn button, and sometimes nothing happens. Click it again and again and nothing. So I cycle through the troops and it usually goes to this one ship that I have to move by hand. That "un-sticks" things and the turn advances automaticall

By turn 200 I have usually invaded 1 or 2 of the AIs to snatch their resources. They are surprisingly forgiving. After taking their home city and much of their territory, a few turns later they usually want to make peace and offer some highly favorable trade and technology treaties. Since it looks like you are food rich but hard up for cash, summon yourself a couple elemental giants and it's time to party. Summon lesser minions to hold captured cities in your wake, until a small observer squ

Has Stardock been reading this thread after all? https://www.stardock.com/media/mailers/elemental_mailer_090110.htm Or this?... Gotta give 'em a B for effort. Put a whip in her hand and I'd give it a B+. [e digicons]:drool:[/e]

I agree this is an over-reaction and dwells on the letter of the "law," in minute detail, rather than the spirit--to the point I [i]do[/i] think this is a troll post rather than a grievance. There seems to be no attempt on the part of the OP to come to any sort of compromise for the admitted and well-known problems with Elemental's release. Frist, releasing the game in a buggy state, too buggy to allow multiplayer, was a genuine mistake. The Gamer

In the climax of the move [i]Unforgiven[/i], Clint Eastwood (Billy Munney) walks into a bar, where in the window lies the dead body of his buddy, Morgan Freeman. Gene Hackman, the sheriff of the town, is there with his goons. Clint Eastwood asks who the owner of the bar is, and the bartender steps forward and says that he is. Clint Eastwood shoots him dead point blank. Gene Hackman curses Clint for shooting an unarmed man. Clint Eastwood says: he should hav

I've already gotten $50 worth of entertainment out of it, so if Stardock wants to give me more with patches and expansions, even better. P.S. I love the thumbs down on the fanboy comment. That added such a nice touch that really made me LOL.

In the JRPG Resonance of Fate, dungeons were a series of rooms--or tactical battles in Elemental terms. The party would clear a room, and then move on to the next one by standing on a glowing arrow at the opposite end of the room, which loads the next tactical battle, as you make your way toward the end of the dungeon. In some rooms there were a lot of mobs, in others bosses, sometimes both, sometimes just treasure chests, sometimes two glowing arrows in the room where the dungeon

Yeah, my first turn is always setting up the army the way I like it. I was thinking a quick solution might be to set up the army for the next battle the way it was set up at the end of the first turn. Wouldn't work though for anyone that goes charging right into battle. I wait for the AI to arrive. [e digicons]}:)[/e]

[quote who="Goldmos" reply="126" id="2796425"] I dont totally agree with you on this. I live in Canada, pop around 34 M. If you go to Japan, Tokyo and their suburb, it's 34M people... I dont know if you know this, but Tokyo and around tokyo is pretty small compare to a country. If you take France, it's around 50M people and France enter 19 time in Canada. Don't forget that IRL, we can build upward too. Take Hongkong for instance, it's not uncommon to see some 60 story building. [/qu

How about this to limit city spam: the level and size a city can reach is dependent on the size of its hinterlands. If you have a bunch of cities crowded together, the highest they can reach is, say, level 2, before the supporting hinterlands are exhausted. If you space cities apart some they can grow to level 5, the rationale being that it takes the production of a large area of hinterlands to support a large city, which is how it works IRL. With this, the pl

Yeah, each set of patch notes, even brief ones, keeps looking better and better. Can't wait to see these ones. I kind of miss the beta startup screen...

I'm down with the human, or human-ish, faction leaders as they are--but if there were more recruitable monsters, i.e. zombies and orcs, that would go a long way toward factional differentiation, particularly if different sovereigns had different general affinities for what monsters they could recruit. Mix different monsters types up with standard human recruits and that could go a long toward some interesting fights once the "epic battles" get worked in. [e digicons]:rofl:[

If you tend to go adventuring tree like I do then lots of heroes are a good thing, bland or not. You need them to go to the notable locations and one in every city is ideal, particularly when notable locations start piling up. Of course if heroes had more style and character, and leveled up a tad faster, maybe with some better special abilities (though don't get rid of the tech, arcane and gildar bonuses), and there was cooler gear you could outfit them with... that would

Reducing training and build times seems like a step in the right direction. Having population as a resource might be an opportunity to move things in a more speedy direction. In the real world, during war, basic training doesn't take that long. For peasants, or "observers," with wooden clubs, the time in training should be negligible. Maybe also be able to select and issue orders to units-in-training, to be completed when the training is over, since if it takes 10 tu

Shift arrow keys are dysfunctional because they move to slow. I mean it is reeeaaallllyyyyy slowwwwwww. Same with rotate, although that is maybe a little faster. They are simply not practical to use. Also, it is extremely un-ergonomic--to the point where you practically have to use two hands to use shift-arrow keys. Why shift anyway?!? Any why can't we rebind them to something sensible? I use autohotkeys to create a Demigod-like layout, but ev

Good stuff. Maybe there could be rare schematics to build an exceptionally powerful mace that you can equip soldiers with, or the ability to enchant weapons carried by either heroes or soldiers. I like the leveling idea too.

I always auto-resolve the gollum--I noticed the same think when I started fighting him--and usually with such a weak attack a 4-squad of darklings can take him down.

Something similar happened to be which gave me negative gildar by a very high amount. However, functionally I could buy anything. Wouldn't try this as a cheat though... the game became highly unstable soon thereafter.

So, I don't know why there is a question mark in the title if that is how you feel. Sure, a lot of the emotional charge around release seems to have dissipated, but I wouldn't have called that enthusiasm, except maybe for trolls. The reality is, the game is getting better with each release--I'm a few hundred turns in to a medium size map with all factions, and no crashes I can remember--and so it is already a playable and fun game. Not that most of us don't think it could

When I went through the campaign, gathering the crystals was automatic--they didn't have to be "sent" to Capitar. I killed the Ogre where the sovereign of capital told me to go, built a city there exactly where the pioneer from Capitar was placed, then when the city grew I laid down a mine on the nearby crystal tile, and when the crystal count reached 25 it automatically triggered success.

In my current game on a large map I have a number of units and ships on auto explore and I'm running into a number of situations where I get stuck and cannot advance a turn. So I tab through the units to manually move each and eventually I get one of them "unstuck" and turns start advancing normally again. I finally deleted most of my auto-explore units and things might be running a little smoother. I'm also running into a log of lag sometimes between the turns, which may

All good, can't wait to check it out. I think I might miss the totally OP archers, but even with random damage I think they'll still be strong. Glad dragons and catapults and demons won't be scrunches together on one tile anymore. They are plenty powerful as an individual unit. As for randomly choosing who goes first, attacker or defender I might even take it further: on each individual attack I might randomly choose who gets the first swing in a melee fight,

I'm pretty much always lost in these sorts of games. For Elemental, I have a core strategy that is victorious against the AI so long as I can get my economy off the ground, and then I try to do a few different things each game. I haven't found adventuring particularly useful either given the opportunity cost required of taking your sovereign away from the action. The rewards from adventuring seem unexciting, and the quests are off to a good start, like "Wild Goos