Tamren

So I was thinking about equipment breakage. There are varying degrees to which you can implement such a system. The first is to have no equipment breakage at all, the second is no equipment breakage outside of combat and so on. Having to deal with the weapons of your troops rusting away is far more attention to detail than players need or want. And even if we wanted that level of realism we could not get there in a single leap. -- So whats the advantage of equipment breaking?

I once read in the news about a woman who had falled asleep in her bed and woke up later standing in the parking lot of a supermarket while loading groceries into her car.

Hah, cheers! [e digicons]:beer:[/e]

Its even more annoying once I remembered all of those places where free move would have helped. Greh. The weapons were a pain to figure out as well. The lava/magma/plasma whatever cannons confused me for the longest time until I realized how they worked. I don't remember using missiles more than once in the campaign. Unless you launch like 10 of them at once the enemy point defence can swat them down like flies. They always struck me as somewhat useless.

If you want to case in point the lack of tutorial, I beat the game without any knowledge of that. And some time later I also read a walkthrough of the game which made no mention of that and all navigation was done with in-game waypoints. And I was hardly stumbling in the dark, I remember points where I was charging and targetting weapons manually.

To anyone thinking of hoarding Karma good or bad, just remember that Karma is a big fan of Irony.

Nexus was awesome but the tutorial was brutal on newcomers. The biggest thing that throws people off is that you have no way to control the flight path of your ships. The ONLY way to move ships around is to get them to move towards waypoints or entities like other ships. You can't simply say "go that way".

Ooooh. Well in that case... Let me fire up the burners and see what I can come up with by tommorow. Also Pigeon, what I mean by "magic is everything" is that magic can be anything and everything depending on who you ask, much like art in general.

And depending on who you ask, magic is everything.

I'm fairly certain it used Starforce back near launch day but I could be wrong. Or maybe it was only on the original release and not the north american port. Tages is pretty recent in comparison.

Darkstar One is another that gets mentioned frequently. I liked the demo when it first came out but the starforce scared me off. Now its on Steam and even GoG.com. Anyone played it?

In a closed setting you also have to be careful to give your magic a cost. If you don't then magic is essentially free. People would have nothing to stop them from solving every problem with magic. Conversly you have no good reason to stop them from using magic when it would do a lot of good.

I was thinking of getting nexus but I heard from multiple places that it crashes a lot. Since it is no longer being patched what kind of state is the game in now?

Its also relative to who is trying to understand it. What is technology to us can be magic to someone else.

Starscape, Id like to try starshatter myself but its hella expensive. Id second space rangers.

If I could snap my fingers and produce a fireball, I could probably teach you how to snap your fingers so you could make fireballs as well. The thing is, neither of us know how it works or why. If a third person were to come in and say "oh yeah thats magic, you are pulling in energy from the Ether" well what the hell does that mean? It would still be magic to us. This "magic" works in a predictable fashion, and because of that you can teach someone else to use it. But what keeps it fr

Sweet. Whenever they remove Tages the game should be well patched, so I will then do whatever it takes to get a fleet of carriers and swarm over my enemies like a school of pihranas, mwahaha.

As Wintersong said, magic is a system of technology that can not be explained and or understood. If you completetly understand how magic works, the mystique is gone and it becomes just another form of mundane technology.

The only reason I bought Mass Effect at all was that I heard the UI was about 6000% better on the PC version.

Sigh. Why must technology keep coming up with new and awesome ways for me to irradiate my brain?

Sorry! I use a program called Pidgin for chatting and the internet as a whole has pretty much corrupted my book learned vocabulary. Thats just the way the internet works. [e digicons]:dur:[/e] -- Your completetly right in that development should happen in steps. You can't simply reach for the stars and get there tommorow. But then again, no matter how far you go, you will never get closer to anywhere without a destination in mind. Man would not have walked on the moon if he h

Thats a good point pidgeon. Back in SMAC the very best developed city tended to be near the center of my empire. These core cities are the only ones who have the industrial power to effectively build units. It was extremely annoying that all of my units pretty much started thier careers as far from the enemy as they could get. With wonders it makes sense to be able to create sub-wonders. All you have to do to balance the system is set a ratio that limits the amount of wonders based on

Half arsed is right. The console port of Mass Effect was pretty good. The interface was certainly an improvement. Problem is something the newer Nvidia drivers just grabs the game by the spine and breaks it in 20 places. Neither Bioware nor Nvidia seem to be doing anything to fix the problem. And us people on Steam are still missing the DLC.

Tried multiple times and it never did anything. Id love to have it work. Though not as much as I would like a "preview post" button similar to the one on every other forum I have ever seen. [e digicons]>_>[/e]

Seems neat. So building wonders allows you to attract the expertise to build mini-wonders elsewhere? Makes sense, but balancing it might be difficult.