Aeon221

I'm not a big fan of this whole drafting people into the Elemental Army thing, but I AM a big fan of numbers and such. And, so, hey, I see you spitting out some interesting numbers! Mind if I ask a few simple questions, you know, to kill some time that you'd otherwise spend just pimping out the AI? Aren't you under-representing the importance of your non-game sales with reg

[quote who="killer105" reply="21" id="2645278"]I use steam, but I regret purchasing a number of Indie titles on it because I have to wait several extra weeks after patch releases to get it on steam versions of the game. Steam has become fat and bloated, which makes Impulse look better and better. Still waiting on the latest Sword of the Stars patch on Steam...[/quote] You are aware that bitching about the lack of a patch to support is an essential eleme

I'd hope that there will be a large variety of legitimate and silly hats available at launch, with modders and players able to add more as the game gets long in the tooth. I can't be the only one who imagines the Sov as similar to the T. H. White Merlin, conjuring ridiculously anachronistic hats into being due to a series of miscommunications with his familiar.

Figured I'd bump this again just to make sure that nobody forgets about important things like making sure mods can use lots of maps in a single game. I mean, eventually someone is going to want to make a space mod, and not having different maps for sectors, systems, planets, and cities will just seem downright silly. So, like, make sure it'll be possible to have all those different levels of maps in mods!

[quote who="Kestral2040" reply="25" id="2645072"]I think that if you look at the submissions so far they haven't been just baseless talking up of an unknown product. They have been forwarding of information put out already about Elemental to people that may not have otherwise seen it. Also because of what the prizes entail (copies of the game you are talking about) I think it implicitly shows that the people saying good things about Elemental for the Army are behind what they say

[quote who="BerkeleyBoi" reply="19" id="2644563"] Whoa... Aeon from the Mount and Blade forums? If so, I love your Pike and Blade mod. Anyway, I have to disagree. I think this campaign is great. It gets people motivated to go out there and spread the word about this game. While other companies like Blizzard can have huge media coverage of whatever it is they release, Stardock, though not a small company, doesn't get nearly as much coverage. For example, Strategy Informer doesn

Actually, I think this is a terrible idea, marketing wise. People are going to wonder if positive feedback about Elemental is being driven by an honest appreciation for both the game and the company making it, or merely for the mercenary goal of acquiring points to get free stuff. And that's never a good thing when your entire business model is based around appearing honest and seeming interested in the opinions of customers. There's the additional risk that forum communiti

Why not have food transport effectiveness be the inverse of city level? So, say you've got a level 5 city, and three level 1 cities, all hooked together. The 5 transports at 10% efficiency, while all the level 1s transport at 50% efficiency. The idea being that higher level (and thus larger) cities consume more of the food they grow and generally dedicate a smaller percentage of total resources to agriculture, while lower level (and thus smaller) cities are more agriculturally b

In both Civ3 and Civ4, the ability to trade for techs was game breakingly powerful. A disciplined and experienced player could maintain a full cash economy focused entirely on military conquest while using threats, conquest, and tech brokering to stay at or near the top of the tech tree. This was bad, and resulted in Firaxis changing what techs could be traded for (from 3 to 4, removing the ability to exchange techs for cash over time and resources), adding a restriction mechani

[quote]The actual thread posting. Commentary along the lines of only having a few distinct units, in a 4X, that don't work. You'd have nothing to research.[/quote] Perhaps we're having a communication disconnect. I posited initially that, due to technical limitations, there would not be an infinite number of units on screen. And due to the preference for more complex graphical displays in tactical battles, that number of units would inevitably be a subset of the number dis

Obviously it isn't really all that useful for the main campaign -- but as a blah blah blah anecdotes blah blah blah, I really expect modding to be rather important to, at the least, a significant minority of players. And since the whole goal is to be the hottest modrod on the planet, this is a feature that absolutely must be in, because it's something that literally every other possible contender lacks, despite literally every modder wanting it!

One of the major sticking points for fantasy and rpg mods in Civ4 is the inability to create multiple maps for dungeons, planes planets and shops that could not be displayed on the overland map. It'd be extremely handy if, in Elemental, it was possible to tie all sorts of maps to one another, in a variety of ways: a daisy chain, overland/dungeons, land/sea/air. It'd also be nice if those off-maps could be randomly generated using scripts that differed from the scri

[quote]The game already use a "flow" system. You don't stockpile anything, but gold. Not even mana.[/quote] How rude of you to ruin the voyage of discovery for all these fine folks! This was developing into a real page turner! But, since the jig is up, I guess I should mention that just about every turn based game since Civ1 has used a flow model for building and research -- with the obvious exception of that terrible series known as HoMM.

I noticed that several people brought up realism claims in favor of stockpiling (stuff can get stored), so I pulled the same (stuff degrades). For rather obvious reasons, neither is a valid argument in a video game, and several other posters have taken the time to point that out. [quote]This goes both ways. Stockpiling models can be modified to eliminate these concerns too. The problem with this entire discussion is that it's so abstract. This conversation might be a better one to hav

You folks all realize that un-utilized assets cannot be stored indefinitely, right? On a timescale consisting of years, everything other than stone or metals will decompose in a relatively short number of turns. Furthermore, having resources stock up indefinitely rewards players who do nothing other than hit the end turn button, and penalizes those who are active about using their resources. The lazy should never be rewarded over the "hard working".

If you check my OP again, you'll note that I viewed increased fragility as a plus rather than a minus. Stockpiling allows players (including the AI) to disassociate their ability to fight from the reality on the ground -- after all, a player who has stockpiled resources for eleventy billion turns (where eleventy billion is any integer greater than zero) is fairly invulnerable to shocks to their resource acquisition network, and thus to raiding. To pull again from Sins of a Solar

You're assuming that upkeep is linear rather than geometric, that a large empire would have the same average upkeep per unit as a small one, and that efficiency gains through superior placement or technology do not provide sufficient offsets against sprawling empires with less exacting placement. You additionally make the assumption that it is a bad thing for large empires to be rewarded with units/structures otherwise inaccessible to smaller empires, and that land is the sole source

Stockpiling resources in order to build something is never interesting. Never. Not even a little. In games like Pharaoh and Children of the Nile, the essential element of the game is the player waiting for resources to stockpile, on many occasions for a far longer period than the total time necessary to set up the infrastructure necessary to acquire said resources. In other games, such as Sins of a Solar Empire, players specifically manipulate the system of resource stockpiling in order to av

I disagree entirely, and I offer up as examples the Total War series, Armageddon Empires and Magic the Gathering. Strict numbers limits, aided by harsh upkeep costs, represented respectively by money, resources and time to pull a card, do a far superior job of dealing with the problem of size disparity. They also minimize the necessary micromanagement otherwise resulting from large numbers -- both AE and the TW series allow units to be grouped in armies. [quote]Not

Too bad Sid didn't think to apply some of those commandments to Civ4.

Please do have the spreadsheet option as well as the story stuff. Picking RPish attributes is cool the first couple times, but after that I definitely prefer to have all the available information in a single location where I can compare costs and benefits.

Think of a deck of Magic cards. There is a limit of between forty and sixty cards, with a hand size of seven. Meanwhile, there are a functionally infinite number of magic cards. The limitations force good decks to specialize, and require the player to constantly make decisions about how to manage their hand. Rather than restricting the player, the limitations act as a spur to build diversity and general creativity. Consider slot limitations in armies as being similar to

Most people on this forum have probably played quite a number of card, video and board games. There are a number of valuable mechanisms we've all seen in these game types that could be used to build a durable and entertaining tactical battle system -- in other words, totally unlike the snorefest of the HoMM games. I'd like to say at the start that several of the games I use as negative examples are very good games, and several of the games I use as positive examples are very bad games

There's no reason to have provinces over cities in Elemental, and the system works just fine either way. I do agree that legitimacy of rule is a key concept that I hope elemental will explore. I'd also really enjoy having an undercurrent of democratic insurgency. It'd be nice to see the common people fighting for self-determination in the face of their tyrranical magical overlord.

Negotiated peace treaties like that are more of a game balance mechanism than anything. They prevent you from just bulldozing all your enemies in a single blitz -- an all too common strategy in Civ4. As fail as pulling for real world examples is for video game arguments, I'll go for it this time -- it's unlikely that a conqueror could replace all the low level individuals necessary for the day to day running of a territory or city in a warzone, and even less likely that individuals in that te