Tridus

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="22" id="2321488"] I think that's taking too simplistic a view. Of course 9 peasants should never be able to defeat 9 paladins. However, 9 pikemen should destroy 9 paladins. Proper balance is achieved by using a rock-paper-scissors system.[/quote] 9 peasants can't. 50 probably can. Considering the relative cost of arming and training 50 peasants compared to 9 paladins, both should be options. The only case where it's not an option is if you put a 9 unit

World of Warcraft still sells because it's the most popular MMO on the market, by a country mile. When you have a group of players that big, there's a networking effect. Your friends are playing, so you try it too. Then you tell more friends, etc. It becomes self-propelling. And yeah, Starcraft is some kind of crazy unstoppable zombie continuing to shamble across the land attacking everyone with 640x480 spirites and zerglings. :D

[quote who="Servius" reply="24" id="2321190"]So, have the emails giving said 100 people access already gone out or will that happen on the day the alpha version is ready? [/quote] Not likely. Usually with this stuff the email you get will be Impulse telling you that your order was processed, and if you get in that will happen once the game goes up for download. I mean they could send out emails to tell you that you got in early, but it doesn't seem like something they nee

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="8" id="2320865"]I think doing a point-value system rather than a fixed cap overcomplicates things without much benefit. I mean, what is the benefit exactly? The big drawback of such a point value system is that it becomes far more difficult to balance and, in my opinion, damages your ability to assess units in a natural way and likely will lead to the creation of charts that rank "damage per point" or "health per point". From the screenshots I

The other fun point in all this - how much piracy is actually stopped by this stuff? The DRM stopped me from buying this game. If I actually wanted to pirate it (and I don't), do you think it would take more then 5 minutes to find a working torrent? None of these DRM systems actually stop piracy. They just create problems for the paying customers that are the only ones the DRM gets inflicted on. One of the things that drew me to Stardock originally was that their bought versio

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="25" id="2320691"] That's a nice idea in theory, however I doubt it would work in practice. Buff spells, as an example, would throw the whole equation out of whack. In MoM the number of buffs you could stack on one unit was pretty ridiculous. You could take some of the weakest units in the game and buff them up to the point where they would destroy the toughest units. Because of the figure system, different types of units would benefit more from the

[quote who="the_Monk" reply="19" id="2320680"] All three of you don't seem to get it.[/quote] No, it seems pretty clear that you're the one who doesn't get it. [quote]In my house DRM works! 100% of the time.[/quote] Well, good for you. That's obviously not true for a lot of other people. I wonder if you'd respond to someone having a problem with their internet connection by saying "it must be you, my DSL always works!" [quote]It always

There doesn't seem to be anything analogous to ship size in Elemental, though. How do you price one soldier with a +2 sowrd and 5 units of training to another soldier with a +5 sword and 2 days of training?

Nice. :) I think the middle ground is a limit based on production or cost or something, like I edited into my last post after the fact. :) If you've got say 1000 production worth of units in any combination, and I've got 1000 production worth of units in any combination, then if we're using the designer well and there isn't some really out of whack ability, we should be able to have roughly fair battles even if we use wildly different units. The big units take more to build and thus y

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="18" id="2320563"] It used the exact system you describe, and once you had top tier units, making anything lower was almost always a waste of time. 8 Dread Reapers vs 8 anything of a lower tier = you win. The same was true for most of the top tier units. Uhhh, no. MoM didn't have "tiered" units. Aside from heroes, there was no clear best unit. Every unit had a counter. If you brought a stack of same units to battle against a diverse opponent, y

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="13" id="2320493"] You're trying to counter with another red herring. That does not work. In MoM, your wizard (channeler, whatever) is you, not a unit. Your wizard stays holed up in the fortress, casting spells from afar, not engaging in battle directly.[/quote] That's nice. This isn't MoM. [quote]I really don't want to comment on AoW, as it did not appeal to me and therefore I do not have the experience to comment on it.[/quote] <

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="14" id="2320502"] This is not MoM. the channeler does not stay in his captal city casitng spells all the time. If you so choose, you can go Gandalf and make a superpowerful channeler to kill your enemies. Making a lot of poorly-trained troops is not the dominant tactic. In GC2, we devoted pages to finding a way around that game's version of the problem, which involved Huge-hulled starships killing everything they fought. Now we have a solution handed to

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="11" id="2320468"] Another red herring. A properly balanced game does not have a "strongest unit", it has many units which offset eachother in a rock-paper-scissors fashion. Therefore, your 9 unit stack might have 3 rocks, 3 papers, 3 scissors against the defender's 3 rocks, 3 papers and 3 scissors. How is the combat resolved? Tactically, with the best tactician winning the fight, although the defender has a big advantage in moving first, potentially cheaper sp

[quote who="Haree78" reply="3" id="2320262"]My point is I couldn't give a crap about a pirates complaints about DRM, like burglers complaining that their privacy is invaded with security cameras in stores, go to hell. Criminals justifying their actions because of crime preventative measures are just morons, Monk, you really don't need to lower yourself to arguing with that kind of person. [/quote] Pirates don't care about DRM. They strip it off

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="13" id="2320312"] Not a one-day minimum training: a one-day lag in the production, as in GC2, civ, and probably a lot of other games with "get it now" features. [/quote] I know, I was talking about the other mechanic. :)

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="8" id="2320348"] 9 unit limit. That's right, you can have no more than 9 units occupying a single map square. This means "stacks of doom" a la Civilization series are impossible to achieve. Therefore, your ability to "barrel through" the enemy's territory is severely limited by the damage and losses you accumulate. [/quote] No, no no no dear god no! This is exactly what creates the AoW style stack of doom instead, where you just load up a stack w

[quote who="the_Monk" reply="21" id="2319954"] You yourself said, having an ISO-reader/emulator installed (which let's not forget...you HAVE used for legit purposes.......) caused a certain DRM to balk. So in fact, something you had installed on your system which is MOST OFTEN used for illegal purposes (but you have used plenty of times for legit reasons) caused alarms to go off in the DRM which exists because WE insisted to make a sport of TAKING thin

We don't know how it works in practice yet, of course. Based on what they've said though, theoretically if you can actually make troops with 0 days training, it should be simply a matter of handing out equipment. You should be able to do that for however much gear you have available. If they impose a minimum one day training in order to make the unit? Then you can't do that. But I really hope we have a millitia style option to simply deploy the weapons to anybody we can find in a

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="15" id="2320029"]I just hope that we have some option to turn on and off expansion features. I don't remeber it being a problem in Gal Civ 2 (likely because it was not multiplayer, which is always where I seem to find what features annoy me. 'cause there is what the AI does, and what players do and when it doesn't coinside at all) But I know in Civilizations IV I wish I could turn off some warlords features while still keeping oth

[quote who="AIAndy" reply="12" id="2320138"]The important part I'd say is that player and AI number restrictions are not rooted deep in code but instead are only set on the surface where they are modable. Since the stated aim for the game is to keep it as moddable as possible I'd say that is quite likely. [/quote] Hard limits on this type of thing are usually put in place for technical reasons. Thus, whatever the hard limit actually is, you can't mod it. (If you can, i

[quote who="Denryu" reply="5" id="2319338"]I don't like the idea of my citizen's being nothing more than a resource. Too much like Real Life. Companies used to have Personel Departments, now corporations have Human Resources. Think about it. [/quote] They also used to have janitors, and now they have sanitation techncians. :P That's just part of a general trend to spend a lot of words saying nothing. For citizen militias,

[quote who="psychoravin" reply="25" id="2319307"] Not being balanced is one of the many things that makes MOM great. It's more like a REAL world instead of a GAME world. I listen to these igmos on other websites screaming balance balance balance and balance does nothing for a game but make everything the same. This is what is wrong with AOW:II & SM the multiplayer scream for BALANCE ruined both of them but more especially AOW:SM. Give me an unbalanced world and playing pieces any day

AFAIK Citizens are a resource. You use them to create soldiers. So they're already more then eye candy. :)

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="17" id="2319116"] That isn't quite accurate. I see Scoutdog's proposed system increasing the value of land overall. Right now with the shards you basically have strategic points that need to be defended opposed to actual regions.[/quote] Yeah. I tend to like points more. If your goal is to capture a lot of land to control a lot of mana, then simply capturing a lot of territory with cities becomes the priority. Given the advantages that a bigger em

Maybe they would have stayed, but I doubt it. A lot of (but not all) ex-EQers are looking for something that rekindles the magic they felt playing EQ. It was for many people their first MMO. Another game that copies it has to also have something else to hold those people, and Vanguard didn't have it. It's the same problem games that copy WoW have now: if you make something that's too much of a WoW clone in gameplay, people will get bored very quickly because there's really nothing to ke