Tridus

[quote who="Sethai" reply="114" id="2822343"]edit: i see the comment about mana maint for imbued channelers. that could work i suppose. but what about children? once you start getting grandkids and get wives from other factions you can still get a huge number of channelers without imbuing. on one hand this can make imbuing unecessarry if you're patient, giving the same old problem. on the other hand it seems cruel to charge mana maint for kids.[/quote] They could make kids not start a

[quote who="Kestral2040" reply="103" id="2822296"]some quick feedback: Yes. Essence as a stat is gone, as a concept it still the conduit for which mana flows from a channeler into a champion so they can cast spells. The way this is represented in game balance is that imbued champions (those with essence) have a mana maint cost you must pay for them every turn. Int is the new all purpose casting stat, it WILL scale some (but not all) spells, along with being a pre-req fo

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="18" id="2821932"] Quoting Napean, reply 16With a global mana pool essence is not as useful anymore, unless it's used like AoW's Casting Specialist stat, where it would limit the amount of mana a champion can pull from your global mana pool per turn. At least, that's what I think. All posts so far indicate that is not the case, though it SHOULD be. Frogboy has previously stated that essense will be boolean: you have it or you do not.[/quot

[quote who="Jean=A=Luc" reply="13" id="2821923"]That same unit could roll 20 on its def. roll and still get "no defense" if the attacker rolled 21 accuracy, it's a moot point. Just like in DnD accuracy/dodge determine whether a unit is hit or not and then the damage reduction kicks in to provide the final amount of damage inflicted.[/quote] That's dodge, now. You roll dodge vs accuracy to hit. Rolling a 0 on your defense roll means that your 50 points of plate armor somehow fail

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="64" id="2822093"] Why is that limit needed? Just because everything your familar with has it? Intelligence counts as a limit on the power of spells everyone but your soverign can cast. Also not having a limit on spending per turn is more strategic, as mana will accumulate over turns like gold. If you use it all up in one turn then you'll be vulnerable for a while afterwards and may also be unable to sustain some summoned units and enchantments,

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="9" id="2821917"] Attack and damage absorb is similar but instead of comparing the numbers and the highest wins the amount of damage absorb (ie: defense) is subtracted from the attack. So if I have an attack of 20 then I will do 1-20 points of damage. If you have a Defense of 7 then you will ignore 1-7 points of that damage. Im not looking at the code right now, there may be another adjustment, but thats the high level.[/

[quote quoting="post"] Elemental uses opposing roles for combat. So if I have 23 Accuracy (I'm 4th level) and you have 5 Dodge (you have a Dexterity of 10) then we both roll from 1 to our rating and the highest roll wins. I get a random number from 1-23 and you get a random number from 1-5, meaning there is about a 87% chance I will hit you. The numbers are strongly weighted in the attackers favor as we didn't want to have long strings of misses going back and f

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="41" id="2821784"] In the physical world, I surely hope not. Here on the boards, you'd put me solidly on the fence. I'd need to be very pleased with improvements in other areas to make up for my dashed hopes about how quests in Elemental could help the eventual GC3 escape the victory=genocide problem that GC and GC2 have. Given that the Master Quest is a 'new' game-ending condition, I'd definitely be willing to give it up if the payback was a game that put t

Towns with hundreds of people in them shouldn't disappear in a puff of smoke if the Sovereign dies... unless maybe the entire population is summoned? [e digicons]:(O[/e] So yeah, that's kind of a silly mechanic.

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="36" id="2821746"] Methinks that you're drastically underestimating the value of hybrids. TV shows, restaurants, novels, and films all have strong 'hybrid' examples. Why not TBS games?[/quote] Maybe. But this isn't a new game. It's an overhaul of an existing one. I don't think there's another two years to get it right. With limited time, limited developer numbers, and a lot of things that need doing, I think the chances of success increase drasticall

[quote who="cpl_rk" reply="32" id="2821590"] The problem is, you can't have both. What would you have the "focus" be? The game was designed to be both a strategy game and a RPG. Focusing only on one will degrade the other. You can't just have "magic" otherwise why build armies or city improvements? Can't have just armies, otherwise why hire heroes? For better or worse, this is a 50/50 game. I think that both elements can be improved upon (hell ju

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="20" id="2821658"] Tridus, your AoW 2 remarks make me think I might try when it hits the bottom of the discount basket at GOG. I avoided trying it so far on account of the lack a random map generator and what smelled like too much focus on MP. MoM had Enchanted Roads and a variety of other global spells that I've had in mind when I pine for magic based on a sovereign's connection to his or her realm. The AoW stuff sounds similar.[/quote] Focus on MP?

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="16" id="2820177"] I'd also still like to see spells based on this sort of connection, e.g. an analog to GC2's Eyes of the Universe that cleared FoW on all your territory. If essence were still part of the land-healing equation, I'd also really like to see options for draining essence back out of land so you had some interesting choices for 'crisis' situations. Really need to build that Serious Smack-down Golem? Then you gotta give up the better part of your

[quote who="cpl_rk" reply="27" id="2821549"] Quoting dowdyhoody, reply 26Isn't this war of magic and not war of city builders? Well, magic is "one" focus, not "the" focus. There is no "the" focus in a game that is one-half strategy game and one-half RPG (hence the current thread debate & the "hero" vs "squad" debate & the "epic" scale debate, etc, etc, etc)[/quote] And that's something they need to fix too. IMO the game needs a focus, the one thing

[quote who="Sethai" reply="31" id="2821442"]the problem is not that players spam settlements to grab resources. it's that all of these settlements end up growing at the same rate, largely regardless of how many are built. everything ends up becoming a huge city eventually, which was not how the game was envisioned. there were supposed to be a few large cities with additional client farming villages or mining towns that did not end up becoming cities and sprawling over the map. this

[quote who="KingHobbit" reply="16" id="2821411"] That is what you do with every building in the game. Unless it gets destroyed. Once it is built, it just goes about it business. The only way to change that is if each building had some type of upgrade it could develop--sort of like Age of Empires. You could upgrade your loggers and miners.[/quote] And that's one of the biggest problems with the game. You don't think about bulidings. You just plop them down

[quote who="Goldmos" reply="14" id="2821389"] Totally agree to this. There is no "micromanagement" to hospitala nd sewer: you build them and they do the rest. Like, you dont need to employ people to the gold mine. You dont have to check c.v. for those who work in the lost library. I don't see any "micromanagement" to implement an hospital and a sewer system that add some bonus to growth or healing process. And of course if we can have some sort of "advisor" option to autobuild city ANd h

[quote who="kenata" reply="9" id="2821320"]I think this is kind of a cop out. Elemental is far from "magic heavy", as every magic user in the entire game supposedly comes from the single source of the sovereign, who himself doesn't really heal people. While I understand that sanitation and health seems like it would add a large amount of undue micromanagement, most games do not implement them with this in mind. Generally, the idea is simply a method to limit city growth by using an understand

Fifthed. :D Now that we have specialists, it makes a lot more sense to let people use them to specialize a city by building 5 studies or whatever then it does by getting to a certain population level then picking a bonus.

[quote who="riadsala" reply="4" id="2821234"] Civ4 did this pretty well. There were some clearly unbalanced trait combos, but this wasn't a problem for game balance as you could only access them via the custom civs. [/quote] How do you figure? In BtS pretty well every trait combination is available on some standard leader.

The caravan > roads system seems to be a spinoff from the "organic roads" discussion in beta. The idea was that paths (or dirt roads) should develop automatically as people travel back and forth between your cities. That's the part that you're seeing, and since these roads are simply beaten down trails by people travelling on the same route, they don't cost maintenance. But most of those ideas also had a road construction option where you could build a better road if you mapped out

I'm not sure what you expect them to say. A new guy just took over as producer of the game, and there's a substantial patch being developed. It's not like stuff isn't being worked on. Plus if you look back in the past, you can see how many times announcing stuff early caused trouble when it turned out to not work out. If they're holding off on talking about 1.1 stuff until AFTER some testing and iteration on the game systems, that's a good thing. Nobody really wants another "t

[quote who="CariElf" reply="98" id="2820715"] If I actually had wanted to write a dev journal about the spells, I would have had to ask marketing because that's more of a feature than a fix. As it is, I find that many people are interested in a journal like this because it gives them insight into the development process, whatever the topic. [/quote] And I"m glad you did, these are pretty interesting. :)

[quote who="Vhorthex" reply="90" id="2820479"]Although this all looks and sounds pretty nice, why is this being focused on? I'd much rather you talk to us about the spells and the core changes that are coming to the game. I didn't even know that there was an issue with ZOC's. But that's just me Cheers, V.[/quote] It's not "being focused on". It's one developer spending some time on solving a problem, and then finding it interesting enough

[quote who="Malsqueek" reply="67" id="2820086"] Squares are easy as well. Just apply the Pythagorean Theorem, and you get a distance multiplier of 1.4 from corner to far corner. Of course, its not as "easy" to count 1.4, 2.8, 3.2, 4.6 as it is to count 1,2,3,4, but it is still no herculean effort.[/quote] But you can't do that, really. Something with a range of 1 when going along a diagonal has a range of 1.4, etc. It's worse with movement because stuff doesn't move the same spee