Tridus

Good choice. Kael obviously has street cred in the fantasy TBS market and knows it pretty well, but it's his day job experience that brings the real benefit. Based on what went wrong with Elemental, an experienced project manager type who can take a critical look at things without being written off as "one of those Internet people" is just what the doctor ordered. This hire will benefit Stardock's games for a long time, and hopefully not just Elemental.

Ok. I'm playing on King, and it's still easy. All that happens past Prince is the AI gets ever increasing production bonuses. It gets to the point on Diety that the AI literally can't MOVE its units because there's so many of them (the "blob of death" is a unit in every single tile the AI controls). At that point the game just becomes tedious because they can produce units so fast that you can't kill them fast enough, no matter how bad the AI still is. And the AI is rea

[quote who="Alstein" reply="19" id="2799604"]BTW FFXIV did not get a free pass Tridus. It got the same review scores Elemental did, despite probably having more payola. Game apparently is a complete disasterpiece. [/quote] It is. It would have been a bad game if it was released in 2003 (ie: before WoW). Compared to modern MMOs? It's a complete disaster. I really loved the part where if you crash while doing a timed quest (ie: all of them)

There's a few issues I think. 1. Some games are deceptive, and most critics don't spend very long with them. Civ 5 is a great example. The first playthrough is quite good. It's only after you get good at it that you start noticing things like how the new happiness and luxury system doesn't scale to large maps and works really badly the larger the map is. Or that puppet states which sound great on paper are in fact a disaster and will bankrupt you if you actually use them. Or that work

This is a game I was hoping would be Simcity 5, but it went so very wrong. Shame.

[quote who="CariElf" reply="47" id="2788429"] We would not have to change to peer to peer for automatic turns. The network model is independent of game mechanics. That being said, I don't think that this would be less annoying than having a turn timer that is started by the first human's turn. [/quote] Can't agree with that. This is the most annoying system I've ever seen in my life. Not all turns need to be the same length, depending on what I'm doi

[quote who="Black-Knight" reply="9" id="2790153"] I have played AOWSM since the day it came out in 2003, before I played its 2 predecessors AOWTWT and of course the first one, AOW1, also from the day they come out. The time one takes to play a turn largely depends on the size of the map, but I can assure you than after turn 50 on a XL map turns always take more than an hour to play (for the winning side that is...)[/quote] I've played them all too, and I think you're talking nons

[quote who="DKL" reply="21" id="2793606"] They took down the site, which locked everyone who had bought things in the past from downloading. In that sort of a situation, you have an obligation to tell your existing customers the truth. If Impulse had to go down for 48 hours for some technical reason, Frogboy would give us an explanation and an apology, not some half-assed marketing stunt. When you're running an internet service, you either treat outages as the serious impac

[quote who="-RAISTLIN-" reply="4" id="2793016"] as far as 4Xish space sim games go its probably got no equal, but there are many games, like elite or i-war or tie fighter or freespace which cast bigger shadows in the space combat and/or trading genre.[/quote] Yeah, for sure. The problem here is certainly not that developers are scared of X3. :P People just don't seem to think there's money in it right now, but a good joystick based flight game and something that plays on

[quote who="SpaghettiMon" reply="14" id="2793324"] You are not purchasing? Again I must ask why. They didn't lie or deceive anyone. The internet deceived themselves. Maybe they should have been more specific, but it was the people on the internet who invented the lie that they were going out of business, not GoG. I have never bought any games from GoG, but this whole stunt has nothing to do with it. I just find the backlash GoG is getting to be hilarious and uncalled for. By the time of

And a very stupid stunt, at that.

I really don't know, and it's disappointing. I tried out the demo for Evochorn Legend and while that seemed like it might be a fun combat game, the early part has a lot of flying around for long periods of time to get contracts to go mine things... which is not. I really miss games like Tie Fighter and Tachyon.

[quote who="Gravedancer" reply="322" id="2790466"] Puppets can kill your economy (is my theory). You don't have control over what they build. If they build buildings that require maintenance costs does that go into your total or does their city just net 0 gold? [/quote] Far as I know their profit/loss does factor in to your treasury. You get the bonus of the buildings they build, so not getting the maintenance would be pretty odd.

EA's smackdown was pretty good.

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="4" id="2789675"] Quoting illmunkeys, reply 3I believe the MP is simultaneous movement w/ countdown clock. So, while Stardock is putting options for a longer time clock, you'd never convince me to play an opponent that thought he needed an hour a turn. I think of it like Rome - you've made your empire so large, you have to choose what to micromanage wisely and eventually, you will begin to see corruption and crumbling within the empire. In Age

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="303" id="2789628"]Is there a way to permanently get rid of roads? (or other improvements) ... or are they ever just "finished" and "pillaged" ? and if so, is the option only available to the person that originally built the improvement?[/quote] Workers have a remove road command if standing in a tile with a road.

[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="43" id="2788455"] Well, we will have to disagree then. Sure, we have the new hex combat mechanic, but the poor AI doesn't even use it effectively. As it has been mentioned above, unlike Elemental, Civ 5 doesn't separate units from buildings in construction, so you lose choices there. Civ 5 doesn't let you get heroes, it doesn't let you get magic, it doesn't let you have sovereigns, it doesn't let you have dynasties or customize your units

EA has been trying to improve for a while, behavior wise.

Single player is, yeah. The new combat model works a lot better, the unique leader traits are a LOT more interesting then the old model, and the city states are good at stirring up trouble (and then helping you if you bail them out). The AI needs work though, and MP support is... well, it's functional. But it's a step back from Civ 4 in that area, in particular how the AI gets weaker in MP games for some reason.

[quote quoting="post"] Today I watched some of the Dev interviews and found out you actually get to move around and dodge and stuff during combat, meaning actual player skill is involved. If someone were to, lets say, throw a car at you, you can actually get out of the way and if it misses you then you don't get hit. It isn't like WoW or CoH where you hit the button to use the skill then watch it go off and hit your enemy and they have no way to dodge it. That alone might make it

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="285" id="2787371"]So ... I heard the AI was REALLY bad. Is this true?? I mean, it seems like the combat AI would be more easy to "improve" due to the 1 unit per tile. I mean right? Computer AIs can handle chess pretty well, and as for the combat AI, its largely like a game of chess.[/quote] You'd think so, but it has to know how to arrange its units in the right tiles, with ranged guarded by melee, and what to pick off. I'd say that the combat AI

[quote who="FadedC" reply="97" id="2787304"]I think it's just gotten to the point where the number of people who are willing to play a very long drawn out turn based multiplayer strategy game (particularly one that does not have simultaenous turns) is a very small niche. When most people want a game that they can play with their friends they usually want one where they don't spend much more time waiting around for their turn then playing. I must admit that while I used to quite happily play s

[quote who="Nesrie" reply="92" id="2786753"] Wow. It looks like there was some sort of developer handbook passed out in the last few years titled how to fk up multiplayer games in as many ways as possible. How unfortunate.[/quote] We really do seem to be going backwards on MP, particularly in TBS games this year. It's particularly sad in the case of co-op, where shooters are getting better at it and strategy games are going backwards in a hurry.

Civ 5 with wizards, item shops, and dynastic marriages would be pretty awesome.

MP is not as polished as it should be, for sure. But "worse then beta" is overblowing it. So long as you set autosave in the game options to save every turn, MP is pretty functional.