Tridus

Except that it is. What they're doing now is just a step towards that. The long term goal is the integration. Funny thing is that Blizzard employees will now apparently be exempt from having to show their name when posting, because of what happened in the first link I posted. So the privacy concerns everybody has are proven justified, but they only care about protecting their own. It's a far cry from the company Blizzard used to be.

Oh, they do realize it. If they didn't, they sure do now. T

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="70" id="2674192"] To be fair, "This game isn't going to be ready!!" isn't actually helping to improve the game. If you want to improve it, keep posting ideas and suggestions.[/quote] No, but it is posted by people who care. A much worse situation would be everybody shrugging and not caring about things being ready in time because the plan is to play Civ 5 anyway. Of the two, an occasionally annoying but concerned playerbase is the better one.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="56" id="2674092"] Once again: For those of you new to Stardock betas, what we provide to the public beta testers is not necessarily what we have internally. We have been doing this for over 15 years. Thank you for your concern. In addition, July 16 is our feature lock date. Not our gold date. After July 16th, it's all bug fixes and polish. If you're certain the game just won't be ready, you are free to hold off on playing it.&

It's pretty funny how the first real ID posts went to great lengths to emphasize the "optional", then not two weeks later the "optional" disappears entirely. The worst part is that it applies to tech support, because Blizzard's phone support is useless. The real support is done on the forums. Need support? Broadcast your name. Want to help someone ELSE by posting on support? Broadcast your name. Every forum MVP and many mod authors have come out strongly against it, and the th

On a more serious note - at what point can we go back to talking about the release date? The last thread on the subject said you aimed to have the game "completed" by July 16 to make an August 4 "gold" date. But since this build doesn't have tactical battles, we're not going to see those until... July 15? At the earliest? One day before the "complete" date? That schedule doesn't sound at all realistic.

[quote who="Sushikawa" reply="51" id="2674053"] Quoting Tormy-, reply 50 Wrong. If you had read the article you linked to, you'd see those drivers stopped the fan controls from working correctly and nerfed the cooling capabilities. [/quote] Yeah, a recall can hardly be described as "working properly". :P (It's kind of sad that Nvidia's driver quality has been lousy for so long. Just bought my first ATI powered video card in nearly a decade.)

[quote who="Hrothgar" reply="34" id="2673715"] Elemental shouldn't be capable of bluescreening the game, and it's certainly not capable of causing your system to take an hour to reboot or continue to experience difficulties. What you're describing is a hardware problem and probably impending failure. I admit I know little about hardware, and not much more about software [although I think I know more than the average computer user]. However, I have

[quote who="Hrothgar" reply="27" id="2673663"]Blue-screen crashes have scared the heck out of me. After the last one, it took me well over an hour to reboot, and I'm still experiencing difficulties. So, I'm all for fixing the stability issues, because I can't play with the game in the state it is.[/quote] Elemental shouldn't be capable of bluescreening the game, and it's certainly not capable of causing your system to take an hour to reboot or continue to experience diffic

[quote who="Bellack" reply="313" id="2672984"] 3 minutes is a bit too short for the tactical combats. You can't get anything done in 3 minutes. Well hopefully they will allow us to set the time on the combats[/quote] Just to be clear on this, 3 minutes is a target for how long they want a typical fight to last. It's NOT a hard timer (or a timer at all). If you want to spend 30 minutes in battle, the game will not stop you. The goal is that combat should move at a pace tha

Tactical combat is off. Looks like the other victory conditions are off. Most likely a lot of things aren't finalized. Modding is disabled. Multiplayer is disabled.

[quote who="bonscott" reply="19" id="2673172"] Ubisoft removed Tages and all DRM from Dawn of Discovery DVD version in a patch sometime last year. I believe it's still on the digital version (Steam, Impulse, GG) though.[/quote] Did they? Well that makes it worth another look.

Yeah, this is looking pretty awesome. Definite buy. (Another forum I frequent has an official "I hate the CRTC thread" sticiked, where all the hate posts go. I wonder if we need an "I hate Steam" thread here. :P)

[quote who="Rincewind57" reply="52" id="2673065"]In terms of action games I don't think graphics are hurting at all but in strategy I fear they are. As is the insistence on making things main-stream. Command and Conquer 4 and Supcom2 leap to mind (P.S I love supcom 2 but, really, it's Not a sequel to supreme commander. It's what c&c4 could have been in the sc universe). I fear a lot of publishers/developers are failing to realise that some things will Not beco

[quote who="MarvinKosh" reply="53" id="2673161"] You have to consider though, whether gameplay is actually being affected. Okay, so there are no towns in FF13, but they are essentially just texture-expensive item malls in some cases; having the shops available from a save station means you can still buy and sell your stuff, but you don't have to trail all the way back to some other place and you don't therefore need to change discs. I think that getting rid of one of the

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="20" id="2672968"]The Army is their way of spreading word about the game, which results in potentially more sales. I don't see anything wrong with them rewarding people who spend time (and in some cases their own money) to promote Elemental around the internet and the Real World.[/quote] That's not really what it did. You were eligible for the discount if you: a ) clicked the "join army" button on the website, and b ) didn't already buy the

[quote who="KWAiRT" reply="18" id="2672624"] Figures as much. Thanks for info. Nothing stopping Stardock from dropping one in my email box though. I guess owners of Galciv2 and Sins get the short end of the stick? Where is the coupon for the people that support this company and BUY their products? Sad really. Sign up on a forum and get a coupon. Support the developers and get nothing I see how it works [/quote] Yeah, people who bought many months ago didn't get anything either. <

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="3" id="2671890"]There should be a manual option that comes up when you run the launcher.[/quote] Launcher?

Blizzard also has their own store, not that they sell anything via DD until it's been out in stores for a month.

If you're feeling that way, it's probably best to wait. :)

[quote who="Sethfc" reply="5" id="2671964"]I like the variance. Maybe have an option to have a map generator 'equalize' starting locations or to allow it to be random for map generation.[/quote] I got a start location yesterday where after 15 minutes the ONLY resource I'd found was a shard. There's variance, and then there's "you're totally crippled this game, sorry". I mean I had almost every spell in Procepinee's staring spellbook researched by then, and I didn't even have a town un

[quote who="kyogre12" reply="23" id="2671844"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 22The game supports 32 players but WE don't support 32 players on our servers. Well that answers one question, but it raised another; why not? Why can't we have SD hosted 32 player games?[/quote] The other 16 are probably for things like NPC factions and such. Could you possibly imagine a 32 player game? It'd take an eternity.

Are we going to be able to build custom map generation scripts?

[quote who="fstkfstk" reply="30" id="2668878"]I'd love to see a none-cheating AI that actually challenges the player like a human being would, but I suspect building something of that complexity for a game this intricate would be EXTREMELY challenging and I'm not convinced its been done before (at least not with a game so close to release with so many features still up in the air). I suspect SirPleb is right that the only workable approach to this would be to have different A

Best bet is to post on the "Elemental Beta" section. :)