Tridus

[quote who="Climber" reply="10" id="2641173"] Yes, you can. If there is a Victory condition for being the most populous, and your starting location is an island all on your own. This won’t be fun though. In most games, after researching the Civic tech for a while, you will need to branch out just like all other TBS games. However, I agree with you. This tech tree cannot be self-sustaining, but all others can. Do you have some i

Would also let us use caves and such in a normal game. :)

How in the world would you be able to win a game with no troops, no magic, no adventurers, and no diplomats? Sure, you might have the greatest farms in the world... which don't do you a lot of good if you can't trade with anyone or defend yourself against anyone that wants it.

[quote who="larienna" reply="44" id="2638799"] Never "FORCE" a player to have to do anything they don't want to. Maybe the term forcing was wrongly used. It should be stated as: Strongly convince that this is a good or bad choice for him. Note that player are not forced to take a path, it's just that some path are less useful than others. But players still have the liberty of taking the wrong or ineficient path. [/quote] Tha

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="37" id="2637240"]Your idea of everyone getting economy at the same rate sounds a lot like the ideas of everyone getting essence at the same rate. Killing diversity for the sake of possible "balance", also potentially removing a lot of the exploratory fun (even if its not fun in a competitive sense). [/quote] It's not really "diversity" or "variety" when everybody is doing it that way because it also happens to be correct. As soon as you have a right ch

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="34" id="2637129"] See, I don't see this happening. And the reason is ... is that at that point its just "common sense." The real plague of some must builds is if its too specific, cheesy, and always wins in ANY situation. Econ strats working on large maps, and specialized starts working on small maps ... to me is an indication that the system WORKS.[/quote] Which is why I removed the Civics tree. Problem solved, there is no "specialize in economy" opti

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="69" id="2636661"] The engine handles small hills already. It can also handle lush grassy plains. I'm not sure why you're thinking the game map is flat. One screenshot is not representative of the whole game, especially when zoomed out.[/quote] His issue is that on some areas of the map there's large chunks of what looks to be a whole lot of nothing. That will probably go away some by release, but little doodads even like rocks or flow

This strikes me as adding complexity for the sake of adding complexity. Essence and mana already control what you can cast in terms of spells, throwing arbitrary limits on what your champions can cast will just make it more cumbersome. (Especially since if you can pick the spells, people will just go for the best combat ones anyway.)

The main tech research isn't really a "tree", and as such there is a bit of randomness in what you get. But aside from the rare techs, the standard techs are fairly predictable and you'll know what is going on.

[quote who="XeronX" reply="14" id="2636443"]You know frogboy. If you turned these toys loose a little early and set up a submission area in the forums or site. You guys would probably get some truly amazing things that could be added in pre release. Hell thinking about people like Raven you would probably have almost 2 new expansion ready before release.[/quote] There's too much "game" missing right now for that to work. Mods are likely to break early and often with how muc

[quote who="seanw3" reply="27" id="2635942"]To me the its whats inside the borders that matter. I have no time for such frivolous aspirations. Next you'll be asking for modable borders and different border flavors for each faction and cool animated interactions when the skull borders meets the celtic knot borders.[/quote] Why wouldn't graphics like that be moddable? [e digicons]^_^[/e]

The problem is that schools increase research in everything else. So the guy who goes down his chosen line in a largerish game will always lose tech wise to the guy who goes schools, then goes down his tech line. It's very much a case where economy > all else.

You know, I thought I'd seen this thread before. Bad necro! No soup for you!

You could probably do this with magic too, by using an "invisiblity" type spell or enchantment. :)

[quote who="Peace Phoenix" reply="27" id="2634760"]Is it me or are everyone supposing that all factions will use the same tech tree? We know from Brad's journal that Fallen factions don't beleive in efficacity of schools ...[/quote] Right now we can only talk about the tech tree we have, which has the problem and presumably will continue to. Besides, if the Fallen have four "go down this line towards a way to win" trees and one "economy" tree, they'll have the same problem too

Haven't seen anything about it in beta 1, but that doesn't mean much. You should make a post in the Ideas area of the site. :)

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="6" id="2633964"] Quoting astrath, reply 5Meh, just terminology. Point is that there will be standard games a la Civ Meh yourself. Clear, consistent terminology is damned handy. Just sadly unpopular amongst jargon-addled IT folks... [/quote] Hey, good developers love clear terminology! It's the buzzword-compliant types that give the rest of us a bad name. :( For the overall theme here, yes the game will have "sandbo

[quote who="GCFL" reply="330" id="2634055"]I am also a little concerned about premade maps. Won't the battles ultimately get repeated and get very boring?[/quote] I don't honestly think so. The armies coming into each battle are different, and there would be several maps. It's not like every fight would take place on exactly the same terrain. Previous games also had limited numbers of tactical maps, and honestly not having enough of them wasn't a complaint I heard much.<

[quote who="LeBlaque" reply="13" id="2634081"] Radical, but absolutely worth thinking about. I would, however, think there are some "Civic" based research branches definately worth pursuing. By example, "Seamanship" is given (don't we all go on rivers, lakes, waterways, etc. in some fashion?) but would it not be valuable to have a research branch where you can make trade ships larger? A research branch where you could pump just a bit more out of your farmlands/orcha

[quote who="LeBlaque" reply="11" id="2634065"] This is truly spot on-- I was thinking the same thing but you articulated it very clearly. Your point, however, doesn't resolve the OP's issue and that is to develop a game mechanic to partially address this. Perhaps one way to address this is to re-think the economy-based (and others) research tree and automatically give, after a certain number of turns, every playing faction the "basic" research outcomes--

This problem exists because for a successful empire in these games, you need a variety of techs, most of which are the early game ones. It's not even a balance problem so much as it is a fundamental capacity problem. You can't be an effective warmonger without the production to back it up, and production is economy based. Research is economy based. Diplomacy is sure helped if you have a strong economy to back it up (and switch to troops to defend yourself if need be). Everything else

[quote who="Tormy-" reply="324" id="2633848"] I am gaming since ~2000 and I know MoM very well...in fact I used to play older games even. The fantasy TBS genre is not very popular compared to the FPS/RTS genres for example. The TBS fans are dedicated gamers imo, so they should know about MoM. It's the "father" of the fantasy TBS games afterall. [/quote] You've also been posting on this forum for a while and thus are atypical. :P Not to mention you'd already have known the game w

The end is nigh. Kotick has a reverse midas touch, he destroys any game franchise he touches. Activision already has several franchises in trouble, and they killed one of their best studios in IW. Now they're going to try to screw up Blizzard too, by putting people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing in charge.

[quote who="Tormy-" reply="321" id="2633793"]Well most of the people [especially those, who didn't preorder] think that EWoM is the successor of MoM. Do you really think that those people are expecting to have an RTS or WEGO style combat system?[/quote] If you want to go that way, "most people" who didn't pre-order but might buy the game later would be people who haven't been gaming for 20 years and thus will have no idea what MoM is.

[quote who="Grove12345" reply="5" id="2633112"] "But they don't tend to look alike in PC games"? Looking at WOW or Lineage 2 and actually ALOT more of PC MMOs. Ya they do. And FFXI which has your standard amount of faces and armor and looks as most PC mmos runs super fine on the 360.[/quote] FFXI looks very dated, actually. And people only look alike in WoW at high level because of Blizzard's thing with armor sets that are easy to get and look alike. Look at a game with a cosmeti