Tridus

Not a problem, I'll attack with my dragon. Take that, peasants! [e digicons]:cylon:[/e]

I'd usually raze captured cities in Civ as well, unless they had something really worth keeping. The way Civ 4 worked, taking a city required putting a garrison in it to quell the revolt and to keep it from flipping back, especially since the other cities of the person you took it from would put massive cultural pressure on it until you took those too. It was usually easier to burn most of them down and keep a few. I'm really liking the food ideas, though I think I already said that.

[quote who="Cauldyth" reply="139" id="2547193"] Give other, cheaper than a new city, ways to grab land. A good suggestion. I've never liked the Civ mechanic of your borders being defined by your city radii (the later switch to culture was a little better, but annoying in other ways). Speaking as a Canadian, we didn't claim the vast north by spamming cities all over the place up there! [/quote] We did claim the west that way. That's the reason the

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="5" id="2547186"]Food won't discourage players to spam 5 cities with 100 pop in it instead of two cities with 250 population. Same population, but in one case you spam cities, in other you try to stay at least grouped. [/quote] No, but the natural effeciency of upgrades will. From what they said about automatic upgrades, most upgrades have levels. Higher tier settlements can get the higher tier upgrades, as well as more of them due to

The more I think about it, the more I like a food based solution. Food is already in the game, it makes logical sense (with the land desolate and lifeless, food would be pretty scarce & valuable), and it opens up a lot of options without being complex. It's easy to understand that you only have enough food for 5000 people across your empire, and it's easy to understand what you have to do to improve that (capture more food sources and research improved farming technologies). Actually *doi

[quote who="Skvader" reply="21" id="2545410"] Exactly - I've been playing Age of Wonders Shadow Magic lately, and this is the exact problem it has. In AoW SW, one can beat an army even three to four times larger than yours with proper spell/abilitiy usage and clever fighting and tactics, especially if you're defending a well-fortified city (it's still possible to beat overwhelming odds outside of a city, it's just a lot more work). This is never possible with autoresolve (rightly). Howev

[quote who="Outlaw" reply="132" id="2547097"] Not quite the same since it results in less finer tuning of the system. Simply using houses, there would be no way to assign a city to import and then export to another city. Plus no way to priortize importing or strore food.[/quote] Yes you do. Exporting is automatic, food is exported to wherever demand for it is if the city producing it doesn't need it. Why would I need an option to enable that, not exporting excess production just

When the AI is good to begin with, cheating helps it be better, yes. But a bad AI given cheating help is still bad. AoW2 suffered from that. The AI wasn't very smart about how it would do things like forming up stacks. In the early game, its cheating advantage and the general fact that it started off with more terrain then the player made things challenging. You had to compete against superior forces to gain ground. But the AI's fatal flaw is that it liked to use mixed stacks.

But it will still feature Stardock's patented "so awful it makes you claw your eyes out" technology, right? [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

When the AI is playing the game by a different set of rules then everybody else, the AI is cheating. That's the way the term is always used when it comes to AI, since the AI can't cheat by using things like hacks. You're describing the same thing in something like a tournamnet, where it's just called a handicap instead. Same thing, different terminology. The test of an AI is how challenging it can be while playing under the same rules as the player.

[quote who="Outlaw" reply="124" id="2546922"]You will still need a way to transport excess food from farm towns, to these hungry larger cities. In a past dev journal, I beileve the concessus in how ot move resources around the map was to use the "merchant option", which was a mix of one option that was similar to civ's automatic transfer of resources and another one that had every resource act as an item that the player had to manual move between cities (similar to Civ4:colonization).&n

[quote who="Valiant_Turtle" reply="108" id="2546547"]It occured to me that one other way of limiting city spam would be to limit population growth. After all, it's not a city without people. Population growth in Elemental still seems a bit funky at this point, especially growth that happens by attracting the natives. If there are benefits to having large cities (which there probably should be) then spamming small cities might mean it takes a very long time for the

[quote who="zigzag" reply="78" id="2546364"]Right now it seems like they're spammable because players have nothing else to do with essence. What we really need are competitors for that. [/quote] I don't really know how many times people have to repeat themselves on this. City spam doesn't require essence, because restored land radiates outward from existing cities. Rushing cities quickly requires essence, after that in the restored area you can build as many as you want without e

[quote who="KellenDunk" reply="50" id="2546164"] You do realize that cities are actually the highest rank for a settlement, right? Your argument loses all sense when you replace "City" with "outpost" [/quote] Since one of the proposals to fix the problem was outposts incapable of growing into cities, I believe everybody does understand the terminology. The entire objection people have is the idea that some backwater mining settlement will grow to be as

[quote who="Valiant_Turtle" reply="36" id="2546074"]I'm in the minority that believes nothing should be able to built outside of cites with the possible exception of military forts/watchtowers. Any resource harvesting type of building requires lots of labor and those people need a place to live, people couldn't really commute that far to work in the past. Some sort of high-end research later in the game might allow for it, but it probably wouldn't matter nearly as much then.[/quot

[quote quoting="post"] These make us sad, and while there have been many solutions presented to improve the system, I wanted to throw my own into the mix as a way to fix these problems AND tie into the other game mechanics (remember Sid's rule "Complex system's aren't fun - instead, make simple systems that intertwine in interesting ways."*). * - I really shouldn't put that in quotes since that was the gist of what he said...but it was something like that.

Something tells me the early beta 2 will not be fun either. It's a new multiplayer system in a new game. There will be crashes. There will be odd things happening. Since it's running on the server there probably won't be desynchs, but at this point who really knows. :) As it goes on beta 2 should get more fun, but expect kinks early on.

[quote who="Nick-Danger" reply="94" id="2543625"]Sovereigns... expend essence to bring the land back to life so the city can be built. Does this expenditure continue or is it a one time thing?[/quote] In the currently released beta, the essence expenditure is to restore life to the wasteland, which lets you build on it. Over time as the city grows, the "restored land" spreads out from the city. In that area, you can build another city without spending essence. It's

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="98" id="2543886"]One nice thing about cities in Elemental is that they don't really require any micro management if the user doesn't want to mess with them. There is no morale or approval or what have you. You want a mining outpost? No problem, plop down your keep, build the mine and you're done. Your entire civilization gets a benefit. Want to increase that benefit? Build a road to it. [/quote] Based

[quote who="dragoaskani" reply="23" id="2543796"]Oh wait, thats the mass market. Damn.Ah yes good old barrens chat, which was only overcome by global trade chat. I been clean from wow for a month now and hopefully never go back. Its amazing how much free time I have now when I don't feel I need to be on to raid 3 hours a night 4 nights a week. (not to mention all the other assorted duties when you have 3 lvl 80 raid geared healers) [/quote] I really like WoW, but I just went most

Effectively, yeah. Or it could have a variable mana cost, where you can dump more mana into it for a stronger effect. Or both.

M:tG has 6 kinds of mana. White, Black, Red, Blue, Green, and uncolored. Mana comes primarily from land cards of those types. Most spells cost mana of one color type, and some uncolored. Some spells are just uncolored (usually artifacts), and a few cards cost colored mana of more then one type. For many of the spells, there is an X component. Fireball for example costs X + 1Red. The spell does X damage, and the X component can be drawn from any type of mana. There's also effects that

[quote who="AgentNihilist" reply="39" id="2542619"] Firebolt Requires Fire Shard to cast. Basecost: 5 mana Damage: 10 fire Boost cost: X fire damage per 2 mana (X= Number of Fire Shards controlled) So in this example you need to control a fire shard to cast, it deals 10 damage and its power can be increased by spending extra mana. If you spend 16 mana and control 1 shard it will do 13 damage,

[quote who="Vandenburg" reply="48" id="2542688"] Also, the most important question for me is, what did you change regarding the ressource aquisition system? Currently you have to build snake cities to connect to resources which I hate without end.[/quote] Agree totally. Personally I feel that in a game like this in a world sundered by a cataclysm, big important cities should be rare. If you build a settlement to get access to a mine, why would it grow into a city the same size as

[quote who="Shurdus" reply="46" id="2542656"]Wintersong, that is actually not a bad idea at all. Not having access to all the numbers would definitely prevent the game from being 'gamed.' However, it is a bit screwing over the players who want to get in-depth and play this game all-out since without being able to quantify factors it can be hard to choose what to do. [/quote] It doesn't. For the systems in World of Warcraft where precise numbers aren't available, an entire communi