dalamb

Even without the 50-square limit you wouldn't likely have the resources to build everything. A zero-food city doesn't rate an irrigation system even if you've got room to build it.

These amount to things that reduce clicks (sometimes a lot of clicks) rather than stuff that's not there. I'd like to be able to access the Hiergamenon from the main menu instead of having to load a game. Yes, I know there are two (Kingdom vs Empire) but that should just require either two buttons or an expanded Hiergamenon with two parts (a meta-title-page, perhaps?) I'd like to be able to search the Hiergamenon for random text; I can't always remember

I'd rather see "open save menu" be ctrl-S and "open load screen" be ctrl-L as seems to be standard in Windows programs -- unless, of course, Elemental eventually becomes a cross-platform game!

[quote who="Valentine82" reply="105" id="2754377"]No one ever mentions this, but can we please get the AI Diplomacy fixed so that the AI doesn't constantly pester us to go to war with our friends and allies?[/quote]A bit annoying, yes -- but isn't backstabbing your friends a staple of 4X? Maybe this is one of those things where different people prefer different gameplay. For me it's the "constantly" part -- I find AI requests come rather more frequently than I like.

[quote who="Paul Auger" reply="180" id="2761658"]Yes, they just move around the center square square without actually entering the city if you send them to a square with other buildings in it, as any unit normally would. [/quote]Does this mean you have to leave an open path, without buildings, from the environment to the center square? Or just that you need to select the center square as the final destination?

I thought nobody but imbued champions could cast spells.

It seems to me one element people haven't commented on is how the forums have "changed." Did the change coincide with the release? I just started early last week, so I don't know about "before": was the Beta community less inflammatory? Are the majority of flames coming from people who joined after the pre-release?

A lot of games put stuff in My Documents\My Games these days; a few old ones from early 2000s or before use the game installation directory.

I've come to believe the only time "cheat codes" are cheating is when you're in some sort of competition, e.g. a "game of the month" where people take the same starting save and post about how the game went for them -- you want the games to be comparable. Plus when non-developers want to research how something works, "research all techs" and "build all improvements" might well be things you need to do to avoid spending hours setting up a situation in which to perform the test. B

My comment about insterspersing long thin city walls with mountains was meant to be humourous, not a serious suggestion. "Hack value" is a computer geek term about just doing something because you can and it's interestingly strange, not because it's a good idea.

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="150" id="2757437"]Where are the screenshots saved?[/quote]In My Documents\My Games\Elemental\ScreenShots -- at least, that's where it is on my machine. Parallel to that are My Documents\My Games\Elemental\Saves for sandbox game saves and ...\Saves\Campaign for campaign save games.

I'm a little surprised some of the first-week problems weren't caught in beta, but not too surprised -- I worked as a programmer for a little while, long enough to have had several "gah! how did we miss that one?" experiences. I'm also a little sad about how intense some of the negative comments have been. Personally I'm happy I got 1.0 when I did, but mainly because I quickly found these wonderful forums where people explained many things that were mystifying

Oooh, Great Wall! A long thin circle of cities, using Raise Land to put mountains in the 5-tile gaps. Weird but maybe worth doing once just for the hack value. Why always focus on actually winning the game? ;)

Filthgrinder: All I know to do is write things down. But I've started trying to follow a set of imperfect heuristics that makes it easier for me personally. Extend the game's names for my cities with a word that reminds me of their primary purpose, e.g. "flibbity gold" if the game called it flibbity and it's got gold mines, or "flibbity arcane" if it's got an Ancient Library, or "flibbity tech" if it has a lost library. Past about 3 cities I can't remember wha

Archonsod: it has happened to me already! I suspect you bulldoze the existing improvement and make a mine -- unless the improvement pops up under the city centre. Seeing new resources everywhere on the map happens in Civ when you research a tech that reveals a resource, so there's precedence for that approach. Seeing resource everywhere in the world might be too powerful, though -- as far as I can tell, distance from capital doesn't affect costs, so you could spot some nic

arentol: I've definitely had cities close enough that expanding was a problem, since terrain constrains expansion too -- can't build on steep hills, can't build on forests, can't build on water or those "partial" tiles next to some water, etc. (though the hills are vulnerable to Lower Land, of course). I've definitely had one patch of resources close to each other and another patch far enough away that you definitely wanted another city, but close enough that expansion was restricted.&n

Select your caster, open the mana/spells panel, choose "imbue champion", click "cast spell", select the champion to be imbued. You have to research the spell first, of course, but it's first-tier and can be the first spell you go for. Your essence declines by 3, and his/hers increases by 3 (from zero). Dunno what happens if you try to imbue essence again on the same champion, but wouldn't be surprised if it also increases his/her essence by 3.

[quote who="greggbert" reply="15" id="2753322"]Forward scouts! Spread our your older obsolete units across your frontier and use them to push your view as far into enemy and friendly territory as you can![/quote]I should have thought of this; I play a fair bit of Civ IV, and spreading out cheap warriors to "fogbust" is a common tactic there.

More specifically, "posting this game sucks in lots of threads" is spam, and thus sucks.

So, a summary of what I think people said (along with my commentary/questions) : Having all the element books is great because they each provide a powerful summonable creature. (sounds good to me but has to be balanced against whatever else you could do with the points; is it enough by itself if all the other criticisms are true?) Having more than one element book is useless because the spells are all duplicates of each other. (well, there's #1 to

[quote who="dalamb" reply="128" id="2749659"]I begin to think that researching Lost Bounty very, very early is tremendously important, so you place more cities near food. Especially since my experiment suggests food bounty can pop up underneath existing improvements. [/quote]I later discovered that this is a very bad idea, since Lost Bounty only shows new resources inside your current territory -- if you take over more later, you'll never see new resources there.

I, too, would really like to see units merging into squads. With regard to disbanding units -- yeah, you get citizens back, but you've lost all those precious gildar, which so far I never have enough of. With regard to upgrading -- it'd have to have a cost: perhaps the difference in gold and metal from the original to the new? And perhaps costing some training time?

I just wanted to make sure I understood a couple of things people said: There's something wrong with shards not working (outside of some mods, apparently)? what specifically is wrong? not increasing essence and appropriate spell damage like they're supposed to? If so I can save 100xN guildar and not bother building near them -- until it's fixed! If I understand correctly, each spell book has some sort of summoned creature, and each caster can only summon o

I did a brief experiement. Settled capital on turn 2 adjacent to a farm and with a 1-tile gap from a lost library. Border popped on turn 14, so that looks like 12 turns. Was able to start the LL and it definitely didn't appear on the city build queue. So, the advice about how to use the 2 separate queues is really valuable in the early game, when getting going faster (presumably) makes the most difference. Warning: if you're trying this sort of experiment, make

Ooh, amateur game designer -- with emphasis on "amateur". Not sure I can manage my way out of a wet paper bag, though. A few detailed questions based on a 2nd reading:[quote]Usable Space: A measurement of how much space a city has to build with. You can find this in the city detail screen.[/quote]If you mean the "Open Tiles" number on the detail screen, they actually mean "square" -- but it's misleading. I currently have a level 3 city with 28 tiles occupied and 27 little