sagittary

A resource needs to be within 4 tiles of of a city tile to link up. That's pretty much it. If something is just out of range, you can build towards it. As for the might equals diplomacy, that's a whole 'nother topic. For small kingdoms, it's mostly just a lack of options. Practically every victory condition relies upon research. Only one (shard) doesn't but that requires either making a patchwork kingdom or having a lucky start. And outside

Would it be possible to have a few of the cliff shores? They do make for some nice city placement at times, if only for looks. And they can make for interesting island plateaus as well. At any rate, very nice.

[quote who="ddd888" reply="3" id="2757950"] Quoting Archonsod, reply 2 we'd have an app which could potentially do X, Y, Z but you need your customers to tell you precisely which route(s) they'd like development to go down. You can't do that in the games industry unfortunately. right now you can there is internet, and forums you know [/quote] Gamers can tell you what they want. They can not tell you how to g

[quote who="1SuperG" reply="24" id="2758454"]I established a caravan from a town with +8 food to one with -2 Food which resulted in a town with -3 food and one with +9 food. I haven't seen the caravan since I established the route, but every now and then when I click on the city I snag the 'trader' stat screen and it does seem they are traveling as the road improvemet bar is increasing. So how come the city with the food shortage didn't benefit at all?[/quote] <

[quote who="Archonsod" reply="6" id="2757944"]You can often skip landmasses with a decent border push and the teleport spell, but yes, the random maps leave an awful lot to be desired.[/quote] Not really random since it's all seed maps. I've played enough that I've actually started to see repeated starting locations and landmasses. While the seed maps do tend to have more interesting terrain than the random ones I've seen in Civ, I would have liked to see at least some

Because the majority of the time, you're not going to be close enough to the models to notice? Even in tactical, you're not often going to be zooming in close enough to see eyeshine. Does it look better? Maybe. But it's not getting much bang for buck outside of the large character portraits.

[quote who="dalamb" reply="65" id="2758134"]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] In the world of fantasy, interesting strange is a good idea. :P

Depends on what you're testing for, who (company wise and position wise) is testing, and the resource available. Though in general, being that most games are fairly unique outside of long lived series and also under heavy resource and time constraints, usually any sort of automated testing is likely to take as much time to write up (on a massive scale) and implement over the course of development as manual testing. Remember as well that things tend to change - a right and wrong value can chan

Maybe, but it would be nice to see first some more mundane sea-based interactions. Otherwise, if a channeller can replace any special function one may need (transport, artillery, etc) or just do it better, it boils down to whomever has the most/best channellers win. I'd rather see more supplemental magic and channellers. For instance, a channeller ability that when on a transport, provides a passive movement increase and has castable abilities that work while at see (and only at sea). Then, s

8 cities? That's not big at all. :) In all seriousness, there should be at least one or two harbors per landmass, if only to allow for sea-based interactions all around.

[quote who="divvu80" reply="2" id="2757678"]So, as said in another thread, funnel all your caravan toward your capital for a massive food bonus! You could wait and research some of the adventure tree in order for orchads and twilight bees to appear, I had, rarely, other cities producing more food than the capital...[/quote] Since it's based on distance traveled, you'll get better returns linking more distance cities. And since the bonus applies to both ends,

As far as preorders and sale goals, remember that say they need 50K to break even (number out of air). If they only end up selling 51,000 copies, that'll break even and make a profit, yeah, but it's hardly enough profit to be able to really re-invest back into the company (ie expand and maintain a second team). If they needed 75K to break even on Elemental plus pay for the second team, well... 51K is far short. As for the team prior, I'm guessing it's like so: S

I've seen this happen before. It eventually seems to un-twist, likely due to influence changes, but of course, it's still a bug regardless. Seems like it happens to two cities that are just close enough to be almost but not quite touching.

And who exactly is going to be paying the developers in the 18 months development would take? They can't exactly live on promises that people will buy their product.

[quote who="Sethai" reply="8" id="2757004"] don't forget empire players have to research teleport, so you could still be stuck for a long time even if you thought of this.[/quote] Ah right. :P In that case, it should prioritize proximity to your own land and non-claimed terrain over someone else's land. Or, heck, just teleport the Sov to the closest friendly city.

The way Civ 4 handled it is that upon declaration of war, units were moved to the border. Though in general, there needs to be ways of telling the other players stuff (AI or otherwise) such as "Please move these units away." instead of being unable to do anything outside of "Do whatever you want" and "War! Kill 'em all!" Also, why didn't you teleport back to safety? Not enough mana?

As far as Brad is concerned, I think part of the knot that occurs is that he does work on the AI. Though he is the CEO and President, he's as much a game developer as the engine programmers sitting next to him. This -really- blurs the line between "Face of Company" and "Face of Development". Plus, with such a small company and such an active communication style, it's also easy to take what he says when he's being "Brad the guy" and think of it as "Brad the CEO and/or Game Dev". Yeah, may be h

Administrator and Farmer only work if they're in a city and it applies to that city. All others are global or apply to the unit as appropriate. Royalty does not seem to work at all.

[quote who="dalamb" reply="62" id="2755583"]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? [/quote] If we could have both city and state buildings (buildings that serve the government and/or aren't necessarily tied to a given city), we could do it a bit better.

[quote who="DevildogFF" reply="12" id="2755802"]This seems to contradict what you were saying about "Our income doesn't rely on games" and "The possible poor performance of sales won't affect our work to fix Elemental" (I've obviously paraphrased here). Does this mean that your games studio may shutdown or that things are worse than you alluded to? Will we truly have a fixed Elemental one day or will Stardock end up folding? I'd HATE to see that happen, especially since I absolutely love some

[quote who="dalamb" reply="60" id="2754362"]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 c

Have you tried building a town city or other influence increasing building near the resource?

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="33" id="2754094"] Quoting sagittary, reply 32 Quoting b0rsuk, reply 4What does a paying customer get from a copy-protected game that an unencumbered version doesn't have ? The knowledge that the game developers will have a paying job come next week? Are you for real ? Developing software is hard work, especially in an obscure, new direction or where no one likes to go. People are and will be paid for it. People pay e

[quote who="Tegga21" reply="10" id="2754135"]the biggest dislike of no increasing costs per city means there isn't a soft 'limit' meaning each city is less special. Why do I care about city (x) if I can make 35 more for no cost increase. Idk how this would be implemented, maybe 1 city per civilization/empire level and additional cities over that incur increasing penalties? idk.[/quote] True, but we also have to take in to consideration the general size of th

Random House doesn't 'work for' Stardock. And at any rate, it'd be cheaper just to have the Stardock artists do it. As far as a more flavorful tutorial and such. No, tutorials shouldn't hide things in humour and fluff. Tutorials are meant to teach the rules of the universe - if a player has wade through stuff to figure out basic things and figure out the basic flavor of the game, the tutorial fails no matter how cool it is. <a href="http://www.gam