sagittary

While I agree that ICS is bad in general, I don't agree that expansionism is bad. Fact is, a city is -always- beneficial (this game or other games) because ultimately, you will likely get far more out of it than what you put in. Expanding is something you -want- to do even if you're trying to stay small. Limiting empire size doesn't work because all it does is say "Stop expanding here"; you end up building just as far as you can go. And in certain situations, you may -want- to over expand; yo

As far as AI in general, while I would like to see some personality, I also don't want it 'locked in'. If I always know that Umber is aggressive and tries a X type of strategy, that's no more interesting than if all factions did the same strategy. The only surprize is who I meet. I'd rather see randomize personalities/strategies so that if I see Umber I don't know if they're going to be aggresive or defensive or what kind of unit they're going for. Also, one hitch with personali

Resources no longer apply to the tile limit of cities however they will use the city build queue if they are (or will be) connected.

I would say the easiest way at the moment would be to do a inverse economic starbase from GalCiv2. That is, caravans aren't attackable once set up; they no longer exist as independent units, only as (functionally) counters. Monsters can 'attack' a section of road. If they do, the caravan takes a hit. The longer a monster camps on a route, the less bonuses the caravan produces and the slower road development occurs until finally it stops all together. A little (monster face)! would appea

Disclaimer: I play exclusively on huge maps on epic speed. So all commentary are based on that. To me, it feels like there are two difference paces at work. The first is the meta-game (how you win). This seems very slow (and mostly about right). By turn 150, I've got an idea of what's going on, how I want to proceed, etc. The second though is the day-to-day game (what you're doing from turn to turn). And here, the game

Insofar as the population scaling, one thought was instead of a direct 1:1 ratio of population, tie in the usable population with housing. So instead of 1 house provides 25 citizens and 25 people to put to work, 1 house provides 25 citizens and 1 person to put to work. If you have 5 houses, 5 people to work with 125 citizens. This might (in tandem with other additions/tweaks) help reduce excessive population and specialists. For one, this produces a slight choice in how you want higher level

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="1" id="2851805"] Soon.[/quote] Now are we using Valve time or real time?

[quote who="Stuie_acs" reply="1" id="2851695"] Even if all the mechanics worked perfectly (they still don’t), it is hard to care about what happens to Kraxis or Capitar or Alderaan or Narnia or whatever. LOL. That's why either the in-game story telling needs to drastically improve (call me skeptical that this approach will ever really work), or it's fantasy tropes to the rescue![/quote] Eh. To an extent part of the problem is just that Elem

While we don't want to copy Civ wholehandedly, we also should recognize that Civ does, in fact, do some things well (and possibly, right). We shouldn't be afraid to take cues from Civ and twist them to fit Elemental. After all, if you want to be picky about it, Food in Elemental is exactly the same thing as Happiness in Civ 5, save for the fact that Food is a hard cap and has no secondary benefits. That said, terrain does need to be a little more 'alive' in the sense th

Personally, I'd separate strategy from elements. Give each element something 'neat' but don't also make each element a defacto cut and paste definition. I'd rather have it so if I want to turtle, I pick up the Defensive spell book. Alternatively, building upon spell books much like technology. For instance, I study Defensive spell books... and then from there I can pick Air Defense, Earth Defense, etc. If I want to heal units, there should be healing style spells in every element.

I suppose, at the very least, all sovereigns should get universal spells. So in addition to faction spell books (life and death) they also got generic spells so they could at least do a few nifty things. Of course, these would not be nearly as good as the specialized books but it would would allow for some balance between being almost overwhelmed with spells and not having any real spells at all (at least until researched well well into the game).

They probably hired him out to write 'em better hive AI algorithms. Wouldn't do to sting the help.

Frankly, right now, unit size is mostly arbitrary - bigger units get more HP and more consistent damage (due to more attacks). I'd rather see more interesting dynamics that aren't just modifiers and that don't have so much overlap. As it is, while you can make the illusion of, say, an elite group of horsemen, you don't really since they're literally just peasants with HP modifiers. For instance, instead of unit size and normal/veteran/etc, both of which are mostly just

Civ 5 did some to mitigate this by simply giving cities an innate ability to attack and defend themselves even without units at the city. At the start of the game, they start off at a decent strength - with the minimum recommended 4 units, even that takes many many turns and a lot of save scumming as well as experienced units to make it possible. As the game progresses, cities scale in power (though slower than units). Any attempt to early conquer a city means a significant devotio

I've mentioned this before, long long ago. Essentially, my thoughts boiled down to: Give city-states objectives. They may or may not want to 'win' the game, but they may want to 'win' in other ways (that don't necessarily equal end game). Some objectives may be shared (t hey want to gain a second city but since they can't build pioneers directly...), others may be unique (the orekeepers may want to have at least 10,000 metal in stock),

Perhaps bi-weekly then. Early Spring - Late Spring - Early Summer - Late Summer, etc etc etc. Or maybe Early - Mid - Late. Still somewhat abstract without getting so bogged down in weeks that years take very long to get through.

To me, the clumpiness of cities is because of the clumpiness of resources. Such clumpiness takes away any choice as far as productive cities go. Making resources weaker but more plentiful would make terrain more interesting as far as placement and help de-emphasize capitals (which, as it stands, are the backbone of your empire. It goes and your significantly handicapped).

[quote who="lambdaman" reply="27" id="2841643"]I'm curious about the term "lockdown" -- I've always heard "freeze" or "feature freeze". Is this a gaming industry term?[/quote] Nah, I've heard code lock, lockdown, code freeze, etc. Considering how informal game development is, definitions and labels vary a lot.

[quote who="Fistalis" reply="29" id="2841801"] Quoting pad152, reply 26 The issue here is the AI, it's not able to play on a map of islands because it doesn't use boats, something CIV games have been doing from the begining. Selective memory here.. Many of the vanilla release versions of various Civ releases had major issues with AI using boats. Civ IV for instance had issues til about the time of release of BTS.. and the vanilla pat

Reducing damage, better resistances,, better defenses, and more opportunity cost to use it would all help. Otherwise, it's the basic Save-Or-Die problem from D&D. Doesn't matter what the other guy does or how powerful he is, he flubs a single roll and goes splat. Or gets no save at all (more an issue with high level epic spells). After all, if you can wipe out a good chunk of health on turn one, that automatically puts the other guy at a disadvantage since now they

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="6" id="2839722"] Quoting gsitetfs, reply 5Regarding expansions.. during my efforts to get Impulse to restore an old archive, stumbled upon the "Detect application" menu option of Impulse Choose "Games" and you see that Elemental has got 3 additional expansions planned..Destiny's Embers is from the book (need to buy it these Christmas if possible...) so that's not one. I wonder if the other two are exclusive retail content (to be re

One, expecting a reply to a thread that's only been posted to at 2-5 AM is silly. Two, Stardock isn't likely to be trolling the forums constantly. Three, a lot of posts get posted. So expecting a personal reply is just silly. You'd be better served PMing one of them and asking them directly rather than grumbling about it and expecting them to see every little post. After all, if they spend 'just' 5 minutes to read and reply to 1 post... they'd on

[quote who="AlexFury" reply="74" id="2838915"]sagittary: A few quick questions for you. 1) Lets say you've got a LINE of resources between two cities A[][][]R1R2R3R4R5[][][]B for example. can you actually link the two cities? if say, you build connections to either end with matching build-times? (I've actually seen similar setups. I have one city with nearly 10-15 resources easily in range. gods the boosts that city gets.<br

Just as a small bump/update. I'm still around and will be updating this. However, I'm waiting for 1.1 because it looks to introduce many changes to the game as a while, some of which aren't in the beta patches. Thus rather than poke at things that may change, I'm letting them settle in presumably a more stable state. Also, I'm trying to make sure I can approach 1.1 with a clean palette for this as well as feedback; thus I'm intentionally not playing the game so any changes and such are more p

I expand when there's a good spot and I have enough to cover the initial resources. Waiting until you have a stockpile to cover the initial cost and have extra is too long; not to mention, the expansion city will be generally be generating and building on it's own.] However, I also pre-build units in anticipation of expansion. Finding a spot and then building units to settle it takes too long. Having pioneers and basic defenders on standby means they can eithe