sagittary

If they're just basic strategies, why not call them basic strategies? :)

You heal 1 HP per turn in friendly turf. You heal faster in cities but I haven't checked to see how that works. As far as active healing, as far as I know, only a few units can heal but other than that, nope.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2010/09/07/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-september-2010/1 :: Helpful guide for you. :)

Polls are nice but they should not be the only way the devs make decisions or get the pulse of the community. At best, polls will tell them the things the community feels strongly about but it's only more indepth feedback like the actual forum posts, play testing, and so forth they can help them with how to proceed as well as lesser issues that may relate to larger general feelings.

I think it could be refined and enhanced to draw out the unique properties but I don't think it's bad or cartoony or that the style itself is bad.

Right now, Wisdom does nothing other than increase starting essence

[quote who="thisisretarded" reply="9" id="2762281"]i just said that. [/quote] When I posted, yours hadn't shown up yet. *shrugs*

-osterone?

Did you have a sovereign with any elemental spell books? Unless you pick an elemental spell book, I don't believe life/death or enchantment have any tactical spells.

[quote who="Seboss" reply="18" id="2762187"]Very insightful posts here. I work in the non-game software industry and I always thought the only development method the game industry knew was "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks". Seems I'm not close enough. Game engines such as UDK, Gamebryo or Kumquat are different story though.[/quote] To a certain extent, it varies by company and by discipline. Designing (whether levels, mechanics, or whatever) tends

It was an old 4X game but there was one that essentially had three layers of overworld. There was the surface, there was a layer of caverns below, and then a layer below that. That might be workable for a MP dungeon as it would be part of the map itself rather than something running in isolation.

I would also suggest that for popular properties like Warhammer and Lord of the Rings, people add additional pre or post fixes so that more than one person/group can be identified. Right now are LOTR, LOTRX, LOTRJBL different forks of a base mod or something else? It's not necessarily determinable. It also prevents the case where multiple groups want to work on a popular property and get into a forum war about who got the name first, ownership, and all sorts of asinine things.

Personally, I'd rather see kingdoms delineated along more interesting and less binary lines. Inevitably, fantasy societies tend to end up looking like a silly cartoon parody of every good or evil thing that can happen - evil societies rape, murder, kill, enslave, burn babies and cut forests, and jaywalk MUAHAHAHAHAHA! while good societies are the exact opposite. It'd be nice to see a little more variation in that. Some parts of a society may be bad, others, good. It breaks the status quo

[quote who="VR_IronMana" reply="11" id="2760956"] when a Sovereign and an NPC love each other very much... [/quote] ...they mix their shards together and do the elemental mana dance...

Personally, I'd rather see a system more akin to the old Dark Sun D&D campaign setting (or some aspects of it at any rate). It's a setting that has a lot in common with Elemental in style and tone. The relationship between clerics and Witch-Kings is very similar to that of Sovereign and imbued champions. Likewise, the role of magic in the setting is as much dramatic and destructive as anything else.

[quote who="Sethai" reply="8" id="2760607"] Quoting buchecker, reply 5I abused that in my last game. I researched the adv tech that gives two food sources, but i held off founding new cities so they spawned right next to the capital. That gave me 3 food sources and from there i funneled all caravans to the capital. Its currently producing 336 food ... (more than 100 to spare) exactly. this is the problem. why should adventure techs reward you for staying at home? the purpose o

[quote who="cephalo" reply="13" id="2759379"] There's a few things I don't like about the cliffs. For one thing, they tend to flatten the coast contours and take up a lot of space. Another thing I don't like about them is that they assume that all the non-mountain/hill land is all the same altitude. In my maps the land is actually kinda bumpy and looks alot more natural. I was lucky this sort of thing works! I'm happy with the possibilities presented with the Elemental ma

[quote who="revjwh" reply="13" id="2760475"]This is a short game in my opinion - Galciv on a Huge (Immense?) can take me a week on Twilight of the Arnor. I'm finishing a large map maxed out on AI and # of opponents in less than 4-5 hours. J[/quote] True but that's game time in general not the individual phases that compose the game time. It's like comparing a short story and a novel. One may be 80 pages and the other 800 pages but it's

[quote who="Kilsonx" reply="10" id="2760249"]Would like an option that would have your adviser pop up and say- Sire- That resource is to far form a city to produce from. Do you still want to build the facilities? - Yes , -No option This would keep you from wasting the building cost, when you could not make use of the resource. [/quote] The thing though is that you can build a city towards a resource to claim it.

[quote who="tetleytea" reply="4" id="2760391"] I think Elemental suffered from a strong programming discipline overwhelming the design and art aspects of the game. It's not bad in itself but it is bad, as you mention, when it starts to take away from some of the other important things in the game. Interesting you think that. I've been thinking the exact opposite: NOT strong programming discipline. I'm not fascist when it comes to codin

Don't expand unless you absolutely need to. Unlike other games, there's no huge benefit to doing so - the 20% bonus from level 2 is not going to make up for the -1 food (25%) needed. In fact, since a level 2 requires 1 food, jumping to level 2 to get a food bonus does not actually help! A farm makes 4 food. It takes 1 food to level up so now you have 3. Building the 25% farming bonus building gets you back up to 4 food. In essence, you're spending -1 gildar per turn for not actual increase.&n

Alas, placement matters. That said, you can do this already to an extent; you can keep placing buildings save for building off a WIP building. You still need to place the buildings yourself though.

Tom Chick perhaps said it best in that Brad (and through his example, the rest of SD) is a programmer. He does things from a programming perspective. This influences how he approaches things compared to how a designer or artist might and how all three disciplines would work together. You can kind of see this same thing in other studios with studio heads that are active developers - iD/John Carmack, Maxis/Will Wright (well formerly), Firaxis/Sid Meier. I think Elemental

I don't think you can really make a turn by turn judgment of what start/mid/end game happens. A lot of it varies based on location and happenstance. I think it can also vary from player to play within a game. I think at best, we can use loose definitions. Start Game: Initial exploration, aggressive and/or relatively unhindered expansion Early Mid Game: Expansion slows down, increased monster activity relative to size, consolidation of internal terrain and resour

[quote who="Mivo" reply="71" id="2760170"]I've never quite understood why games polarize so much. Why can't both titles be great? Games aren't monogamous relationships, you can guiltlessly enjoy more than one at a time! [/quote] Agreed. However similar they are, they're both good and enjoyable. *shrugs* But the bigger things get, the less people see of it. Which makes people bring out the tinfoil hats and cults of personality.