Scoutdog

The statement you are quoting assumes two things: You can choose an "affinity" for one of the four classic elements. That "affinity" affects your ability to channel the element. We still lack info on the finer points of magic, so it's all up in the air. I could be VERY wrong, or I could be exactly right. I have no idea. However, simple permutations are only half of the story. Different methods of getting magic will in and of themselves add com

[quote]Well if life and death were treated just like the others, then they could also do a MoM-like pick system where you can start out with multiple schools of magic. In which case there'd be more permutations than 8.[/quote] I don't have the time to do all the math, but just guestimating, you would still get more. I'll post the calculations soon.

Well, there's a big difference between going out of the way to make it known you're female in the middle of a random other conversation, and going out of the way to make it known you're female on a thread for going out of the way to make it known you're female.......

Perhaps he hanged the spelling...... Calax.... Krax..... I could see them actually being the same..... remember, stuff can still change....

[quote]Don't these two paragraphs contradict each other? On the one hand you say you don't want them to limit themselves by catering to a MoM-fan modder while on the other hand you hope the game is so moddable that it can be turned into anything.[/quote] (S)he wants the best of both worlds, and I think we are going to get it: the game will be unique, AND it will be almost totally moddable. Basically, (s)he feels that changes to make the game more like MoM are redundant</strong

I rather like the system we have now, which is why I want life and death considered non-elements: you choose life or death, but you also get to choose an actual element from one of the four. This works out to eight permutations, as opposed to the six you would get if life and death were treated just like the others.

Pigeon, I think you are absolutely right. If the AI modding created an environment like GW fears, it would be quite nasty. However, I highly doubt that something like that will ever happen.

I was going to hold off on bringing this up because I have little experiance (none, actually) in AI programming (perhaps someone with more technical know-how could correct/corraborate my theory), but it seems like it would actually be rather difficult to reverse-engineer a winning strategy just from studying the code. It's not like you'll see "IF: Playermana=400 THEN: executeSubModule: Roll_Over_And_Die071"(apologies for my aweful syntax..... still can't actually program).

As long as they don't have the "bumps in the road" quality that both GC2 minors and Civ4 barbarians were afflicted by, independant kingdoms would be a LOT of fun. Fear they may not be in, though..... that's the only reason I haven't necroed the original thread by now....

I'm partial to DS9, myself, although the X-Files was great (excluding the last season).

Myst 5: The rushed-seeming introduction of the Bahro, and the fact that we NEVER learned what happened to make D'ni fall. Or how Catherine died. Or what Esher's angle was. In short the loose ends in general. And the loss of the photograpy zoom feature. Todelmer was cool, though.......

[quote]But, I think life should be whitish (or else forest green), and earth should be more brown, with more "MMMM" symbols like mountains. They're pretty unclear as it stands.[/quote] I still can't decide which one is air and which is Earth! As soon as I settle on one of them, I noticwe some tiny feature of the other that swings the balence back again........ gurrently I think the green one is air, but the brown shard pic looks "airier"..... [e digicons]<_<[/e] [e

[quote]Just think about 'spoiler' reviews and you should get some sympathy for what I'm trying to type about. I don't presume that the Elemental boards will somehow be free of posts from zero-sum 'win' lovers. I'm just fairly certain that making the core AI code public would do nothing for me except increase the number of posts I wish I hadn't read. I play to play, and people who play to win mostly seem to value things that I find to be no fun, or worse, anti-fun.[/quote] I see what y

I still don't understand this. If you don't want to listen to people discuss how to beat the AI, then don't click on the page. More of something you completely ignore and don't have to even have to see coudn't possibly affect you're gaming experiance.

[quote]and ghost partner[/quote] You mean "Bunnyboy"? I think the show would be better off without him...... or maybe they're planning something..... if so, it had better be good........

[quote]Still, one of the reasons I liked the idea of a unified fifth 'Life/Death' element is mainly because of my deep interest in ecology and a personal rejection of the idea that death is somehow evil in its own right (when I was a teenager, I wanted to live forever, but that idea seems both scary and silly to me now that I'm 'middle-aged'). Murder is evil, but death is part of nature--without death, the world would be limited to autotrophic organisms (ones that can live entirely on the raw

One thing I just realized is that the factions don't necessarily have to be physically identical. Probably won't get anything radically different or non-humanoid, but with all the magic zipping around during and shortly before the Cataclysm, I could easily see groups of people getting scales, fins, pointy ears, odd skin colors, and so on.

[quote]Are Krax playable? I don't remember them being listed in the list of the faction names a while back.[/quote] I am 99% sure that every faction will be playable. Or do you mean in the campeighn? That I'm not sure about, but I doubt it: the GC2 campeighn only had one playable faction. This could easily change, however.... [quote]hmm, in Darkodinplus's post there is another symbol with which I am not familar. It is on what appears to be a BLACK mana bar. If it were n

We don't care if MoM is being used as an example. It's just when people yuse MoM as the only example that I become concerned. Whatever happened to Dwarf Fortress, AoW, and the HoMMs? Sure, other games get mentioned some, but not nearly as much as MoM, and as a political scientist, you should know that very few trends are absolute. This one is no exception.

I have seen those symbols before: they appear on the cover of the game, and on the concept art: A fellow named CondarF and I translated the runes independantly, and we discovered that the text around them reads: " . I think

Actually, now that I see them together, the "life rune" does not look at all like the others: they have white outlines, while it has a black outline, and the background circle is a different color. It may just be an optical trick, but the brown outer border appears different as well.

[quote]Modding is interesting and all, but having the AI code out in public would inevitably lead to a bunch of tedious best-strat nonsense that could swiftly drain the life from the game for those of us who could care less about multiplayer and don't even think of 'winning' very often when we're off in the singleplayer sandbox.[/quote] How? I don't get how an open and evolving AI would interfere with sandbox games you don't really care about winning. If you don't want to use another

[quote]And what does Dark Energy has to do with all this?[/quote] Nothing. But I'm not in the mood to recite my list right now. [quote]The lack of shard for life/death could mean that it's not an element but considering that it's based in living (or dying) beings, a shard per se wouldn't make much sense. And that is neither evidence of life/death being an element is it could be just a.. er.. byproduct? of the interaction of the four elements.[/quote] The way I look at

[quote]I doubt anyone has come out and said it that brazenly, though I recall a post along the lines of "We need Myrror like MoM!" It's a general attitude where MoM is up on a pedastil and anything that makes Elemental more like it is inherently good.[/quote]Exactly.

Well, my concept of the elements was based of off a comparitively old PS2 game known as Jak, in which "Eco" came in four colors (red, yellow, green and blue) with "light" and "dark" existing as a synthesis and abscense of them, respectively. It also appears in early-Renaissance medicine/science with fire, air, water, earth, and Ether. This system always seemed to make the most sense to me, and I assumed it would be used in other places. The initial concept art featuring This lead me t