Scoutdog

[quote]Load them into a catapult and rain them upon your enemy.[/quote] Niiiiiiiiice. Giant "morning stars" also spring to mind. [quote]When defending a wall, dump buckets of them everywhere once your position is in danger of being overrun then retreat to the next strong point.[/quote] No. Heat them to a nice, yellow glow, then drop them on the enemy along with the coals you used. [e digicons]}:)[/e]

[quote]Make it a foot high and put it in a shallow pit...[/quote] Well, after a certain size the effect is rendered rather moot on account of the fact that people won't go anywhere NEAR the giant spike sticking out of the ground. I would say that the optimum size is three inces or so: it can still cause MAJOR pain, but you could concievebly ignore it in the field of battle.

Now, while I don't believe that the "prophecy" has any real significance, I do wonder why that particular date has stuck in our consciousness for so long, at the exclusion of others. My personal theory was that the calendar added credence to it in a way that random people with signs on street corners could not, plus the fact that for the conquistadores who saw the calendar and more importantly the new-age-ers who launched the fad, 2012 was comfortably distant, but still near enough t

[quote]I would very much like to see champion- or special unit-based research (both mundane and magical) that is connected to the caravan network. I would enjoy, for example, recruiting a truly amazing but delicate research champion who might best be protected by isolation in a distant fortress. Assuming there are no magical communication methods available by default, there will be at least a period where a new spell from said researcher has a 'time-to-market' that includes both research itse

That's fine, as long as there's a "skip" button: wouldn't want to sit through the same tutorial gain and agin, now would you?

[quote]I'd be interested in a bit of quoting and replying here, but something (probably pasted text w/ background 'HTML' tags) seems to have broken the thread in FF 3.5.[/quote] It's broken for me, too. Maybe just a FF issue, though....

[quote]The point being, if a player(s) would quit over the loss of "anything" early game, then no system would suffice to appease them. [/quote] Well, yes, but my point is also that more people would quit if you lost research as opposed to losing military or social activity. With a locus-based tech system (the only one where it actually makes SENSE to lose progress in the first place), you can't just pick up again unless you have empty labs, and keeping those empty in anything approac

[quote]a shot in a billion, btw[/quote] I'm not sol sure about that: a lot of the stuff I've been reading about lately (Scientific American is an excellent magazine, BTW: understandible to most laypeople and hobbiests, but no dumbed down @ all) talks about the idea of cells and protobiological material being to a certain degree self-organizning , a bit like crystals growing out of molten rock: it's in their nature to behave contrary to entropy, and become more

[quote]Any posts that are replying to me in relation to my beliefs will be ignored.[/quote] So I gathered.[quote]I am sorely tempted to cease responding to any of this at all.[/quote] Please do! It'll save me and the rest of us a LOT of typing, and I can go back to eating that pizza.

[quote]Why create a new unit called the Kabalkoz write a huge history and then add its description which does the same thing, when the gamer will just refer to them as vampires. [/quote] You have a point, but I feel the creative industry (especially in fantasy) has gotten a bit..... lazy in that they keep re-using "stat blocks" like undead+hurt by holy attacks+drains life. When was the last time you saw something completely new? (And I don't think we've used up all possible

[quote]I can easily imagine something like that in a magic system, but for mundane knowledge, I'm stumped.[/quote] Well, it generally applies to ethically-limited techs like necromancy, holiness, and slave labor: for example: If you research "Slave Revolution Inspiration" to inspire the enemy's slaves to revolt, you can no longer research "Slave Subjegation" to enslave more people in your own kingdom. A tech like "Beast Hunting" would probably preclude "Beast

[quote]The Grand Canyon is one thing I could think of. Plus it helps that Noah's Ark is on Mount Ararat in Turkey.[/quote] The Grand Canyon was made by the Colorado River. Plus, that's not the sort of thing you would see with a worldwide rise in sea levels. As for the "Ararat Anomaly", isn't it strange that noone has actually found any sort of ship there? The only "proof" is in a series of grainy pictures of what looks like a piece of rock.

[quote]At the same time, they can also look at it for an example of what *NOT* to do with DRM![/quote] Amen, Brother(/Sister)! [quote]That is a good question. I've seen other games that would do the first couple chapters as a tutorial and then you're on your own. I would think it would be easy enough to have a setting to turn off "hints" or "tutorial mode" in a campaign. I just know that a lot of Stardock games get dinged sometimes for not having a tutorial and this might b

[quote]rock layers? PLEASE, that can easily be 'falsified' to look older by natural disasters (worldwide flood anyone?).[/quote] And those natural disasters would themselves leave telltale indicators of their preasence. A worldwide flood, for example, would leave behind a layer of snadstone & limestone (or their metamorphic varients) all over the world @ a consistent depth (comentsating for plate movement, shearing, faults, and the like), along with aquatic fossils everywhere.

[quote]Yeh but my point is, how the hell do you acurately predict something that happened 4.6 billion years ago? I mean thats a really fecking long time, the only way you'd be able to actually prove it, is if you travelled 4.6 billion years away from earth, and looked back at it.[/quote] You don't "predict" it. "Predict" only applies to things in the future. You look that the rocks and isotopes. A lot of the rock on Earth contains uraneum(sp?), which decays into lead

Sounds good. However, the question in my mind is: Should the campleighn double as a tutorial?

Uhhhhh...... people...... I said life first arose 4.3 billion years ago (it's something like that number, my recollection of the exact supposed date is a bit hazy). The Earth itself formed 4. 6 billion years ago. This data is fairly reliable, and was not gained through carbon dating. And the fossil record proves that humans and dinosaurs were millions of years apart. (Again, this was calibrated using rock layers, as opposed to carbon-dating).

[quote]I believe he is actually talking about a shift in the Earth's rotationaly axis. I thought he ment magnetic poles at first, too, but I looked it up just to be sure. Supposedly the Eath's axis changes every now and then, which could have the potential for mass disaster. But since pole shift hasn't been proved yet, no one really knows.[/quote] Oh. Still, although I don't have any math behind it, it doesn't seem like that would destroy much of anything. You might get some economic

Nels, this was exactly what I was talking about when I said we shouldn't anomalize female gamers........

[quote]At the very least, I'd like to see large increases in costs or development times for trying to expand in every direction.[/quote] Indeed. One idea I'm rather fond of is that of mutually exclusive technologies. That is, techs that if you research one, the other becomes unavailable.

[quote]& maybe blackhole which may occur in space due to collaspe of a planet.[/quote] Although it is THEORETICALLY possible for the collapse of ANYTHING to create a black hole, the only macroscale black holes that develop in nature do so as a result of the collpase of stellar-mass objects or larger. Not planets.

Well, it's theoretically possible for the prophecy to become self-fulfilling: the religious/mystical loonies who really believe in that sort of thing could get violent when nothing happens for a while, and we've already seen the power of terrorist attacks to destabilize the geopolitical balence. That could concievebly result in a world-war situation.... but it's all up to chance.

[quote]Terrains can decay too. But "traps" like caltrops are pretty much one-use objects. After all once a caltrop is stuck in someones foot its unlikely someone else will step on it too. Caltrops are just devices that impede movement. Specifically they are design so that no matter which way is up they remain effective. They don't always take the form of tetrahedral spikes. Giant caltrops made of I-beams can function as tank traps.[/quote] A use-deacy system as well. Again, doable, bu

[quote]Caltrops is for horsies though. [/quote] Well, accoridng to Wikipedia, they can be used against most any type of walking or rolling thing. Even if the article is wrong, just the appearence of the thing indicates that it can be used against foot units:

[quote]haven't you tought of that epic unit squad of unborn wizards that cast rains of fireballs from inside the womb of their mothers? [/quote]That souinds like it would HURT. Plus, there's probably some special-interest group out there that would sue SD if they included them...... but maybe a mod..........