EmersonPF

I'm listening to baseball and surfing the Internets. Hooray for lazy Sundays, Elemental can come when it comes.

Personally, with a game like this, I'd rather have a short campaign that gets you into the tools, gameplay, story, and so on without artificially drawing out the experience. Heroes is a campaign-driven game, because the AI is usually terrible unless it's scripted, and it's not really nearly as fun as a one-map sandbox as it is in a series of "levels." Even so, HOMM5 suffered from having maps that were clearly just filler, some of which were extremely long, arduous, and boring.

Let the flames begin...

On the first idea, you can already set the game to always play on the cloth map. If you go to graphics, there's a "cloth map zoom level" (or something like that) slider, which, IIRC at 100 means that you never switch over to the 3D engine.

Awesome post, Brad. I've never been as excited about a game as I am about this one.

I like this idea.

I've seen this as well. It happens when, somehow, a unit's attack speed is less than 1.

Yep, problem solved. Thanks Island Dog, and happy birthday to Impulse!

I'm having the same issue as louist. "Impulse-Bday." with the period gets the maintenance message. Everything else returns an invalid code message.

I also wasn't keeping track of FPS on Beta 2 (just 2A), but it does feel more sluggish.

I like "wondering," there... The thieves wondered what would happen if they set the camp on fire. They're not evil, just curious.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Especially when you capture an enemy city, being able to pull up a quick buildings list would be fantastic. I understand the value of keeping things visual, and it is true that you can get a quick sense of what is in the city already, but a quick tab or screen that lets you know the exact materials, food, metals, etc production and population growth would be great.

Yeah, I don't mind being able to transport items. It feels unrealistic, granted, but it saves you from the silly micromanagement of sending your extra merchants or whatever gallivanting across the map just to get bracers from your eastern border to your western one. This has always been a pain in the Heroes of Might and Magic series, as LintMan points out. Maybe there's a middle ground? After researching caravans, for example, maybe you can then send items across the

Obviously this is something that'll be worked on as the game moves forward, but I want to chime in, too and say that the beta is quite sluggish on my laptop. On the cloth map my FPS is fine, but zoomed in it drops to the 10-15 range, which is surprisingly slow given that I'm running it with about as low graphics as I can. I don't have the most powerful graphics card in the world (what with this being a laptop and all), but it runs, for example, Dragon Age Origins without that kind

I've had this happen, too, but didn't have the wherewithal to take a screenie. Next time I see it, I'll snap one. Happened in Beta 1, also.

@RedneckDude That is helpful to have around, since GPU temp and CPU temp aren't exactly independent, especially in laptops. Really, a GPU that runs hot isn't much of a problem unless it's also causing your CPU to run hot. Speedfan tracks both, and it's definitely worth it to keep your eyes on both.

Yeah, it really depends on your box and the GPU. Some cards these days are fine even up to 100+ degrees C. Frankly, you're not going to break your GPU before you need a new computer unless you have a faulty card to begin with, or if you don't have a fan at all.

Ha, figured it out myself. Turns out you have to make sure you delete all of your old files from your "My Documents" folder before you try to use the new beta. Somehow that killed both birds with one stone, so now I can advance past the "New Game" screen and I get 3D graphics (though they are a bit sluggish).

When I move on from map selection to the choose sovereign screen the game crashes (without creating a .err file). Likewise if I try to choose a sovereign in multiplayer. Ignoring that screen, when I do launch in multiplayer, I only get a cloth map, no matter how far I zoom in. Do I have some option wrong?

Yay! I already bought Sins - which I've been thinking about getting for a long time - and Prince of Persia. And all for less that $15. Hooray for holiday sales and hooray for Impulse!

This quiet voice in the corner of the room is of the humble opinion that, moving forward, Apple's big competition is not Microsoft or Google, but Canonical. Apple works because it's a hardware company, and it doesn't actually compete with Microsoft as directly as people think. Sure, they want more market share vs. PCs, but they still run Microsoft software - Office, for example - on their computers. On the other hand, Microsoft is a software company that simply sells their s

I just started playing SotS, as well, and I've learned early that keeping your savings balance above 1,000,000 is vital. My first game ended in disaster due to morale problems, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what was wrong, since morale isn't covered in the Tutorial or the accompanying videos. That 1,000,000 savings gives a +1 per turn morale bonus to all your civilian populations, and 5,000,000 gives a +2. Absolutely essential, and the most-important-least-obv

The download is about 1 GB, IIRC, so that might be tricky on a slow or limited connection. As far as I know there's no other way to test out the beta...

I'm going to second Fall From Heaven II. I remember seeing a sig on their forums: "You can get tired of cocaine and heroin, but not Fall From Heaven." I'd also second the original Mass Effect (I haven't played the sequel yet). Just a really clean, overall game. The Witcher is also a decent RPG worth looking into. Finally, I concur on Europa Universalis. The game mechanics are a little odd, and the learning curve is as steep as they come, but once you ge