shadowtongue

Free expansions are great. Then again so is bargin bin... *shrug* If you think you would enjoy it as it evolves go for it. If you think it would frustrate you don't.

You're right Brad, I didn't enjoy the book, but I can be rather picky. I'm not expecting great books from you anyway, if you know what I mean ;) Back story really isn't that important to me either, but I can see how it is fun to do, and potentially helpful in design. Though I'd rather have the design first and then the back story, lest you suffer issues with design based on some issue with the lore which is just difficult to implement. <p

Since elemental is *not* MoM2 I would guess you'd be disappointed if you were expecting MoM2. As to whether or not you would enjoy it... Well that's harder to answer. I think I would enjoy Elemental for about 10 hours in it's present state, and then become disgusted by it. I'm waiting until the AI is at least improved and the mechanics are rebalanced. One thing I've found to hate, is when i jump into a new game, only to have core

[quote who="Xan" reply="70" id="2788149"] Uh, I don't think Elemental has backstory problems. You may recall that Elemental has a book on the shelves. A book, I might add, that is pretty good. [/quote] It is good to have a book on the shelves, but the book itself is not good. My opinion of course, but bleh, it was not good.

I'm still in no hurry to jump in. I'll probably wait until the 2nd expansion comes out at this point, nothing I've noticed so far is making me itchy to play and deal with crap AI and ongoing balancing issues. I feel the same way about Civ5 for what that's worth :p

There are modmods which address some AI issues apparently, though I'm no expert on them. I played some Wildmana, and found it to be entertaining, but the problem I have with FFH2 is that my system is ancient (more than 5 years old now) and so late game I get a lot of crashes. I dunno, the early game is the fun part to me anyway :)

So the main complaint about FFH2 is that they cribbed some artworks off the internet? FAIL. Though it's true, if you didn't like civ4 there's not much reason to think you would like FFH2 either. It is more than just civ4 with a new coat of paint, but not much more. I'm not sure what kinds of mods for elemental won't be able to be described in the same way though.

AoW was hexes... And they had the awesome effect of being able to pull multiple stacks into combat. Yeah, you could do that with squares, but it wouldn't look quite as good I think. Jes saying. Hexs are better than squares for tactical combat at least, but getting poked in the eye is better than what passes for tactical combat thus far in Elemental.

Worst review ever. Are you sure you didn't accidentally just fire up Civ:Rev? Money worthless? Wow, money is so much more important than in civ4 it quite boggles the mind that you can make that claim. So they got rid of the pointless and annoying sliders, that's a good thing in my opinion, the sliders never made that much sense to me anyway, and led to silly microing of 100% research to 0% research to 100% culture to ...

[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="262" id="2783568"]I think Elemental has a far greater upside than Civ 5. The real measure of a game is several years after release when it starts to take on "classic" status. In another 5 years, we'll have Civilization 6 and Civ 5 will have gone the way of the Dodo. However, with Elemental, we'll have a game people will still be playing consistenly. Also mods are a big factor. Sure, we may get a few nice total conversio

[quote who="Xan" reply="255" id="2783435"] Quoting lord ebonstone, reply 253If you have the slightest inkling that Elemental at release and Civilization 5 at release are even in the same stratosphere of quality, you're a blind fanboi. Or just have an incompetent editing team, ala 1UP. LOL. The difference is that Elemental's issues are fixable in a pretty straight forward way. Civ V's problems are core to its design and it's unlikely

[quote who="bonscott" reply="34" id="2783489"]Lot's of negative posts over at CivFantics. Mostly gameplay stuff and the "dumbing down" of the game. Plenty of crashes too though. Not a smooth launch at all. [/quote] Hmmm... I dunno about that. The posts at CF are not nearly as horrific as the ones here at launch, and there are lots of people playing and posting AARs, something that I've yet to see for Elemental.</p

[quote who="FadedC" reply="25" id="2783226"] Quoting wilebill, reply 21Kael is rumored to be porting Fall From Heaven to Civ 5. Oodles and gobs of magic then! Kael has also made two cool mods for Civ 5 already. Added the Celts and the Legions mod. Unfortunately, neither mod will download and install for me. They are working on it. FFH for Civ 5 would be amazing. His legions mod baffles me though as it removes the one unit per hex rule which is one of the best t

Can you also be more specific as to the 'problems' you are referring to? From what I've seen there are not really an unexpected problems, and most people, other than those who know their specs are on the low end, seem to be running mostly crash free. There are some issues apparently at start up with stuttering, but it seems to go away after a few turns are played. Hardly game breaking, but still annoying I guess. Of co

[quote who="JimKnopf" reply="33" id="2782250"] Quoting KzintiPatriarch, reply 32 Quoting JimKnopf, reply 29This is getting ridiculous ! Civ IV I bought from the bargain bin and it was even worse. You even could not raze cities that did not fit in your scheme. In one of the game setup options is the ability to raze cities or not. Apparently you didnt spend much time with Civ IV. I was not able to find it. Actually I had to use a Py

[quote who="GTRanma" reply="21" id="2780920"]Meh, I bought the game just because I wanted to support them, and I know that some day they'll iron out the kinks. Why wait till then to buy it? Atleast with stardock, they know when they put out a game that is below par and will do what they need to do to fix it. Unlike certain companies who release Call of Duty games and NEVER fix any of the cheats or hacks -.- [/quote] &nbsp

To annoy you.

Yep, I'm a fan (or was, am somewhat confused at the moment, but I'm not a hater) of SD and Brad, but this process has been hard, and the fact that the beta crowd (and apparently QA as well) were largely ignored made me very leery of jumping in immediately. At this point I am incredibly happy I did not, and likely will not until the expansions (yes, plural) are done and I can just buy whatever bundle is offered at that point. I'm done supporting games which come ou

^ LAWL.... Sigh, will the fun never cease around here?

No comment from me (yet), I just stumbled over this in an Elemental thread over at civfanatics (no, not civ5 forum...). [QUOTE] ust got this comment in a previous post and thought I’d respond here rather than there. So. WHAT were you guys thinking, to go around saying it was ready to ship? Because, y’know, it wasn’t. As just about every review and forum thread is acknowledging,

Dom3 is 95% a MP game though, you can play it SP, you can even enjoy it SP (well some people can), but it is intended for MP, and is more entertaining MP (with the usual caveats about winding up with a bad group of people playing in the game with you, fortunately the Dom3 community is fairly light on that type of person).

[quote who="taltamir" reply="79" id="2619415"] Quoting shadowtongue, reply 78Well different strokes for different folks. MoO3 is to me still one of the better space 4x (after the necessary user mods/patches, out of the box it was indeed crap). There is indeed ample opportunity for you to manage your empire as you see fit. Did you find a solution to the need to manually "auto-design" every single ship type every single turn or fall hopelessly behind? What mods

It continues to boggle my mind that this wasn't part of the day zero release. I mean really. A 4x without a summary screen?

[quote who="UmbralAngel" reply="1" id="2773796"]I think that having to many features/options isn't a problem for a well written AI. I am writing an AI for a hybrid RTS/TBS right now and my game is fairly complex, its very similar to the layout of Elemental's combat system. The key to writing a good AI for a game where the AI behaves like a player, is to write the AI as if it is a human being, instead of a machine. Personalities, impulses, desires, strategies, all of these should be the core o

I've been fooling around with AI war of late and have been reading a lot of the creators ideas. Here's one which stands out to me, which I think SD botched up badly in GC2, and I fear the same fate for Elemental. [QUOTE] Minimizing AI Opportunity Costs Through Game Design: In general, since I'm the designer/programmer of the game as a whole, as well as of the AI, this gave me a lot of flexibility to set myself up for success with the AI. If som