pigeonpigeon

[quote]But why is bigger always better? Its like your average paradox game.[/quote] Bigger is not always better. It's a preference, like most other things. I'm a big fan of gigantic maps - I love the epic feel they impart. It feels like I'm playing in a whole world, whereas smaller maps make me sort of claustrophobic - like I'm trapped in a mountainous cage or something. That said I also like playing on smaller maps time and again, largely because they really do play out very differen

[quote]I disagree with the contrived part: the ancient Greeks thought that everything was made of the Big Four, and it apparently made perfect sense to them.[/quote] Well if you were to go with the classical greek elements, air is primarily wet and secondarily hot. Fire is primarily hot and secondarily dry. Earth is primarily dry and secondarily cold, and water is primarily cold and secondarily wet. Also note that they were heavily influenced by their climate, as anyone living farther

[quote]Didn't Civilization 4 solve this problem by preventing the enemy from using your roads? Seems like it'd work just fine here. I still think it's the defender's fault though if the enemy manages to capture their fort. There's already a ton of special spells for protecting your fort in MoM, such as flying fortress, wall of fire, wall of stone, wall of shadow, recall hero, word of recall, earth gate, etc.[/quote] I've never played MoM, but the thing is (and I suspect this is the ca

Your suggested scouting method is interesting - I can definitely see how it would be extremely efficient in certain circumstances, but it doesn't seem particularly adaptive and it also doesn't apply well to rectangular maps... It's not particularly adaptive (not without major modification, anyway) because if I manually send out a scout in a straight line off in one direction, your algorithm would get all thrown off. And I'm likely to do much more than just send off one scout in a stra

[quote]Well,considering the number of them, you would need to create a special screen just for that..... add a destription and title for eac event to go on that screen.... would make MP an ablsoute NIGHTMARE, except if you voted on each event indididually and the ones that got more yeses than nos got in...... I'd say it would be modeartely difficult to do, but I imagine the fun value might be worth it....[/quote] A small popup window with a list of the

[quote]Tolkien did an amazing job and what he wrote isn't bad. Yet, there are better books out there without the need of such extensive background for their stories. But as everything, that's just an opinion.[/quote] Lord of the Rings doesn't need its extensive background, either. After all it it became a mass hit before the vast majority of said background was ever published - its background was published because there was demand for it. I'd say it's a great book on its own, and it's

[quote]The modding of events would not only allow us to create our own fun events, but it would hopefully allow us to remove any events from the original game which may be unbalanced or bugged.[/quote] Yeah that'd be nice. Although I'd actually like the ability to switch individual events on and off at game setup, too. That'd be neat and I can't imagine it being particularly difficult to implement. At the very least I'd like to be able to do this for mega events - for example in GC2 I

[quote]This way, you also give people a chance to improve their knowledge of the mod-tools and the game and start out with something easier...[/quote] And give them time to actually make the more complicated stuff. Learning how to mod is only part of the challenge - it takes people months (sometimes years) for people to finish some of the more extensive mods out there, even after they're comfortable with the modding...

[quote]Way I figure it, when you unlock the ability to add another research slot, that's all you've done. You've gone from putting X research points per turn into 2 fields each to putting X research points per turn into 3 fields each.[/quote] Thing is, there are a dozen different ways to put meaning into his post where there is none. When you get right down to it, his post doesn't tell us anything other than that we will be able to research multiple techs at once, and that we will hav

[quote]And even though fishing sucks in the rain (it's yucky AND the fish don't bite) like I said give me some interesting reading material and a tent (and NO cell phone!) and it doesn't get much better.[/quote] Except when it rains hard enough that your tent doesn't stay dry. How hard that is of course depends on your tent and where you pitch it, though :P Back onto off-topic: like DrGuppie, it depends for me. If there's a lot of high quality player-created content then I wou

[quote]The large variety of playable races is kind of an important part of it. The uniqueness and vast strategic and tactical diffferences between the races combined with the huge number of combinations of spell books and wizard retorts cannot be understated. From what I've heard (that spell research/tech trees will be fixed to each faction), EWoM is going in a totally different direction.[/quote] There won't be a large variety of playable races, but there will be a large variety of p

It's been alluded to in an earlier post here, but there is a cost to imbuing heroes with essence other than essence itself: risk. Spreading it out across various heroes, who will all be weaker than a sovereign who hoards his essence, means if you lose those weaker heroes, you lose that essence investment. And you're far more likely to lose those heroes than you are your sovereign (at which point you probably lose, anyway). That combined with the many other ideas combined in this threa

[quote]The sword of truth was TERRIBLE. How can you include that?[/quote] I think The Sword of Truth started out great. Wizard's First Rule is a first-rate fantasy story as far as I'm concerned, and the next few books in the series are pretty good, too. The story started to drag on and get too convoluted starting with the 5th book, at which point the series degenerated into a steaming pile of poo. Although still, there are some great moments and scenes even in the latter half of the s

[quote]Yes a well documented sample script would be amazingly helpful for modders. Sample scripts for more than just the AI, but all kinds of things would be wonderful.[/quote] Definitely. If there a lots of well-documented sample scripts I could see myself poking my nose into the modding world (which I've never really done before). That's also one of the things that could easily be given to the community after release if there's no time during development.

I'd just like to mention two series/books that are some of my favorite of all time, and yet seem to be really obscure... The first is Riddle of The Stars, by Patricia McKillip. It's an incredible book and an incredible story, with a very different approach to fantasy. This might very well be my favorite fantasy of all time, trumping Tolkien, Eddings and the rest. The second is the series, The Rune of Unmaking, by Madeline Howard. The first two books are out, the third (and fin

More details on magic! Do you plan on rigid magic trees? Something ala AoW:SM (which I think is similar to MoM)? We know you intend for much of faction diversity to be a result of the magic system, but does that mean we won't have as much freedom to mix and match various types of magic?

[quote]It would be neat if the top fan contributers got some sort of in game feature in the final version. Our names listed in default name generators for example. the city of Luckmania, or the Spear of Spartan for example (I believe those are the top in karma rank)[/quote] Haha, way to pretend you don't have more karma than Luckmann.

[quote]Well based on this statement all games should be classified as fantasy games. No game can provide all realistic functions and combinations especially within a timely fashion, but the facts and realism of the real world should be recognized to provide a more widely accepted truth/reality to the game.[/quote] Eh that's just a cop-out. Total War is not a fantasy game. It has no elements of a fantasy story or a fantasy world, other than that the player acts as an omnipresent

I couldn't really disagree with you more Psychoak. I can sort of understand your reasoning if you consider Lort of the Rings or the Hobbit on their own, out of the larger context in which they're a drop in the pond. Tolkien didn't create elves, dwarves or orcs - but he did turn them into something they had never been before. For elves he completed several complete languages, each consisting of multiple dialects and time evolutions; all of which were intricately tied into the narrative

[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] What Scoutdog said. Stardock has stated that they want to make the game extraordinarily moddable. Frogboy's exact words were: "It is our dream to slowly evolve Elemental to be so modable that a user familiar with Python 3.x will be ab

[quote]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.[/quote] Well if life and death were treated just like the others, then they could also do a MoM-like pick sys

[quote]Wow. Some of the hostility toward modding, and especially ai modding, leaves me really confused . I think support for modding is fantastic, and is one of the really positive things about the pc gaming community.[/quote] Derrrr.. Wha? The only thing I can possibly imagine you might be talking about are GW's comments about how he doesn't want the built-in AI to be open-book, because he doesn't want to understand exactly how it functions under the hood in such

[quote]If I were to create a mod based on copyrighted material, It would be a copycat of "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson. (Or more probably about "Zothique" by Clark Asthon Smith, but this one is more about vampires, mummies, golems...) Considering that the only kind of elves are those of Tolkien (or D&D) would be like considering that the only kind of vampires are those from Twilight.[/quote] His point is that Tolkien incorporated all sorts of different creat

[quote]my goal of the question (because I already know it is not on the list of factions given to us by Frogboy a while back) was to bring up the fact that this was... well, a faction not on the list. I'm not really sure what else to say... The land in which the faction apparently resides is on the world map . There are more than 12 factions on the map,

I like your post, Landi. And just to clarify, I have no problem with your Myrror obsession because you have explained why you want it in the game (and on more than one occasion, I'm sure). It was probably brought up largely because you say it so often that it gets stuck in people's minds :P My personal gripe is mostly just with knee-jerk reactions against any proposed feature or idea that is a departure from MoM. If people say "we should have this because it was in MoM"