pigeonpigeon

[quote]"The entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." This is why, if you leave a shed alone in the wilderness for a year, you wouldn't expect to come back to find it having spawned a second floor. Instead, you'd expect it to be in disrepair. This is why smoke rises out of a pot, and why the universe is expanding. Nature spreads itself out, gets more complicated, and more disorderly. <br /

[quote who="Sammual" reply="3" id="2076718"]Humanoid - \ -- Human / Sentient - Beast - &nb

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="7" id="2076691"] Was this what you were remembering, pigeon?[/quote] Yes, that is the quote I was thinking of. And yes, that whole post/thread is a goldmine of information. I'm really excited to see how they implement 'action-driven' victory conditions for some of the more abstract ones. [quote who="Sammual" reply="8" id="2076700"]I think that MoM went in the right direction with the distance cost multiplier when you Wizard cast spells in c

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="5" id="2076637"]What that also means, is that you may need to leave on other victory conditions besides 'dominate' or whatever its called in this game. (I know many many people who have the tendancy to turn off all but 1 victory condition)[/quote] That's me! I often turn off all but one or two military conditions, but because of me not other players. Sometimes I'm just really in the mood to take over the world, but somehow it almost always t

I like these ideas, especially for the black market. A good black market implementation would make playing an economic/trading nation much more feasible. It would allow you to support multiple sides to a conflict and remain on good terms with both of them. Also, any UI feature that means faster results with less clicking and switching between screens is a good feature in my book - in other words I like the whole auction bit. I still want to see trade routes as a very important feature

[quote who="mrakomo" reply="23" id="2076373"]This may work, however it is a projection, not the invisibility. However how do you think such thing could be implemented? What shall AI do? What would probably real players do?[/quote] Well in reality, we'll probably be able to see what troops are behind walls and where they are anyways. That's how every game involving tactical combat i've ever played has functioned, anyways. In all TBS games with tactical combat I've played, there is no f

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="25" id="2075876"]I surely hope Brad sticks to his guns here. I would *very much* prefer to see dragons being closer to a 'force of nature' than something you'd dress up for a parade. Melnibonean dragons might be a barely-tolerable compromise, but I'd expect anyone claiming the right to ride them to be wielding something like Stormbringer.[/quote] I definitely agree with you. I love the concept of dragons being akin to forces of nature. I'm really excited

Really I think it depends what you mean by underdog. Frogboy made a great post about victory conditions a while back (sigh, I can't find it...). But to summarize, one player might have a unstoppable military, and it looks like it's only a matter of time before the entire world succumbs to it. But another player might be well on his way to casting a major world-wrecking spell that will completely change the game - the player with the unstoppable military might topple over, indeed most empires

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="12" id="2075614"]It would be like balancing a check book, you don't want to run out of money, but you don't want to not-spend it either.[/quote] Bad analogy, because you're not going to spend your money in order to balance your check book. At least I hope not, or you've got some major financial troubles coming up!

[quote who="Tiefling" reply="5" id="2075995"] Quoting Tamren, reply 4Whats a CiV style killer stack? I never got into the combat portion of that game much but I didn't play it for long. Good question.... In CivIV you could stack as many units as you liked. However, combat was always one unit against another unit. One unit could only attack once and it had no control over which unit in the target square it attacked. Units could defend multiple times. So if you h

[quote who="Tamren" reply="2" id="2075248"]This is the main point. The whole reason we have killer stacks in the first place is because of the stack limits.[/quote] No it's only one of the main points. If you only remove stack limits, all you do is trade AoW2/HoMM/MoM-style killer stacks for Civ IV style killer stacks. I hope they do something to make multiple armies the norm during war in Elemental. It makes conflicts much more interesting and exciting, in my opinion. The rest of you

[quote who="mrakomo" reply="21" id="2074582"]The problem of the hidden city in the game is the cities in the game are not Gondolin like. Gondolin could remain hidden, because it was completely isolated from the world. However cities in this game are considered not to be isolated. If that happen, merchants can not access the city, nor the peasants.The city would starve and you would get fine ruins. If on the other hand merchants can enter the city, spies can do it too.[/quote] Who is t

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="17" id="2073844"]I was under the impression that dragons were going to be super rare and hard to get, and NOT beasts. Somewhere frogboy said something about how sentient fantastic creatures like dragons were going to really feel special in this game.[/quote] I don't see how sentient fantastic creatures like dragons being super rare and beasts are mutually exclusive? Although I think I just found evidence that you're probably right, at least

I agree that both forms of killer stacks should be discouraged most of the time. The AoW2 style 'killer stack' can be solved by not imposing stringent absolute limits to army sizes. This can be done in lots of ways (making army size dependent on logistics/leadership, etc). The Civ IV 'killer stack' can be solved by making it strategically advantageous to divide said stack into smaller ones. This can be done by making meaningful defensive locations (in most games you can just g

[quote who="arstal" reply="15" id="2073467"]The impression I got is only four types of units: Human, fallen, beasts, dragons. Maybe a construct as a fifth class for undead and magical constructs like golems and elementals. [/quote] I got the impression that dragons are going to be beasts. But more importantly it'd really suck of we were limited to 3 or 4 types of units in a world of magic.

[quote who="mrakomo" reply="14" id="2073049"]The invisible wall is a bad idea i think. A hidden city is also nonsense - even a blind spy can reveal it. It is difficult to hide something, where there are lots of people.[/quote] Why? It's not like we're talking a drape over it. We're talking about using magic to make something invisible to prying eyes. A blind spy isn't going to find a city that's been made invisible by magic (unless the magic used doesn't work well). That said, I agre

I definitely agree that illusion type spells should be limited to those that can be used against both the player and AI. It is limiting, but I think it's better than having spells that can force the AI to forget something. Also, they should be more believable than, for example, HoMM's masking spell (don't remember the name either). Making every stack in your army look like the strongest one is not believable. It will fool the AI but not other players - once they see that they'll know

[quote who="GreatVolk" reply="8" id="2071615"]For me, it's okay, if a AI begins to cheat as the difficulty increases. But I like to know, what the AI is able to do. I don't like to be forced to change the strategy, depending on different rules on different difficulties.[/quote] I definitely agree. Rather than completely removing or adding aspects of the game, cheating AIs should merely get bonuses to various things like production, military strength, economy, etc. [quote wh

[quote who="NTJedi" reply="10" id="2071142"]I agree a second set of tags should exist such as good, neutral and evil which will allow for good undead to be immune from a spell created such as holy light. This would allow the ability to create a race of good undead, evil insects, neutral angels, etc., etc., etc., .[/quote] That could get complicated fast, though. For example, if there's a spell that only affects undead units, I guess it would affect good and evil undead? And if y

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="4" id="2069136"]Has anyone caught a hint yet from the devs about how much time will have passed between the cataclysm and the standard game start? I can imagine anything from last season to a couple of generations ago.[/quote] One of them said somewhere that channelers started to be born just before the cataclysm; and I believe it's also said that Elemental is the story of the first channelers rising to power. So to me, that means no more than a generati

[quote who="Tamren" reply="19" id="2069180"]Still, given that archers get the exact same "shoot arrow" power as heroes they are most likely single units.[/quote] No, most likely it would have just been a pain to implement archers in any other way than that, and so that's the way they did it. In AoW I've successfully sieged cities with just a couple archers and swordsmen. Quite frankly, 3 or 4 armed individuals wouldn't have a chance of conquering a city with a population of several hu

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="19" id="2068058"]Wow, I'd really like to now. Like.. really. But dude, I have no idea what you are talking about. I've never heard of a thread or post about that. Are you sure it wasn't actually in this thread?[/quote] I guess I should've been a bit clearer... This thread has gone farther into creation/destruction of items than I think any other, but the ideas of rarity and power sliders were discussed in another thread for sure.

[quote who="alway" reply="1" id="2067719"]Make bridges appear demolished, causing the soldiers to waste turns trying to repair it.[/quote] I really like that one, but even more in a different scenario. I want to be able to make it look like I demolished my own bridge, forcing invaders to take a longer route. Of course, if you employ this tactic often they might catch on and try to cross the bridge anyway. But then you could switch things up by actually demolishing the bridge

[quote who="DrGuppie" reply="17" id="2067179"]I think you're probably right about that. A rarity slider and "player createable/destructible" checkboxes. Possibly even some sort of "power" slider, that either limits which artifacts will show up (based on some calculation of the artifact's power) or scales the power of all the artifacts one way or the other. After all, if you have rare artifacts but they aren't powerful enough to matter, then rare artifacts wouldn't be very fun.[/quote] <p

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="2" id="2067094"]What's with you and sociopathic AI's, KnutAreMykland? [/quote] Yeah I've gotta go with Luckmann on this. I would get so bored of playing a game if its AI acted like you're proposing KnutAreMykland... For one, it would make alliances absolutely worthless. The point of an of being allies with someone is so that you each know that if something happens and you need help or support, there is someone there to provide it.