pigeonpigeon

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="14" id="1960296"] If you make 1 turn = 1 week, then it'll take 2 game years (104 turns) for your population to double with a growth rate of 5% (which is huge). That means if you start out with a population of 1000, it would take ~13.5 game years (702 turns) to reach a total population of 100,000, in your whole civilization. If you make 1 turn = 1 month, then it'll take 24 turns for your population to double, and 162 turns to reach a total

[quote who="Anomander" reply="14" id="1961140"] If I had to make a beautiful city, and to give my opinion some weight then I would prefer a more muted one..less spires & less princess in distress (less classic fantasy) as per the bottom example. http://www.bulbmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/castle.jpg *my insert link appears greyed out.[/quote] The picture you linked there is extremely beautiful. But I suspect that the artist behind that painting could make a

[quote who="Lavitage" reply="22" id="1961107"] If your infantry is no match for the enemy cavalry, why should that tactic do you any good? The cavalry would logically just beat the dog shit out of the infantry in front of them then run down the slower heavy cavalry.[/quote] That's only assuming someone would retreat if they're losing horribly . Who's to say the cavalry will beat the dog shit out of the infantry?It might take them a significant amount of time, enough to al

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="12" id="1960509"]I think I see what you mean. You mean how the inner walls appear to "bulge" inwards (and the upper inner walls slightly outwards)? I agree, but I think that's a matter of perception, it could look just fine from another angle. It really doesn't show enough for me to judge.. (unless I completely missunderstood your point).[/quote] No, you've got it. I don't think it's just a matter of perspective, though. If you compare the inne

[quote who="Anomander" reply="9" id="1960426"]Have read it, and its quite obvious its directed at the Dev's. If you all felt personally offended then surely thats your issue.[/quote] You entirely missed the point. It's irrelevant at whom your initial arrogance and hyperbole were directed. What is relevant is that you started off this discussion with an air of arrogance and pretty extreme exaggeration (you compared the art to My Little Pony... do I need to link a picture to m

[quote who="Anomander" reply="4" id="1960035"] Who else here has dared to disagree with the art direction, and who else has presumed to stand contrary to the majority of this thread, and who has dared to show dissent? lol[/quote] You make it sound like it took great courage to say you don't like the art, and that anybody who does claim to like the art does so out of fear... I propose that few people on these forums have disagreed with the art direction because most of us happen t

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="13" id="1960208"] A lot of my response to this sort of stuff will depend on how the game treats time--and if even a fairly long game lasts only a few game years, breeding a million people (or even gathering most of them from the wilderness) shouldn't be possible. But I haven't seen anything from dev-land about how much internal time a game on a Most Ludicrously Large map might take.[/quote] This goes back to the discussion in the "1 day = 1 turn" th

[quote who="Solam" reply="6" id="1960010"]I would also add that once you beat the creatures at the entry port that it not stay free forever. Meaning another creature could come and make it his home once again. MOM always left it open once you beat the creature. I did not like that. I would of liked it if another creature showed up after a while. It could cut off yoour troups and leave you stranded in the ways.[/quote] I agree. It's always kind of bothered me that in most games, once y

I agree! Plus, it can't be that hard to implement... Especially considering Stardock has been bragging about how easy it is for them to make UIs with their system. I think this is a relatively simple addition that could go a long way.

[quote who="E_MacLeod" reply="11" id="1959860"]In addition, I've always heard people complain about the difficulty jumps from one setting to the next. One is too easy and the next is too hard, no in between. This sort of system would create that in between.[/quote] I think stardock actually came up with a good solution for that in galciv 2: the difficulty slider. Instead of easy/medium/hard/impossible there's a slider with something like 10 values (i think). Having a wide gradient of

I think the best way to achieve multi-day battles is through a combination of good fatigue and retreat systems. If units tire out and become essentially useless in the fight, and if you can retreat units, or squads, on an individual basis, then I think multi-day battles will occur naturally as the best option for one or both of the combatants in some circumstances. But I think it needs to be done very carefully. Even battles that last for more than one day should not be able to last t

[quote who="Nights Edge" reply="4" id="1959838"]Cost-free? In the books waygates certainly weren't a cost-free way to move armies.[/quote] By cost-free I meant it would require no effort on the channeler's part to use the ways. The cost associated with using the ways would come in the form of lost/degraded units. Your troops would be vulnerable to attack from all sorts of dark creatures, and like Denryu suggested units that have spent too long in the ways could be negatively affected.

I'm putting my vote for unit-by-unit, situational retreat if possible (if the battle system allow for it). An adapted version of Medieval II: Total War's system. If my army consists of speed 5 infantry, speed 10 heavy cavalry and speed 20 griffon riders, and my opponent's army consists purely of speed 15 light cavalry, my griffon riders should be able to retreat easily, and the rest should have a difficult time of it. But, my infantry should be able to try to occupy the enemy long eno

Wheel of Time-style waygates would be awesome! Having doors scattered around the map, each connected in another world through a maze of paths inhabited by unfriendly creatures. With enough strength/stealth, waygates would be a really cool cost-free way to speed up traveling to certain places!

[quote who="Nights Edge" reply="9" id="1959221"]I think that's a nice take on minor factions: they live in places you can't. Maybe Galciv 2 needs some minor races on extreme environment planets... But I think some players might want to try living in those places and playing those factions too, so I don't think there should be a hard ban. Maybe a faction could choose habitable zones? Or maybe there could just be magic that made inhospitable places colonizable, but divided up a bit s

I'm hoping for a really, really big tech tree as well, but I think this is going to be a really tough area for stardock to pin down. After all, to take the magic example, the debalancing endgame spells shouldn't only be available in the really huge maps. But if they can be reached in regular sized maps, then what happens on the really big maps? Not really sure how to deal with that issue... I must say I prefer the "future tech" solution over completely running out of things to researc

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="10" id="1959115"]IMO, if it is possible to have cities coming anywhere near a million population, the game needs a hierarchy of city types and the biggest ones need to be limited to one per very large chunk of the map. I'm thinking of places like Tenochtitlan before the conquistadores and Rome at the height of the Empire. Or maybe instead of 'classes' for cities, we need a way to have cities share claims on resource tiles so that something like a dist

Off-topic: how did you make my username blue and fake-clickable, Solam? I've seen others do it before but I have no idea how...

Stardock devs have confirmed what you just said a number of times, John Hughes. Settling many cities, especially early on, will significantly drain your channeler's essence to the point where it'll take a long time for him to recover, meaning your large empire will be spread pretty thin for a while. They have also said that there will be some "essence free zones" but they will be very rare. Personally I hope that it's actually difficult to found a city close to shards, not easy.

While I think there should be magical ways of transporting armies, I think they should be limited until maybe endgame. Endgame massive magic transportation capabilities could actually be a pretty elegant way to solve the clean-up problem once you've already pretty much won. [quote quoting="post"] Their use is simple - to cut down on transports. The bigger a game is, the greater the odds that by the time your troops get anywhere near a front line, the front line have been moved, t

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="11" id="1958907"] I'm sure that many other players agree with Solam here, but IMO a game like Elemental is more likely to attract folks who disagree than was a game like GC2. Here, I suspect that having a game that works like a good story will be more important to more players. That leaves me leaning to the idea of a very generic way of describing turns/time, *unless* the devs can devise a meshed time management scheme that can whip the problems described a

I'm fully against any sort of reactive AI that changes difficulty within the course of a single game. The way I usually play strategy games, I start out the game significantly behind the AI in terms of points, and build up slowly but surely. Basically I provide myself with a strong foundation while trying to stay out of major conflicts, and when I'm done with that I slowly overtake the AIs pointwise. In order for the computer to really gauge the player's strength it has to understand the play

[quote who="Solam" reply="7" id="1958617"]Personally I don't enjoy huge maps. It takes to long to play, it takes to much micromanagement. I prefer smaller maps. I wonder if most people enjoy big lar maps or smaller medium ones.[/quote] I love huge maps, although there is a limit. For example in galciv2 the biggest map size was too big for me. But there was a lot of needless micromanagement in galciv that I'm hoping will be cut out in Elemental. For me, the ideal map size is inversely

I think I will be happy as long as "gold" (let's just pretend that's the general currency for now) doesn't become the be all and end all resource. It should be good for certain things, like paying workers' salaries and military upkeep, but really unhelpful for most other things. If I want to trade for a resource with a neighbor, I should usually get a better deal if I can offer them a desired resource in exchange, or some research, than if I try to just pay them in gold.

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="7" id="1958657"]Some scraps of the LoTR marathon on TBS this weekend made me want to add an important word to this thread: Ents. We definitely need biggish territory elements on the main map that are the domain of some cool entities with no potential for direct player control but are possible sources of allies by the time we need to do something like take down Eisengard. Such territories certainly don't need to be limited to forests, either