pigeonpigeon

[quote]I just don't want it to turn into all level 10's ... with monotony ... is what im saying ... and it should be hard to support large cities (like shipping food to said large cities) ... also, especially if we are sticking with prestige, I think over-all availability of food should greatly effect prestige.[/quote] Oh definitely. I completely agree with you there. I would like it either to be quite difficult to raise many cities to a high level, or for there to be good reason

[quote]Well, for Call-to-Arms, I think the entire idea is that these people are not meant for battle. If you want to take an experienced regiment and train them into profesional soldiers, be my guest, but I think re-absorbing them into the city should lose all their experience points, and that there should be no "perks" for absorbing battle-hardened peasants into a city. All you would get are traumatized citizens which get drunk alot and have nightmares ... realistically your city value might

[quote]It would be an interesting equation, with specific and interesting decisions. Also, with low-rations lowering prestige, if You have such an incredibly high prestige, you can keep them happy with incredibly low rations, although perhaps you will have a weaker militia with the Call-to-Arms, a la moscow's 200,000 population durin middle ages (insanely high), although history of relatively weak militias. Meanwhile, a city keeps regular rations because of its relatively low base prestige, o

[quote]When researching a given area of tech (warfare, civilization, magic, diplomacy, etc.) they player would know the odds of a particular tech being available once that milestone is reached. In addition, some very rare technologies might pop up once that milestone is reached. For instance, maybe under warfare there's a 1% chance that a breakthru in the warfare area might allow the player to get "doom fire" (a tech for helping in sieges) but that means in most games, that tech

I am still skeptical, and for the same reasons as before. Your response to my first post hasn't really assuaged my skepticism much. 1) Experience: if I send out a Call to Arms and go to battle, imagine the following scenario. I get 1000 troops from my CtA, 500 of them end up in the thick of it; 200 of those 500 survive with significant experience. The other 500 were used to fortify key locations and never saw battle. When all these units are reabsorbed into the population, the 'calibe

[quote]It could be a very simplified system, where speed is from 1-10 (or it could be called agility, and movement could be separate), where 1 speed has 100% slow, 2 speed has 80% slow, 3 has 70, 4 has 60, 5 has 50, 6 has 40, 7 has 30, 8 has 20, 9 has 10, and 10 has 5% slow. Where the percentage is 1 attack per round based on that many HP in relation to whatever 100% ends up being. We could have 100% to be 100hp, or we coudl have 100% be as low as 20HP, where an agility of 10 would net you 10

I can play Elemental for as long as I want, as long as I never build any cities! I even managed to win once as such - none of the other AIs did anything so I wandered around with my sovereign and killed them one by one... But the moment I try to build a city and then end my turn, freeze. :( It also freezes if I conquer someone else's cities and then try to end turn. So basically all I can do is explore, kill spiders, trolls, swamp bandits and wolves, and collect gold, those healing po

[quote]In doing so you made several points. I assumed all your points were on topic and therefore in support of your objections, and treated them accordingly. I now see you added in separate points, as shown by...[/quote] I was responding to multiple people, and not just you. You are not the only person in this thread who is making comments that I think are worth responding to... [quote]My thinking is that only the excpetionals could become the 'best' units (ancien

[quote]Despots would likely gain power in the productions department, while those who are democratic would earn diplomatic benefits. [/quote] Random nitpick: I never understood this. Why would democratic nations earn diplomatic benefits? Sure, when dealing with other diplomatic nations, I can see it. When dealing with non-diplomatic nations? Nah uh. In all honesty, in the real world I'm of the opinion that nations are most effective at dealing with other nations of similar governance.

[quote]In the game as we've seen it so far, they would be, since very little combat is done with magical creatures, and an even smaller sections of those might use "anti intelligence" types of attacks. (The same goes for corruption.)[/quote] So you are saying that, because magical creatures will be rare, the combat mechanics regarding them should be secondary? The reason Stardock decided to make magical creatures rare is in large part to make most/ever

I think Willpower/discipline is a very appropriate attribute. Willpower, rather than intelligence, would determine a unit's defense against mind spells, and could also double as a modifier for morale (if we get morale...). After all, a unit with strong willpower would be less likely to turn and flee, cower in fear, or succumb to temptations (corruption) of any kind. I see this as being totally separate from any attribute that would modify a unit's spell-casting abilities. I hadn't tho

I agree. I'd like to see only the 'core' resources that everybody needs for basic building and training be rummage-able. Perhaps allow the other resources to be rummaged only if you have access to that resource somewhere in your kingdom already - but if it's at a rate like 0.05 per turn, I wonder if that'd be worth it at all. And if it's at a rate higher than that, then it just diminishes the importance of those resources.

But that's not what 'rummaging' represents... It represents the fact that even if there are no forests near a city, there might still be some trees, or there might be wood in other forms that can be recycled, etc. I really like the rummage idea, I just wish it'd be combined with an actual resource storage mechanic. Rummaging would be yet another feature that'd reduce any tedium that might crop up with local storage. It'd allow people to undertake small-scale projects in cities t

I think for random techs to work out as intended (encourage changing up your research path from game to game), they need to be both numerous and significant. If there is just a small pool of random minor techs to draw from, and only a small number of them show up in a given game, then the random techs will not really change much. Sure maybe you'll put off your 'normal' path by one tech to get a convenient random tech first, but overall it will not really add strategy and won't add much variat

While this seems like an interesting idea for another game, I think Elemental is far too deep in development to implement such a thing now... That would require a complete reworking of the entire kingdom and city development systems... And it would affect pretty much every other mechanic in the whole game...

Interesting idea but there are two major flaws I can see with this system: 1) Experience. If the hordes of troops you get from a Call to Arms melt back into the population, what about any experience they might've gained? How in the world would you keep track of that? Even if doable, I can think of no way for it not to be messy, without retaining those soldiers in some way (for example, all those squads still exist, but are stationed at cities and demobilized by the player). Bu

[quote]Game design that allows one to simultaneously use units of various skill levels, preferentially using the best when all else is equal, is to you not good game design?!?![/quote] You missed my point again. In most games, you are better off training only the best troops you can possibly train (within the different classes of units, of course), even if you could build, say, 2x or 3x as many troops of a little lower quality. All in all, like has been said, I think most of u

[quote]If I understand correctly, if I preorder the game, I would now have access to the beta download via Impulse. It's just that the pro-order page still say that the beta is not available, so I just wanted to check.[/quote] No. If you pre-order now, you will have access to Beta 2 (which probably won't be out until very late '09 or early 2010). We are currently on Beta 1B, and Beta 1 is supposed to run all the way up to F or something.

Holy crap Tasunke, what world do you live in? A knight killing 100-200 peasants that have him surrounded? Nah uh. Maybe 10, if he is really luck and skilled. Nor would he be able to kill 20 or 30 peasants at a time, nor would he be able to continue to kill round after round of 20-30 peasants. Killing that many units would be exhausting, and he'd be absolutely spent long before he came anywhere near defeating 1000 peasants. A lone knight would not really be able to defeat very many (determined

[quote]Well, you at least have to recognize the implications of making a spell kill all standards of soldiers equally. You will always target the best units first. If too many spells have this effect, you will have a massive collapse in broad spell utility.[/quote] Well I never said all standards of troops. I am only referring to the same type of unit with different experience levels... The more I think about it the less I care, I suppose, but I still think it's a

[quote]I would use my imagination, personally, but I', sure you could also duplicate the appropriate sections of a randomly-generated map.[/quote] Huh? If you mean you would make up cities and points of interest in the lands that Tolkien never laid out in any detail (south and east), I don't think that's a good idea. Personally I wouldn't really mind, but I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would object to it. If that's not what you meant, then I have no idea :P

[quote]We have 2 fire creatures and already 1 exception. Even if the fire salamander is inmune or resistant to fire (for the record, in AD&D 2e it is inmune), doesn't change the fact: there's no logic behind it because magic is not logical. Why a Fire Salamander is inmune and a Fire Elemental is not?[/quote] I already explained the reasoning behind that. Also, I never said Fire Elementals shouldn't be immune to fire... I gave an example of a spell that would fall under th

That seems like a pretty good solution, Demiansky, I like it. In fact it works very much like the way I'm starting to want magic resistances to work. If most units won't have magic resistances, it is not worth displaying a half-dozen different resistances scores that will nearly always be 0. Using modifiers analogous to your idea here would allow for magic resistances in all their glory but without causing a visual mess where it doesn't actually add anything (in the case of zero-resis

[quote]One thing I'm not sure about is how to treat the Eastern and Southern sections of Middle Earth. None of Tolkien's maps have anything there, they just focus one little section of middle earth. Maybe I'll just pretend they don't exist, and put an ocean there to simplify things.[/quote] Just set it up so that Mordor is basically in the south-easternmost portion of the map, and the eastern and southern sections will be naturally cut off.

[quote]Sorry, but to me monolithic armies of, say, all swordsmen, is a problem. However, if everyone uses a mix of knights + pikes + archers because it's the best combo, it's not a problem, because it makes sense. Most medieval armies were very similar (knights + peasants + archers). So when your OP says monolithic armies should be avoided, I understand and agree. When you say that by monolithic you mean 'always using the best units', you're twisting the meaning of the word and I no longer un