Serik55

4X games run the risk of becoming mind-blowing spreadsheet games with so many options and choices that the player becomes overwhelmed. I support options 3 and 4, if my support counts for anything. I'm already managing armies, spells, diplomacy, battles, etc. There is a limit to the information I can process before the game ceases to be fun. The question, then, is how to accomodate players who want to micromanage every detail of their economy without ruining th

Will players be allowed to write map generator scripts? I much prefer random maps so I don't know what the world looks like beforehand. One of my favorite aspects of Civ IV are the wonderful map scripts. (Big and Small is my current favorite.) This is still a cool feature. When I was a kid, I'd always draw fantasy maps in MS Paint. Half the reason I even bought RPGs back then was for the maps they included in the box :D

[quote who="psychoak" reply="13" id="2172529"]Routing when done right doesn't make combat tedius either. It makes it less tedius. Fighting to the last man, that's tedius. Oh look, I've won, now I get to spend twenty minutes killing this itty bitty army. In the TW games, those itty bitty armies go oh shit, he flanked us and charged us in the rear, ahhh! splat.[/quote] Agreed. Routing is one of my favorite aspects of the TW games. And it really makes training

[quote]Ever heard of tectonics? Continental drifting causes Earthquakes that contains sooooooo much energy, it puts thunder or tornado velocity to shame. Call it Core & Magma dynamics at your service.[/quote] Heh, we can't even predict when earthquakes will occur, let alone harvest their energy in a meaningful way. For comparison: the average flux of geothermal energy on the continents: 0.07 W/m^2 (here's an <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=

[quote]A couple of concepts to consider. In real life, if we model the development of the world from -4000 BCE to 2000 CE, active colonization occurred from -4000 BCE until around 1600 CE. That's 93% of the "game." In the Civilization series, a settler becomes a pretty much obsolete unit by about the 10-20% point. After that, you might build one or two to take a desert spot that just turned up uranium or something, but even that is unlikely with the way borders work&nb

[quote]Nothing wrong with surprises, just don't have the game go into panic mode because you are winning decisively.[/quote] Well it depends on how you define "panic mode." Having some of the remaining AI personalities form an alliance against your superkingdom makes sense. If you can't beat this alliance, then maybe you don't deserve to win? Another idea (mentioned in the thread I linked to) is for some AI personalities to implement last-minute desperation attacks.

OP: You might be interested in this thread , which discusses the steamroller effect and ways it can be avoided or mitigated. [quote]During mid and late game some of the weak AI personalities should seek alliances to stop the greatest threat ... whether it's human or computer. Thus on a map where you own 40%... the remaining 5 AI opponents recognize this threat and at least some AI personalities sh

Using Steam/Impulse to launch games is like using iTunes or whatever to listen to music. Why bother when you can just launch games/music straight from your file browser? All my game icons are right on the desktop. Easy. I know lots and lots of people like using game and music managers, but they seem like extra cruft to me. I like Impulse precisely because I don't have to see it. To me, it's a nice patch manager and nothing more. Steam is starting to get on my nerve

RE Spore sales: this analyst believes that it will take EA five years --and a bunch of expansion packs -- to recover their investment in Spore.

An upcoming game ya'll might be interested in: Gratuitous Space Battles The idea is that you outfit and deploy a fleet of ships and watch them blow stuff up.

I don't think players need to be confused with in-depth naming rules. Leave that for the city council guys who decide who gets a street named after them. Against the AI, the player should be able to name geographic features, even if the names are silly and stupid. (Here be the Buttface Mountains!) Against human players: maybe disable naming? Only name stuff in your territory? Random names pulled from a database?

The "PC gaming is teh dying" meme was so incredibly stupid. If your product fails, then PC gaming must be dooooomed...it couldn't possibly be your product? It's safe to say that the PC is the most popular videogame platform on earth when you take into account MMOs, flash games, RTS, 4X, FPS, RPG, etc. etc. Personally, I find that PC gaming is actually improving now that consoles are becoming (gimped) PCs themselves. As Brad Wardell said in an interview

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="5" id="2128729"]BoogieBac, could you consider to add a "notepad" to the game? So I can open it and add whatever information I need to record. And that whenever an event (popup/window/message/globe) appears, it has a button that adds the relevant text of that event to the "notepad". The text file for that game's "notepad" could be edited in and out of the game so the player can add and/or delete as needed.[/quote] Wow, that's an excellent idea. And if you

[quote who="Dale_" reply="7" id="2127248"]Not necessarily. Civ has never been able to resolve the 40 city MM nightmare through UI. That issue stems from a city-based architecture and has nothing to do with UI at all. To resolve THAT MM nightmare you'd have to convert to a Empire-based architecture and eliminate the City-based, thus redo the entire engine not the UI. CTP2 make great inroads down this line of thinking, but it's a shame that this was set back again with C

Steam ran out of Unreal and Rome Total War keys due to high demand during the holiday sale, so it's not unheard of... How is Gamersgate? Their website doesn't exude confidence in their service. Seems "second rate."

Math Blasters came with my first Acer PC. But SimCity 2000 was the first PC game I owned. My mom drove all over town to find me a copy. She got it for $55 at the now-defunct Egghead Software. Other lovely games from the time period: Transport Tycoon, SimTower, C&C Red Alert, SimAnt, and Civ II.

Good question Cesare. I like generating random maps more than searching for custom ones to download. Thanks again for creating that nice Civ IV script.

Awesome! I'm actually on a Civ IV binge at the moment (been reading Civfanatics like, well, a fanatic). I bought the Complete Edition for $25 during Steam's holiday sale; would much rather have purchased it on Impulse :( (Will Civ IV Colonization also hit Impulse?) Soren Johnson has a nice little blog about videogames if anyone's interested. <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/02/20/making-of-soren-johnson-on-civ-4/"

[quote]But along with the benefit of the uberness your hero gained from doing it, there as to be an associated "opportunity cost" - the world doesn't just sit idly by waiting for you to get to level 80 , while you are following THIS path to greatness, other channeler's are out there building, summoning, schmoozing.....[/quote] Heh, I never looked at it that way. In most RPG games, the world does sit by while you level up to kick its ass. If you know your opponent is

[quote quoting="post"]quest-fest/treasure hunting rinse and repeating exhaustion[/quote] The entire MMO industry already has that covered :D IIRC, Frogboy said that AI-controlled adventurers might occasionally show up and cause mischief while on their own fetch quests and missions.

Blizzard still has the best download/account management service. Register your key on Battle.net and download a Mac or PC installer for your game. Easy as pie. I wish every publisher would let you register their games with a client-free download website. It also helps that Battle.net is sleek, efficient, and devoid of adverts and other bloat.

[quote who="Blitz64" reply="3" id="2113109"]"$8 million in revenue" which equals about 200,000 copies of Sins sold. Not bad. Lets hope Demigod will do better.[/quote] Sins of a Solar Empire has sold at least 500,000 units as of September 2008 .

I was in the Army (as a civilian employee) and liked it :D

Gamestop makes most of its money from used game sales. PC games are not conductive to that. As a PC game purchaser, I fail to see the problem with Gamestop only carrying a shelf or two of PC games. There are plenty of better ways to purchase PC games.

I find it interesting that Steam will be the only major digital distributor still forcing you to use a client. Once GG dropped their client, I actually became interested in buying from them. I think special editions can be to the videogame industry what vinyl records are to the music industry. Vinyl sales are actually booming, despite the huge growth in digital sales. Many records even come with a code so you can also download the mp3 files. With vinyl, you get a nice record, the m