Meerk

[quote]Another idea is to add personalities to veteran units. They'll pick up a veteran corporal or a veteran sergeant - a named individual that grants bonuses to the unit. [/quote] I thought this idea sounds fun. In particular, I often feel that victorious units gather personality over time, and it would be nice if the game reinforced that. The personality wouldn't need to be super-powerful, but something to make the unit a little more distinctive. I guess it's another way o

For what it's worth, there is a relative diminishing returns built into the current formula. For example, if you have 10,000 population, and just got mining, then the first day of improved mining research will double your mining effectiveness. After researching mining for one week, then another day only increases your mining effectiveness by 12%. After researching a month, then the next day of research is only worth 3%.

The fantasy strategy genre very often has RPG elements blended in. I have played many of these games single player, but only Warcraft III multiplayer. In Warcraft III, hero development is not too deep -- you generally only have one or two viable paths to develop your hero, and in multi-player games, I would always know the path I was planning to take before the game started. Also, there was basically no choice to leave your hero at home, as it was too essential for winning fights. I a

One of the early ideas behind the game is that the sovereign can be managed differently to match different play styles. As I recall, there were playstyle examples a la Lord of the Rings. For example, you could build a powerful warrior sovereign like Sauron, or you could chose to go the Morgoth route and spend essence giving yourself more powerful minions. Clearly, the nature and severity of the Sovereign Death penalty will dramatically impact which style dominates. For

I created a unit named askdjhaksj. Things worked fine for a while, but eventually it became unselectable. It's icon still appeared on the cloth map, but it stopped reacting. The debug.err file is at: http://pastebin.com/m284d3beb Later in this game, I moved into a hostile city, but no combat happened. I saved and was about to try to reproduce, but it crashed on load. It looked like these issues had already been reported, but I didn't see any other

I am seeing a similar problem. It just hangs on the splash screen. DebugMessage: Version 0.22 last updated on: Thu Sep 17 11:59:54 2009 DebugMessage: *********DXDiag info follows.********* System Info Time: 9/19/2009, 08:25:57 DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) Machine Name: FORMERMYTH Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp.080413-2111) Languages: English (Regional

This probably falls under "stupid user tricks," but it seemed awkward so I thought it may be worth bringing to your attention. When I installed, it needed to update C++ runtime. However, that initially balked because Impulse was using the old version. It gave me some "abort, retry, ignore" options. Per C++ installer's suggestion, I initally tried closing Impulse. This complained because I was installing Elemental. I chose the close anyway option, but that did

First of all, I agree -- exploring stuff and fighting for loot is one of my favorite things about the genre. It's very strongly present in all the titles that I have played. One of the gameplay problems that can get introduced with fighting random creeps for loot is the ability to get too much experience from it. (i.e. you are fighting relatively weak monsters that don't have the backing of another sovereign's magic, so the danger can be much lower.) In particular, hero

banned for indecisiveness.

I think recent graduates frequently don't understand what it means to write code that will be used/maintained for a long time. In particular, it is easy to write a bunch of code that makes perfect sense today, but in two years you are trying to find a bug in it, and can't remember just how it works... and it's even worse if you are trying to pick up someone else's code. Shortly after college, a more experienced colleage told me that he writes comments as if he were tryi

I love the idea of more player input before the game is released. The major alternative is to address the problems in an expansion pack. The expansion pack approach suffers from problems if the initial game experience is underwhelming, or there are major problems that cant be fixed without rearchitecting something. I guess w e just saw some of this in the Demigod world -- if the multiplayer problems had been found while it was in Beta, you may have been able to fix the p

This seems to be one of Stardock's big goals for elemental. They want to eliminate the fundamental problems that introduce this kind of extended mop up. For example, in MoM once you get some key technology (say Paladins), you can start to pump out big armies from multiple sites. They seem to be designing Elemental to counteract that kind of approach -- powerful units are inherently limited in number. This is certainly a big step in the right direction, but there are elements of this i

quote who="Frogboy" reply="22" id="2118135"]BTW, one thing to remember: It's not playing orcs or high elves that made MoM have each game feel different. It is that players had massive amounts of choices from. [/quote] This. For me, the replay value came from the idea that you could mix together arbitrary combinations at the start, and that would force you into playing very different strategies. For example, you could pick up all the books from one school, and immediately