[quote who="Yestin" reply="54" id="2386624"] Have you played Dominions 3, or Civilization 4? I'm sure their designers did their best to reduce ai thinking time, but on the largest maps even a good computer can take a looong time to calculate multiple ai actions.[/quote] AI rarely has high priority and AI thinking time probably even less.
[quote who="LDiCesare" reply="48" id="2386135"] In a turn based game that should not be that much of a problem, especially since you can do a lot of computation while the player does his turn. Unfortunately that's wrong. Play Civ (any version) on large maps on an average requirements machine and you'll see that turns take a lot of time to compute.[/quote] Well, of course you can always use up any amount of computation time if you wish to. It depends on what algorithms you us
It is always a matter of balance. If death is too expensive, then you will never use your sovereign to fight. On the other hand if it is too cheap, then you might not care how dangerous the situation is for your sovereign and using a fighting sovereign is too powerful. And as far as I know, you are supposed to have the choice to use your sovereign as a powerful unit.
[quote who="LDiCesare" reply="44" id="2385033"] In my opinion the issue is not so much the complexity to code the algorithms but the amount of time they require and then how to handle fuzzy/incomplete information. I did something like the above example in my own game a while ago, where I computed power projections and had a map of power projections that could be used to decide whether or not it was safe/useful to go into a certain area. The data was incomplete because there we
AI programming is one of my favorite things. It is fun to see computer players doing all the work for you after you have tweaked stuff. And imo it is really not the most important thing to have the AI play very well but instead the most important thing is that it plays interesting and varied. Back when Warcraft 3 came out I started AI modding because the AI was so boring, always doing the same thing. But the problem was that a lot of the AI was hidden in hardcode instead of in accessi
The target selection for movement feels more awkward for me than the unit selection. The unit selection you can at least repeat when you misselect but it happened quite often to me that instead of entering combat with the spider I selected as movement target, I accidently moved to the field next to it.
Even if the unit gets some experience, the sovereign should always get at least some of it. Otherwise you would be forced to keep your sovereign on the forefront to get more levels and therefore more essence even if you would rather play the MoM kind of sovereign who mainly stays in his fortress and does long range magic.
I had that problem on Vista 64bit. Running Impulse as admin fixed it for me. So it seems to be some rights problem.
I think what happens is that while the city is still pretty small it does not use up all food so it stacks up food supplies. The city growth seems to depend on other factors but require that you have enough food supplies to feed all. So if you build a farm earlier you have a higher stock of food at the point when the city reaches the size that requires all new food to feed. So it starts to use up the supply but still grows. Now at some point that supply is used up and the city stops growing.
This happens even when the mine is right next to the city square. But only with mines, a shrine of air worked fine for me. You can even place lots of mines on the same spot if you click several times.
When I reloaded a saved game after a crash due to Alt-Tab I got my sovereign at the same level and with the same items as before but the other things were not correct: - The cities had disappeared except for their borders - Items were still equipped but could not be reequipped after unequipping - Research state was back to starting state Unrelated to the above issue but I could not install Elemental from within Impulse as normal but instead had t
[quote who="Wieke" reply="27" id="2366866"]Well a added benefit of the second option you described (the host doing all the computations), is that it provides some protection from cheating (as long as the host doesn't cheat). [/quote] The protection from active cheating is not any higher in that case because if all computers do the same computation then you desync at some point if you cheat. The advantage of host only computation is that you could hide some inf
I don't quite get what that lot of data to transfer in such a game should be. In general on each computer the entire map with all information is present. So you have the choice: You could just transfer the player input and a turn based game which is kind of determinate by default should remain synchronized. Ancient modems are sufficient for that kind of data rate. Or alternatively you compute some things only on the host or one computer and transfer the result. But even then,
[quote who="psychoravin" reply="8" id="2353290"]Remember in LotR the wizard MADE creatures from trees and mud and other magical ingredients. This could well be used for creating offspring for non-human types just like in the movie. So, it would be very easy for the eye to have offspring as it could make them from molten lava and pumice rocks in the mountain of doom. Throw in some spark from it's eye and wallah an offspring.[/quote] Actually in LotR, all life comes from Eru. Not even o
All Ainur including Sauron and Gandalf had no physical form at the start. Only once they entered Arda they took on physical forms but that also meant they were bound to the world. Sauron lost his physical form more than once so it seems to be possible to regain a physical form after you lose it but at a price. It takes quite some time to gather enough strength for that and there are permanent costs. Like when Sauron lost his body the first time during the fall of Numenor, he was not a
Killer stacks were a problem in MoM. Yes, they took long to build, but then they cut through pretty much anything without losses (unless you fight other killer stacks of course which the AI rarely built). Elemental definitely needs fundamental mechanics to counter the power that massive armies at one point give yet keep the balance between larger armies of weaker units vs. smaller armies of stronger units. Especially considering that heroes can become a massive power. An infin
[quote who="Tridus" reply="13" id="2320232"]Hard limits on this type of thing are usually put in place for technical reasons. Thus, whatever the hard limit actually is, you can't mod it. (If you can, it's not really a hard limit.)[/quote] Yes, and I hope that it is not a hard limit. And the statement that they will see in beta where they set the limit does not point at a hard limit but instead that they wrote the code at all places up to now for x players (x not fixed).
The important part I'd say is that player and AI number restrictions are not rooted deep in code but instead are only set on the surface where they are modable. Since the stated aim for the game is to keep it as moddable as possible I'd say that is quite likely.
The risk with that kind of tech tree is that it can easily be boring. If you leave out random techs, then each tech needs to be kind of balanced. Therefore there might be no techs that give you special advantages but instead only slight increases to some standard values each time you research something. Of course that is not a must. I loved about the MoO2 tech tree, that among the standard increases to certain values there were also several special techs that gave you entirely
Balance is a difficult thing. The more complex the game, the harder to achieve. And many game developers have fallen into the trap to go for the easy way which is making sides more or less equal. Balance is not something that should be considered as the last thing but instead needs to be rooted deep into the mechanics of a game. Don't sacrifice choice and diversity but instead make sure you know from the start how they will interact with each other. It is a number game
In my eyes the majority of the replayability of MoM was not only the vast amount of different combinations at game start but that the choices you made there meant a lot of difference. Spending a point at the start did not make simple changes like making your farmers 10% more effective or anything boring like that (at least most of the choices were far from boring). Instead most of them gave you very specific powerful advantages. If you took warlord you got an extra experience level fo
I wondered that as well. When I first read about the essence system, I thought it was supposed to be a kind of limited resource that does not follow the standard exponential growth of power (with that standard I mean that when you expand you gain power which allows you to expand even faster and so on) and that how you spread it would determine what your strengths and weaknesses are and allow for replayability. Yet if you imbue heroes with essence and they get more essence from