Malsqueek

[quote who="seanw3" reply="2" id="3208624"]I would fix the pioneer spam problem by making pioneers cost twice as much to start. Then in the Civilization tree I would make Administration half the cost of pioneers. So now you need a tier 2 tech to expand at the rate one can currently expand. The opportunity cost of pioneers is doubled on turn one to reflect the scarcity of people early on. The AI would then need to change its value of expansion until Administration is researched.[/quo

I've noticed the opposite. Champions with bows seem to be borderline useless unless the bow is a really good one.

All right, we are finally getting to the place where it is more worth our time to focus on Usability over Mechanics (mostly). Very nice work with 0.95, Stardock. Very nice. I absolutely adore what you did with the overland spellbook. It is cleaner, faster, and looks WAY better than it did in Beta 3. Very nice work with that. However, with all of the visible UI cleanups (and there are many), there is one thing that is starting to bec

I would rather see Consulates go away entirely, and be replaced by something that allows farming around the outpost (+20 Food, fixed bonus). That enables the outposts to help cities grow by allowing them to have a higher cap without the higher end Civ techs, or with a base food output below 4, but does not in any way overpower the higher end civ techs increasing food production or prestige. Plus, the graphic could be three or four small farm space

I dislike using "Fertility" for base food output capacity because of how very many different connotations that word has. Frankly, if the words need to be changed (they could, I personally don't care) then we should look at the function the numbers have. What is now "Grain" could be called "Food" What is now "Food" should be called "Surplus Food" so that we know that the remaining number is the number of citizens the city

I just had a game that an AI I was at war with (Ythril, if it matters), plopped an outpost down adjacent to my Capital city. There was a crystal mine 2 tiles away over fields. The outpost automatically flipped to my possession because it was in the ZoC of my city. (I assume) Yithril took a massive army (probably strong enough to have taken my capital) to go recapture the outpost. This flipped the ZoC to white, over my crystal mine. <

I have to agree about starting locations being incredibly [i]feh[/i] on average. I've started two games tonight (a testament to the improved AI), and both of them took at LEAST 5 restarts to meet my requirements (3/3 or better with 1 or more essence and at least one resource of any sort within immediate visibility). I don't think that I'm being unreasonable in the least for the place the sovereign decides to stop wandering the wilderness and says "this place

I'm officially upgrading from my perennial declaration of "Fair" to "Good". After a couple hours, here are my thoughts: Cities feel more meaningful. The fact that I can't just crap out all the things in the queue and then have the city sitting lifeless and worthless by midgame is WONDERFUL. The game still looks and feels the way it always has, except it is WAY more polished now. I have preferences about how th

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="6" id="3194331"]I think this is virtually guaranteed. Even E:wom supported it, and we can already divide the factions into teams in FE in single player.[/quote] You say that E:WoM "Supported" multiplayer as if E:WoM supported "working" or "being fun". I do think there is enough community interest and there has been enough dev chatter to the effect that it is more likely than not that FE will get some form of multipla

In all seriousness, I'm not really excited about synergy between champions. They need some refinements in their own fundamentals, but adding another layer in creating interactions would be adding features when the ones we have are not yet fully implemented.

[quote who="Kongdej" reply="26" id="3192749"] I think these are fantastic ideas, I would like the sovereigns to start more magic oriented, I feel rubbish to start with only a flame dart as a fire sovereign. Sincerely ~ Kongdej[/quote] You obviously start your Sovereigns out REALLY strong in magic.

[quote who="Captain Pat" reply="15" id="3191686"]Also, you damn well know the problems with E:WoM were WAY more severe and numerous than "crashing every 10-20 turns" like you said above--(even that particular problem is pretty severe and embarrassing upon release). For example, the broken ai, dozens of animation/unit function bugs, broken/unbalanced tech trees, crashes, etc., etc., didn't even compare to the very minor release problems I experienced with Homam 6. I'm sorry y

I've posted a few times on this, but in relation to "What is wrong with magic in E:FE". Personally, I'd like to see City Enchant and most if not all strategic map spells limited to sovereigns only, regardless of spell level. Doing so would; Make spell school selection on Sovereigns valuable - you would not be able to just find a champion with Earth magic to get your +production city enchant. Make the sovereign more implicitly powerful in

Naval units in 4x games is a very fine line. I like them, personally, but have never seen them really well implemented due to numerous constraints. Functionally, they are difficult to implement in a game because they complicate a lot of the inherent strategies involved in land terrain, and in doing so, the AI has a really hard time using them to their fullest effect. Additionally, if implemented in a more limited fashion as in E:WoM, they become d

[quote who="seanw3" reply="16" id="3186374"]I suppose we should add Capitar and that other faction to the list. Maybe Capitar is planning to return by boat?[/quote] I don't have any idea at all who you think might want that other faction to come back. :D

[quote who="Percopiusmax" reply="12" id="3186011"]Metal Fatique[/quote] Yep. That was it. Beautiful example of how great concepts can totally ruin a game that they don't fit into properly.

Heavenfall, all of the above are good ideas EXCEPT for the extra planes/underground addition. Even in the holy Master of Magic, where the additional plane was BEST implemented, it was somewhat tacked on and provided a wildly unfair advantage to the person who was able to capitalize on it. Giant area, rich with magic-enhancing goodies, special races, and goodie huts. Difficult to gain access to, and easy to prevent access via spells or militar

[quote who="MalaiseofElite" reply="46" id="3183926"]Is it just me or is Civ V the most plodding game ever? Looks like an '80's throwback.[/quote] Actually, it's Art Deco in style, which means 20's. That style is 90 years old. More to the OP. I also really like Civ V. Now, it's true that it has fundamentally changed many things from the predecessors, which does make it a bit of a Fallout 3 (great game with an unfortunate n

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="36" id="3183867"] I don't like maintenance. It is a nessesary evil sometimes, but if you can design systems that don't use it, that's even better. I don't like there being a downside to work the player has done. I don't like the most effective strategy being to to go wipe improvements you aren't using (growth buildings when you hit your pop limit, trianing buildings if you aren't going to be training units the

Thank you Derek. Thank you and the whole rest of the Stardock dev team for your hard work and your support of Stardock's gamers. This update looks fantastic. I do have one question, though. Part of the issue with the bizarre balance of cities in Beta 3 and earlier came from many buildings not having any upkeep at all and money being generally sparse. This led to many city features literally being placeholders for production simply because ther

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="14" id="3182954"]Vampire: Bloodlines is also one of my all time favorites, hard to have left it off my list. That and Arcanum...shit all the Troika games could be on my list.[/quote] Yeah, Arcanum was pretty freaking awesome. Fallout with more divergent playstyles via the tech/magic mechanic.

Yup. It has been my experience that the alternate victory conditions are generally only viable if you turn conquest off or cant be bothered to hunt down your opponents utterly. Alliances only really happen when everyone is afraid of you. Requires Conquest. The Magic stuff takes so much production and so much time to get there that you kinda have to wait for it. Happens late enough you pretty much have to wait for it on purpose. The Mas

Recent: (no particular order) Red Dead Redemption UFO:Afterlight Minecraft Civ V (poo poo all you want, I adore the way combat went semi-tactical, and am willing to trade strategic depth for that type of finesse) Silent Storm 2 Vintage: (also no particular order) Master of Magic XCOM: UFO Defense Fallout 1 & 2 Thief 1 & 2 Syndicate For the record

[quote who="Gorde" reply="22" id="3182009"]I'm amazed so many here remember MoM enough to make a comparison! Heh, my memory must be terrible, because I only have the vague impression of having fun and getting lost in the strategy/puzzles/exploring combo for hours; on top of that, I'm much changed as a gamer (and person) since then. [/quote] Don't be surprised. a large contingent of the people who are actively Beta-ing FE are here because we bought E:Wo

[quote who="OrionM42" reply="19" id="3181319"] " When will Beta 4 come out? The best I can say is "The Summer". It definitely won't be out in June but might make it in time for July. " That's the latest reliable (or semi-reliable) word that I have seen ... [/quote] I'm expecting that means week 3-4 of July at the absolute earliest with my own personal guess being the first week of August.