This has happened to me as well. There's a place where the menu has the background poking through, and I mean right through, numbers messing everything up and making it impossible to read. I just can't remember Which! menu this happens on.
Most spells don't cost essence. In fact almost none of them do. In actually playing the game I don't feel a need to keep more than 5 points at any given time, and freely cast regular magic quite regularly. Once I have my initial city base, I usually allow the natural spread of healing to make more without even needing to use essence.
In all honesty you get a lot of essence. You get 15 at start, and each city costs 5. Every time you gain a level you can get 10. You gain levels pretty quickly, or at least in my experience. 3 cities is a huge production base.
I'll give windowed a shot from here on out. Thanks for the heads up.
This may not be related but the save game for this particular crash now also doesn't load, it just hangs.
Crash to desktop after hitting alt-tab. Memory dump and debug.err included. http://journals.rpgnexus.net/users/TCores/downloads/elemental_debug/Elemental0_295-2010-03-05T20-17-30-562.zip
[quote who="shadowtongue" reply="16" id="2556801"]Sure, you all can figure out how to overcome this easilly. Point being that AIs (yes even the overrated stardock AIs) cannot. I will hope to be proven wrong, but I don't know what anyone would point me to to make me begin to consider that it's going to be any different in elemental. [/quote] AIs don't need to know what a river is. All they need to know is it is a tile that
On further reflection, with player numbers greater than 16, the default mode should be simultaneous; Thirty two players taking 30 second turns each (wildly optimistic by mid game) would result in 16 minute waits between each turn, allowing roughly four turns every hour.
Simitaneous turns are bad. Very bad. Nice concept but open to abuse and also open to bugs. One of the ideas I mentioned before in this thread was to take the turn orders, and those that occur at roughly the same period, and randomize the orders. Or, have an intiative stat and roll off. A lot of TBS games have eventually gone this route, Civilization recently patched it in. For those who don't really play TBS games, why don't you fire up a TBS
"and a text chat you can use at any time. " Oh please include a chatbar that's part of the default UI during multiplayer. Chatting to people without having to hammer tab or something in multiplayer also gives me something to do, and people are more likely to respond back if they don't have to break flow.
In multiplayer TBS, the real important thing is minimizing downtime where players do nothing but stare at the screen waiting for other people to finish. Turn timers are one way to do that but another really good way to keep people entertained (rather than bored) is to give them something to do between turns. FallFromHeaven includes a minigame called Somnium. It's a fairly irrelevant little card game you can play for a mild rela
[quote quoting="post"] Brain Storming.. So what are some things we can play around with here? What are some other OPTIONS we could have? I like the idea of a time bank. You get N seconds per turn. If you finish your turn early, you get to add those seconds to your time bank. If you run out of time, it starts to cost you gold. Like 10 gold per second. If you run out of gold, the turn goes automatically. There could be city improvements
RE: totally incrossable land (like ultra sheer cliff faces or vast pits) was dealt with in populous by air ballons. In Elemental these solutions are good: Large Essence Cost, which makes impassable land spells prohibitively expensive : ( Natural soil erosion / cheap magical erosion will make those cliff faces only temporary spells Tunneling abilities, stairways carved from the rock by quarriers on behalf of units : ) Cheap "non-channe
Part of the draw for this game for me personally is the ability to perform land altering spells, and not just in the end game. The solution is in making things like rivers inherently fordable and changing the pathfinding AI so that when calculating the shortest route, it adds the time to cross the river tile as though it were a "this tile takes 7 movement points to cross" with the additional six being the "build a canoe part." As soon as it hits it, it works on fordin
[quote who="Martok" reply="65" id="2549077"] Quoting Kanaric, reply 33 real-time + 4x = annoying to play or overly simplistic garbage. You've never played Imperium Galactica 2 or Pax Imperia, have you? They're both (admittedly rare) examples of a real-time 4x game that actually works pretty well. [/quote] I enjoy real time 4X, when it's done right. In
Important Question: Can we pick up more traits and perks as we level up to certain levels, a la Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. perks? Or are all starting traits available only at soverign creation?
I like drawbacks. I just do. Coward - When your Channeler is alone, he suffers a -1 in combat. Arachnophobia! - Little Miss Muffet ... spiders are particularly effective against you! Take +25% damage Technophobia! - techonology is bad mkay, -10% research penalty Hemophilac - wounds hurt, they Really hurt. +25% damage from everything Bureacratic
I like traits that scale with and grow with your empire. Rather than being some static bonus (of say always getting four free gold each turn) you get a bonus that gets better as your empire grows. Drawbacks should also scale. They are easier to balance this way. With a static +4 gold bonus, that could be too powerful early game when gold is scarce, but utterly meaningless late game when you make thousands of gold. Mercantile - gain 1 additional gold per turn fo
[quote quoting="post"] Q: What are the tools we would need to know to mod? A: We have chosen Python as our scripting language. Post release we plan to keep full time developers to be dedicated to exporting more and more APIs from Kumquat to expose them to Python. In terms of UI, we use DesktopX. All the .dxpacks in Elemental (and Galactic Civilizations) are made using DesktopX. It’s a free download. DesktopX version 4 is in devel
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="26" id="2537951"]Players can create a faction. When they create a faction they can choose its race from one of the pre-existing ones OR create their own race . Then they can choose their allegiance - Empire or Kingdom. The choice of allegiance is the one that determines whether they use death or life magic and its environmental effects. [/quote] Now that's pretty sweet. When we create our own races, what kind of choices do we have
The race of the Krax are a sub-group of men who are on the side of the Empire for instance. They are men who practice death magic. Do we get to choose our race, then choose our allegiance? Or are human-humans always life magic users, human-dwarves life magic users, human-orcs always death magic users? I like the idea of taking the Ironeer race and then leading my splinter faction down the dark path of death magic. Or
Option 1: Play on the Stardock servers Player loads up Elemental, chooses Multiplayer, selects “Host” (or Join). If they select Host, it will find the nearest (geographical) Elemental server run by Stardock and put them in the lobby. From their point of view, it’s almost exactly like any other game. But in reality, the player is now part of a client/server setup where Stardock provides the servers. If the user chooses “Join” they instead g
[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="4" id="2533014"] Are you saying the whole API of DesktopX 3 is going to be addressable in Elemental?No, just the placement information is really used, but graphically it gives you an amazing amount of power to change to feel of the game. [/quote] Thank you for the clarification. Knowing that skinning the game will be easy makes me happy, even if we don't get all of the DesktopX API at our disposal (which would be incredible). I hop
I have noticed that. I've been following the game for a while and lurking on the boards and the responsiveness is really impressive.
Hello Frogboy, That's really neat. I thought you would have something like that but wasn't sure. Are you saying the whole API of DesktopX 3 is going to be addressable in Elemental? So that I could just drop in a modified .dxpack, scripts and all, and the widgets would be there? I'll try out DesktopX and see what I can come with. Thank you.