TCores

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="13" id="2628145"] No it's not, you continue to have the normal channel for giving feedback (the new ideas forum), plus another channel that is the CSM. The CSM has the advantage for CCP that in theory comments will be filtered so only "good/interesting/prioritary/..." will reach them, which I think it's pretty good when you have up to 300.000 people giving comments. But it's not as if the CSM is the only channel now. And it's a pity the CSM stops

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="1" id="2627782"]When I get a chance, I'll try to put a side by side comparison. [/quote] Is elemental still using shader model 2? Or have you moved on to using 3 (the 9.0c stuff?)

An update for those who missed the dev journal: dungeons are back to being tile based, turn based.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="19" id="2627786"]Yea, originally the battles were continous turns, pixel-based ala Baldur's Gate. The problem users pointed out on the forums and we eventually agreed with is that it's kind of bait and switch. [/quote] It is a shame that none of us actually got to try out the tactical battles from an RTS standpoint, we might have had different opinions. Thank you for the update.

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="11" id="2627628"] This point means that your "In EVE, I'd have to petition some random person who may not actually care about anything I have to say to maybe mention something I'm concerned about instead of something he (and if you see that picture, it's all men) thought was important to him and his guild/thing?" doesn't make any sense. [/quote] The crux of my point is the intermediation of the channel of feedback res

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="6" id="2627244"] There's a lot of people that put a lot of hours into Eve (the same with many other MMORPG, like high level raiding guilds in WoW or things like that). That's their choice, they are free to do it. I'm sure there's people in these boards that would love to go to Stardock to chat with the Elemental team and try to give them solutions to the game issues. [/quote] I should hope that you had understood I was expressin

[quote quoting="post"]Every six months, elections are held in EVE Online to elect nine players to the Council of Stellar Management (CSM). And in an appropriate parallel to the kind of tactics players deploy every day in EVE Online, these seats are won through rigorous campaigning and corporate politics. The elected player representatives then work with the rest of EVE’s 330,000 players to develop a list of issues to be discussed when developer CCP flies them to its headquarter

[quote]Elemental's backstory isn't particularly original. However, I'd argue that Elemental's setting is quite original.[/quote] I agree.

What's under question is not whether there will be dungeons, but whether we'll get ones even capable of being modded to do what the OP suggests without being kludged.

Having a transition out to a separate map may not be on the table. We could see it implemented in the tactical mode of the game. That's pretty cool (because we get real time) but we should not be to surprised to find the dungeons are rather simple affairs, consisting of singular or stringed together encounters, and not multi-level constructs.

A "small" amount of essence obviously, not the crippling amount that a city costs.

Another option is to use essence to form a link to each and every mana node, "opening" it for your usage despite being far away. This means your access to magic is still essence controlled, but has nothing to do with your mana reserve - mana magic being the realm of the magicians and not channelers. In fact I really like this idea as well.

There may not be any off-map, multilevel dungeons. Last time I asked (a month or so back) Frogboy was not keen on the idea of multiple "maps" a la age of wonder. I guess I should say that "multiple map" means support for dungeons, because transitioning into a dungeon is a change of "map," unless dungeons are entirely done in the tactical mode or another game mode. https://forums.elementalgame.com/371166/page/3/#

[quote]And it doesn't diminish the "specialness" of Essence in any way but encourages it (if you plan to do anything related to Essence, be it building cities in forsaken lands or to be able to cast the most simple spell). [/quote] I think you may have misread what I wrote. Having sovereigns the only ones with control over magic does not diminish the specialness of Essence. I'm pretty sure we agree there. What I was saying was the corollary of that: A flood of NPCs will

I don't agree, because I don't see essence as mana cap being a core mechanic. I view it as "something you could do with essence, I guess," which explains why we have completely different views. I won't try to persuade you that it should not be a core mechanic, but for other people: Why would Essence be linked to mana? That would imply that all casters have essence, and we know that's not the case from the lore, and would really diminish the "specialness" of Esse

[quote who="Stmorpheus" reply="1" id="2621376"]i like your idea, but what about this. what if instead of spending level up points on magic related stuff, you spent essence. say for instance. you have 10 essence. you could spend it on max mana - every essence point you spend increase your max mana by .1 Permanently. Mana regen - every essence point you spend increases your regen rate by .05 permanently power amplification - every es

The big problem with being able to access spells at all is that it requires you to have essence. If you want to cast spells at all, you'll basically be giving up additional cities. (see Frogboy's thread). The game requires you to fight in order to gain more essence, as you need to level your sovereign in risky combats (and this need to level your sovereign has also meant our soverigns almost always teleport back to their base if they lose a fight, rewarding suicide behaviour.) I

The real fix is delinking essence from mana cap, and tying it as a flat modifier to spell power. 1 + (essence/100) * damage etc, exploring alternate one-time essence gains, and alternate XP mechanisms.

Supposing that it is not, and you're actually suggesting these changes be made to the game, I'll add my comments. one time additions to essence - destroying a magical item and absorbing its essence Destroying a magic *artifact* of extreme value - killing a magical beast Legendary Monster and absorbing its essence - It should not

[quote quoting="post"]I think there is somewhat of a Consensus to Remove Essence from level gain entirely. There is a smaller Consensus to have all essence be equal and slowly gained over time at an equal rate (among all Sovereigns) -> meaning no sources of essence, just the essence that your Soverign gets over time. [/quote] I do not know where you came up with the idea that there was "consensus," but I am certainly not p

[quote quoting="post"]I read recently that one of the "praises" of HTML5 is that it would remove the need for video add-ons, such as "flash". I guess that means that with html5 the video code is embedded within the program. the question; I wonder if you can still turn the video content off in order not to play those obnoxious video advertisements. I think the new FF is HTML5 based, maybe a couple of you would respond. [/quote] I do not know to whom the rest of y

[quote quoting="post"]I didn't want to make a journal entry on this but would rather talk directly to you guys on what we have in mind. We don't like that players have to use so much essence to build up cities right now. Instead, the plan is to require essence to still revive land but the land will spread out more quickly (it'll become more apparent why in the full 3D engine). So while you will still need to spend essence if you want to spread across large swaths o

Is this for a mod you're making?

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="18" id="2620669"] The tool doesn't look very impressive (to me anyway). That's why I kept pooping on it. The map editor and the tile editor "demo" a lot better whereas the effects editor just looked boring. [/quote] Frogboy, it depends on who you are trying to impress. If you want to impress modders, getting an article out there on how moddable Elemental is (with videos) would be really cool. If you need, get one

Thanks for the update, Hughes and Nick. I do hope they fix this. Every time the game gets patched, the firewall checks to see if it's allowed to patch again. I don't think it doesn't has anything to do with fetching the .dll you mention. This also happens with Sins - seems like something in the network code. There's no "hang up if no one answers" it's just "keep dialing forever." Having to kill the power to my hard drive on a regular basis is going to kill it