hairrorist

It's a mock-up...

Erm, this isn't exactly correct. The only way to expand the influence around a city is to construct improvements that grant bonus influence, or select a faction with the "Influential" perk.

And this will somehow impede the salves of Civilization? I was responding to your statement that Elemental had nothing to fear from the impending release of Civilization. In any case, by all means, purchase Elemental. That increases the likelihood that SD will somehow be able to salvage something from this fiasco. But do not purchase Elemental expecting something that is fun to play or anything resembling a 'good game.'

Because the largest online distributor by a factor of 10, the service that has now eclipsed retail sales, is such a restrictive sales environment?

@ Wintersong You are correct. I misspoke. What I -should- have said was that "it is a known factor according to official Stardock polls, polls that would by nature attract the most sympathetic audience, that the majority of Elemental owners are disappointed with the state of the game. The developers have repeatedly apologized for delivering us this mess. However, there is still a chance that given SD's history of aggressive patching and community in

That would be accurate. The game is currently unplayable. It might, one day, in four to six months, be a game that offers a reasonable amount of enjoyment. Currently, and I think I speak for the majority of Elemental owners, the game is rubbish with a slight chance of redemption. I would wait and see what it looks like next year.

Some units get a counterstrike bonus. Di d it happen during a counterstrike?

Yes, we should all put faith in these magical patches, because the ones we have seen so far have been such winners.

I love how people still line up to to defend SD as they continue to shovel shit out their door as quickly as possible. Jharii--no harm done by releasing patches that break the game even more? You're encouraging developers and publishers to continue this trend of releasing broken products with a path-it-later philosophy. They've completely lost any credibility with me at this point. I'm even starting to think that GCII's quality was simply an acci

I kind of like the idea that shard possession is so crucial. Those kind of elements force conflicts to flare up.

This is just getting ridiculous. I might be done with the game. There's clearly a lack of real QA, which pisses me off, because it shows an arrogant disregard for their customers.

I haven't checked yet, but -maybe- if you are playing on the fastest game setting with a sovereign with bonus arcane research, but if you're playing on that speed setting then tech research is amped up as well. I would also contend that even your level 4 Fire Elemental summon is essentially useless against multifigure units. Its ranged ability is not very great, and it will die to a single hit from 4 or 8 figure warhammers. You get more leverage out of Rokot

Level 4 spells by turn 30 is not possible. Look at the number of required research points. Its in the XML files.

There are several problems with that theory. Firstly, by your own admission, it requires a high degree of fortune for optimal performance. If you've played strategy games in competitive settings before, you know that the way to win is by employing methods that produce stable and relatively predictable results... essentially the difference between playing a game of Texas Hold 'Em vs. playing cee-low dice in the alley. The key to success in strategic gaming hinges on your abil

That's the plan! We should release the much expanded version .70 soon after 1.08 hits. Also, in other news, we have a 3d modeler and animator onboard, the talented Foxunit!

Could you please add Unique Weapons by Kenata and Hairrorist? The previous Updated Weapons mod by Kenata has evolved into this project.

I'm -still- awaiting an ETA on our promised trog porn.

Fantastic work, Foxunit! Would you be interested in working with me and Kenata on the Unique Weapons mod? We need someone with graphical expertise to model the new weapons, and to create animations for all of the new abilities we've added. Send me a PM or hop on stardock's IRC if you're interested.

Evil: Check the original post, but in short, yes, the AI uses the abilities. Guys. me and Kenata are working hard on .70, which has gotten quite massive. We're just a few abilities away from a new version, this time full of extra awesome. Warning: There is a bug in the current version. The ability "Disrupt," attached to the Karrazwhatever swords behaves... unpredictably. This should be rectified on next release.

I don't think its as simple as that. In a competitive multiplayer scenario, focusing on anything other than Warfare/Conquest will be a huge gamble--that your neighbor is also playing pacifist and is not going to leap at the opportunity to double his empire in size in the early game. An early capital conquest is much more economically valuable than the improvements unlocked with the early civics tree. There -has- to be a mechanism in place to prevent a repetitive metagame.</p

I think that when MP is enabled it will become more clear why something like this is necessary.

@Frogboy Me, Kenata, and Gnilbert have been noticing some... irregularities in the [calculate] function, most noticeably when you attempt to decrease an enemy stat using AdjustUnitStat after dealing damage, or just generally applying negative modifiers to statistics. If you want to look into this, I can PM you some examples, but I think it might be most productive if you had someone on the team actually write some script to do this and take note of the results.

Over the last couple days I've noticed several threads mentioning how exploitable the tech tree is. It's far too easy to focus on warfare and win the game quickly and decisively. The grandaddy of TBS games, Civilization, resolved this problem by weaving civics and military technologies together in one contiguous tree. Now, Elemental uses a pretty slick system of its own, and I actually like this implementation of technology more than Civ's. I like the randomnes

@Boltcutter Yeah, DomIII's combat system is awesome. It really strokes my grognard the right way... wow that sounds wrong. Something on that scale would be ideal in a dream game, but frankly I'd just be happy with what I and others have outlined above. A simplistic system, but one that is infinitely more nuanced than what we currently have.

Icecrown, this is truly great work! One thing you might consider is removing the dissipating smoke effect that occurs at the tail end of some of the animations. It drives me crazy to have to wait until every last particle has resolved until I can move or attack. I think this quick fix would catapult this mod from Great to Legendary status.