Not yet been able to try it out. Does sound interesting though; I never played Dwarf Fortress but I have heard a lot of good things about it, especially when it comes to procedural generation of ingame elements.
Cool thing, thought it didn´t work? Care to elaborate what is hardcoded and what can be altered and what you actually did now to alter the generator? I just had a look at named XML file but I only get a very rough overview, cause my XML skills are.. well... nonexistent. ;-) PS: Do I get it correctly that there is (yet) no possibility to create different name-generation rules for different factions?
[quote]Yeah, I'm ashamed now for linking to that.[/quote] And rightfully so. ;-) But ok, now I have a simple Visual Basic program that reads in the lists I have defined, puts them into an Arraylist and randomly puts together a name from e.g. list A and list B, standing for the beginning and the ending of the name. I got two lists with 83 and 80 components respectively. That gives 6640 possible combinations. Still I got components or even whole names repeati
[quote]How.... exciting.[/quote] I really just never have had that problem. Perhaps I don´t even read all the names? I dunno, I only know that this hasn´t yet bothered me. But ok, so now I have tried around a little with visual basic to make a simple random name generator. It´s not hard. But. As I expected, programming this thing is only the smallest part of the work. 1. Letters as components The simplest approach, randomly pic
[quote]Ah but it's easier than that! They just need to present the forums with a "City Name Contest"[/quote] I doubt that it would me less work to manage such a contest than it would be to do it themselves. ;) But, sure, it´s totally ok to bring up such topics, why not.
I don´t wanna take that away from you, it´s cool with me. It´s just that I don´t look for this in a game like Elemental. I even thought about it a little; sure, in, say, a classical RPG, I want a good story. But that´s because in an RPG playing at least somehow along the story is an integral part of gameplay. In a game like Elemental on the other hand, a good background story is not needed, it is not part of the gameplay. What is part of th
Hm. I don´t know. It´s ok that you are interested in the history of Elementals world, I mean, it´s not my issue, but I personally have no interest in that. I don´t even have the slightest interest in premade faction leaders, I never play them. I also never played premade factions in Master of Magic or in Master of Orion, and I don´t really have interest in a premade story. I want to play and create my own story. And accordingly I wouldn´
Ok, sure, a simple list of names could be pretty easy to implement. But even though that would perhaps be something between 4 and 15+ hours of work, depending on how thoroughly that would be thought through. If you really dug into the matter, did research on citynames in different languages for all of the factions, and if there perhaps also some problem with integrating these schemes would arise, than this could well amount to a day of work for a programmer and an additional two day
I must say that I never encountered that problem because I always give unique names anyway. But, yeah, sure, if the generator sucks, make it better. Someday. In my opinion, that´s one of the less pressing issues...
@Alfdaur: Welcome to the club. ;-) No honestly, with all this anger-venting, why not spreading bliss instead? *g*
@MxM111: Right, Lujan said it. If someone doesn´t even get a glimpse of the game possibly being fun in the future, if someone couldn´t even imagine it becoming fun to play... what else could you say to this guy? Something like "Perhaps wait some millenia, surely a wonder will happen some time."? Apart from that, Brad seemed to act quite emotionally, so I wouldn´t try to see a higher logical reason for his locking of the threads or his "Then perhaps better move on."
It is just at this point, I wonder, if it is even smart for Stardock to spend resources on trying to improve the dead horse (I am a bit exaggerating here) and instead focus everything on expansion, which will be free anyway for most of the elemental players. Please Stardock, prove me wrong with patch 1.3! As I have understood it, Brad just thinks that people have the right to get a game that is fun for them, regardless of having the expansions or not.<br /
@MxM111: Ok, in this case I apologize to you. Thing is... I REALLY am no fanboy, I never liked fandom as in "fanatical devotion". But when I look into this forum (Elemental - General), I see about 2/3 of the topics are some kind of rant about the failures of Elemental. We all do see this failures, and I am pretty damn sure that the developers in special do see them. In my opinion we have long past reached the point at where such rants could be seen a
I don´t know if this posting is a good idea, but I just felt I had to say this. I really do understand how some people may feel disappointed about Elemental not being the game they had envisioned. It happens when you really anticipated something. I was disappointed with Master of Orion 3, I´m disappointed with there being no Wizardry 9 or Might & Magic 11. But being disappointed is one thing. The quantity of rantings about how bad EWoM was and ho
Well, most of the things you mentioned have to do with "interactivity with the gameworld", as I would love to have it. When it comes to epicness, I think differently though. Often read people demanding more epic elements, explaining how they had pictured the game to feature massive battles between huge armies, etc.. I´ve never wanted something like that for EWOM, nor have I expected it at any time. One aspect, and in this respect it´s nice that you mentioned
[quote]If we as a community push them to make one unplanned change, we take away resource from two. Thus, we must ask ourselves is having them spend the time to redesign and reimplement entire systems to allow for co-op multiplayer or just making the game feel epic worth them being able to redesign tactical combat or the economic model. I think, if we are thinking carefully about it, the answer is no.[/quote] I guess it´s not that simple, but in the end the outcome is the sam
@IronKaiser: Or perhaps he simply impaled himself by accident with his own sword and was cursed and bound for his clumsiness? ;-)
In general, I even don´t mind arcane research points at all, not at the current state of the spellsystem. I simply don´t need it. Yeah, sure, teleport is more than nice, as everybody else has already pointed out, and some of the other spells can be helpfull too. But with, say, a dungeoneer (?) sovereign and some decent weapons, roaming monsters are no real threat, and at this point the AI in general doesn´t make me need spells to win. Most importantly
@LoA: In this case it´s not simply the art that would have to be removed, it would be the whole mechanic. As I had suggested, this spoiling/replenishing could simply be replaced with some "guardian of the realm" spell, or something. @Glowing_Ember: I haven´t read the book and haven´t even begun to play the campaign; the background lore thus doesn´t concern me.
[b]@Frogboy[/b] [quote]I think the reason people think the Empires are evil was because of the art style. It's something I've requested changed in Fallen Enchantress.[/quote] No. I don´t mind the art style. The one thing that really carries this sense of evilness is the spoiling of the land. It is as Tridus put it ironically on the last page: "Here we have people who corrupt the land in an obviously evil and twisted way. I can't possibly imagine why anybody w
[b]@Frogboy[/b] [quote]5. Map enhancements.[/quote] What kind of map enhancements are we talking about here? Would be very interested to hear something more specific!
My point is that people are not simply good or evil. They sometimes do "good" or "evil" things. For this to be believable, there has to be a reason to act accordingly. If spoiling the landscape doesn´t give you anything, why should you do it? Just for flavour? On the other hand, if there was some kind of reward for spoiling the landscape, it would be much more believable that there are people who would do this. So my point doesn´t necessarilly have anything
[quote]i think a gameplay focus is more useful than speculating on the nuances of a mythology that isn't really our to know.[/quote] Indeed. And pardon me, but I don´t need ideas of how I could interpret that what the game shows me to help with immersion. Either the Empire spoils the land or it doesn´t. If it doesn´t, just leave that aspect out of the game and replace it with a "guardian spell" that gives you the combat bonus that you get when fighting
Well, the only thing, think I already mentioned that somewhere, that irritates me about the Empire is this exact destroying of nature while themselves relying on nature. If the Empire nourished on the pure essence of corruption, or some funky thing like that, then it would make sense, but themselves needing normal food and normal other ressoruces, deliberately destroying the land seems rather suicidal and erratic.
Dude, I think you have a serious issue with classical highscores, am I right? ;-) Apart from that, some reward system sounds cool, but a.) It also only goes so far. In the end you will have earned all rewards and the game is "dim" again. b.) This could be extremely hard to balance. The better you got at the game, the more often you would win, the the better your sovereign would get, making it constantly easier for you to win. So I don´t really know if it would rea