Andorfiend

[quote who="OMG_blackmage" reply="241" id="2698249"]I honestly can't wait to see the amazing games you all come out with, I mean you can criticize bioware so harshly that means you can damn sure do it better. [/quote] I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you can't design and build your own car out of pocket. Does that mean you can't tell the difference between a Yugo and Mercedes Benz, or spot the flaws in them? Does it mean you don't know whether you need a pickup truc

[quote who="Autarkhos" reply="123" id="2682338"] I'm not really certain, to be honest. If they're going to examine it, they have to examine it, and not just add it into the story or gameplay or give it a passing mention. It's not a theme if that happens. I mean, you could claim that all Bioware games an examination of morality, but that's not true when the moral choices are a) Help a person and don't accept a reward, Help a person and accept a reward or c) Murder a person, ravish t

[quote who="Autarkhos" reply="112" id="2681821"] DA and ME are the typical action movies of the RPG world. Utterly forgettable. I couldn't even really identify any themes within the stories for analysis. Compare with Planescape Torment (identity, redemption, immortality etc as well as avoiding as many RPG stereotypes as possible) and Baldur's Gate 2 (becoming the monster, morality, doing evil for the sake of good etc).[/quote] Dragon Age ... I'll buy that. I don't thi

[quote who="OMG_blackmage" reply="69" id="2681541"] 3-D is not ruining games, this is the same damn argument that was literally said when voices were first introduced to movies; they said it will ruin them. The problem is balance; do you want to know why the cost of graphics are so high; try buying some 3-D software and see how much time is spent to get those geometry, Google to programs Inferno, and Houdini and see how much these cost and then you'll see why so much money is put into it

[quote who="Austinvn" reply="72" id="2681279"] The issue is balance, I think. Sovereign A gets lots of melee stats, gets a few useful essence-expending spells which he uses to full benefit (he may not be able to cast the BEST spells, but he can find some use for his essence) - then he spends the rest of the game ignoring essence, further raising his melee stats and hacking things up. Sovereign B gets lot of casting stats, but he doesn't dare use essence-costing spells because it'd

[quote who="VermillionChaos" reply="49" id="2681004"] Well in the case of Grecian-Roman 'borrowing' as long you don't lift the textures and models, but instead just look at them for inspiration it is in no way a copyright violation. Last I heard no one had a copyright on history. [/quote] ... But ... Why wouldn't you just look to actual Greek and Roman styles/weapons/troops/tactics/clothing for inspiration, rather than what another game did from those

Bioware. I've just been thinking about them quite a bit. They do have their little 'formula' of starting location -> 4 areas to explore -> End Sequence. It does get kind of obvious. There are interviews with the Bioware founders btw where they mention they've done research on how many locations people can really get involved with in a game before they stop caring, but still, shake it up a little guys. Dragon Age. I really enjoyed it, on my first play through. I've never

I was playing MoM earlier today and it occured to me that my favorite little feature in the game is the Surveyor. For anyone who doesn't know (or remember) what this is, you could click on the surveyor and mouseover a tile and it would tell you the maximum potential population size for a city built on that spot as well as terrain related gold and production bonuses for builing there. It was very, very useful and as far as I can recall unique to MoM. From what I know of Elemental's cit

[quote who="the_Monk" reply="47" id="2673580"] Right. I can control every Mac/PC and server in my business from almost anywhere in the world and very rarely now actually need to sit at my desk, but it's only an "over-priced shiny mediocre device"? What kind of crack are you smoking.......lol...I think I should get me some of that...... [/quote] Errr... But couldn't you do that from a $300 Acer? Or any Smartphone? Perhaps I missed something, but there isn't

The I-pad is (from what I gather) a superior consumption device. Which it ought to be, given that it's a purpose designed tool for consumption. That doesn't somehow make it superior in general to a general purpose device with vastly more capability. It's basically a really shiny dumb terminal with no wires. That not new. It's not a bad thing either. But it's not the future of computing because you can't particularly compute on it. If it fun? I bet it is. Is it useful? I'm sure it can

[quote who="Aractain" reply="44" id="2667228"] I'm still waiting for a good x-com game, not that FPS thing where all you see is shooting and graphic presentations. While AlienShock might be a good game, its not X-Com. I too want an X-Com with better graphics - what I don't want is a switch to super detailed completly static enviroments that can't be destroyed. Every wall, every door, every shelf, every console must be destroyable! Random layout of tactical missions is also req

All I desire from graphics is clairity of communication. I don't want to learn 12,000 crappy symbols to comprehend what I'm looking at in some ancient style asci graphics mess anymore, but conversely I don't want photorealism if that means the only way I can tell my lvl 1 peons from my hyperelite rangers is because they are wearing slightly different subdued insignias on their drab camo uniforms, which I'm looking at from a mile away and overhead therough jungle canopoy. Gameplay trum

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="400" id="2662566"] In Medieval times, however, I simply don't know ... [/quote] In a pre-gunpowder world fixed defensive structures like castles were basically unconquerable without massive advantages in manpower or some other kind of factor. That was why sieges could last for months or years, because no credible attack could be mounted. In a world with magic? Who knows.

You know I think I misunderstood the adjacency rule when I started reading this thread, you guys are talking about buildings that need to be built next to a special resource tile, yes? What I was thinking was something Frogboy said about some structures acting as add-ons to other structures. So for example if I have a barracks in a city (and can only build one per city) then if there are, say 5 different structures that can be built next to a barracks but only 2 of them can</

[quote who="Tourresh" reply="13" id="2631674"] As we get closer to the content addition stage I realized that I'll soon be needing a lot of sprites. There's not that many good futuristic sprites out there and I can't count on just ripping all the graphics from other games. If anyone out there can draw or knows someone who can please let me know. [/quote] I seem to recall seeing huge pages of sprites for another modding community. One sec... Ah yes.

[quote who="SirPleb" reply="389" id="2661040"] Instead of just putting the whole game into auto-resolve, when a player chooses a strategic-focus game mode a number of aspects of the game must change. The mechanics of combat don't just get auto-resolved, they get replaced by different mechanics which are quicker and simpler. But still provide interesting decision points and a need for strategic planning. Skills and spells which apply to rich tactical combat are replaced by

Heh. I remember when MoM first came out how awesome we thought the graphics were. "Look! You can see individual troops in a unit!" Times have changed.

SirPleb had an interesting comment above about defender advantages and it sparked me towards thinking about various defensive tactics and how they might be employable in game. Common defensive tactics usually center around the fact that the defender (usually) picks the place of battle, so he gets to use terrain to his advantage, might have superior intelligence, use ambush, build fortifications, etc. In the Civ games a unit could fort up, digging into a place and enjoying a de

[quote who="SirPleb" reply="385" id="2660376"]It looks like Elemental will follow the usual approach where one party initiates combat by moving onto a world tile occupied by another party. I think that the invading party should be able to terminate the attack at any time when it is their turn to act, and that this should return their remaining units to the tile from which they initiated the attack. The defending party should either have no retreat option at all, or if they have one

MoM Gameplay is still 8 kinds of awesome, the only thing lacking by todays standards and the graphics and the AI. In it's time the Ai was damned impressive. Compared to what we can do now? Not so much.

Elemental armour only applies to, I think, chaos and nature foes/magic. So Iron skin is generally better, EA is situationally better.

[quote who="Nick-Danger" reply="8" id="2659511"] There should be no intrinsic bad choices. Yes, there should be bad choices, but situational -- in situation X it's bad to build a market, or bad to not build a market. Building a market being the best choice in all situations is not desirable, it's bad game design. [/quote] I'm not in the beta and don't have the cash to buy my way in, so I don't know the specifics, but in general... It's not bad

[quote who="John_Hughes" reply="5" id="2659490"] "Also, get the market as quick as you can!" And this is what we want to avoid. The "must have quickly" in any Build order... [/quote] Why is this something to be avoided? There are always going to be bad choices available including "Do nothing and hit the turn button until an NPC gobbles you up like trail mix." *shrug* Any game with a tech tree is going to have trees that come into play in different priorities

This kind of touches on why I thought the "all captured cities immediately become your race" idea is a terrible one. In MoM it is highly advantageous to have cities from multiple races because no one race can do everything. Elves make the best ranged attackers but can't build roads or clear pollution. Humans get Paladins, engineers, magicians and priests but no fliers. Gnolls make great shock troops but are terrible city builders. Halflings farm like mad and have the awesome sl

That sounds like some whackiness to me. My saves work just fine. @Warren Steffan thanks for the link! Even though I already had both MoM and Dosbox I never did get it set up right. My Dos-fu is ancient and rusted into uselessness. It was worth paying $6 to get it all done by someone else. Now I just need an extra 10 hours in every day so I can play properly. [e digicons]X([/e] About Phantom Warriors. They can kill you dead, they do a lot of damage and your defenses are