UmbralAngel

This sounds really great... but I'm surprised you took this long to add it in to the game. Having played Moo2, this seems like the most basic feature to add to a TBS game that allows you to design units. (both upgrade and traits). The trait system is basically like the special systems in Moo2, while the shields, weapons and engines more closely mirrors the armor and weapon system of Elemental. I suggest you consider adding traits that give active abilities in c

I haven't played elemental so I can't make a direct comparison, but I feel like this new tech tree concept is a bad direction to take. I am a big fan of MoM and AoW and neither of those games even have global tech... its all per-city. I think that having global tech is fine... but the civilization route of researching a building, then constructing it is a bit dreary. One of the cool things about MoM is that you can gain technology by

The DS just doesn't have enough games on it to be worth upgrading. Besides the Castlevania games, i have been pretty disappointed with most of the releases. Most of the games might as well have been game boy advance games... and the games that do use touch are usually gimmicky or annoying because they force you to use touch. I see the same thing happening with the 3DS, and I wish they would focus on making it easier for developers

@Tridus They didn't merge Mythic into Bioware. They have 2 separate offices in completely different parts of the country. They simply renamed Mythic to "Bioware Mythic" for two reasons. One because they were sharing resources, (Mythic is doing the PvP element for The Old Republic) and two, because they think they can convince people to play Mythic games if it has the word Bioware on it. So i don't really see how the name change will have any effe

i think that you will have to wait and see troglyte. I am sure that Gamestop knows that Impulse's success is dependent upon their business model, changing the business model would hamper their new acquisition and prevent them from re-couping the purchase cost.

Looks like a much needed improvement over the old system. Not sure why plate-mail protects against blunt damage, IMO should protect vs Cutting. Are you forgoing historical accuracy for the sake of a rock-paper-scissors type of system?

Why elemental is bad: poor game design Why elemental will never be fixed: the core game design has not been revised Enchantress has some potential, because its actually being designed/redesigned by people who (theoretically) have passion/talent for design. However, the constraints of the engine may limit them, we will see. I am not trying to flame or generalize or imply that people who enjoy playing E:WoM that th

This is a change that would be trivial to make.... so i'm guessing they are leaving it out for now because it is low priority. It would take more work for them to add this to the options screen than to add it to the code... so yeah it should come along one day.

Okay, besides the fact that you can get a few TB/mo for 10$ I don't really know how much bandwidth costs are, but i wish i had the option of paying the bandwidth costs and paying a smaller % cut for my revenues

I have noticed a trend... its not particularly hard to see. Apple app store: 30% cut Amazon Books: 30% cut Steam (steamworks): ??? cut Impulse store: 30% cut, or 15% if you sell through your own website Android store: 30% cut Everyone else: probably 30% cut too... New Impulse microtransactions: 30%. PayPal: 5% cut + 5 cents for microtransactions, 2.9% + 30 cents for standard transaction As an indie game dev

[quote] How gay do they think my sons are ?[/quote] Maybe its time you pulled your sons aside and had a talk. You could be surprised! [e digicons]>_>[/e] [e digicons]:smitten:[/e]

[quote who="nates1984" reply="24" id="2905376"]Base HP lowered from 10 to 2 for trained units. This is the only one I'm worried about. The rest of the changes seem pretty nice though.[/quote] They also changed minimum squad size to 4 (except for giant units i would assume). This makes the combat closer to Master of Magic's system, which is awesome!

its basic economics. They realized its cheaper to import oil now when its cheap and hang onto their own oil until oil starts running out and then they will have more oil to sell at a higher price. This is a strategy that will play out over many decades... i don't see oil running out any time soon. However, prices are definitely going to go up in the US for a few months. I predict we will hit $4 / gallon this summer. It will then fall off before el

I hope you even read the PM I sent you Frogboy (when you announced you were hiring) :P

This is just a guess but... From what they said, I gather they will be licensing out the engine for Elemental once they spend a bunch of effort making it accessible to other programmers. I suspect that if you are going to sell a game using the engine they would want some sort of cut, but if you are making a free game they may let you use the engine for free. Its too early to tell but i would say it has a good chance of happening.

AI for games is probably different than solving equations. I would say that no game AI today actually "learns" anything, as that is too much work. Instead the programmer will just create some basic objectives and concerns for the AI and it will make decisions accordingly. Now you could write an AI that is connected to the internet, monitors every game your players play, (especially in multiplayer), and have the AI look through all of the replays a

if you wanted another example, compare the original diablo 3 screenshots to the most recent ones... you will see they made the lighting darker to keep with the fan's expectations from the older games.

[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="9" id="2885859"]Lol. You know, every time I play FfH, it makes me want to play Elemental. But when I play Elemental, all I want to play is FfH. I could elaborate on what this means, but I won't. I do think that it's promising for Elemental, though.[/quote] I think that it means that there aren't any really good Fantasy TBS games to play, especially not recent ones.

I would like to point out three things (assuming its real time) 1) Its not too difficult to make the initiative system optional 2) It make multiplayer a better experience since you never have to spend too much time waiting for opponents 3) It adds a hole new dimension to strategy, which makes the AI programming much more complicated. This could lead to weaker AI.

I believe they indicated that they would branch Elemental into 2 games, The current version and Enchantress. While a large amount of effort is being put on adding features to Enchantress, some of those features will go into Elemental as well, and Elemental might also get some exclusive additions in the future. So i would say yes more stuff will be added, including quests, spells, etc, but probably not for a while until they get all of the basics fixed.

Any system that uses a serial key is DRM as far as I am concerned... same for any other kind of authentication/activation. So I agree with the OP that it may be a reversal of previous stance to include such things for their game. However, they also had to amend their bill of rights thing after they released a game that wasn't finished. So its not like it should be a surprise at this point... at least they care.

My suggestion would be to take advantage of every aspect of the game to make quests. So lets say a farmer is down on his luck and needs some food to survive. You have 3 options: Ignore the farmer, and he ends up moving and setting up a farm in a random other kingdom. Give the farmer 5 food so that he can survive the winter, and he will send his strongest son to fight as a champion for you. Kidnap his weakest son, and force him to set up a farm in your k

I haven't used Lua but I have used Python quite a bit. One feature I know that Python has is its modularity. If used with Elemental, it would be extremely easy to integrate multiple mods together. I am not sure how this works with Lua, but this should be an important consideration. I personally think that Python is very read/write... thats why I like it so much. I am a C++ gamedev so obviously no problems with C++ option.

[quote who="Sythion" reply="7" id="2879612"] Nah. It's the points that are broken. Specifically, they consider lots of shit units > a few strong units. They are just added attack + defense values, which is just not going to work.[/quote] This is exactly the kind of thing my proposal would fix... the AI would be able to swap out 10 weak and obsolete units for 1 new strong unit, which would make it more competitive. Only for units that hadn't been in ba

I have an idea for how an AI could easily be made more intelligent as a placeholder until its done properly: The AI can cheat, but not by getting free resources and seeing the whole map. I think that the AI should be allowed to make up for bad planning by trading in buildings, units, and spells and getting new ones out of the mix. This solves the whole Starcraft-like tech tree problem, where the AI has to plan for every possibility. So lets imagine an AI