Yestin

[quote who="egable" reply="98" id="2587034"] Quoting TheProgress, reply 78Are turns and tiles being used to represent real-world units of measurement? Does 1 tile represent a X meter * Y meter area? Or are they simply "tiles". Same thing for turns: does one turn represent X days, or is it simply a "turn" ? Establishing some real-world units of measurement will help refine the pacing. As it stands right now unit movement is about 2 or 3 times too slow (coming f

Regarding Seasons: In games like Civ or MoM seasons are not represented in part because of scale, but also because the games do not (and do not pretend to) model the seasonal military campaigns that characterized warfare in decentralized (Fuedal) periods like Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. By this I mean the player does not see large peasant forces (on both sides) return for harvest season so that they can avoid famine, leading to a period of small scale skirmi

[quote who="Tridus" reply="132" id="2580705"] When you destroy a caravan, the city it was heading to should lose access to every resource it can't produce itself until the next caravan gets there. Course, that'd also mean a city needs a road to be hooked up to the global resource network, but I'm okay with that too. One of the things caravans originally envisioned doing was moving stuff around (under camp 1 it was both resources and produced goods that were then used as inputs

One thing to remember about building up these large Legions is that the populations in Elemental are much smaller than even Classical Era cities. For example Corinth during the Roman Empire was pushing 750,000 people (an extreme example, but that's just *one* huge city). With populations like that, empires could skim men off for professional armies. Even earlier, the Zhou Dynasty of "China" (I use quotes because the kingdom only spread across a fraction of modern China) had populations above

The whole Ring discussion hinges on whether the mod(e) is going to be tuned for single-player, multiplay or both. In Single-Player many of these ideas would work perfectly, but for multiplay I really think Kygore's plan of having the ring be hard to find in the first place would be best, that allows it to be game-breaking but so rare that you cannot count on it turning up. I'd like to see the possibility of some players going for a "Ring Strategy" where they send out he

I personally wouldn't mind some sort of clarification on the timescale of the turns. In all honesty I was under the impression that each turn was one day or at most one week in previous betas due to the amount of turns it took to train troops and get from place to place. Then heirs show up and suddenly they are aging! I really have to opine that the turns should either have a set standard timescale, or admit to non-concurrent times for different aspects of the game. One

[quote who="Rishkith" reply="31" id="2581509"] Actually these games all had a lot of local resources in addition to the global resources. In Civ4 food is not a global resource, the tiles of irrigation matter to the city they're near and not cities on other continents. Same with all tile improvements actually. MoM is the same way with Nightshade, forests, roads giving bonuses to the city which has them in its tile set. They also had a set of global resources due to the simplicity of their

[quote who="Rishkith" reply="22" id="2580875"]The global resources still sooo don't enthuse me. Regardless I'm actually kind of glad this is the weekend for delay as I've got so much going on I'd be very pressed to test this one. Next week I'll have a lot more time for seeing if quests actually appear, how well magic is working, how stable the game is, and how much I decide I hate implementing a RTS global resource economy in a TBS game.[/quote] Just out of curiosity, h

I searched and was surprised to not find anyone mention the new play by E-mail game Solium Infernum. Like Dominions or MoM you design your leader (an Archfiend competing for rulership of a very hexogonal Hell), but SI takes it a step further as you also choose a "Public Objective", which gives you bonus victory points for completing a condition by the end of the game. Some of the interesting conditions are: Sloth: Make no Demand or Insult the entire game (Solium Infernum is ve

Wow! Great concept, sounds like the features (terraforming, diplomacy) would fit great into what Elemental is going to have. In many ways it sounds like a more epic version of Alpha Centauri. Couple questions: 1. Is magic out? If so, were you thinking of any particular mechanic to replace it (ie, the magic system might be tweaked into something else instead of creating something out of whole cloth)? 2. Aliens, only as 'monsters' or would some races be pl

One thing to think about would is that currently any troops drafted out of city population are permanently out of the workforce. In medieval warfare (actually all warfare until standing armies became commonplace in the early modern era) there would be seaons where the majority of the army (i.e all the non-professional soldiers) would return to their homes to work on the harvest. Without modeling the ebb and flow of marshalling troop numbers (which I would find fun but understand that

I shall let you decide Kyogre, a lot depends on how moddable Elemental is, i.e. if it can be modeled that the Haradrim do not have Orcish troops without taking away Sauron's Orcs. Thinking about it more, your idea of super-loyal vassals with limited free will actually sounds like the best compromise as that would retain Sauron's dominion without creating the "blob" effect.

The banners are looking good! On the Haradrim: The reason I suggest a separation from Mordor is for multiple reasons. Firstly, Mordor's "population" is Orc with Troll and Man minorities, wheras the Southrons were Man, with no other races mentioned as far as my memory goes. This is at least as different as Man and Dwarf or Elf. The second reason is that the Haradrim did not have access to Sauron's magic. Sauron did not provide them with Ringwraiths, Risen

I'm starting to come around on the non-playable nations idea, I think it may be a good idea (for now) to focus on the less esoteric nations in the 3rd age. To keep with Elemental's gameplay I would suggest the game start as early in 3rd age as possible, so that the empires are small (1 to 2 cities with a smattering of hamlets for the bigger nations), in order to keep the game from being very deterministic. One question regarding your vision: Are you going to pre-set the game a

This post is without a doubt the most encouraging post I have ever read from a developer. If you guys stick to your guns with these numbers, I will personally buy 6 copies of Elemental for me and my friends to LAN!

Raven X I support your cause here. 100%. Small groups of characters battling is not War, it's like a D&D adventure. Not that there is anything inherantly wrong with that, but I think part of what made the Age of Wonders games less "epic" was the dramatically low number of units as an artificial way of enhancing the proportionate influence a Hero has on combat. At least in MoM you had a dozen little guys in a squad at times. A big problem with over-abstraction is that it ma

Personally I think as long as the AI is good enough to handle everything on its own, players should have the option to customize as much as is possible. One of the brilliant parts of Medieval Total War 2 was the variation in troop appearances. Watching a couple dozen brightly coloured knights charge down a hill was made much more impressive when each knight had his own random outfit, some knights had pot-helms, some had round shields, etc. One of the biggest tragedies w

[quote who="Raven X" reply="2" id="2397265"] quoting post Thus, if I recruit a "Warband of Fearless Reavers", I might get 50, or I might get 150 of my Fearless Reavers. I don't know until they show up. Sadly I don't think Elemental's unit sizes will be anything near that big. I wish they were though. That would give a much more epic feel to the battles.[/quote] Quoting from a dev journal: If anyone has ever seen Fellowship of t

Regarding resources, I think that nations should have the opportunity to build some sort of marketplace or bazaar that they can use to trade resources. That way the "Iron mine produces 1 iron per turn" could be used but starting positions would not be destiny.

"Re-Activate" Worked for me :D

I think ChongLi hits it on the head with the comment regarding Optimization. Many players enjoy optimizing their play experience, it's like how first person shooter players enjoy shooting monsters in the face. Just as too many monsters gets repetitive, too much micro can be boring. I think the best kind of micromanagement is where you can spend a longer time on fewer, more important acts, as opposed to dozens of meaningless "Build an upgrade to this bank" no-brainers.</

[quote who="Denryu" reply="52" id="2386514"] What, are we running 286 processors? I am pretty sure the AI will be figuring out their moves and will be "waiting" on us meatheads to hit "end turn". I would be severely disappointed if 1 minute was ever required to make its moves. Even late game in a huge world.[/quote] Have you played Dominions 3, or Civilization 4? I'm sure their designers did their best to reduce ai thinking time, but on the largest maps even

I would love to help out in the design/playtest component. I put many hours into playing the various great LOTR mods for Warcraft 3 and Age of Wonders (Shadow Magic). I have a couple questions A few suggestions: Asymetry is essential to any 3rd age LOTR map in my opinion. If it is possible in Elemental, I would love to see a situation where (depending on when you set the map in the timeline) the forces of Sauron are apparently overwhelming