FadedC

[quote who="Melamine" reply="679" id="2781149"] Quoting FadedC, reply 677 I was talking about Steam going out business and they have said that will unlock all games if this happens (and if somehow they didn't I'm sure Firaxis would release a patch that did). Steam going out of business is the only scenario in which I would need the security of a physical copy, otherwise I can use the electronic one. Other scenarios include your Steam account

[quote who="Melamine" reply="676" id="2781120"] Quoting FadedC, reply 675 In terms of security it means you have a physical copy of the game so that if Steam goes out of business and you get a new computer you won't lose the game like white elk described happening to his purely digital music. Actually, you do lose access to the game if Steam deactivates your account, game license, or otherwise locks you out. You not only need Steam to downloa

[quote who="Melamine" reply="670" id="2781084"] Stored electronic copy? Are you referring to the physical copy? Either way, this copy is still 100% Steam-dependent, so it offers none of the security of a traditional physical backup copy. [/quote] I realized that was a little unclear while I was writing it. I meant the copy that's kept on Steam that I can download at any point later in addition to the physical copy. In terms of security it means you have a physica

[quote who="WhiteElk" reply="654" id="2780889"] Physical or digital copy makes no difference. If you uninstall steam you can't play Civ5. If you uninstall Impulse you can still play Elemental. It matters not what happens with Impulse. Players can still play their games even if Impulse goes defunct. With Civ5, players must run steam and do a "systems check". If all systems are go, then the player can play the game.

[quote who="WhiteElk" reply="623" id="2780475"] "Imaginary nightmare scenarios" ?!? I've lost music due to Yahoo and MSN decisions. They both dropped their music service, so I lost all the music when the PC they were registered on suffered a fatal crash. I am once bitten twice shy on this issue. Both Yahoo and Microsoft are big players with their own reputations to protect. That changed nothing. And no law suits has gotten my mus

[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="624" id="2780479"] So, you're saying Steam isn't a digital distribution service? Nice try (actually, it was terrible, but whatever). [/quote] Go back and read what I actually said. I never said that Steam isn't a digital distribution service. I said I was talking about the use of steam as a copyright method for games. This is a completely seperate issue.

[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="621" id="2780450"] GoG.com just did this very same thing. Anyone who doesn't happen to have their purchased game downloaded right now, at this moment cannot access their game at all. This happened without warning. Now, I don't care if this is just a stunt/joke, or if it's a legitimate going out of business notice. The fact remains that your purchased games are being held hostage at this point in time.<br /

Well I have to say that it took me awhile to figure out why people were concerned about Steam and most of the concerns do seem a little paranoid. I can understand objecting to technical errors in connecting keeping you from playing (though my understanding is that for Civ 5 you only need to connect once). But feeling that they are going to suddenly hold all of your games hostage unless they start paying you money seems unrealistic in the extreme. Can you imagine the lawsuits and PR? There see

Seems like a pretty inconsiderate marketing stunt if it means that customers don't have access to things they have purchased. Many might just never come back not realizing it came back on later.

So I did finally decide to pick it up and I haven't tried the expansion to the original campaign yet (the one that requires you to start from scratch) but I did quickly play through the other 2 campaigns. They were ok but overall I wasn't that impressed. Both campaigns are just a small number of fights, one focuses on boss monsters and one focuses on regular enemy heroes with wierd terrain modifiers. Nothing all that different then we've seen in the previous game and they were over fairly qui

[quote who="James009D" reply="40" id="2778344"]MOOII was... is still one of my most favorite strategy games to date. I don't understand why nobody can successfully re-invent it. Don't get me wrong, I love the Gal Civ 2 series, especially with all the expansions, but it's still missing some of the inginueity, charm, uniqueness, and technologies that MOOII had. I cannot help wonder why no one can make a good sequel to MOOII. It may be due to some of the "best practices" in programmin

So the manual finally answers my question about how research beekers are generated. It's interesting that it's completely tied to population now and not in any way related to gold/trade. It will change the game a lot to be able to have gold to spend without having to give up research to do so, as well as by potentially being able to suffer through crippling upkeep for awhile without science grinding to a halt.

I'm toying with the idea of picking it up. I'm not sure that I feel like replaying the whole armored princess campaign in order to experience the new content there though, and it's unclear if the other 2 little mini campaigns (more like challenge modes) are worth the purchase price.

[quote who="Jingseng" reply="4" id="2776836"] Quoting FadedC, reply 2 Well it does sound like a whole lot more then usually goes on in the first 25 turns of Civilization (and probably MoM too? It's been awhile). Traditionally a big part of 4x games is hitting next turn while you wait for things to be done. You get nowhere comparing games to other games. You need to compare elemental to itself. Where it was and where it

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="43" id="2777169"]AoW I was there first game they made, and that the others are better shows they learned from the experience. However, that does not mean it was a beta. It was its own game (as a note, even Shadow Magic has a number of unresolved bugs). [/quote] Well I meant it was beta in the sense that it was an incomplete and buggy game that was released before it was anywhere close to being ready. Not beta in the sense that it was a literal beta tes

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="41" id="2776838"] AoW I is a seprate game from the other two. AoW:SM is a stand alone expansion for AoW II. [/quote] Right but AoW I was kind of like the first attempt which didn't work very well. It had an extremely bad release with crippling problems and while later patches improved things it was never able to quite recover from it. AoW II was kind of like how AoW I should have been if they had taken more time to get it

I would avoid 1 and 2 and just get SM. AoW 1 was kind of like the paid beta version of the other 2. Regarding the fan made patches, are they reasonable to use if you are playing through the campaigns? Or will they completely break them?

Well it does sound like a whole lot more then usually goes on in the first 25 turns of Civilization (and probably MoM too? It's been awhile). Traditionally a big part of 4x games is hitting next turn while you wait for things to be done.

[quote who="wilebill" reply="11" id="2776275"] I'm more concernted about who good the game itself is. The getting started wiki isn't exactly organized in a way that gives you any kind of overview of the game. FadedC the first missions of the campaign are very tutorial. Maybe the whole campaign is tutorial. Continuous game is more of a sandbox builder that you set up like you like. There is a game speed control and a pause command. Like Sins or Sim City, get in and dink a

[quote who="greggbert" reply="3" id="2775957"]Nearly every moddable games requires mods to be redone or at least recompiled when there is a new game version. True even of World of Warcraft. Devs spending time on ths spend less time on stuff people care about. [/quote] I'm actually running quite a few mods on WoW that I haven't updated in years. By default when a new patch comes along it will turn off your old mods but there's a check box you can click which turns them

It's interesting to note that the average user review score for APB on metacritic is about the same as the average user review score for elemental. Good thing Elemental is probably costing a lot less to maintain.

At least according to Wikipedia, Ubisoft will give you more activations if you ask for them, but still seems like a pain and who knows how long that will take. Still I only have 1 computer I doubt I'll be activating it multiple places so I'm more concernted about who good the game itself is. The getting started wiki isn't exactly organized in a way that gives you any kind of overview of the game.

I'm kind of surprised that AoW 1 has fans, I played if for the first few patches and my memories of it were that the AI and balance were so bad as to make MoM look good. AoW 2 on the other hand I actually liked.

Sadly it looks like the 1.4 MoO 2 fan patch is only a bug fix patch. There was so much incredible room for improvement in that game that it would have been nice to have seen something beyond that. It looks like he had been working on a gameplay patch as well designed to at least make the Antarean ships that are supposed to be this huge threat less completely feeble (I guess part of the problem was that missles were way overpowered early to mid game and the ships had no missile defences).&nbsp

So there are the civilization bonuses, that's what I was most interested in because it's new and it makes them a little more distinct then before. As to be expected some definitely seem better or more interesting then others, though obviously hard to evaluate without playing the actual game. Certainly the game would have to have changed a lot before extra rewards for beating sea barbarians would be something I cared about!