FadedC

[quote who="greywar" reply="79" id="2740960"]ADOM Crawl: Stone Soup I post these knowing very few will tolerate playing them. [/quote] Both are great games, I really wish ADOM was still being developed. Regarding Dragon Age and Baldurs Gate, one things about DA I did like better then baldur's gate is that the fights are consistenly challenging. In BG 1 and 2, most of the fights were kind of pointless and were just about waiting while your fighter typ

[quote who="Sethai" reply="105" id="2743486"]btw i will never play a civilization game. thw whole "spearmen-attacks-helicopter" thing, and napoleon living for thousands of years is just too much of an immersion breaker for me. [/quote] I don't see why spearmen getting gunned down by helicopters is an immersion breaker. There have been plenty of times in history when low tech people got gunned down by high tech people. If the spearmen had a reasonable chance of winning that would

Well more importantly, the math was broken at the time. There were parts of it that he didn't understand (the fact that percentage bonuses multiplied instead of adding), but there were other parts that were genuinely broken (the fact that educated gave 5 times the bonus it listed and the fact that all modifiers were applied twice instead of just once).

[quote who="Rune_74" reply="47" id="2741354"] You do realilze that the majority of studious cannot do what blizzard does. They have huge successes on afew games that gives them a very large bank deposit to draw on, hell look what they draw from world of warcraft every day....not a fair anlogy at all. [/quote] Blizzard was waiting to release games until they were extremely well polished long before WoW came out though. In fact they have only released one non WoW g

[quote who="Archonsod" reply="29" id="2741224"] It reflects the views of certain sites. Given most won't rate a game as lower than 7 in case it jeopardises advertising money it's pretty meaningless, which is why you see a fair few games with an 80+ metacritic score that tank, and some with a sub 50 score that sell bucketloads. [/quote] So your saying that game sites won't give a Stardock game (like Sins) a low grade because they are afraid of losing advertising money?

Apparently in auto resolve there is no movement, every unit just attacks whoever they want every turn. So it renders archers completely useless.

[quote quoting="post"] - When RTS/Quick attention span incredibly popular (Starcraft II/Farmville, anyone?) they took a risk on a game with sessions lasting 10-15 hours. [/quote] I must admit, I never thought I'd see a time when farmville and Starcraft II were described as similiar types of games. You do realize farmville is a game where you plant crops and then have to come back the next day (or sometimes multiple days) to harvest them. It's not exactly

[quote who="Raven X" reply="12" id="2739878"]AI is probably THE most challenging aspect of any game to code/program. I truly don't envy Brad the job ahead of him, but, I'm greatly looking forward to the results of his efforts over the coming months. Granted, the best AI's are the ones who can pose a challenge without Cheating, but, I honestly don't think too many of us would mind having a AI that cheated just a little bit on the Hardest settings. I imagine right now the thing holding the AI b

It's worth noting that it's not at all unusual for an indie game to be released online first, and then much later when it's really popular to have a boxed version in the store come out. Quite a few of the more succesfull indie games have done that, so I'm guessing it must be a valid marketing strategy.

[quote who="KingHobbit" reply="301" id="2738937"] Bugs are a big part of initial impressions, but being unfinished is about far more then just being buggy. It's about haing poor AI, poor balance and having gameplay features that were clearly not well thought out or playtested and which do not work well with the game as a whole. Well then I guess Blizzard is glad that I can overlook initial bugs, because I was part of the group that the computer froze almost every 15 minu

[quote who="KingHobbit" reply="291" id="2738789"] On a side note, for most people the difference between a "complete" game, or a game still in "beta" is if you are being effected by the bugs or not. Unfortunately I was effected by some of the issues with SC2. In the case of Elemental, I am not. It seems by most of the posts certain Operating Systems combined with even more specific ATI video cards are causing the biggest assortment of issues. Hopefully they wil

[quote who="brass1983" reply="45" id="2738698"]the thing you have to keep in mind is this: FFH2 is no longer being worked on, it was developed over the course of years and is now in its "final" state. Elemental is brand spanking new with years of development ahead of it. Right now, FFH2 may be more stable on some systems, have deeper gameplay ect. ect. ect. but it got that way through developer commitment and community feedback and support. FFH2 is a great game, but its static. if there is so

It seems like it must be really hard to get a solid AI working on a civ mod. I mean the base AI in Civ 4 is pretty solid and can provide a strong challenge and frequently kick my butt, at least at my skill level. But it's obviously not set up to make good use of whatever crazy mod people throw in. I thought the AI was decent in FFH2, but certainly not as hard as Civ would be at a comparable difficulty level. Of course I can always turn the difficulty up too. And it's worth noting that I

I just started playing FFH 2 (the basic version) and I think it's a lot of fun even if there are a few issues. It just does a great job of creating that epic fantasy feel of giant armies of crazy fantasy troops doing battle with each other while being supported by spells. It's true there is no tacticial combat, but sometimes it feels like there is, or at least that there is more so then in Civ. The traditional stack of doom is much more interesting with different unit types worki

It seems like the only reason to buy the game now is if you really need to have it at this moment rather then later. If waiting is a reasonable option and your patient enough to do it, then it's pretty much a no brainer. Based on the reviews we see on this site, the game may be fun to play right now, although not everyone is in agreement. However there is universal agreement that the game will be much more fun to play in a few months when it's had it's issues worked out. So given the

[quote who="cwg009" reply="181" id="2731834"] Well it's important to note that WoW's release, while it did have serious problems, was actually really good when compared to other MMORPGs. And the game was actaully far more complete and polished then any other MMORPG released, which of course is not saying that much given that most other games tend to be released extremely incomplete. So the standards were quite a bit different there.....getting a C doesn't look so bad when everyone else g

[quote who="cwg009" reply="146" id="2731477"] Quoting Bellack, reply 141 However in this day and age of PC gaming the masses will not forgive a 'botched' release. This is patently untrue. Some games with horrid releases go on to be massive successes, the most famous being WoW - their release was a real stinker, but the game was fun and addictive once they solved all the server issues and inital game-breaking

[quote who="Mtn_Man" reply="76" id="2730899"] Quoting niteshade6, reply 60 Well I didn't play Total War, but I certainly never felt Civilization was unfinished on release. Civ 4 was in pretty rough shape out of the box. I remember one bug in particular that would mute the sound whenever a movie played, and you had to restart the game to fix it. Also, a lot of city improvements didn't do what the tool-tip said they would and some were ju

[quote who="arentol" reply="76" id="2730743"] Quoting niteshade6, reply 65 Hmm....fascinating. So your saying that they release games unfinished on purpose as a weapon in the war against piracy. That is not exactly what I am saying. They do release unfinished games, and only unfinished games. The primary reason for this is because they believe in providing ongoing support and updates for games for years after release, so their games are basi

[quote who="rossanderson48" reply="50" id="2730768"] Oh that is just utter bullschitt. Creative Assembly (Total War series) and Firaxis or 2k games whichever (Civilization series) have gotten away with a lot more [/quote] Well I didn't play Total War, but I certainly never felt Civilization was unfinished on release. Are you really claiming that the quality and polish of elemental (including things like AI and gameplay balance) are exactly the same as Civilizati

[quote who="Mtn_Man" reply="38" id="2730691"] Quoting SapSnark, reply 29 It does seem that there is a definite bias from the gaming "press." There does seem to be a double standard where big-name releases from major publishers are given a pass for similar things that Stardock is getting slammed for. I think part of that might be due to the same reason that Best Buy broke the release date with impunity: Stardock doesn't have the clout to prote

[quote who="arentol" reply="62" id="2730556"]The Gamers Bill of Rights is more a statement of Brad's belief about gamers rights in general than rules Stardock ever intended to 100% commit themselves to. It effectively became a bit of a PR thing, but it was intended more as a way of pushing the rest of the industry into realizing that gamers are generally good people and should be treated with respect rather than as criminals. As to Stardock and Elemental, they are

Well the review isn't saying anything that I haven't seen any number of people say on the forums here. And overall the review is hopefull that eventually the game will be a good one and positive about Stardock being good game designers, so it's clearly not malicious. I don't think the review appears unreasonable at all. I think there are just people who are so emotionally invested in the game that they view any criticism of it as a personal offense.

Although I was originally leaning towards buying the game on release I think I'm going to wait now. For me half the fun of playing a game is learning and exploring how things work, and that is so much fun if everything is working the way it's supposed to. I'll have much more fun if I play the game for the first time when it's finished, then if I play an unfinished version now, and then go back later to repeat the same experiences with a (hopefully) completed version.

Well I think it's still important to review the game as it is now, not how you imagine it might be in the future. This is the version they felt fit to put on the shelves and sell to people. Keep in mind too that while the expansions did fix a lot of the problems with GalCiv II, they were not exactly free.