Admiral Rom

I tried out the enchanter faction trait today, and initially thought the scrying pool improvement looked excellent. Unfortunately, it seems to be badly bugged. Whenever my towns completed construction of a scrying pool, my mana totals and mana per season got really messed up. Example 1: I had 84 mana at the end of the turn. A town completed a scrying pool, and my total mana was reduced down to 30. Example 2: The next turn, another scrying pool was complete

[quote who="mastroego" reply="80" id="3273363"]Quoting Emperor_Nero, reply 78I disagree, you are one of those rose tinted nostalgia people. If we just took MoM and gave it a graphic update people would bemoan the horrid game design, because it just won't stand up to today's game. Sorry, sir, you're wrong: you have it the other way around. It's "today's game" that doesn't stand up to MoM. MoM had diverse races, flying units, naval units, alchemy, i

[quote who="Lantros" reply="63" id="3272802"] I know this problem. I have it with books. Aside the story, its always only paper and letters. So boring... All bad jokes aside... [/quote] Yes, lets put that aside because it wasn't funny and was a terrible analogy. I like the way you insinuate I don't like reading either, thanks for that. [quote who="Lantros" reply="63" id="3272802"] are you all really that conservative

I agree completely with the OP. To be honest, I dont really care about the background lore, so to me Elemental is basically 8 slightly different skinned human factions. For this type of 4x game, it is far more important to have radical faction difference and unit differences or the gameplay suffers. I would sacrifice custom units in a heartbeat if it meant that each faction had their own unique units with special abilities. In a fantasy setting, the use of differen

[quote who="Hawawaa beat you to the punch. " reply="10" id="2931499"]it will be really nice to see more of the gorgeous art that has been created for this game and see the story brought to life. i expect to really enjoy this stuff. however, i'm not sure if it's the best use of resources. most of us never played the campaign that shipped with the original game, and even (in the best case scenario), that the campaign and sandbox games were integrated as i always h

I think the main problem with Elemental War of Magic was that even forgetting all the bugs and stability issues, the fundamental game design felt broken and not fun. That to me was the biggest worry when I started playing the game when it was released, because bugs and stability issues can be addressed, but core game design is not easily fixed once a game has been released. I was expecting large scale tactical battles with dragons and other fantasy creatures fighting with/against armies of me

Im a big fan of space based 4x style games and Ive played just about all of the ones mentioned on this thread. I just wanted to say thanks to the people recommending distant worlds. After reading about it here, I bought a copy with the expansion and have been thoroughly enjoying it. I played a lot of Galciv 2 with both expansions and while I enjoyed it a lot (economy and spreadsheet issues aside) Distant Worlds is a much better game in my opinion. Being able to automate

[quote who="zigzag" reply="36" id="2889874"]I may be the only one who believes this, but I wish Elemental's backstory were less intrusive and that the factions were good and evil simpliciter. I enjoy fantasy games because they provide an escape from the rationalizing that accompanies everyday decisions. Destroy the magical item or take it for yourself? Do it for the sake of being good/evil. [/quote] Yeah I agree with this. Im tired of all that "ooh they a

[quote who="Trojasmic" reply="36" id="2886218"]What makes you guys think FE is going to be any better than EWOM? Remember we were just as excited about EWOM from "what we've read" that it was going to be the best game ever. Six months ago I said that EWOM was released six months too early... well it's been six months now and EWOM is still not solid. I don't know about you, but I'm going to be dragging my expectations in on the floor for FE. [/quote]

Yeah I agree completely with Anglophile as well. I just hope that in Fallen Enchantress they ditch the lore straight jacket they put themselves into, and just adopt standard fantasy style races to give the factions some interesting gameplay elements to them. Also, a land "devastated by magic" will by its very nature be boring to look at, *unless* you do two things: 1) Show the devastation. Eg destroyed cities, magic torn canyons ripped through the ground, shatte

Trojasmic's post made me laugh as well, because he summed up all my complaints about War of Magic in a single paragraph. I also agree With Elena and Xia. Nothing about Elemental draws me into the lore, and because there is nothing new, interesting or innovative about it, it just feels like a poor rip-off of the D&D darksun campaign setting. The game world is bland and featureless, and the factions dont stand out either. I didnt play MoM when i

I am really pleased to hear that Fallen Enchantress is going to be a stand alone game and not just a bolted on expansion. I think that move makes a lot of sense from many point of views: PR, programming, game design and lore etc, and really cant see any down sides to it. Getting it free, will certainly help redress any feelings of disappointment I had from War of magic. Hopefully if it is done well it will get some good press and word of mouth going and will be seen as completely seperate fro

Playing Elemental for several hours on release day killed all my enthusiasm for the game. It was blatantly obvious that many hundreds of hours of development time needed to go into the game to actually make it worth me playing. I tried playing it with the recent patches, and *some* of the most glaring out of memory errors were solved but not all. Its not the bugs that stopped me playing it however, the game is just bland and not much fun. For the moment I have shelved E

[quote who="Mtn_Man" reply="245" id="2783146"] You've said that you were too close to the project to see the flaws. I think the opposite is true now: you're still too close so all you're seeing are the flaws. To put it another way, Elemental wasn't as good as you thought, but neither was it as bad as you think. My opinion is that the reviews were unreasonably harsh, perhaps because Elemental and Stardock presented a "safe" target for reviewers to say all the things they

Win 7 - Professional 64bit ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 4GB Ram I played a game on a tiny map yesterday. I got the first out of memory error when trying to save about 100 turns in. I started getting them regularly after that.

Yeah I pretty much agree with the OP. I was really disappointed with Elemental when it first came out, and I think its going to need a ton of work before its worth playing. The new patch has changed a few bits and pieces, but I can see that its going to need a lot of development time before problems with the magic system, AI, heroes, the terribad UI, the economy, bland scenary, tedious tactical battles, etc, etc, are resolved. Incidentally im still getting out of memory er

Another *signed!* for the OP. The current tactical battles are dreadfully boring and nothing like the promotional screenshots shown in the lead up to the release of this game. I remember seeing screens of what looked like hundreds of troops fighting monsters and what we got is so pitifully far from that.

Thanks for the tips guys! I managed to get sound working in the end, and increasing the cycles and making the game full screen made it much more playable. I just need to set up a config file now so i dont have to tweak those settings every time I play! I also hadnt enabled tactical battles, so I was a bit confused as to why my units kept getting owned when investigating caves/ruins etc without me being able to control the action! Its strange the conflicting emotions tha

Can anyone let me know where I can find out more about: 1) Setting up dosbox to work properly with MoM? (I can only get it playing in a small window with no sounds atm). 2) Any detailed info on tips for how to play MoM? Thanks in advance.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="14" id="2768359"] Ironically, if the game had gotten positive reviews overall, we'd be stuck with the current system (ala GalCiv II's terrible economic system). But now, we're free to make wholesale changes over the long haul. "The pressure" is off" [/quote] Its actually really reassuring to hear you say that about the Galciv 2 economic model. Dont get me wrong, I loved Galciv 2 and I just finished a huge map game of it two days ago. My one

Yeah I just watched the gamespot demo for civ 5, it looks fantastic! :)

[quote who="Dethedrus" reply="80" id="2742509"] I'm am a hardcore devoté of the fantasy TBS genre specifically and 4x games in general. I'd be willing to be that many of the more prolific posters this week (especially those with long lists on bug reports and constructive comments) are also similarly devoted. How about Stardock completely dropping the ball insofar as their own Gamers Bill of Rights (specifically points 2 and 5) by releasing a half-baked game full o

Thanks for the review OP, it was excellent and summed up my major complaints with the game. I think Elemental could be a good game with lots of patching over the next few months. I just feel sad that stardock would release a basically unfinished game like this. All the goodwill built up with me from the amazing Galciv games and sins has been dealt a tremendous blow. I know I wont be buying a stardock game on release date again, unless Elemental is radically improve