Asharak

It's not a great solution. It denies people who haven't purchased the game but who are legitimately curious and have questions the opportunity to have those questions answered before spending their money. It also gets complicated when you remember that SD's forum system spans multiple games - hundreds, even, if you include all the forums for non-SD, Impulse-released titles. How would you have them handling posting in those forums? Should my account for Elemental allow me to post only in this

An alternate way of acheiving the same benefit might be to add a subsequent technology (one or two tiers after the initial caravan tech) that automatically gives your established caravans a combat rating / an always-present troop that defends the caravan in tactical battle if it is attacked. You know, like hiring Mr. Reynolds . - Ash

You're not quite correct. There's an "Egalitarian" trait when creating your Sovereign that allows you to train female units. If you select that trait, each time you open the unit design screen your template will randomly be either male or female. - Ash

Click on the fertile land tile. Building on resources is done through the resource itself, not the city build menu (this seems counterintuitive early, when you're building on resources right next to you, but is done to make more sense when your city grows and your potentially claiming resources many tiles - even a screen or more - away). - Ash

[quote quoting="post"] Are children totally random, or do the skills of their parents affect it at all? Also, why are some children Channelers and some not? [/quote] Randomized with weighting towards the parents' attributes, essentially. In other words, children will tend to have similar attributes as their parents but it's not 100% predictable, on purpose. [quote] Also, my kickass daughter regenerates health and mana during battles whereas my sovereign doesn't

[quote who="CLeder" reply="4" id="2726427"] If someone joins your party who gives you a special bonus (+1 gilder, +1 prestige, etc), do they need to be in the town to bestow the bonus, or can they be a part of an exploration or combat army? [/quote] Depends on the someone. Their card usually makes it reasonably plain but, generally speaking, if the bonus sounds global ("+1 Gilder") than it will work anywhere; if the bonus sounds specific ("+25% settlement food producti

Yes. Research is handed to you at plot-based moments in the Campaign. It's not something you do yourself like in the sandbox game. - Ash

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="11" id="2723977"] Okay, but what core features aren't in Elemental? Bugs means it's unpolished, after all, not unfinished.[/quote] - Custom faction creation was removed from the standard user experience and "moved" to modding, where "moved" means "instructions or documentation on how to do this have not been provided". - Random map generation was removed in favour of a very limited number of "seeds", with only post-release uproar resulting in

[quote who="drtechno" reply="4" id="2723597"]I am at work so I havent tried it yet, but someone should post up the name of the directory we need to move/rename.[/quote] Shirley did in the thread in the Support forum. Check there; page 2 of the thread, IIRC. - Ash

[quote who="elmo3" reply="10" id="2723528"]No, not the cloth map. Normally you are looking at the map from an angle. I did something that put it into a top down view and can't figure out how to get back the the side angle view without quitting the game. Scrolling all the way out goes to the cloth map but this top down view is from fairly close in and does not involve mouse scroll.[/quote] Are you right over a city? It zooms to an uber-close, direct-top-down view of a

[quote who="Mr_Moog" reply="4" id="2723531"]Sandbox![/quote] OK, then the advice already given about generally protecting your settlements is about the best we can give. In the scripted campaign, we could maybe have told you what enemies were around that might have been causing problems but, obviously, in a more random game type, that's not something we can do through the forum. You can train a single peasant pretty quickly (3 turns, IIRC), so queue that up right away and just

Campaign or sandbox game? - Ash

Just going to add my voice to the disappointed chorus about this. Reasonably balanced randomized maps are something other games have been able to manage and I would expect Stardock to be able to achieve it as well; failing that, a very large number of prebuilt map seeds - i.e., enough that I will never notice repetition - is needed for all map sizes. This is a medium-to-long-term dealbreaker for me. As is, I will probably get several weeks of enjoyment out of the camp

What hermes said but, to get slightly more specific, it'll be a tech in the Warfare tree. You can achieve this in two ways: the tech that unlocks larger parties (i.e., a troop of four peasants have four times the HP of a troop of one) or the tech that allows better training of your soldiers (this does, directly, increase the HP of each soldier. The two effects can, of course, stack (assuming you have the money and materials): a troop of four Veterans will have more HP than a troop of four unt

I definitely like the sound of Camp #3 more than #1 or #2 (not surprising, since resource sophistication with transport simplicity was what I asked for yesterday). There will probably be some UI considerations to address during the betas about prioritization (do we have on/off/priority toggles, no/little/some/lots/max toggles, etc.) but those seem like small enough issues that making the adjustments based on hands-on feedback would be reasonable and such changes wouldn't require rethi

I've read the OP but I've only skimmed some of the responses. Thoughts so far: 1) Camp 1 sounds a little too complex, while Camp 2 sounds a little too simple. I share Kyro's idea that the best way to find a good balance would be to simplify or abstract the "transport" elements of Camp 1 while keeping the resource complexity (and thus, build possibilities) intact. I might even go so far as to suggest that resources should be stored an abstracted empire-level warehouse wit

[quote quoting="post"] 2. I’m killing off the bots concept. People hate them. I thought they were cool but they’re too much work only to be hated. So there won’t be artificial players. [/quote] To be clear, the bots were just a multiplayer concept to fill open slots in games, yes? The single player notion of providing a variety of AI "personalities" a la Gal Civ remains in the plans? All the factions won't play exactly like each other in single pl

[quote who="Zubaz" reply="18" id="2213766"] I'm going to assume where 'jerk'='a good looking and intellegent fellow' [/quote] Maybe but clearly 'intellegent' != 'good at spelling'. ;) - Ash PS> And thanks for the info and videos!

[quote who="SackLunch" reply="2" id="1936750"]This is one of the best ideas I've heard. It keeps the random factor in it while giving you a fairly specific direction of research. I love it![/quote] For reference, we've been having a very detailed discussion of approaches to technology research in this thread . Reply #60 has a good summary of the current proposal, with a key part of it being support for non-specific res

This is an area where I think Stardock's plan is already the right one. Dragons shouldn't be commonplace creatures or a playable race; they should be extremely rare and extremely potent NPCs. That opinion is based on nothing more than my own sense of the kind of world I'd most like to play in. - Ash

My two cents on the graphics: I quite like the current state of the "map" screenshot that has been posted and I wouldn't mind if that didn't change all at between now and release. The two "game world" screenshots in the OP, though, need to have significantly more detail added to their textures before I'd be happy. The overall style is fine and I like the look of the interface panel at the bottom of the screen (it looks very crisp and detailed). If the textures on the land, trees and castle wa

From a game design point of view, one of the major things that having technological advancement adds is another set of goals for the player. The best 4X games are always described as having "one more turn" addictiveness; that addictiveness comes from having so many overlapping goals that you're always on the cusp of achieving something, be it starting/ending a war, building a unit - or acquiring a technology. So technological development, aside from being a staple of the 4X genre and

[quote who="ThreeKings" reply="1" id="1936088"]And I should have done this when the Canadian $ was at par.[/quote] Heh, ditto. Sadly, the game wasn't available for preorder back then. Friggin' exchange rate... - Ash

[quote who="keithLamothe" reply="14" id="1936125"]Am I missing something?[/quote] One slight correction. Since we're doing the research-inefficiency by reducing the number of "research points" added per turn, these values: [quote] [/quote] Should be 1.0, 0.9 and 0.75 respectively. We don't want to multi

[quote quoting="post"]One thing I should mention about the tactical battles that isn't clear in the screenshots is that they're continuous turns. They're not like HOMM. The player tells where they want their units and uses the space bar to pause the action to give new directions. That way, we can get much more interesting battles.[/quote] Passing on some questions about the combat mechanics, in case a