LDiCesare

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="5" id="2117755"] Luckmann That kind of 'Tactical Combat' is infinately preferable to actual on-hands Tactical Combat in a TBS. "You're" (as in "you are") insane (referring to your current "mental and psychological sate") deep tactical combat is one of the most interesting aspects of elemental and orders of magnitude better than the auto-resolve combat style of Galciv2. Edit: That specific enough for you?

[quote]We must have played a different Dominions 3 because everything you said there applies to Dominions too. Build army, roll over neutral province, rinse and repeat with very similar armies and strategies until you find someone. In the meanwhile research or kill with your pretender (if it's not a sleeping pretender) and have "fun" accounting which mage has searched what type of site in each province... Yep, the same as the start of MoM, Civ and AoW.[/quote] I disagree. Firs

HAhah, Civ IV random map generation, my pet peeve. I ask again, will it be possible in Elemental to write map scripts like in Civ IV? I worte the Tectonics map script that's been included in the last Civ IV patch, and there are a few others who produced interesting map scripts, some of us rewriting the land mass generation totally... So, can we definitely SCRIPT them? I don't want graphic stuff, I want to code the map generator, and use it from the in-game like Civ IV does.</p

One point of game-enforced save/continue is psychologic. If you know you cannot save/load, you play differently. I play hardcore Diablo II because I prefer save/continue. If the game didn't provide the option, I would fall to the reload game becaue the option is available. Call me weak-willed if you like, but I am not alone to behave this way: If there's an easy cop-out, I'll play differently from no cop-out. Which means a save/load game with a save/continue option makes sense, as in

Damn. Your veteran hero looks... fearsome :D Lots of difference in hp between rabble and trained soldiers. I'd think all humans would have about the same hp but to hit and to defend chances would vary, with armor soaking damage. Is the attack/def/hp system definitely in or is it just an example to give us an idea of the system and different strengths of units? And how would compare a channeler and a dragon?

If leadership just enhances the ai, drop the idea. People who want to play effectively will never invest points in it and handle battles manually. Make it give bonuses to the troops morale or something like that instead.

I'd suggest python if you want to pick between the 3. Perl has an ugly syntax like almost nothing else. Ruby is something I never managed to like. The only drawback of python id indenting with an arbitrary tab = 8 spaces. Don't start with C++. The syntax is terrible to begin with (templates, function pointers), it's got a preprocessor inherited from C which you might want to use "creatively" and gives you so many tools to shoot yourself in the foot. The real question however s

Arcanum, as has already been mentioned. If you like minimalist (read zero) graphics, roguelikes are worth trying. Ancient Domains Of Mystery is great. Just don't expect to win and don't look at it if you think your character should look better than an @ sign.

[quote]With Elemental, we may drive the point home by having the first beta of the game only use the cloth map instead of the actual game engine for game play. The idea is, if it's a good game, it should be reasonably fun even without fancy graphics. Then for once we could get people to fixate on the key features of the game rather than piddly details.[/quote] Awesome. I don't want graphics. I just finished an ADOM game (I died of course). Cloth is huge. Great. Gorgeous. Grap

[quote]# The concept of lesser and greater heroes needed to be abolished. [/quote] If you just lift the limit on the number of heroes, you"re set. I tend to agree, some heroes you refused just in order to be able to get a better one. [quote]# Heroes also needed to be resurrectable by all channelers. [/quote] I disagree. Dominions3 has some of the best heroes around. Most cannot be resurrected or summoned again, and it works well. [quote]# Configurable gov

[quote who="CrazyC0330" reply="5" id="1972424"]Maybe some people should repeatedly ask the guys at Ubi to put their games up on Impulse. And to use Stardock's simple "register-serial-and-download-the-game" method and nothing else. Wouldn't that be something?[/quote] If they put no DRM at all, it's even better. The "simple" mathod used by Stardock still requires internet access to activate the game, which some don't have, and Impulse is still unstable.

Concerning the graphics, they are not that bad. I wanted to draw a picture of a fight with units I desinged myself. Making the units in Dom3 and modding the game a little to make the battle screenshots was easy and gave a good result. If I had tried this in a 3d-units game, even with the skills, it'd have taken me days instead of an hour. The moddability of this game is huge, not because it allows you to do everything like Civ IV but because it lets you do a lot of things easily like Civ2.</p

I don't like predetermined city locations at all, but nothing prevents Civ players from making scenarios with prebuilt cities and modding settlers out. It's nice sometimes, but settling is a lot of fun and shouldn't be out. [quote]I don't want an abstract Civ IV "I have a horse so I can build cavalry anywhere" type system. I want one that gives some strategic value to an area of land. Hardy mountain folk, fast horse men/archers, etc. I want to take that area so I can have some</em

It's an interesting way of getting feedback from the game logs, probably better than what submit to metaverse could do in GC. Unfortunately, not being able to play when not connected is a big no for me, as I'd be unable to play at all during wek-ends when I have the most time. Somewhere along the beta, you may want to switch to a more open mode where it's possible to play locally. I wonder how many people played the beta of GalCiv2?

I think this won't work for MP unless there are mods grouped together in "sets" that are widely accepted. Even then, if the gameplay changes a lot, one may or may not want to use such mods. So it's a great idea, but I believe one must be able to submit mods which are "just" the sum of some other mods. Eventually, a few such mods will emerge and be more or less widely adopted by MP community (for instance the Candle Bre Mods in Dominions: often used for MP games but some shun them because you

My bad, I ment Martin's Song of ICe and Fire. Though I like the Dragonbone chair too. [quote]Do you have any idea if there is a published version of the Leabhar Gabala?[/quote] I don't know. I read a (probably the) French translation in a library in Paris, so I'm not sure. There are two excellent books, 'The Book of conquests' and 'The Silver Arm' by Jim Fitzpatrick at Paper Tigers (first issued in 1981), which are not translations but very good and beautiful (particularly The

George R R Martin's Dragonbone chair series. Of course, hardly anything comes close to the Leabhar Gabala (the Book of Conquests) and the Tain Bo Cualngé, the Eddas or the Mahabharata...

To me one of the key points in MP is game duration. Civ IV has different speeds, for instance, but even then I feel the fast speed is too slow (you may spend one evening of play mostly hitting end turn). How long would a MP game last? Are the turns continuous a la Dom3 or a la Civ IV or are they more Galciv like (which means much slower games)? What does the Empire vs. Kingdom mean? If I play a session that is not finished, next time I connect, can I play the same session or a

[quote] 10, yes. 4, no, not really. See: (American) Football, rugby, etc. (For football at least, everyone's pretty much "armored", so take that into account when comparing it to x amount of untrained guys vs. someone wearing "impenetrable" armor.)[/quote] In Rugby and Football, the tacklers usually come from the front and the would-be tackled tries to rush forward. In rugby, when you can get at someone from behind, you tackle him all the time if you're fat

Diablo III does the same for example, so there may be a reason indeed.

[quote]I'd say that early-to-mid game, scouting is essential, depending on what nation you're playing with. I learned this the hard way. Scouting not only gives you the chance to find your enemies faster in the early game, thus allowing you to plan your expansion phase, but also gives you valuable intel as to where their armies are, and so on.[/quote] Yes, scouting is very improtant, but it's not eXploration like trying to know the landscape while avoiding barbarians or animals or ene

[quote]D3 requires a CD key...Elemental will not. [/quote] Yeah, but Elemental will require online activation, and likely through Impulse, which, currently, is a piece of software I would rather not talk about in order to remain polite. They both need copy protection, period. Plus if you purchased D3 directly from Shrapnel, I'm pretty sure they could find you in their database and send you a new code. [quote]Not in the least, but does the AI in D3 even matter? Everyone

Ys, FfH2 allows it through a random event. Always refused. I mean: "Hello, you jsut crushed 90% of our empire, but we would like you to be our lord so you can get crushed by the empire you just built. Please?" My answer is usually something like "Mwahahah, die silly Sheaim!" (or Grigori or Kuriotates or whatever...)

To me Dom3 is the best MP TBS game I ever played. Talking about the MP aspect of the game based on what it looks like in SP is a waste of time. Obviously, the poor interface won't change, but as far as strategy is concerned, it's huge. The game is so rich that the ai just can't cope with all the possible strategies. About the AI: Brad has coded a great ai in Galciv. However, if you look at what you can actually do in Galciv, you'll realise your tactical options are zero: Number of shi

Heraldry lets you describe coats of arms quite easily. I know the French terms only but with it wouldn't be very difficult to make a program that lets you change metals, furs and enamels (colors) or pick various furniture you want to put on your coat of arms. Still, it would be easier to have a library of these, which reference images (png, tga, jpg, whatever) and create your own coats using a dedicated program.