LDiCesare

[quote]If you have no gold mine you are screwed (...) I don't know why nobody found this design bug months before while I could find it in a few hours of game play. [/quote] When I commented along those lines in the beta, Frogboy said something like "Starcraft is bad because you have to work to earn stuff" and mocked my comment, which was that your starting city had zero gold and you had to wait until you could get a gold-income-generating building before you could do

If summons and imbues cost the same from a limited mana pool, players will have to do one or the other, not both. So if summons are stronger than wizards or the opposite, one of these will never be used. This system requires careful balancing in order to work. Considering the state of game balance right now, I would strongly advise against doing that, as you won't be able to balance it, and one option will prove to be superior to the other, meaning half of the magic (strategic

Same problem with spells.

If you've met your neighbour, why don't you conquer him? I had killed 2 civilizations by turn 57 in my last game. It doesn't take that long to summon a familiar and a fire giant.

[quote]Teleport raised to cost 15 - sheesh why even put this as available for starting Sovereign? One imbue and that Sov can't cast it. This is crucial spell or allow the young Sov to roam and able to return to defend those early cities.[/quote] Strongly disagree. On level up, you can gain 3 essence, so gain 1 level and you can imbue and still cast teleport. Plus you want to have 16 mana at least once in your life to summon a fire elemental, so that's not an issue.

Patched 1.08 game. Running tactical battle. This was a new game, but ALL spells which could miss missed consistently and everytime. Instead of doing max damage systematically just before the patch. Anyway, battle. I'm rotating camera while enemy infantry is trying to stab my air elemental with a pointy stick. Game freezes and crashes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8046784/Elemental1_08-2010-0

It's been mentioned several times that picking equipment for the sovereign is pretty useless, but I decided to try to buy stuff because after all I don't need anything but 15 essence + earth + fire spellbooks to win the game right now. So I discovered this pearl: Why is it that an oak spear (damage 4) costs 15 (yes, FIFTEEN) points (more than to learn all the elemental spell books) when a war staff, which has EXACTLY the same damage costs only 8???? When will the start

Better magic should definitely be in. Making use of dynasties would require the game design to change dramatically. I think most players would like it, because many players want a strategy game not an RPG, and the "I killed your sovereign all your cities and citizens go poof" feels a bit cheesy. But Frogboy stated from the start this would never change. As for races, Frogboy said there were art assets to mix in new races. He doesn't want them by default because the game comes

Regarding crashes: Did you try cutting the sound off? Worked fine for me to get rid of the crashes since 1.06 or somesuch. And I would like an option to get rid of animations in tactical battles altogether so things get done faster.

Strange. They could write an xsd and validate their xml schemas, that would fail on loading if incorrect.

Get an ai able to, if not threaten the player, at least put up a fight first. Either that or provide hotseat MP so one can test the gameplay against oneself. Until the ai is able to provide some opposition or strategies tested agaisnt oneself, game balance will be very hard to check. So: Code the ai. By doing so you'll realise that researching exclusively the summons spells and using your sovereign and her 7 summoned monsters alone you can beat all the civs on

I'll post here too. Seeing many units in a battle may be fine, but controlling them would be a nightmare. The hundreds of soldiers in the image pasted several times in this thread would require handling about 30 or 40 units, as most seem to be in groups of 9. And they're all going to be killed by the dragon anyway. Such battles take forever to play in a turn based way. They have to either be automated (a la dominions) or in real time. I wouldn't play the tactical battles if they were

I like units going each after the other in turn, but attacks should be simultaneous unless special abilities (like MoM throwing axes, first strike and negate first strike). Damage should be less random min-max, and can be linear inside that range. So a sword could be 6-8 damage instead of 1-14 for instance. Armor could work on the same principle, or be a fixed, not random at all, reduction, not altered by Dex either, but with a small chance to be ignored by the attacker (criti

I don't like campaign very much. I stated this in FfH2 and Galciv, campaigns where you don't carry anything from the previous 'episode' to the next boil down to me to: If you want to play cool scenario #3, you must beat boring as hell scenario you hate and would never like to play #2, which is, well, bad. So I don't like campaigns. I don't want to be channelled into doing something if I don't like. However, I do like scenarios, as long as they are stand alone or, if th

Thanks for the links. The fractal links offer some interesting points. I don't think the rest are particularly useful, though. The agent paper provides an algorithm that may be used or adapted but can be summarised as 'we found this to look nice, nevermind it's slow', which I think is a bit lame. These papers don't seem to worry in any way about realism of generated terrain outside rivers, like having mountain ranges near coasts instead of the middle of the continents. Most often gene

Must have: A sword on your sovereign, found in some goody hut or bought. Hire Janusk. Build just one city. Others aren't needed to get started. Build a workshop, a merchant, a mundane and arcane lab. It will take time. Research military (name depends on whether you picked empire or kingdom). You should be able to buy some weapon when you have amassed enough gold. With one weapon and some limited armor, your sovereign can take out most early indies and l

[quote]same as to why we wouldn't have dozens of radically different races -- think: cost of low resolution sprites vs. fully realized 3D models[/quote] So the logical answer for a fun game would be... Go 2D? (goes back to play some roguelike)

Hi cephalo. Did you write down an explanation of Elemental's map xml format? I had started one in the beta forums but the thread being lost somewhere, I never got back to it. I remember puzzling over what looked like duplicate information in many places. Regarding duplicate resources, do you mean the game adds resources on top of those you put (I suppose near sovereign starting positions)? Last, did you try to get Brad to include your map gen algo in the game or to ope

Lack of significant terrain and chokepoints. Slow animations. Random damage. Shortswords of running and spellcasting. Generic spells that cost far too much to be used in subsequent battles. Silly initial placement of troops.

[quote]Perhaps because the AI in Civ only needs to worry about building its towns and normal troops, while Elemental's AI needs to worry about keeping its Sovereign alive, recruiting heroes, equipping heroes/sovereign, leveling heroes/sovereign, fighting monsters, doing quests, clearing goodie huts..[/quote] Civ AI needs to worry about tech, diplomacy, religion, culture expansion taking out resources, strategic resources, goody huts (yes, they have them too), quests (there are som

I can't see what ai has to do with the extraneous randomness of combat. When you have to wait 6 turns for your 20 attack unit to kill a 1 hit point 5 defense guy, it's just painful. How can ai change anything to that?

I think TDD slows down development by 20 or 30% (I think this is Microsoft figures), and I think the game companies want to get prototypes (features) out early rather than stable versions early. I'm not sure if there are good reasons for that, but it's certainly easier to change the gameplay if you get the features earlier. So, yes, game companis prefer to churn out lots of (bugged) features and then play with them, throw many of these away and come up with new algorithms/mechanisms a

I want more cities to be razed. Particularly if I didn't research fortifications, if I leave a city undefended, it's in hopes someone will come in and raze it. Keep bandits razing cities, I like it.

I prefer the left portrait to the right one.

Yes, they should do hotseat if only because playing agaisnt oneself is the best way to testabuse strategies and help balance the game. A 'probably not' is really a poor answer.