ashampine

Have been unable to replicate, unfortunately.

As Draginol noted, most players seem to enjoy customizing their side. Thus, they will choose their own characteristics and be indifferent to how those characteristics are divided between side / faction / race. All they care about is the final set of characteristics and appearance they get. Where things get dicey is when they start conquering other cities. The relevant question now is the degree to which you can pick up different characteristics by conquering. A

The armies are so personalized in Elemental, with each person coming directly out of your population and having a name and picture, that I'm a bit uncomfortable about drafting people. I'd like to be able to research a technology for an all volunteer force. Presumably, you have to pay people more if they're volunteers (higher creation costs?). On the other hand, their morale is presumably higher.

I also like the idea of military units building roads. Given the game fiction of how hostile the wilderness areas are, this seems appropriate. Also fits the empire building / Romanesque theme. THis would also allow building roads that don't end anywhere. FOr example, you may want a road that ends near an enemy border so you can rapidly shift troops around. You can't do that in the current system.

There was an interesting book called "The Warded Man" in which demons came out every night. There were economies of scale in warding buildings and ground (i.e., wards have to be maintained and there are a limited number of people with the skills to do so), hence you tended to have large cities and small outposts by critical resources. Same basic theory - there's some limited resource needed for towns and there are significant economies of scale in its use.

Come to think of it, if you use the city "influence" approach, there's no real reason to require built tiles to be physically adjacent. If you want to put your farms several tiles away, go for it. It'll mean your defensive forces have farther to go if someone moves in and starts burning them, but it may allow you to take advantage of natural resources. That's the usual reason cities had outlying orchards, farms, mines, etcetera. For that matter, why not have an

I am nervous about a food based solution. It can be very hard to tweak the numbers just right, and it is hard to prevent having lots of smaller cities rather than a few big cities. However, something similar could be done at a more abstract level. For example, the underlying game fiction strongly supports the idea of few cities. Most of the land is blasted and lifeless. You may put a military outpost in such territory, but no one is going to voluntarily li

Several possibilities come to mind. 1. Spell could have a maintenance cost. They don't stay charmed unless you pay upkeep. 2. There could be an ongoing chance of the creature breaking free of the charm based on its level. For example, the % chance could be equal to the monster's level - a level 8 troll would have an 8% chance of breaking free each turn. Thus, for very powerful monsters, the caster has a strong incentive to use the monster immediat

The interface is beginning to show some scaling problems. They are most obvious in city construction on the current build, but I can imagine them becoming a problem elsewhere down the road. The list of possible buildings is really, really hard to read after any amount of research has been done. The itty, bitty icons are awfully tricky. I'd like to see a whole column at the side of the screen devoted to the possibilities. Failing that, being able to access a sep

Confirmed. Still present.

Confirmed. Continues to persist.

I saw Frogboy's post on setting a maximum amount of mana that you are willing to invest in an auto-resolved battle. I think this is an excellent idea. I would go further, however. For most battles, I find that I use the same tactics everytime. I also find that the AI tends to be awful with respect to its spell choices. I was just thinking this the other day while playng King's Bounty: The Legend. My troops were sufficiently overpowered that it wasn't really

Moved onto a spider with my sovereign and nothing happened. DebugMessage: Version 0.262 last updated on: Wed Dec 2 17:59:17 2009 DebugMessage: Entering WinMain DebugMessage: ******* Starting Game Shell ******* DebugMessage: *********DXDiag info follows.********* System Info Time: 12/6/2009, 16:19:49 DirectX Version: DirectX 11 Machine Name: ASHAMPINE-PC Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The kingdom report is much more informative now, but roads are still a black box. There is no indication in the UI as to what road construction costs or how long it will take. Furthermore, the NET INCOME figure in the kingdom report does not include ongoing road construction. Road construction itself is possible to cities that have not yet been discovered (although not all other cities in the game, apparently). I haven't figured out why some foreign cities are making

When the sovereign creates a city, they get displaced to an adjacent tile. It would be nice to have the option of choosing which tile they get displaced to. It appears that if you are out of movement and select an adjacent tile, that you will move there when you are displaced, but this method does not work if you are not out of movement.

When you get the pop-up asking you which tech to pick, it would be nice to know which are green, yellow and red.

So gold should be decreasing by -1.30 per turn. But it's not.

Construction costs are deducted when you first put the building down, then an additional amount is deducted upon completion (i.e., for a palace, 200 to start construction, 500 upon completion). In addition, sometimes further amounts are deducted during construction, usually in the first few turns. None of these pending costs appear in the cost summaries for the cities or kingdom. A related bug on construction - when you run out of tiles, demolishing a building does not fre

1. When you discover a pouch of gold or other item - please indicate how much gold was found. 2. Building roads apparently costs gold each turn, but does not show up in the Kingdom Report or in a pop-up. There should be an info card for roads that tells you what the benefits are (reduced movement? caravans?) as well as the construction costs (and maintenance?). 3. Pop-up card for city indicates current population greater than max population.

Crash when trying to load saved game. DebugMessage: Version 0.25 last updated on: Thu Oct 22 22:08:24 2009 DebugMessage: Entering WinMain DebugMessage: ******* Starting Game Shell ******* DebugMessage: *********DXDiag info follows.********* System Info Time: 10/25/2009, 15:53:12 DirectX Version: DirectX 11 Machine Name: ASHAMPINE-PC Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 760

There are a fair number of bugs with the economics system but those will be covered in other posts. Here I'd like to focus on some big picture UI issues. First, the good news. 0.25 shows a lot of progress and polish from 0.24. I think the economics reporting is heading in the right direction, although it still needs a lot of work. So onto the suggestions. THE KINGDOM REPORT - right now the kingdom report screen is worse than useless - it actually g

Mobility becomes important only if angle of attack and formations become important. If rolling up a flank isn't a meaningful maneuver, then mobility is relatively unimportant. It's hard to reflect mobility properly in a turn based game. One possible way is to allow attacks to occur at any point during movement - that would allow, say, horse archers to wheel close, shoot, then retreat. If automatic counterattacks are implemented, then there should be an advantage t

Personally, I'm delighted to have the chance to weigh in on the game mechanics in this way. I've been waiting until 1B is available before giving any detailed suggestions about the economics mechanics or UI. I suspect the weight in the threads will start shifting from bugs to suggestions now.