Philocthetes

[quote who="Tridus" reply="21" id="2821428"]... And that's one of the biggest problems with the game. You don't think about bulidings. You just plop them down whenever you gain the ability to do so.[/quote] It does seem like there's a near complete absence of trade-offs when it comes to settlement improvements. The only apparent questions are whether you want to try to make a site large or spend that food on another site's pop growth. But then I'm typing that with no real idea

[quote who="Sethai" reply="13" id="2820404"]better solution: ditch level up bonuses so people don't have to worry about these sorts of things. if you want cities to be able to specialise as they level up, assign these specialisations to buildings that require a certain level (and that you can only choose one of from a selection). that way players can do the specialising as and when they choose, and all the info is contained in one place: the buildings list. ...[/quote] Seco

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="7" id="2820375"]Frogboy was originally pitching the idea that if you kill a sovereign, any land controlled by your married off daughters (that is not equally controlled by another player now) will become yours, allowing dynasty to be a path to victory by marrying your children off to warring factions (and claiming land once one side defeats the other) I'm not sure if that is currently implemented, but we may want to keep in mind that is likely the ul

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="1" id="2820320"]From what they've explained in posts: Yes.[/quote] Nonsense. Trojasmic's question is too vague to answer in the first place, and the dev talk on the general theme of city spam is hardly a fountain of details. Signs indicate that there's hard work happening re city spam, but just how much and what kind of fixes we'll see in 1.1 are (understandably) not very specific. From some perspectives (AI personality/diversity), city spam is a

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="9" id="2819947"]... If you are meshed with the land the way you are as soverign in elemental though that's a bit different. [/quote] A bump to healing rate for being inside friendly territory hardly counts as being "meshed with the land" for me. But then I was crazy enough way back when to suggest that conquering a city should require a mana and/or essence investment to complete the transition from one sovereign's ownership to another. I'd also

kyogre, you're definitely someone I remember as 'old guard' and I'm glad you replied. My main sentimental reason for this thread was thinking about how different things were when we had just posts and a few rapidly-aging screen caps from the devs. I manage to catch a post from Denryu every now and then, but I can't remember the last time he did a survey-monkey poll. Still kind of wish one of us who was flush with disposable income had just bought him the full license; I think he might

[quote who="Gyb" reply="18" id="2820122"]... In a perfect world all manuals would be written by an outside technical writer who was hired to work in tandem with the game's developers throughout the final testing phases.[/quote] There was some talk a while back from Stardock folks about them hiring dedicated editorial talent, but I don't know if that got abandoned or transformed into the deal with Random House. I know times are tough for anyone making a payroll these days, but I sure h

[quote who="psychoak" reply="91" id="2818962"]... You actually got your posting privileges suspended huh? I wonder why that never happens to me. ...[/quote] Because you're such a sweetie-pie at heart? C'mon, admit it. You've rescued stray puppies and collected Hello Kitty stickers.

This past week saw the second anniversary for forums.elementalgame.com, and it made me want to check in with folks who were around during those first couple of seasons, mainly to ask who you miss seeing numerous, regular posts from. I miss a variety of people. Some of them are still posting a few scraps and others seem to have turned lurker or left entirely. So, to the folks who were around before the betas rolled out, who do you miss reading regularly on these boards? I'm as

[quote who="Bingjack" reply="13" id="2818332"]... The only real difference between community wiki's and developer wikis, is that the former actually exists, often thrive, and are within our power as a community to effect, whereas the latter is mostly wishful thinking. ...[/quote] One of the best reasons to take up constructive arguments as a hobby is that they can help you get a decent grip on your own thinking. You're half (or more) right about me heckling 'community' game wikis, or

[quote who="Bingjack" reply="11" id="2817923"][edit] Never mind. I decided this is sort of not worth arguing about. Carry on . [/quote] [e classic]:P[/e] I already did... And I peeked at your edited reply. Don't think we're really arguing so much as venting with different emphases. My only real problem with an all-volunteer game wiki is that it has the same fundamental weakness as Wikipedia: you need to take all the info with a grain of salt. I use Wiki

Mordenkainen's Lubrication.

[quote who="Bingjack" reply="8" id="2817732"]I never had a problem with the community maintained Gal Civ wiki when it was up to date. It was a much richer source of information than any of the official sources of documentation... It would be nice to see a *lot* of things from the devs. But they are a small team, with a finite amount of time. At this point, anything that is not related to working directly on the game, I'm willing to let slide. ...[/quote] OK, I admi

[quote who="Bingjack" reply="5" id="2817723"]... Updating the wiki with the changes and keeping it maintained is probably the most useful thing the community can do for game documentation. A comprehensive, well maintained wiki > than any native documentation.[/quote] Better still would be an official wiki maintained by devs, Stardock editorial types, and perhaps a select handful of volunteers. Unofficial wikis are OK, but it's always better to have original sour

[quote who="hfbrooklyn" reply="27" id="2815506"]So, my only question is this: if mana regen can be increased in the future along with the mana pool, so long as magic is the same strength won't stacks of channelers be crazy overpowered? Like, I have all my kids in a stack, for instance. How would you challenege four dynasty channelers?[/quote] I'm still hoping that the devs will make Essence important again by making it the per-turn mana spending cap for a given caster on the main map

[quote who="Tridus" reply="179" id="2815870"]... For some of us, this is the second go around on this. We already had a huge thread on the subject. The forum consensus was clear at the time. Brad even says he preferred that. They went the opposite way in the game. This time I just want to know what's actually doable and what's off limits before we get to page 23. [/quote] Yup.

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="99" id="2815380"]Seriously though ... everyone (in the game) is too bland for their looks to even matter :/ I'd be interested to see how they handle Hero differentiation in 1.1[/quote] I still have an insane hope that 1.1 might include a nice bundle of revisions and additions to champion special abilities, particularly ways to apply experience to improve those abilities and ways for 'non-combat' champions to improve their abilities by staying on

[quote who="Gandhialf" reply="9" id="2814281"]... BTW, do I want to play GC1, or just skip it and start with GC2?[/quote] It's definitely a matter of taste, so I'd suggest trying the demos: https://www.galciv1.com/download.asp and https://www.galciv2.com/Downloads.aspx . I bought GC1 but put it down pretty quickly because I felt boxed in by only being able to play as the Ter

[quote who="Dewie" reply="3" id="2813278"]See here: https://forums.stardock.com/399593/page/1/#2813182[/quote] Beg pardon for quibbling, but that's about the 1.1 beta, not the ETA for the finished 1.1. I don't recall where I saw it, but I'm pretty sure someone at Stardock mentioned an aspiration to get 1.1 finished around the end of November. That seems more than sufficiently ambitious to me, especially given the big changes to the crew doing the work.

[quote who="ElanaAhova" reply="2" id="2813040"]is it possible to swap out mp3 files to change the in game music?[/quote] The music files for the game are all MP3 format, so you can replace them with your own files & they should work OK. There are three Music subfolders in Program Files\Stardock Games\Elemental. What I tend to end up doing after I get bored with a game's built-in music is just to turn it all off and run my own playlist in another app. That way, I can easily

What-what? Could this mean that the old Camp 1 crowd might get a few bones thrown to us during the post-launch rework? Adding refined resources to the mix could go along way towards making trade a more interesting and important part of the game. It's also one of those relatively 'simple' things that could lead to fun complexity when it's linked to things like quests and dowries for the dynasty system. Champions with improvable resource-based special abilities could also be good fun--a

[quote who="Gizmet" reply="3" id="2811651"]how do I get the pic? print screen didn't seem to work, either that or it saved it somewhere where I don't have a clue?[/quote] If it works the same these days, you should find caps in your Documents\My Games\Elemental\ScreenShots folder. If that's not working at the moment, PRT SCR should also copy your display to the system clipboard so you can open something like MS Paint, use the Paste command (menu or CTRL+V), and get the cap tha

[quote who="cpl_rk" reply="5" id="2810766"] ...A 10-man horse archer squad with all the item shop stuff should be able to take down any champion including magic users if it gets the first shot. ...[/quote] If we were playing a strict materialist medieval game, I'd agree. But this is a fantasy TBS, and I'd prefer to see champions be able to play a range of roles in the game, including surreal combat prowess. The only way something like that would bite badly is if it just fed into the s

Adding abilities that can grow would probably be the single biggest thing the devs could do to make non-imbued champions more fun, and more interesting strategically. Especially if they include non-combat abilities that can be improved through duty time at a settlement or fortification. [quote]On another note, the item shop needs to be severely overhauled, at the moment it is like a 1990 JRPG shop. You can only sell and buy in seperate screens and you can't even see what you currently

Re crash data, see Cari's How to report a problem thread for detailed info. Re a game lockup, that's also a problem worth reporting, although I doubt you'll get a crash dump after you force it to close. I'm pretty sure you're in a group of users getting related problems, and if the devs haven't fixed it yet, another data point (debug.err) might be helpful. Re the too-close-citities, that sounds like something you should rep