Philocthetes

Brad's said something recently about thinking that the lack of a global mana pool was the biggest pre-release design mistake the team made. I definitely hope to see some improvement in the game by changing that, but the parent of that problem was the fact that 'content' was treated as a secondary aspect of the game when it should have been valued right alongside the underlying engine work. Think a game as a travel agency and 'content' as 'possible destinations,' and then you can see how an en

[quote who="Darvin3" reply="1" id="2800198"]The main problem with these guys is that unless you imbue them, they're just powerful singletons that cost a small fortune to equip. They need unique abilities, both as "governors" that boost the city and as "commanders" in the battlefield. Right now they have very little role in this game, though I do like farmers and administrators. They need more variety, purpose, and flavour.[/quote] The OP seems to be a new sugges

[quote who="k10w3" reply="8" id="2800189"]... If that person has an opposing world view from the person purchasing their goods, perhaps the consumer would be acting against their own passions to be enriching someone with their hard earned cash ("fruits of their labors" or the numerical representation of the portion of their life they spend working, in most cases doing something they'd rather not be doing at that moment), when that person becomes more powerful by being enriched with that cash,

I posted about this back in early August, and I'm pretty sure I saw it somewhere on a dev list of things to tweak after the dust settles on the big changes underway. Hopefully, they'll settle on shifting to fuzzy words instead of specific numbers. There's no real calendar in the game, so it just doesn't make sense to give unit ages in calendar terms.

[quote who="MOIISKA" reply="6" id="2799880"]... We as a society need to stop being lazy.[/quote] Trying to respond to Brad's OP, I'd split that in two: we as media consumers need to stop being lazy, and media producers need to both stop being greedy and revise their obviously low opinion of their customers. It's really bizarre that a society so riddled with problems based on over-valuing self-esteem could have a mass media that is driven by nearly complete contempt for the gen

Back to the OP: I believe I'd pay Raven 1 karma if he'd just take a moment to fight for the good guys in defense of apostrophes and tweak this thread title. An apostrophe doesn't mean "Hey, there's an S coming up in this word." It means the word you're reading is a possessive or a contraction. UFOs are a category. A given UFO's evidence trail is an entirely different thing.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="26" id="2799569"]... Never underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance. [/quote] And how. More lit-ra-chur-oriented types would cite irony, but they probably haven't read enough about neurological theories of sentience. I've had a fuzzy list of unsolicited 'post-mortem' advice percolating in my head since mid-summer, but I'd probably put "don't spend so much time actively working" at the top regardless of all my quibbles about what I'd hop

This personality-driven problem is pervasive and has been corroding public institutions for decades. IT news just managed to survive longer, probably because it was a small enough niche and because the pressures on any sort of news outlet to increase profits have only gotten truly outrageous in the past several years. The oldest form of the problem I know of is U.S. politics: because we lack a real party system, elections are far too often settled by traits like "fun to have a beer wi

[quote who="zigzag" reply="5" id="2798978"]It might be poor design for a web form, but it's the only completely accurate solution. The alternative would involve hooking the game up to a dictionary with plurals in any of the number of languages that players would use to name their units -- and that wouldn't even cover player-invented names.[/quote] I agree with zigzag, but won't hold my breath to see a change like this. So far, the devs have seemed very focused on keeping t

[quote who="MOIISKA" reply="1" id="2794848"]Been talking about this for a while. ...[/quote] Indeed; since long before the first public beta. Implementing some sort of civilian functionality for champions might even be the hat trick needed to put the non-conquest end conditions on nearly equal footing with the boring old war wins. Especially if the old ideas about secession and governing as a skill/stat get worked into the mix.

I think it should be kept alive to mock people who mock anxious folks who might have missed (or not been much encouraged so far) by the dribbles of dev info about 'the city spam problem.' I very much agree with folks who claim that making city spam (nearly) impossible would be a mistake--the game needs to support as wide a range of play styles and strategies as possible. But what I've read so far from Brad et al says a lot more about moderating city spam than it says about tweaking th

[quote who="Onionfighter" reply="3" id="2797284"]I like this idea. I wish more heroes gave similar bonuses instead of the boring +1 to total research or whatever.[/quote] Said it before, saying it again: What we really need are 'civilian' abilities for champions that can be boosted with experience, and experience for 'civilian' champions who are stationed and doing their job (farming, researching, holding fancy parties, etc.)

Ditching the Restore Lands mechanics was a case of throwing a promising baby out with the bathwater. What I would rather have seen was the elimination of random habitable land, a relatively slow spread of restoration (adjustable in game setup), and the Pioneer units able to found settlements on good land. (Would have been nice for them also to be able to set up camp on resources in blasted lands if they were close enough to a viable settlement.) As the OP notes, we lo

[quote who="Phylast57" reply="2" id="2794850"]Sounds great. I thought HBO did a fantastic job with Rome, so if anybody is going to d it, it should HBO. I checked out the sight for GOT--it does look amazing.[/quote] The Rome people did a fantastic job, but HBO let us down by killing the series early. It was a very expensive show, though. They got the freakin' tableware right. Gods but that was amazing work, right down to casting all those Italian extras with their Roman noses.

[quote]... To make my point explicit: I'm not whinging for Stardock to nerf the city-spam/conquest strategy. That can be fun in it's own right. What I would like to see is some way to structure the AI's approach so that I'm not forced to race up the Warfare tree and spam outposts at the beginning of the game simply because I know that I'm going to be in a war-to-the-knife with the AI within the first 50-60 turns (on a large map - I've had as little as 15 turns before that happened!) or get sq

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="10" id="2795179"]I'm not affiliated with Dropbox but everyone here shoudl definitely try it. It's a real game changer IMO. http://www.dropbox.com. [/quote] Beg pardon if I seemed to accuse you of some collusion with dropbox. I'm simply one of those folks who is both lazy with browser UIs and picky about third-party whatnot.

I'm still hoping that someday Stardock games will be successful enough to support direct attachments on the forums. Storage is steadily getting cheaper, and it eventually should be worth it to Stardock to encourage us 'fringe' folks who won't bother with extraneous clicking, typing, and risking system security and/or personal privacy just to be able to post a link here. <div id="_mcePaste" class="mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; over

Tweaking the food math just seems like tweaking tax policy; there's always going to be a significant minority who hate the changes. I've been a homemaker and a political scientist, so I appreciate the value of unending tasks like laundry and struggling for tax reform (whatever your idea of 'reform' might be), but this city-spam question makes me want to offer one more mostly-shameless plug for a return to early-beta roots: I never understood why so many folks early on seemed to dislik

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="62" id="2793066"]... To add to my earlier idea, there should be a global spell that prevents enemies from using teleportation magic in your zone of control, and possibly a detection spell that will reveal the location of a stack that used teleportion magic in or near (say within 8 tiles) of your zone of control.[/quote] This just makes me want the original Restore Lands spell back, with or without a sovereign requirement for settlement founding. Making 'zon

Black-Knight, your 'teleporting is not a fantasy thing' thing is purely a matter of taste; I love teleport-free Tolkien-land, but I also appreciate many other fantasy settings where movement mojo is a minor detail and/or a major plot element. What we are really lacking here is the cosmology for the world of Elemental. There is no description of what magic in the game really is, much less how it differs from and/or relates to 'realistic' physics. Lacking any sort of meta-rules, it is p

Does appreciating minimalist art and music mean I can count starting with a blank page as 'skinning?'

[quote]... (would be nice to postpone the level up indefinitely, could make it a (!) next to the city name on the city management screen for a reminder a LVL up bonus is ready) ...[/quote] Very neat idea. The middle of turn processing is no time to be forced to make what ought to be pretty important decisions about the character of a given settlement.

Now that I remember to wonder about it, might there be any chance that we'll get a similar list view for Champions? I've fought the city-spam imperative in all my games so far, but I still occasionally ended up with quite a bucketful of champions, and the whatever-thingy on the left of the main map is just not much in the way of UI for an old-school TBS player (old-school being much about shunning real-time) like me.

My main gripe with champions is the fact that they can only gain XP via combat and they can never increase their non-combat abilities. If I have a sage or a merchant stationed in a settlement for hundreds of turns, it only seems reasonable that the champion would get better at research, trade, farming, etc.

Here's hoping we get a shortcut key straight to that tab.