Philocthetes

Very interesting, Denryu, and a reminder that we should have taken up a collection to get you a basic Survey Monkey account so you could have gotten a larger sample. Might have been more interesting as a pair of surveys for beta participants and forum-only folks. Question 8, if I'm reading it right, indicates that 8 of the 100 folks have not actually had access to the betas. (Also, the Skipped Question numbers just look wrong, if there are indeed only 100 in the sample?) I hop

[quote who="Austinvn" reply="1" id="2704119"]Yeah, it's a subset of the larger issue of representing any distance or time in a strategy game - there's just no way to reconcile it all in a way that's still fun for gameplay. So it's best to leave actual units out of it, use abstractions like "turns" and "tiles" and hope players don't think too hard about Procipinee watching 4 consecutive generations grow up and still having kids. Actually showing numerical ages is just going to make the discrep

I've tried, but I can't seem to drag and drop to move units around in the medallions for a selected stack, and there's nothing that looks like a Move-'em-Around button. I'd like to be able to choose the lead unit in a stack because it seems to affect placement at the start of tactical combat. It would also save UI time & bother in finding & using a strong imbued champion for an overland spell.

[quote who="_PawelS_" reply="11" id="2707758"]... A development team that knows what to do from the start* and uses good ideas from games that were made before, as well as some original ideas. The beta feedback should be used only to fix bugs and polish the details, like adding a new feature that won't change the general game mechanics but it's a nice addition that makes the game more enjoyable ...[/quote] Yet another situation where things seem either-or to (many, most?) folks but I

[quote who="_PawelS_" reply="7" id="2707702"]I have no idea what you're talking about [/quote] In December 2008, Brad posted a journal note called Integrated physics that spawned a great deal of discussion about how physical combat would work in the game. I forget when & where I started using the term "integrated metaphysics," but for a long time that thread has stayed in my head because we have never seen anything remotel

I'm thinking mainly about strong spellcasters caught by surprise by a large group, as is possible in quests in .981, but I also think something along these lines could do something to help the 'dullness' problem with the current spell set. The details could work out in several ways as far as costs go, but the general idea is to make 'summon' a short-term (tactical) class of spells and rename the current summoning spells as binding spells (or summon & bind, if the UI has room for t

[quote who="rune74" reply="4" id="2707668"]They have stated that the main cammpaign has been worked on outside of what we played on the beta...so...whats with all the sky is falling threads lately?[/quote] I'm not exactly a sky-is-falling customer, just one of those folks who had never done a primary beta before and someone who still has no clear idea what Brad means when he's talking about the difference between 'engine' and 'content.' (Or maybe I do get him on the distinction and ju

I didn't do the GalCiv2 original beta, but I played it from early versions and put in some beta effort on expansion pack(s?). Stardock are definitely addicted to constant fiddling and occasionally putting out major free updates, and the GC2 expansions seemed almost more substantial than some standalone games that I've accidentally wasted money on. But I'm with PawlS in finding the last public beta to have few signs of a distinctive game world that's integrated with the mechanics.

Seconded, especially the waypoints thing.

I believe: It is sheer hubris to assume humans are the only sentient beings in the cosmos There is no peer-reviewed, publicly-available, empirical evidence of non-human sentient beings visiting our planet Numerous, seemingly rational people have offered anecdotal evidence that 'little green men' are up to something The Hitler Channel programming staff needs to be sent to the countryside for hard labor and re-education with a focus on what it means

I just managed to win the dragon Sarog to my cause by returning her stolen egg to her. I'm utterly mystified at how she could have sent me on such a quest and responded 'reasonably' to my returning her egg when it turns out that she only has an Intelligence of 1. Maybe the Charisma of 1 makes sense if the humans and fallen are generally raised to see dragons as horrific monsters, but even that seems pretty odd for a creature that can act as a sort of freelance nation-in-one-unit on th

If you are indeed a reincarnation of Hortz, please at least ditch your old whinging rut for a new one. If you can't do that, maybe you really should go away and stay away.

In .981, the kids seem to all be spawn of excessive inbreeding even when my sov picks the first wandering mate who comes along. I sure hope that even before RTM, there are some changes to those surrealistically low stats. That aside, it's looking like my hopes for the focus of the first and second expansion packs are 1) More Fun with Magic, and 2) More Fun with Dynasties. Hopefully at least one of those current impressions will be blown out of the water by the shiny results of the fin

[quote who="DethAdder" reply="26" id="2704599"]Thread reminded me of Foamy on Achievements . I put link instead of embed due to language and crude humor, so beware.[/quote] You rotter. The last thing I need is another trail of WTF to putter through at FoolTube. Squirrels are Accursed Cute Rats, beasts that ruin most of the fruit that grows in my yard by taking a single bite and moving on, usually before the poor bit of reproductive output is even close to ripe. But

This problem still seems to be in .981. But it might be moot given the news that goodie huts are going away.

I don't expect to see much additional complexity in the RTM version, but I'd at least like sovereigns to be able to remarry if/when they outlive their spouses. Being a permanent widow/widower before you have a decent batch of kids is a bummer.

Thanks, Tridus. I still hope to see the site eventually be more readable without browser-tweaking, but life's really just a long chain of compromises, innit then?

In .981, we can drag items from one unit's inventory to the medallion for another unit in the same stack. I'd like to be able to do the same thing when it comes to casting spells like Stone Skin or Arcane Weaponry. Currently, the game forces me to break apart stacks just so my sovereign can lay some mojo on a champion in her retinue.

There's little doubt that for any one of these items, a good share of players consider it essential or useless, at least during a given phase of a long game. You'd save us post-reload click labor if save games retained the state of those three options. p.s. This suggestion assumes that all three will make it past RTM. Please don't ditch the Terrain Info. It's extremely useful, especially for moving around seaside cliffs in the cloth map view.

Wow, I suppose someone as involved in past threadjackings as I've been deserved to see something like this spamarama. Really, all I wanted to do was speak up for 'accessibility' for folks who really like reading wildly verbose posts around here and don't have the eyesight of the Man of Steel, or even the eyesight we had as teenagers. On the art side of it, I'll admit, though, that I thought the original design was way more 'cool' than what we have now. That's because my idea of 'cool'

I'm looking at turn 124 of a game with standard Procipinee as my sovereign. She took a champion to wed fairly early and has three offspring, but the UI describes her as just 24 while her firstborn is already 15. I'm pretty sure she was '21' when the first kid arrived. Not a big deal, but definitely odd for anyone who looks at and thinks about numbers in the UI. Unless the sov age has game value, it doesn't really seem necessary to display. And unless a numerical age for offspring is s

[quote]For those who don't like the new design, while not the same thing, you can view the page with StarDock's default theme here: https://forums.stardock.com/forum/511[/quote] I think that might be a better compromise for me than some browser add-on, but at the moment it seems to only work for Elemental General and Dev Journals. I can't get threads from the Beta, Mods, or Ideas areas to load in that view.

[quote who="Xiandi" reply="11" id="2703186"]I find it ironic that a game site can have a cool looking forum like that....yet the WC site gets a very plain one.[/quote] It's an example of a general problem in the software industry. 'Cool' too often wins out over 'practical.'

Sigh. I guess I really shouldn't be spending so much time on the boards anyway. It's not like I cared about Elemental very much or anything... Here's hoping that the folks behind this particular design decision get really addicted to reading the boards. Maybe that will hasten the demise of this anti-reading color scheme.

I appreciate the value of a refit as part of getting ready for release, but the change to a black background for the forums is awful, at least for readability. The new home page looks sharper and the black is OK there because it isn't a big reading thing. But please, please, please tweak this tweak so we don't have to read white on black forum threads for the game's life cycle.