Philocthetes

[quote who="TCores" reply="19" id="2567701"]I think option D should have a 1% chance of backfiring in the traditional fairytale way.[/quote] The dynasty system does seem like a possibly vast bucket of hooks for quests and random events. Every once in a blue moon, I'd like to see the entire diplomatic landscape thrown into chaos by a starcrossed-lovers or prodigal-child type of event. "My liege, your heir and the heir of Krax have both disappeared from their households, leaving

[quote who="klaxton499" reply="21" id="2566709"]What no Braveheart or Highlander? Swords are getting no love in this thread it's all pew pew lazers and mind trips.[/quote] Kurosawa's Ran has early muskets in it, but blades rule the day and nearly every frame of the film is worth hanging on the wall as art. Also for folks who don't mind subtitles, The Emperor and the Assassin is full of swordplay and massive battle scenes. (It's long and convoluted, thou

[quote]A question for all here, can you give any historical examples of any business or company being 'evil' without being in bed with the state?[/quote] This is a cart-before-horse muddle, complicated by that uselessly vague word "business." Corporations cannot exist without a state or states to establish their market context. One of the prime pathologies of 'evil' corporations is that they use their wealth and power to capture elements of government so they can increase their compet

[quote]And if you play the female sovereign, it is even more unprobable. They cannot be that stupid. All women I know have realized their pregnancy sooner or later.[/quote] A queen not knowing she is pregnant does seem highly improbable, to put it mildly. But here in the U.S. we still occasionally have women come to full term and deliver a child without knowing that they were pregnant. There's a recent story about a woman <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?entr

Swell idea. (I wouldn't call it a 'realism' problem, though, just a missed opportunity to add some info to the cloth map.)

[quote who="Telpeurion" reply="312" id="2565994"]... I wonder, where is this free market you speak of? ...[/quote] Nowhere, as in Utopia. I used the shudder quotes because the 'free market' is an oxymoron, at least in any large society after the late Stone Age. Social order depends on both the allocation of scarce resources and the application of force to control behavior. Add a sufficient number of people and degree of technical complexity, and you end up driving Thomas Hobbes to wri

The CRA chatter is a red herring probably originated by bigots who wish it were still easy for local communities to practice redlining and appropriated by 'free market' zealots. Questionable loan products were peddled to plenty of people who would have been good candidates for a normal mortgage on a less expensive home, and the real culprit was not individual mortgages, but mortgages that were commodified via modern financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and credit def

I live in a real 'urban forest.' The idea of magically burning or manually clear-cutting forests seems to defeat the point of the OP? One big reason I like the idea is that it should drive some art that could help make cities more visually distinctive, kind of Rivendell vs. Minas Tirith. And maybe 'mixed' cities with a forested quarter, a hilly quarter, a riverfont quarter, etc.

Stardock's last major in-house game project, GalCiv2, does not yet have per unit/stack waypoints but it does have a rally point feature. I'm hoping to see Elemental keep some form of the rally point mechanics while also letting us use per-unit waypoints to manage things like a multi-turn move around the FoW perimeter of fortified/stationary enemy units.

I wonder if there's some kind of Helvetica joke in play here...

[quote]I suspect it is just a feature of Stardock.[/quote] I admit that there's a degree of eye-of-the-beholder in the bug-vs-feature distinction, but pray tell how is it helpful in any way to hide the locked status of a thread just because I'm seeing it on a My Replies list? I can see ranking it minimum severity, minimum priority, but it still seems like a bug to me...

[quote who="WebGizmos" reply="1" id="2564836"]Not sure if it's related but I've had the latest Firefox crash on me 5 times within a day. I went back to 3.5.8 and no problems or crashes now.[/quote] I mostly use FF for just the GC2 & Elemental forums and I don't have any optional plug-ins. I've never had an FF session crash.

ZehDon's totally right about "gamer" being hardly more precise a category than "reader" or "grain-eater." For TBS lovers, this thread needs more 'epic' titles (and no, Star Wars doesn't count after the first two films; George Lucas let perhaps millions of us down with his descent into blockbusterdom). A version of Starship Troopers done by someone who loves Heinlein as much as Peter Jackson loves Tolkien would be awesome. Even better would be to see someone give a good try at The Moon

Thread looked open from My Replies list, but the main lists show the lock icon. Thread itself is definitely locked.

Enabling a double-click (with or without optional results) would save significantly on pointer moving for a common UI task. Me, I'm still crazy enough to want right-clicks to pop context menus always and everywhere. (After all, this is a PC game from a committed Windows shop.) If I have a unit selected and right-click something else, I want info, navigation, & attack options. If have nothing selected or right-click a selected city, I want commands that save me the bother of moving

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="12" id="2564082"]I'm pretty sure the game has a few major memory leaks at the moment, I can generally play about 25 turns before it locks up and crashes so I normally play for 20 turns, save, exit and reload.[/quote] The devs have typed about the leaks and in his March FAQ, Brad noted that clearing these problems up is one of the criteria to meet before moving to Beta 2. I think I saw Scott mention something about 100 turns being when the memory leaks s

[quote]... I'd really appreciate a roster showing names and kill-counts and so forth, I don't expect it but I hold hope. ...[/quote] More logging is a very good idea, even if the RTM UI might not quite have room for all the captured detail. Collecting and tagging that sort of data could help AAR writers and modders and maybe even enable someone to write a cousin-app to the GalCiv2 Galactopedia that we could use to do some simple query-based evaluations of a finished game. p.s.

[quote]This is why I ignore everything written by this person. He stopped influencing the moment he resorted to these tactics.[/quote] I agree that namecalling doesn't help, but it's hardly like that behavior is exclusive to folks 'on the left.' One of my greatest frustrations with my party is that our national leadership has completely failed to find a way to turn the bilious vitriol of the post-Gingrich GOP to our advantage. Instead of calling out the bullies for both rudeness and a

[quote]That's because you're counting the payroll tax. It does not go towards public goods.[/quote] Bullshit. [quote]Assuming you live to be around the average lifespan, you'll be paid back far more than you put into it as well. The government is only collecting 15% max and spends it immediately, never to invest for any hope of a return. Grossly insufficient for the average length of collection.[/quote] Not bullshit. I might be a 'lefty,' but I'm a tightwad too. Thi

champions

[quote]Spouse is champion or hero type unit; special unit with trade powers/powerful equipment Spouse is in background; leaves all decision making to Soverign. Spouse is behind the scenes and makes many important decisions or gives good advise. Bonuses.[/quote] Magicke, I like the range of possibilities you suggest here but don't see any conflict with the idea that royal spouses should be a special class of units on the map. A champion system that did a good jo

I like the idea of abstracting 'fundamental' resource nodes like food and lumber off the map and adding 'advanced' resource nodes to the list of road destinations. Might even be best as an addition to the current food bonus tiles, if combined with making those tiles less common and maybe some sort of equally uncommon loggers' sweet-spot tile.

[quote]... I'm stating that most of the population doesn't contribute towards the tax revenues for public goods...[/quote] I'm lazy, so I haven't been able to quickly find some online breakdowns of income tax revenue by income level. The last time I saw good numbers like that, it was only a minority (20ish percent?) of W-2 earners who paid no taxes and/or qualified for the credit. More importantly, even if psychoak's wild claim is true, his point ducks the question of concentration of

taltamir, I think you're homing in on the most interesting 'weakness' of the dynasty mechanics. Talk so far has been mostly about how these things will play out in 'zero-sum' conflict terms. But you raise two very important points: 1) the range of options for 'justifying' any given mechanic is very broad, and 2) the mechanics really deserve a good fictional cultural context to connect those mechanics to Elemental's game world. Also, I never thought of sovereign offspring that could "d

I know I'm a horrible threadjacker on a regular basis, but I'd really rather not see this thread digress into how much fun it is to play a given 'alignment.' Cerevox, playstyles aside, what do you think of my original suggesion to make sovereign marriages a decision, and by implication make royal spouses true units like the others in the dynasty system? Would it make the game more fun for you, less fun, or neither?