Philocthetes

Your question is part of why I long ago suggested that sovereigns maintain some kind of personal, magical connection to the lands they restore (or twist, now that we have that term). I'm still hoping to see some sort of major magical process as the final stage of conquest in 'alien' terrain, otherwise the game will probably work like you describe or seem odd because it doesn't. Or maybe it is already planned to be kind of auto-magical in the backround, so that when an Empire sov takes

[quote who="StormSeed" reply="3" id="2551640"]And anyway, it's a homophone problem. ... [/quote] Doh! [e classic];P[/e]

"Hearty" needs to be "Hardy" (or the bonus should be about people being fun at parties, not quick to heal and/or harder to kill)

[e classic]:P[/e]

Humour's a high art and comic relief done well is very nice in many 'drama' contexts. A character with a dry or dark wit should say dry or darkly funny things sometimes. Silliness, though, is a specific subset of humour. I admire it, and am myself a member of the Silly Party who has occasionally voted Very Silly. I'm still glad to hear Brad say that the base game will not have the same kind of silliness that's peppered a

[quote]... I once ran out of a house naked covered in baby spiders (combination of the need for speed and the desire not to hurt as many spiders as possible) ...[/quote] Not to go all second-generation hippie on you, but were you concerned about avoiding the critter harm in general or did you know that the baby spiders covering you were a good ally against a serious pest like roaches? (I admit I'm thinking a little bit about Elemental quests and the Giant Spiders we've seen in the bet

[quote]the occasional boiled brain[/quote] Bah. Boiling is brutal mistreatment for a rich, fatty organ like a brain. A brain ain't no shank, after all. Not that I've ever eaten brains, despite being regularly offered eggs-and-brains as a weekend breakfast treat when I was a kid.

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="17" id="2549838"]... You wouldn't ask Spiderman to be serious while fighting. If one of the Sovereigns has a sense of humour and likes to taunt his enemies with bad jokes, why not? As long as it's in character of the Sovereign, it should be fine. Like it'd be fine to have cruel Sovereigns, compassionate ones...[/quote] I'd say "Snap," but I worry about ending up with a bunch of webbing all over me...

GalCiv never had an immersive story layer for me, so the silliness there was fun. It was also highly repetitive after enough games, so it became pretty easy to ignore if I was in a mood to get all RPGy with a given game. For Elemental, I'd prefer to see silliness kept out of hard-coded text text for pretty much the same reasons Soulfire777 gives. Silliness belongs in the Book of Silly Mods: Part 1-Slightly Silly Mods, Part 2-Silly Mods, and Part 3-Very Silly (Independent) Mods.

My advice from experience is don't borrow money for a degree unless you have strong personal interest in the subject matter and are willing to accept the possibility of doing lots of future tedious work to pay for the privilege of seriously studying something you love. At least in the U.S., the market value of any given bachelor's degree is seriously at risk due to the past couple-few decades having seen the rise of 'the education industry' and the demise of long-term careers. And tha

[quote]Her right, or left. I refer to all images/movies using the viewer's frame of reference[/quote] Stop quibbling, lad. Given your obvious, if youthful, brainpower, it's almost harder to read than your regular statements of unjustified certainty. Put your spiked-leather-clad, square-monacle-using brain to the important business of arguing about the fundamental abstractions and generalizations for Elemental. You might well do more for the game than most of us typing around here.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="4" id="2548552"]... Ultimately, the users will be deciding when Beta 3 is. [/quote] I hope that means that beta 2 is actually going to be about much more than just dealing with the multiplayer stuff. It would be a real shame to see substantial beta input for the magic system, champions, quests, and dyanastic politics limited to a short few weeks between now and when the 'offical MP phase' of the beta begins.

[quote]Why do we have high administration costs?[/quote] Because large-scale formal organizations tend to protect their turf (defend the status quo, retain their current membership) regardless of whether they are part of a government, part of a private corporation, or part of a public-private partnership. Mind you, that's a wordy-t-shirt response that entirely ducks the question of social complexity necessitating increasing investment in 'overhead' to help ensure consensus, if

[quote]IIRC, the skill stat was a total for all mana used that turn and did not reset for combat.[/quote] I haven't played MoM since the '90s, but ChongLi's description fits my recollection. Unless my inner revisionist has changed things in my steel-sieve-like memory, one of the benefits of having an insanely fat mana bank was that your wizard's involvement in each and every tac battle was limited only by your spellcasting skill.

[quote]I'm hoping "assuming" that since we will be able to forge our own magical items in game that we'll be able to give spell like abilities to some of those items. For a cost of course.[/quote] As far as I know, the idea of equipping regular units with magical gear has always been part of the dev plan. I'd prefer to see base-game functions along the lines Tim4fun describes rather than seeing it limited to items and mods.

[quote]Really? I found the opposite.[/quote] Really? Well, really , I had no footnotes, rotten me. Just sloppy recollections of some footnoted stuff about the hysterically lucrative boner med market and various things about how some insurance plans and specific health care facilities (down to pharmacies) make it hard for some women to go on the 'normal' pill, much less get reliable access to emergency contraception. Just the idea that rules could cause the latter problem driv

MoM sort of did this via unit enchantment spells, often with a mana maintainence cost, and species bonuses. I really hope that Elemental will include some 'production enchantments' for combat units, but with pre-reqs like a champion (the Lord High Drill Instructor) who can perform a specific mana-spending ritual and/or a building with a mana cost for construction and/or upkeep.

[quote]Pssh! Health care is a very political topic![/quote] Fuckin' A right it is. Arguing over the specifics of pancreatic cancer treatment outcomes is a really good example of why rationing of care is part of all health care systems . Most combat vets understand this because they know what triage is, although triage is certainly not what it used to be on account of the amazing skills of modern trauma surgeons and nurses. Even in the world outside battlefields, there

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="33" id="2547223"]Landis: Yeah, I'm suprised of that myself. Our answer would be "1G is all those betas rolled together AND some" [/quote] And Some Wish List: basic blazonry tool, basic item-making mechanics in the magic system, and champions with a Governing stat even if we can't yet have them make use of it. [quote]Interesting..... am I the only one who notied a pair of small red scratch makes running down the left side of her face?[/quote]<

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="10" id="2547925"]One of the core balancing mechanics in Master of Magic is the spellcasting skill stat. This stat directly determines how quickly you can spend your mana on spells. If your spellcasting skill is 50, you may spend no more than 50 mana per turn on out-of-combat spells (and 50 pre-channeling mana per combat). Lets say you want to cast Armageddon, which costs 1250 mana, it will take you 25 turns to cast it (at 50 mana/turn). Anyone who i

[quote]T-shirt. I still have it, heh heh I'm so sad. - Guess that feature only works for me!!![/quote] landisaurus has been hoping it will work for Elemental for a long time . I still kinda wish his contest hadn't gone down the golf-shirt route, though...

[quote]or was it the interface?[/quote] It was the interface for me. Well, that plus the buzz that the game was built for MP and I prefer solo sandboxes (with legos, modeling clay, and maybe the occasional Micronaut). Edit: Should also say that I wanted to get into Dom 3 on account of other buzz like the OP here and the AAR it mentions. Lots of the Dom 3-inspired talk around here suits my tastes very well.

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="7" id="2546902"]right, the Krax are humans on the empire side! its reasonable to assume there is somebody on the flip of that coin. (though I guess its easy to say after Frogboy's already confirmed it)[/quote] He said, "A Fallen race could be on the side of the Kingdom." That confirms the possibility for custom factions, but not for the canon factions. Brad's cagey like that.

Some secondary bonuses based on the local magistrate's reputation seem like a neat idea. But I'm actually interested in seeing the home-or-roaming tradeoff be an important, ongoing question in the game. Not least because I'm still very hopeful that this will be the first TBS that has at least a little built-in affection for non-competitive players (folks who often or always 'role play' their TBS games) and snapping turtlers.

[quote]One thing to take into account about city spamming, is that right now you can't use Essence for anything else than city spamming. As soon as Essence can be used for something else, we will see less cities in general. About governors, I like the idea of them, but as an idea, not as a second mechanic to avoid city spamming because the first mechanic we thought doesn't work... (and again, hard to know if it works until we get more uses for Essence).[/quote] I'd pretty c