Philocthetes

[quote]I prefer a city number somewhere between 10 and 30..[/quote] Eye of the beholder, indeed. 10 cities per faction would be horrible spam to me on the beta map size, and 30 would be ludicrous even on a ludicrous map. I'm really sold on the idea of trying to make a marked departure from the swarm-o-cities norm in the TBS genre. I'm late in my second colony rush on a GC2 immense map with moderate habitables. 100+ colonies seems both normal & fun, but I got all my GC2 hab

[quote]If you build your first city, you have no heroes or family. Ergo no governor except your Sovereign, who could not explore, being forced to stay in the city to allow it to grow.[/quote] I read the OP to mean that a champion-governor can be anywhere as long as he or she is alive & the site's OK, but most of these units would grant bonuses when you have them at home base. [quote]Just how common are heros going to be? This system would only really work if they were extr

[quote]Not sure how a corporation exists in such an environment, but whatever.[/quote] I'm just hassling you because it seems that your idea of a proper corporation seems to be closer to an anarcho-syndicalist shoe factory than it is to a modern multinational conglomerate.

[quote]Has the meaning changed while I wasn't looking, or what?[/quote] The meaning hasn't changed as far as I'm concerned; kinda like your affection for ignoring qualifiers and other deliberate expressions of ambiguity. [quote]Sorta like Commies, minus the top down control. [/quote] Exactly. That's what made me wonder about your previous incarnation as an Andalusian peasant in the first place.

[quote who="Doopliss" reply="2" id="2544666"]Very awesome. For release, it might be better if the replay was more visual than text-based, at least with map snapshots of each turn's beginning. "Bandit moves northwest" doesn't give a very good image of the move's consequences.[/quote] My main hope for the auto-resolve is that we can step in and out of it, mostly watching tac combat as movies but still being able to step in and go "no, no, stupid AI, target this enemy first."

[quote who="MasonM" reply="151" id="2544055"]I think it's great that Obama is cutting off funding for any scientific research that doesn't put money into green pockets.[/quote] Beg pardon, but what the hell are "green pockets?" Surely you don't mean that we're about to see NIH shut down or NASA limited to ground-based research? The shaky OP here was about the Obama administration cancelling some major humans-in-space stuff, not stopping space research nor radically redirecting the who

[quote]There is no search option for this forum, the one i used above searches the internet. So I don't know if this has been talked about.[/quote] The on-page search box is Google-based, but the results are all for the forum you're viewing. Sometimes the local Google thing does seem to ignore older posts, but it gives good hits for recent content.

[quote]Do I still sound like an anarcho-syndicalist?[/quote] Little bit, yea. Simple markets, personal accountability. Throw in some Andalusian folk music and you're at least halfway there...

[quote]Government spending is similar in function to a burglar breaking into your house, stealing your money, then buying something with it.[/quote] Yup. Criminals interested in buying things like a civilian-controlled military, a continent-spanning transportation infrastructure, a pre-trained workforce, and a theoretically trustworthy investment market.

The idea of the game playing well on the cloth map level is not just about supporting low-end hardware. It's about making sure that the core gameplay is fun, regardless of how pretty anything might look for folks playing on posh rigs. Strong visuals are a dime a dozen in computer 'strategy' games. Fun mechanics are harder to come by.

My main problem with a Keynesian view is that it assumes the human condition is defined by consumption; it's exactly like the Hayek crowd in that aspect, despite their sprawling disagreements on theory details. Fundamental objections to rampant consumerism aside, modern economies depend on a waltz between the public and private sectors, and if the private sector is faltering, it seems basically reasonable that the public sector should do its best to help prevent both of them falling o

[quote]They're also, not surprisingly, horribly inefficient entities that drag down growth. [/quote] What-what? You sound almost like an anarcho-syndicalist here, what with your fixation on market relationships and your rejection of central authority...

[quote who="dragoaskani" reply="223" id="2543524"]Ugh the spelling and grammar mistakes make my head hurt...and I was only a C english student in college...I hate english, I hate your spelling more.[/quote] I can't (OK, won't) parse that post either. But the short essay at http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html is good side reading for the

[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="85" id="2543526"]... I really liked the "1 per planet", "1 per civilization", and "1 per galaxy" improvements in GalCiv II. They added flavor and a nice strategic element to things.[/quote] I did too, but I like the larger maps and have no use for things like the Hyperion Shipyards. If Elemental includes faction- or world-unique improvements that improve locally-produced combat units, anything approaching city spam will be that much more annoying.

[quote]... This may be an expansion set idea, but developing sanity as a skill should help the wizard on track when developing additional power. ...[/quote] "Sanity as a skill." That phrase alone more than half sells me on an expansion pack. Even better if the base game might include something along these lines. Growing from a fairly humble world-restoring wizard to a potential world-wrecker really should include facing some psychological risks, and a schema for those risks could help

[quote]... every person has uniform worth throughout your empire ...[/quote] The game so far feels like that for me also, and I suspect that the problem has its roots in GalCiv, where population are a resource to be exploited and not the semi-autonomous foundations of cultures and societies. Plus the whole calendar-for-civ-scale-games problem is in there, and no one has yet come up with a brilliant solution to enable a game that has both tactical battles and multi-generational social

[quote who="Demiansky" reply="69" id="2543182"]Is it just me, or does it seem like houses are a waste to build? You know you'll have to build them for an exanding city, so it's really just extra clicks for the player to actually make them put the houses on a given tile. ...[/quote] I don't immediately love your alternative, but I'm definitely starting to think the housing stuff might be mostly annoying click overhead. And that's actually part because of this idea of aut

[quote]Having a problem with the way we've set up corporate law is hardly cause to skip out on classical liberalism.[/quote] And having such a problem is no certain indicator of having skipped out on classical liberalism. I'd prefer it if national academic standards required that anyone earning a BA or BS had read On Liberty and written a proper (or excellently improper) essay in response.

[quote]I do call into question the sanity of people that hold a bias against classical liberalism though. [/quote] Methinks you might mean me, in which case you're quite wrong. John Stuart Mill is one of my favorite theorists, even before he began to seriously consider the plausibility of some socialist ideas. The real rub for me with folks with an NCPA take on classical liberalism is that they have no good answer for the legal perversion that is the modern corporation. Classi

I have an old bias twoards hexes for real (in-person) RPGs. Not sure about hexes for a TBS PC game becuase I haven't ever seriously played one with hex maps. The 3 Civ 5 screen shots don't impress me at all in terms of hexes somehow making maps look more organic. Hexagonal cow pastures? Did anyone not running a math-obssessed religion ever build one of those?

I'd like some weather too. Eye candy if nothing else is worth the dev time, but prefarably eye candy connected to strategic and tactical decisions. For anyone interested in some back reading, weather is a subject in A time and Weather idea , Weather System , Elemental: Tactical battles , and Disasters and Other Random Events , among others.

[quote] See, I would get frustrated with soemthing like this. If I'm used to X building producing Y, I don't want to have to figure out "now why am I now getting Z instead of Y from X"...mostly where Z is a MUCH lower number than Y. [/quote] Holy over-20k treasury penalty, Batman! Re the 5-step plan for pop centers, I would also prefer to see a smoother, more organic approach to pop site growth. Ditching level numbers for words in that specific case seems good for soothing co

[quote who="MichaelCook" reply="190" id="2541607"]... Now excuse me, I've got some pie to eat.... [/quote] Michael, did you notice that while the NCPA is "a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization," it is most definitely an ideologically motivated think tank? They are staunch defenders of classical liberalism , the intellecutal underpinnings of many modern conservative thinkers. They've got some cr

[quote]Channeled spells take multiple turns to cast and manifest different effects throughout the duration of the cast. [/quote] I haven't played any CRPGs or RTS fantasty games, so maybe there's stuff like this out there I don't know about. But to me, the idea of a spell with a specific mult-turn casting time and intensifying effects during that period seems new and worth consideration by the devs. They would be distinctly different from MoM spells with upkeep. Those just established

[quote]As for "biological" immortality, I like it. It's an elegant, balanced way of dealing with an important character, both for gameplay and the story. Do I turn him into the uber-bookworm or train him up and 300 years down the line have a one man army?[/quote] The current story has the channelers being very long-lived. I still like the idea of them being ageless ('biologically' immortal), but I'm not writing the book. Re a 300 year long game, with a turn a day, that's almost 110,00