Philocthetes

[quote]But in the current beta, "livable" gradually radiates out from your city (and from dragon fountains). Over time, it becomes possible to build a lot more cities without spending essence, and those type of cities shouldn't need a channeler to found.[/quote] I had a few games where I founded numerous outposts without having to spend essence. Some were in the 'spread' from my original pair of sites, some were via dragon fountains, some were restored land left behind after an AI kil

[quote who="Terran_242" reply="17" id="2541422"]I'd take a guess Thrawn, and say that they're probably clinically immortal. Like Lord of the Rings elves, they'll live forever under good conditions but a lightning bolt to the face will cramp their style just like it would for us. [/quote] Putting science terms on this just makes it less fun. You're spot-on about how Tolkien elves function. Their lives are potentially endless, but they are vulnerable to conflict, disaster, and despair.<

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="11" id="2540246"]Wasn't cloth map the "safe mode" for less powerful hardware? It could use some improvements but not too many. And MoM didn't have cloth map...[/quote] GC2 doesn't have as well-established a term as "cloth map," but it does have a 2D-3D boundary that you can cross by zooming in and out. The 2D level functions both as a sort of safe mode for low-end boxes and as a 'normal' view for folks who play very long games on very large ma

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="33" id="2541435"]The problem with lightening rods is that they work by transferring electricty from the cloud to the ground along a safe conductive channel. In a fantasy world, it's unlikely that lightning (especially the magical sort) would behave in quite the same way: first, I see no reason why it would have to STAY on the path of least resistance all the way to the ground and not send some feelers out in other places, and second, there's no reason for metals t

[quote]clinically immortal[/quote] [e classic]:lol:[/e]

[quote who="Tridus" reply="17" id="2541384"]... I mean at one point wasn't the idea to have shards each give mana of that type? That's even more restrictive.[/quote] I don't see how it would have been more restrictive than most/all spells requring a control of at least one specific shard type--although you're right to call me on possibly worrying in advance with too little info. Back when I was thinking about 5-6 flavors of mana, I rashly assumed that a sovereign's banked mana

[quote]I'd rather defer to Mises, Hayek, Locke, Burke, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and any of the myriad of thoughtful voices on the topic than have people try to understand these positions from a pack of "shrill" entertainers.[/quote] I'll give you this bit hands-down, not least because I have fancy degrees and haven't done nearly enough reading along those lines. But I want to dismiss the whole 'anti-American' thing on account of the very label being a red herring at root, at least if you'r

[quote who="Tridus" reply="10" id="2541245"]... The spells now require a certain number of certain types of shards to cast (eg Fireball would require 10 mana and control of 1 fire shard, or some such). ...[/quote] I'm still hoping that this particular change will be rescinded or substantially modified. It sounds far to much like making a magic system equivalent of railroads in Civ1-3, only worse because it would make big chunks of spell knowledge useless for a certain range of map typ

[quote who="Nimis" reply="6" id="2541184"]I'd love to find out something about the artists involved, the artwork and style for this game is absolutely stunning.[/quote] The art folks are apparently very fond of Alphonse Mucha . The devs have typed about him, and the recent art surely looks to me like that took his art noveau ball and are running well with it.

[quote]specious propaganda movies put out by an avowed anti-American, and consider reading Das Kapital, What Is To Be Done, then have at The Road To Serfdom and then some Burke and ask the question again, of yourself[/quote] Points for giving a reading list, equivalent debits for the specious rhetorical loop. I have plenty of complaints about Micahel Moore myself, but calling him "anti-American" is just bullshit. He's a US citizen just like me, and presumably you; disagreement is as A

[quote]That would leave factions being different from each other by appearence and tech trees?[/quote] Let's hope it is more about AIs with distinctly different values/personalities. Faction (pre)history needs to shape AI behavior at least as much as practical matters like research possibilities. [quote] * World Class computer AI. What is world class? With what could i compare it ? [/quote] Strictly speaking, "world class" is a tired-to-death marketing ph

[quote]I'd much prefer fantasies to keep the creation myths at a minimum, or better make them vague and contradictory.[/quote] The only time I want creation myths minimized is when the game world is as narratively weak as GalCiv or Starcraft. The thing that has me starting to lower my expectations for the Elemental story is that in a fantasy setting, I want mysterious foundations for the world. As in permanently un-knowable from the player POV; woven into the guts of the code

[quote who="MichaelCook" reply="9" id="2540209"]... Maybe the occasional wheat blowing in the wind, birds startled from trees as your army moves through. A dolphin leaping from the water. Nothing huge, they don't trigger all the time, but they add just that little bit more. I guess with 2D sprites, even with the zoom factor, it shouldn't be very memory intensive to do this? (ie, even a sluggish netbook could handle it?).[/quote] I'd love it if the 'plays OK on a netbook' thing could m

[quote]I dunno...... if it's a man it's a rather skinny one..... and the chest is a bit off as well.... blowing up the image reveals what appears to be long white hair behind the helmet....[/quote] Faugh, as if hair length was a solid gender indicator in the real world, much less a fantasy one. Look at the stance, lad. Legs spread that wide almost certainly mean fully-descended testicles are present. If that Magnar figure is a uterus-owner, she's a very butch one, or she was r

My impression from early (autumn '08, winter '09) talk was that enchanted gear for regular combat units was a given. But that was before the Great Economy Thread led to a 'simpler' approach for collecting, refining, and distributing resources. We should hopefully see signs of whether there's been a reversal of that old goal when 1G finally appears on Impulse--unless the basic magic system component excludes any of the mechanisms the devs have planned to enable things like archer squads with e

[quote]That's just chaining different spells.[/quote] The "just" there seems valid only for the real RPG crowd, unless maybe is spell chaining common in recent TBS fantasy games? (I don't have recent first-hand experience on account of wanting strong random map systems and being too poor-and-lazy to have seriously tried Dominions 3.)

There will be much more color and detail when you zoom in past the cloth map to whatever they're going to call that level (near-tactical, tactical?). The beta won't include that level for quite a while yet. The cloth map needs to stay visually simple in comparison so that it is effective for players who like the largest maps, which will be very large indeed if Stardock can work out reasonable licensing for 64-bit support for the Havok stuff they are using. Color needs to carry informa

[quote who="taltamir" reply="44" id="2538968"]it is an essential part of the "reality distortion field" (google it)[/quote] Pointy hair is powerful even when you only have it on the inside. Dilbert's boss came back from hell this week...

It seems like you're onto not one, but two major categories of possible spells. The example in your OP would seem like the more powerful type, where you perform a long-term ritual that lets you choose where to target the spell effects each turn during the long ritual. That seems interesting, but maybe too complex to make it through all the balance-hassling. But a multi-turn spell that simply intensified its effects on a single target, e.g. a dragon or a city, would be great fun on account of

Thanks so much for 'evangelizing' here. Not only does sticking to named styles help simplify formatting cleanup & design changes, but when you use named heading styles, you make Outline view useful for both navigation and rearranging a doc. (The Document Map pane also depends on named styles with heading levels.) Named styles are even good for things not related to the outline, such as separate formatting for text in callouts, legalese/copyright text (fine print), or sidebars.

[quote who="Splitshadow" reply="31" id="2537077"]It's kind of weird that this thread is called "Preview of Magic in Elemental" when there are no screenshots nor videos [/quote] I'd rather have the thousand words than a pic [e classic];)[/e]

[quote who="Micshoop" reply="17" id="2536691"]... creatable constructs (golems). [/quote] Now that would be a true superior scion of MoM item creation. (Plus it might help enable sentience as a possible trait for artifact-level magic items.)

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="18" id="2536757"]... The race of the Krax are a sub-group of men who are on the side of the Empire for instance. They are men who practice death magic.[/quote] The Kindoms vs. Empires thing has never reallly confused me, but I'm still lost about what, if anything, is the difference (relationship) between a faction and a race. They still sound like equivalent synonyms. Put somewhat differently, is Scoutdog guessing rightly that "correlation does not

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="45" id="2536035"]Custom crests...[/quote] Blazonry made easy! Any chance the initial version might be in 1G?

Looking forward to seeing alliegance functionality in a build as soon as we can. Question: What's the difference between faction and "race" in the OP? Does faction in this context mean roughly "canon race?"