Philocthetes

Games varied fantastically from a few simple setup choices Continuous overland spells Noncombat casting time based on caster strength and spell power Item creation Decent number of distinctly individual champion units Turn-based tactical combat

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="33" id="2535208"]... Not asking for that kind of magic in the game but I'd not mind some(fertility affecting spells could be helpful and/or weapons).[/quote] I'm asking for it, at least at the agricultural level. Stuf like blighting crops, sterilizing herds, and speeding harvests would put some real flavor into the Life spell books/chapters, even if we don't have magic for the dynasty system in the base game.

Re the lass' name, the double e at the end makes me think of the name Renee (with an accent on the last e), and a stress pattern like Persephone. Pro-SIP-ih-nay.

Dire kittens, they could change the landscape of TBS games forever... And yes, that's a vote in hopes that "dire bears" will be more or less an easter egg, unless maybe there will be a good story and/or gameplay reason to have more than one "dire" anything?

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="8" id="2534790"]I always thought of the "leaking" as radiation. "Leaking" liquids for this "leaking essence" would be like... the Sovereign spits when talking? So He leaks on anyone he talks with? [/quote] The radiation thing is the other part of why it doesn't work for me--radiation leakage is unarguably hazardous (just as anal leakage is univerally unpleasant, fetish-folks excepted), and this 'essence leakage' thing seems to be a suggestion for a posit

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="30" id="2534727"]... Teleport seed? Infidelity with another Sovereign? Virgin Mary? Self-fecundation?[/quote] On the silly front, if you haven't read Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," I believe you'd enjoy it. Seriously, though, it seems like some magical 'ob/gyn' stuff should be in the game. Lots of folks are up in arms about how weird it is to combine and ageless sovereign and dynasty mechanics. I'd find it far weirder to have proto-sem

[quote]Like demiansky said, you'd build the barracks, the smithy, the temple. [/quote] Exactly. If "sovereign buildings" wasn't working for you, think "national infrastructure" and remember that modern nation-states are the decendents of a much longer lineage of city-states.

[quote who="Cerevox" reply="27" id="2534588"]Perhaps all channelers could start off infertile and have to tech a spell they can use to temporarily make themselves fertile. Keeps a reign on kids, if you don't want them, you don't get them, and if you want lots, you are only limited by the resources you want to spend casting the spell. Tweaking the spell costs would allow you to control how many kids and how early they show up. Perhaps the spell could have increasing costs as it beco

I dislike this leaking thing as both a mechanics notion and a choice of language. Emitting waste heat is not "leaking." Wetting the bed or bleeding from a wound is "leaking." Even urine-related slang sort of backs this up--you "take a leak," you don't just "leak." The game mechanics just seem like a sort of tax on essence that's more likely to end up narrowing the range of viable playstyles than it is to add fun to the game. I'm on the fence about some sort of 'exposure' proce

[quote who="Campaigner" reply="51" id="2534088"]... Did you just started gaming or have you been without internet for the last 8 years..? Not knowing about Frostmourne is quite a feat [/quote] I'm probably just a slave to my television. Make Love, Not Warcraft ...

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="17" id="2533509"]Yeah but some ideas are... wrongly presented. To totally ignore the "Sovereign death = game over" to present a system that doesn't use it (dinasties, you know I was talking about them), is just wrong. ...[/quote] That's yet another case where the details of the game story and the draft mechanics will make all the difference. What if it comes down to something as simple as sovereigns becoming decreasingly fertile as they gain mag

[quote]I cannot suffer any kind of dissociative identity disorder about it.[/quote] That's just your abstract-feather headdress talking... Re the devs tight lore lips, I hope that behavior means they are still trying to keep the lore in a semi-raw state so that they can finish it and the core mechanics more or less together, rather than way after the fact a-la GalCiv. I suspect there's also some deliberate withholding of things like feature lists, major lore summaries,

[quote]That is arthas with the sword frostmourne.[/quote] Thanks. I thought it was maybe a really bad Elric & Stormbringer pic, but Stormbringer was more of a slippery ally than an overwhelming force of corruption on account of Elric being kind of corrupt on his own.

Don't listen to Winty about your user pic; he has user pic- DID . A very bad case of it [e classic];)[/e] I do agree with him that if you're serious about pitching an idea for non-human/fallen 'peers' as possible mates for sovereigns, putting your case in somewhat dry/abstract terms might help. I confess that the tone left me uninterested in responding to a first read and my doubts about the devs

[quote who="Cerevox" reply="40" id="2533358"]Oh shizzam! the obvious one, and we all missed it. Good catch.[/quote] Obvious to some, a random-looking cover of a fantasy novel to those of us not in the know. What is that blade & who's holding it? [quote]Make a single powerful cursed item and spell it to seek out a single powerful hero, kind of like the One Ring. [/quote] I would love for the game to include autonomous/sentient items.

Apparently, the luge track up in Vancouver is also getting some ursine attention. I caught a blip on CSMonitor.com that mentions at least two racers having spotted bears investigating the course. A bear mauling of a top performer would surely be an un-fun way for someone to win a medal...

Bears just want to have fun?

[quote who="Cerevox" reply="16" id="2532379"]I know, i just think myrran sounds better, so thats what i type. And tbh, i don't pick the lizard picture either. And if you want to hit grammer, notice that i have spelled sss'raa a different way every single time i have written it.[/quote] No worries; I started with a beg-pardon. It was a helpless twitch because Myrror's name is a blunt pun and I have a weakness for puns.

[quote]Yes it does. Being persistent is what gives results. If you bother him enough, eventually he'll fix your stuff so he doesn't have to be bothered again[/quote] Whatever. I appreciate good customer service from the private sector and respectful responsiveness from government orgs, but I'm getting very tired of living in what seems to be an increasingly complaint-driven world. Mainly because the art of the constructive complaint seems to be on the verge of death.

[quote]myrran [/quote] Beg pardon for a helpless grammar-nanny moment, but "Myrran" is the adjective. Myrror is the name of the plane.

It seems like a matter of category to me. Truly permanent curses, 'marks,' or other trait changes should be very rare (expensive or just difficult) and probably should present some risks to the spell-caster attempting to inflict them. But in the abstract, rejecting them entirely seems like a baby-with-the-bathwater thing. It would rule out Elemental analogs of historical figures like Ivar the Boneless. If we're lucky enough to have curses in the game at all, though, I expect most of t

Nagging the plumber doesn't get the pipes fixed any faster.

[quote]It would be a lot like how you manage all those dialogue moments in Galactic Civs: as a steady and manageable flow throughout the game.[/quote] If you're talking about the occasional colonization ethics events, one of the main reasons I go for Xeno Ethics early is to remove that repetitive (boring) click task. (I also do it to avoid the ethics event part of the GC2 Loves Evil problem). Huge, Gigantic, and Immense maps are my favorites. If that stuff kept happening for entire ga

[quote]Ah, wasn't sure what the current state of things was. Unfortunately none of the betas in recent months have been able to run on my desktop.[/quote] The betas are painful in general, but everyone's pain is unique... [quote]Might not be too difficult to just change the skin tone to pale, superimpose a veiny texture on top of it, blacken around the eyes, and then maybe remove the irises/pupils. But I say that as someone who has zero idea how easy that is. Perhaps they c

Having recently remembered how intense my brief love affair with King of Dragon Pass was, the sketch in the OP is very engaging to me. But when I think about very long games on very large maps, I worry about repetitive click overhead and boilerplate text that becomes annoying through excessive familiarity. Do you have any ideas on how an approach like this might 'scale' across the boundary from RPG to TBS?