Philocthetes

[quote]He has a mullet?? Why didn't I notice that before?![/quote] Too low-res & wrong perspective to call it a mullet or not. Safe to call him a tart from the posture, though.

[quote]I cast.... BLENDER!!!! [/quote] Ewww, pureed meat. Wait...kitty-people would love that!

According to Kyogre's twit-tracking page , a Stardockian twitted the link to this picture recently: It seems like evidence that the devs are thinking about genders from multiple points of view, even if they're going to, ahem, wuss out and cut this kind of guy from the UI.

[quote]So you want to replace Congress with a typical parliament? You might as well eliminate the Supreme Court as well. Oh, and separate the President into two offices: a head of state and a chief executive.[/quote] Nonsense. Calling a legislature a parliament is hardly an insult, and the Supreme Court is an essential bastion against tyranny of the majority (at least in theory). But you might be onto something about carving off head-of-state duties for the chief exec. Ribbon-cutting

[quote]Gah I hate it when people use the term "gamey" as though it's a bad thing. Last time I checked this is a game.[/quote] Sometimes, gamey means stinky. Just sayin' ...

[quote who="Anthony R" reply="8" id="2526473"]Those who say McCain was worse than Obama and sat out the election... we now have Obama. Own it.[/quote] That's pretty much (if sort of backwards) how many of us felt about swallowing our 2000 desire to vote for Nader and still seeing Bush 43 get into office. Are you maybe bipartisan-curious?

In-person RPGs are perhaps my favorite 'art form' of all and I love both computers and Star Trek stories. But I quit even reading about MMO RPGs several years ago because the genre seemed to be just a morass of the worst sorts of social-dynamics problems that live RPG groups tend to experience. I don't care about 'winning' anything and I'm very bored/annoyed by repetitive UI tasks that do nothing but enhance stats and/or inventory. Is there anything 'new' about this latest Trek franch

[quote]Honesty! I admire that. I agree with the slogan thing, but unrepetant? There are degrees of unrepetant. Do you wish for a 3rd choice in 08?[/quote] I'm guessing you mean this fall or 2012, but no, not exactly. We won't have functional 'third choices' in the US until we fix the greatest flaw in our constitution, which is its attempt to reject parties as essential political institutions. Please forgive a former civics prof for ranting, but we need to get past personality-driv

[quote who="mbaron888" reply="2" id="2526365"]Isn't "change" great?[/quote] No. Change for change's sake is the evil sibling of growth for growth's sake, and both are more or less cancerous. What you're sloppily mocking is the campaign slogan "Change we can believe in." I mock campaign slogans as a complete category, so you're not getting any ground with this unrepentant Obama voter and current Obama critic. I even really enjoyed the first time I saw a bumper sticker ask me "S

[quote]What wars, historically, have had a suprising ending, where the "winner" was not who you might have thought?[/quote] That's a great classroom question, but seems too rich with complexity for the current generation of TBS games. It makes me think of the long-term consequences of imperial-style colonization (vs. the classical Greek start-a-new-city colonization), e.g. how Vietnam ended up in Vietnamese hands despite extensive efforts by France and the US to take control of the re

Denryu's done some interesting polls via SurveyMonkey, but I'd like to see some current opinions on a 'simple' question that has been around pretty much since the Elemental boards launched in late '08. Yes or No: Should having your sovereign die mean the game is over for you? If you can stand it, please keep your answers to a single word. If you want to argue the question, please start a fresh thread or pick up with one of the old ones related to the question.

[quote who="DariasDruss" reply="1" id="2526219"]Some reason but this topic isn't showing up in the forums. Could it be a server issue or a user issue.[/quote] It was probably a server-side problem. The Stardock forums get balky every now and then. If you see a rash of double postings, you can be pretty sure there's some sort of digital indigestion going on, but it usually gets back to normal in a short time. Things seem fairly responsive again as of about 14:30 East Cost time.

[quote who="idunno116" reply="11" id="2526225"]Actually, from what I can gather, as long as you dont intermarry with any Fallen factions you should be okay in terms of looks.[/quote] The problem with 'looks' formulas for me is that they'd need to take into account the eye of the beholder problem (indirectly mentioned by several folks above). I have no idea how varied the appearances are among different Fallen factions, but presumably they share a general level of what would lo

[quote]What if, for instance, you had other xenophobic sovereigns whom frown upon you if you marry your children off to partners whom are not your own race? Or simply with political enemies of their own?[/quote] I would love to see xenophobia specifically included in the diplo/dynastic modeling. To me, it wouldn't really be a dynasty system at all if it didn't include your latter basic point. "How dare you accept a Prince of Kraxis into your house? Our trade agreements are hereby nul

I'm also very interested to see how 'the end game' thing shakes out by RTM. As a longtime GalCiv2 player who loves large maps and has never managed to make myself click through a conquest win, I'll be impressed if Elemental entices me into actually finishing conquests. But this thread and some related discussions seem to almost forget that we will have multiple choices for how to call a game finished. The classic way a 'low ranked' civ in GC2 can come from behind and win is via one of

[quote who="Wieke" reply="4" id="2525560"]I don't see why the spell effects on the cloth map have to be boring (maybe boring when compared to the 3d engine, but not boring on it's own right). [/quote] One very good reason to keep graphics simple on the cloth map is to help the game run adequately on very low-end machines for players who strongly agree that "The 3D engine should enhance the fun but not be the ultimate source of it." For the beta process, it seems to me th

[quote]A country cannot be nationalist when they want to lynch their own leadership more often than not.[/quote] What a crock. Or maybe it's just a derailment into ill-fitting terminology. Let's try swapping "nationalist" for "jingoist" and/or "American exceptionalist." You of all people can't seriously be arguing that flag-waving, framer-naming, etc., aren't a major factor in both how we work our internal politics and how we are perceived abroad? Or are you taking Rick Perry'

[quote]Did you ever get the chance to play King of Dragon's Pass?[/quote] Yes, I did, and I wish I'd kept track of the disks so I could putter again via DOSBox. That AAR looks awesome, especially if the detail keeps up for all those forum pages. I was highly addicted to the game when it was fresh, but replayability wasn't that great, probably for the same immersion-related reasons that I enjoyed it so much initially. Detail was wonderfully deep, but in the end the game world felt pret

[quote]*To an engineer, a human is a swiss army knife. They can to a whole lot of tasks, but none of them as well as a purpose-built tool. Robots are designed to do simple and repetitive tasks better and faster than a human; a human is the solution for tasks that are rare or complicated enough to not be worth designing a robot to do.*[/quote] That's just not the point, at least until we have a seriously wealthy nation or megacorp that wants to sponsor a minimally self-sufficient offwo

[quote]yea, i think this would be important, maybe it could auto update old rumors if you found something that would change it?[/quote] I'm still vaguely hoping that we'll see some 'staff AIs' of some sort in the game. If we get a Royal Council or whatever, the spymaster or senior diplomat should give reports on new rumours that relate to old ones. But I'd settle for a more or less flat list of past rumours.

[quote]Quite simply, no machine has yet been created that can adapt, and overcome based upon situations not yet imagined. [/quote] Gah. That's a red herring, or at least it's so for some of us long-term space program supporters. You are ignoring the fact that we have plenty of valuable, hard work to do via unmanned space missions and 'arrogantly' assuming that personalized, dramatic moments are more important to the future of humanity than the basic research and engineering that wi

[quote]Because no computer has been designed yet to mimic human intelligence. Until such time as they can, the intuitiveness of humans will be the difference between success and failure when exploring space for any purpose other than measuring temperature and water content.[/quote] What a godawful short-term point of view, and a gross underestimation of the state and pace of development of robotics and telepresence . That "measuring" you so blithely dismiss is indeed being do

[quote who="Slaymore1975" reply="82" id="2524141"]It would be nice with an ETA on the next update [/quote] Unless there's an unexpected problem, it should be this Thursday (4 Feb). I can't find it quickly, but I saw something from at least one dev to that effect within the last week or so.

I scoff you 3D-obssessed deck junkies, but you get the point back for good onomatopoeia. Bring on the plooping terrain icons, and sing praises to the Horse That Made the World. Re the first run at charm spells, I also think that some entities should be difficult or impossible to charm no matter how powerful a spell-caster is. And I have an uncomfortable twinge from my inner D&Der who wants separate spells for charming character types vs. monster types. That would be one way to wor

[quote]Well... that's true. Stalin and Hitler could honestly find a lot of common ground. I don't argue that. However, none of right-wing dictators ever got cozy with the socialists in their own country that we're supposed to believe are a step away from one another. Between Hitler and Stalin? Perhaps. Between Hitler and Marx? No fucking way. I find it hard to believe that the average leftist WWII partisan had much in common with nazis.[/quote] Hitler and Stalin only got cozy the way