Philocthetes

[quote]Are Hitler and Franco ideologically similar to the communists and socialists they fought? I think you'll find they aren't.[/quote] I recreationally call myself 'what passes for a socilist in the US,' but pschoak's sort of got you here. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin all had a major area of ideological compatibility: authoritarian nationalism. You can throw in Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, those wacky Kims in North Korea, and Castro for good measure. Perhaps t

[quote who="RisingLegend" reply="103" id="2523343"]It's been a long time since the last beta release, my assumption was that we are getting two updates in one: a Dynasty and Magic beta.[/quote] That's how I'm reading the forum tea leaves. If I remember rightly, the current build (0.264) is both 1C and 1D as described in the sticky beta sched post.

[quote who="CrusaderScott" reply="21" id="2522884"]I am glad to see Diplo/Dynasty took the lead in gameplay interest. Quite surpising, actually.[/quote] Smells a bit like a result of what's getting heavy public discussion discussion recently. But then I might be the one who skipped that question on account of I really wanted to be able to pick an answer along the lines of The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts. I could end up loving tactical battles if the magic is right

I like the idea in general, but if the rumours are potentially important, I'd want a UI chunk that let me 'go through my files' at will and look at old rumours in the light of new events and/or other rumours. I've occasionally kept notes outside a game, but I like it to be optional.

[quote]It is no good if the game crashes.[/quote] I'm sure the devs agree. It's just a matter of how unusual your situation is. You did post your debug.err and dump zip for your CTD problem, didn't you?

[quote]Make sense yet? [/quote] Your general idea is sort of what I've been pining for ever since I first thought of 'going Gandalf.' Probably the most important part of your argument is: [quote]This is a game. It can be made however we'd like with whatever kinds of balance between different elements we'd like.[/quote] Although the devs are more of "we" than us peanut gallery folks. [quote]by the current model of the economy, magic is mired with the mundane ec

[quote]so now some california police officers is going to have to patrol the moon to protect these histric aritifacts(this trash)[/quote] You must not have read the article. The move by the commission appears to be self-consciously rhetorical, a gesture of support for the idea of getting Tranquility Base on the World Heritage List.

I try hard to kill impulses to bigotry when I have them, but sometimes it is very hard not to make rude generalizations about Californians. Other times, they really do leave me wondering if they're more crazy-like-foxes than they are just plain crazy. I don't know what to make of the news that their official historical commission has designated a bunch of trash at the Apollo XI site as "protected resources." I t

[quote who="Shurdus" reply="29" id="2522561"]Will it have bugfixes and such as well? At the present I cannot play elemental for more than a minute or so before my machine freezes - that is, I cannot play it.[/quote] There've been bug fixes in the builds so far. I couldn't play 0.24 at all and had the wonky unit designer graphics in 0.255, but I could play 0.255 more or less and in 0.264 the unit designer graphics seem OK.

[quote]I'm not even sure how dynasties went through the beta, what kinds of new and exotic functionalities it has and it hasn't.[/quote] Dynasties aren't in the public beta yet, but the first draft will be in the next release, hopefully this coming week.

[quote who="Myles" reply="29" id="2521892"]... Just so we're on the same page, I'm fully in support of a space program. It provides invaluable information about celestial neiborhood and science in general. I just don't think putting people on the moon or mars, at this point, is much of a benifit.[/quote] This is definitely one of those pages where so-called liberals and conservatives can be in complete agreement (or disagreeement). I was born in 1964 and my folks didn't have a TV unti

Just in case the next (few) beta(s) are still messy in this regard, you can do cleanup manually by deleting your custom .xml files from your \Users\ YourUserNameHere \Documents\My Games\Elemental\Units folder (I'm on Vista now, the path will be a bit different in XP and maybe 7).

I've picked on lifekatana about tone a few times, but I'm sure he and I have far more policy preferences in common than either of us have with Myles. That said, I'm sick to death of hearing the public space program described as a 'waste.' Even if you ignore the importance of moving industrial processes off planet for the long-term health of our biosphere, there's still plenty of short-term benefit from the basic research that has gone into the efforts so far. Not to mention the dispersion boo

Sigh. The move to outsource LEO astronaut launches should please the core of the 'space-race' activists, who've been bitching about NASA for years and spending huge bucks on sci-fi authors who tell stories about how private industry paves the way for human expansion into the rest of the solar system. As a staunch, Floridian Democrat who just told the DNC to fuck off asking for money until they get their act in DC together, it is mainly a sign to me that Obama's tactical folks have alr

[quote]what do you think about the possibility of moving/combining shards?[/quote] Ages ago, I suggested that basic map setup should include options to make shards scale from their current status as geographical features all the way down to easily portable major magic items like the One Ring. (If AIs could cope with that, it would definiitely expand the 'replayability' space.) Combining shards seems odd in general, except possibly as a specific quest to Reassemble the Origina

[quote](also get off the name)...There are things like ... Launch pads...legal pads..knee pads[/quote] The pad thing's niether here nor there for me. Just had iNough of tired branding formats like this one...

[quote]Who names these things?[/quote] iDiots?

[quote]Do away with magical academies and all that! Focus magic development around the channelers, not buildings![/quote] Seconded.

[quote]So when do we see the results?[/quote] The OP says, "I will post the results when the 100 threshhold is broken OR Saturday at 10:00 a.m. PST whichever is first." [e classic];)[/e]

[quote]"starting major event" enables a random event in the first turn or on turn 5 or 10.[/quote] This seems like a fine idea for a hybrid of campaign/scenario games and sandbox games. All the UI would need is a drop-down instead of a check box, and maybe another drop-down or small set of radio buttons for what turn to trigger the event. I think I might even enjoy a game where I started with a deliberate choice of mega-event and still left 'normal' mega-events enabled. (I had a sort

I don't see how swapping mana types for shards-as-spell-prereqs does much good to help that basic "game being won in the first 10 minutes" problem. It just changes "the first 10 minutes" to "the crucial 10 minutes" on a given map. Having shard pre-reqs seems a very neat idea for late-game, world-wrecking types of spells, but I'm still hoping for an overall approach that shakes out along the lines of the spell book system in MoM, i.e. a major setup choice should be whether your sovereign speci

[quote]That'd be all well and good if socialism only helped people who really needed help. Unfortunently, people are the problem as people abuse an imperfect system.[/quote] This reminds me of a cocktail-party solution I've had to this problem for a long time: why don't our corporate oligarchs just settle down and accept the cost of an adequate welfare state as a more efficient way of securing their business environment? Decent public housing is possible, and adequate doles will keep

Maybe Kryo can confirm Winter's and my sketchy recollection that it's normal to have a PayPal 'window around the beta enrollment milestones. I think it's so, but I also can't quickly find a dev post saying as much (PayPal is mentioned all over the place...).

Yup. Deadpan humour just doesn't work that well through these danged inter-pipes. [e classic];P[/e]

[quote who="cephalo" reply="29" id="2519456"]... So you say it might be possible to be a kind of "Octomom".[/quote] Well, I was mostly being silly because I don't expect to see much reproduction-oriented magic in the initial game. But yea, a female sovereign with Life magic strenght should be able to make herself an 'octomom plus,' the plus being she can outsource some or all of the gestation work. Not the best way to build a loving family, probably, but could provide an edge in a dyn