Philocthetes

[quote]we all should be able to use it but not pillage it.[/quote] Given what you say about bridges, I'm guessing you really mean something more like "disable" when you write "pillage" here. I think that a given unit's ability to disable a square of road or a bridge should depend on the unit's abilities and/or equipment. If the game includes sappers of some sort, bridges should be fairly easy to break by late-mid to end-game, and ruining a small stretch of road shouldn't take that muc

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="18" id="2516060"] Death magic doesn't mean evil necessarily. But it does alter ones view of the world (in the game) So....... that's a "yes"?........[/quote] I take it as a sign that the 'actionable' parts of the back story are still unfinished and/or open to change. Early last year, I had the impression that being Fallen meant being oriented to Death magic, which most everyone typing around here seemed to equate with Evil. That appears to be

[quote]for the people in the Elemental beta[/quote] Thinking about faster results for Elemental, it doesn't seem like there's a need to design a survey or involve Impulse. Just create a mailbox and ask beta folks to send zipped debug.err files. Some ETL code to import them into a database should be no challenge for Stardock. Then the devs can query/analyze the data all they'd like, and maybe collect a steady stream of new datapoints by filtering fogbugz data (and maybe even the forums

[quote]If you liked DS9 watch Babylon 5:[/quote] Yes, but also be prepared to be driven away from an old show with then-revolutionary space opera graphics and a fascinating setting/backstory by a remarkable train wreck of mediocre acting and bad dialog writing. I've never been able to watch that show start to finish because the wince-to-wow ratio is wrong for me now matter what series I start with...

[quote who="SpardaSon21" reply="32" id="2515812"]... Free marketerers believe strongly in protecting the intellectual and physical property of members of the free market, and see proper government intervention as a means to that end. Free marketers also desire government intervention to break up monopolies and trusts, because a monopoly, trust, or cartel is an inhibition to free, competitive trade. Basically, they belive in leaving it alone, until it stops working. Only then

[quote]hanging/corrupting Men and Dragons[/quote] Yay, apparent confirmation of Fallen sorts of dragons! [quote]If I read this right, and discard some of the early blanket statements about kingdoms/empires from long long long long loooooooooooong ago, then does this mean that there could be "good" (i.e. life-using/not-raping-murdering-pillaging-and-torturing) Fallen factions?[/quote] Don't tease; I've almost given up my pining for a Middle Way in the Elemental ethical

[quote]At the center of it all is a single laptop, the screen displaying abominations too terrible to describe. Illumined in its infernal light is Frogboy, on his hands and knees, weeping. "What have I done?" he cries, raising his hands to the blackened sky. "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" seemingly unaffected by the horror. He gazes over the crowd, then into the sky and quietly murmur(sp?)s.... "now, to find a means of distribution....[/quote] <p

You have several very broad questions here. You might get some answers just by reading threads, particularly in the Dev Journals section. Elemental is going to be a fantasy TBS game with some RPG elements such as quests and having your faction leader be a unit on the map that can fight and die during the game. The game will support multiplayer, but singleplayer is the primary design focus. Moddability is very important to the devs, as is in-game customization.

[quote]Bad things. Unholy, unnatural things.[/quote] Maybe you need to put a Call of Cthulhu project on the long-term project list...or is that just another Civ IV mod waiting to happen?

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="5" id="2515794"]Will be Froggits in the game? So we can have Frogo and Ham trying to destroy The One Pin created by Souron, ex-servant of Moregoth, encouraged by the mage Grandalf? Oh wait, wrong game?[/quote] You make me wish I was a modder. Anyone who builds a decent Bored of the Rings mod would be a real hero to some of us...

[quote who="Jalicos" reply="4" id="2515781"]... Only two natural sentient species: humans and dragons. There are other sentient species, but they're all artificially created. I'm guessing they're either humans and dragons modified beyond recognition (The Fallen), or other animal species uplifted to sentience through magical means.[/quote] Brad's really good at leaving big, interesting holes in a description. One way to read the OP is that Fallen=civilized, which would mean there's no

Back in '04, Sci-Fi put out some buzz about a possible Ringworld miniseries, but I haven't seen anything happen in that regard. It would be awesome if they could do a treatment of the full four Ringworld volumes that was as good as what John Harrison did with the original Dune trilogy. They are apparently doing something to try to make up for the travesty of a pilot for a Riverworld series that aired back in '01, but even with Tahmoh Penikett in the cast, I'm pretty sure it will end u

Thanks very much. More, please.

[quote who="the Gorgon" reply="93" id="2515640"]... At its worst such a system could ruin the fun of the game at its later stages when the AIs will start "abdicating" and people inherit lands over here and there. ... [/quote] Part of the mess here is that sovereign death=game over is still an open question, at least as far as I know. If the answer to that question ends up No, then I'm confident the dynasty system will naturally include some form of succession process for the

[quote]ugh, patent? really?[/quote] OK, I admit I was throwing a bit of a red herring there. I have a shred of sympathy for patent law in general, but software is so far beyond what any of the early designers of copyright and patent could have imagined that all attempts to apply those antique concepts strike me as hilarious at best. I'm one of those honor-code customers who vex Brad philosophically. I buy Stardock licenses instead of pirating because I believe in supporting specific g

[quote who="Dr Guy" reply="17" id="2514596"]DRM is, for the most part, a violation of your rights. You have a right to make archival copies of any digital media. That is in the fair use laws. So you can copy DRM protected objects (games, songs, movies). However you are prevented from owning or using any product that bypasses DRM locks. So how do you make - what is your right - an archival copy and yet not violate another portion of the law? Simple answ

I couldn't find your cases via http://fogbugz.stardock.com/default.asp?pg=pgPublicViewForm in Opera. I have a couple of cases with numbers in that range, and I can find them with the links from the system email. If you shared URLs directly to your debug.err files, you might get some suggestions from external testers who know how to read those files. (I couldn't help, but some folks in this beta crowd seem very familiar with Stardock debug.err files as well as general PC gaming problem

That thread from December '08 does make me wonder if we might see a prototype of the hearldry tool somewhere in Beta 2. I'm hoping it can be fun/useful on the cloth map. [quote]Really? I'd like to see that.[/quote] Assuming your "that" is about US free speech and not Aussie rowdiness, Aryeh Neir did it in 1977 in 'the Skokie affair.'

The music credits in TA list Mason Fischer (sic) and Eric Heberling . Fisher's site has a February (last year?) news blurb: "Signed on to create SFX and music for Stardock's Elemental - War of Magic."

[quote who="astrath" reply="2" id="2511856"]With respect to 2, essence limits cities a lot currently anyway. ICS isn't a viable strategy.[/quote] I think it's early to say this with such confidence. I hope essence ends up being a fun way to limit city spam, but the magic system isn't in yet so we have no idea how the tradeoffs between essence hording and aggressive site-founding will work. A build or two ago, I had a game where lots of luck with items & fights got m

[quote]the writers' strike[/quote] A search for "joss whedon" and "writers strike" yields about 24,000 hits just now. He's more or less admitted that big names like his own didn't suffer that dramatically from the kerfuffle, but specific shows and the folks who seriously wanted to see them keep going did get screwed. I was a barely-teenaged boy when the first Bionic Woman aired. Thanks to the TV execs forcing a strike on the writers and us folks in the audience, I'll never know whethe

[quote]Shouldn't that /scorched-roads mechanic/ prevent your own civ from using the roads, too?[/quote] Yes, it should. At least until you've been able to spend the time & resources to clean up afterwards.

[quote who="Mumblefratz" reply="1030" id="2513194"]... No I don't. What do they do with engineers when they turn forty? [/quote] They, whoever they are, make engineers have a shred of respect for comma usage rules.

Adding an optional timer to military asset transfers sounds like something that will put off quick game lovers and/or picky coders. I'd have fun playing with it, but I'm not a typical game customer. But your idea reminds me of something I think lots of TBS player types might really enjoy: AIs allies that can coordinate with you during a war. Rather than essentially leasing military assets from or sending them out on contract to allies, I want to be able to do something like agree with

I'm pretty sure Stardock are unreasonably serious about this. If GC2 is a good comparison, I'd about bet money that with a very conservative set of video and audio options enabled on a sub-spec machine, the RTM version of the cloth map will play well enough even on middle-largish maps. That's how GC2 worked for me, anyway.