Philocthetes

I'm still not sure I'm quite following you, partly because forests, mountains, and land-mass styles are all terrain parameters to me. Also, the only way I've thought of "default" is what the map options are for a freshly-installed game. What you typed above sorta makes me think of those big-flat LEGO foundation pieces. I'm not a coder, so it all looks like 'map' to me when I get a game started. Could it be that you want something like a slider for Devastation, with one pole generating

Wintersong, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "default terrain." Are you talking about the turn 0 map conditions or maybe somehow being able to pick lava vs. plains independent of whether you're playing an empire or a kingdom? The map generator in its current state already seems to produce a quite varied mix of terrain types, and there are already three 'terrain' options in the game-start UI.

Quoting isn't entirely smooth in FF either. You can't mix an attributed quote with other quote blocks (plain or attributed) without getting a confusing mess.

To me, this is another good reason to consider replacing right-click moves with context menus where the default command is Move Here (X Turns). Secondary commands could open detailed info displays, begin the process of adding a label to the map (letting players name geographic features), etc. In the short term, you can turn on the grid (CTRL+G) and count squares. The gridlines are pretty faint with mostly-default video settings, but they're visible. In the builds so far, I don

[quote]What I would really like to see is a special unique victory condition for each kingdom in addition to the generic victory conditions. [/quote] The base game will have 12 factions, which seems like a tall order for unique game-ending conditions, but I like the idea very much regardless. After all, Elemental aims to be a TBS-RPG fusion, and to this old-school (dice-and-figs) RPG player, nothing could advance the TBS genre more than including non-zero-sum thinking in the paramete

I really appreciated the addition of a "No Tech Brokering" option to GC2. It might be nice to see an extension of the idea that uses the 'points-not-complete-techs' idea Wintersong mentioned for stolen and/or traded techs. If my faction did not learn a tech independently, it should be harder (or impossible) for us to offer it as a trade item. But we should be able to 'finish' the research if we want to, enabling us to trade it as if we'd done all the research from scratch.

The basic red-yellow-green framework makes sense to me, especially because I've let myself lapse again recently. Sometimes it's just terribly hard to put your values where your fast-typing fingers are...

I'll probably always want real ink and paper for reading 'lit-ra-chur.' Part of my love of the Harry Potter books is all about quality printing. But I'd love a very sturdy tablet PC if it was clearly designed as a sort of peripheral for my PC, something I could use to read the web and do 'ink' work on Word documents, email, and my timesheet in Excel. Mainly, though, I'd want to read all sorts of reviews about how "My dog carried it off and it still worked when I found it" and "I drop

[quote]A Song of Ice and Fire has no Elves or Dwarves or blah blah blah and is more epic than just about every other fantasy series ever made. Believe me, you can do a lot with just humans. [/quote] I've only finished the first book, and I am in complete agreement with you. I loves me my Tolkien elves, perhaps more than the average nerd. But Mr. Martin's work proves that you don't need to fart around with 'races' to get a great fantasy story. [quote]By the way most f

[quote who="astrath" reply="14" id="2503721"]Didn't take long did it?[/quote] [e classic]:lol:[/e]

Yup. Same old trolling twit.

Could you possibly be a bit more specific, especially for those of us who never played the game you mentioned and don't want to do more than see if Wikipedia has a decent description, which it doesn't at the moment? I'm asking because I wonder if you might really care about Stardock's project and aren't just the nasty 'troll' that you seem to be. Strong communities need vibrant minorities, but it's often hard to tell the differnce between constructive critics and reactionary stone-thr

[quote]Half the time i just wish the devs would shine some light on all these things we seem to discuss to no end. I mean, like I said, I had expected the game to revolve around a feudal system, and now i'm not so sure (because there has been no clarification) I'm just getting tired of not knowing anything i guess[/quote] If felt similar frustration regularly, especially regarding the early plans for the magic system. But the devs really do seem to read most or all of these posts even

[quote]One question thou, will there be terain changing spells? [/quote] I've not caught anything about major terrain-improvement magic, but there's already some volcano-raising stuff in the internal builds. I'll be really surprised if the game ships without some overland magic similar to MoM's Change Terrain spell.

"Make it epic" is an epic example of meaningless game-biz jargon, and I say that despite having great admiration for dev leaders like Sid Meir, Will Wright (pre-Spore?), and Brad Wardell. It's a sloppy way of avoiding both the differences and dependencies between scale and complexity. But let's take a moment to do some fake intellectual history. The roots of the complaint in the OP go all the way back to the ancient days when AD&D was new and many folks were still defending old-bo

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="10" id="2501162"]If Area of Influence could be separated from Area of Control, Keeps/Castles would be more important and interesting as they would be used to increase the area of control and could be independent of population centers, IMHO.[/quote] A separation like that sounds both interesting and not-too-complicated to me, but you don't mention the question of essence investment. To me, even though a fortified pass or a lonely watchtower might only nee

For folks interested in ideas from the forum 'old days,' there was a bit of interesting talk along these lines from pizzapicante27 and Denryu . (Those are from long before we had beta builds in our hands, Dec '08-Jan '09.) I've definitely wanted to see non-town outposts for a long while, and I like the idea of having some outpost types designed with an upgrade path. Re

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="10" id="2500151"]It's the top ten games that the PC Gamer staff members are looking forward to in 2010, not the official 'Best of 2010' list [/quote] Beg pardon, apparently I'm 'old' enough to think a headline would include a key parameter like that... [e classic]:P[/e]

[quote who="Denryu" reply="31" id="2495000"]Shards also generate mana, don't they?[/quote] My impression is that even if the possibility of multiple mana flavors is ruled out, shards should still be the *primary* mana sources, with sovereigns generating a token amount of (formerly life or death) mana directly.

[quote]Making special weapons, hell yes. Making special weapons with your channeler specifically, maybe. Only making special weapons with your channeler? It always annoyed me that there wasn't some other method of producing weapons, you pretty much had to go artificer if you went the way of the hero recruiting whore.[/quote] That's only true if you were a score-whore first. I almost never picked Artificer and I always loved forging fabulous items. It also seems like a red h

It's only the first week of 2010. How can a mag offer its 2010 Top 10 list before December 2010? And how can a pre-release game get on any sort of Top 10 other than one clearly labeled with words like "under development?"

[quote]Well, in defense of SyFy (God, how they have butchered, botched, and mangled "SciFi"), they do have at least 1 shining gold piece. "Sanctuary".[/quote] Sanctuary is why I mentioned Tapping above. I caught series 1 on DVD and will probably give series 2 a try when it comes out, but the show is still a bit too heavy on action/effects and light on writing for me to really love it. For me, it's thin gruel compared to the decent meals offered by SCC and Dollhouse. Siffy's 'real SF r

The wonkiness looks sorta different, but it still seems wonky. At the moment, I see a Last Reply on 12/17 for my thread whining about the demise of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and how much the Siffy people annoy me. The Recent Posts page shows a reply in that thread from around 10:30 Eastern today.

[quote]While i do think the idea of multiple currencies would be awesome, for reasons mentioned above by valhur and ratya, i just think it would be even more complicated than "camp 1" to implement.[/quote] I'm not at all seriously expecting to see a true multipolar currency market in a TBS any time soon. But the kindgoms-empires context in Elemental does seem like an opportunity to try some very basic stuff with two currencies, e.g. recruiting a major Death-oriented power (say a Lich

[quote]What becomes not fun (for most) is if things are both complex and confusing, so that it is not clear what to de to achieve a desired result.[/quote] I'm far more annoyed by needlessly repetitive mouse/keyboard task than I am by a steep learning curve. But I reserve the right to be a greedy whiner about UIs that do little or nothing to help a solitary player learn the game. I love GC2, but I would never have been able to get the replayability fun out of it that I did without the