Philocthetes

[quote who="RisingLegend" reply="1" id="2498548"]Well, we already know from the beta that we are finding bags of coins in the world around us... So possibly the world before the cataclysm had a single currency and the post-cataclysm factions are just using those coins as a basis. I mean with as vague as money always is in these 4x games, this is as good an explanation as any imo.[/quote] I guess I've been thinking of nearly all the beta 1 UI text as an extremely rough draft, right alo

Kyogre let us t*itter-phobes know that the devs have been told that " ... Elemental should have a custom name for its currency, with fancy symbol and everything." This leaves me immediately curious about how the game world might explain a single currency acceptable to all factions, or whether the devs have already considered the question and dismissed alternatives as 'un-fun' complexity. I'm ready

[quote who="Scorpiana" reply="9" id="2498357"]... On a more serious note, have a look at this. Why not let the game do something similar and generate a new currency every game?[/quote] Those Shiny toys are shiny and all, but I'd find randomly-changing names for currency vaguely annoying at best, unless perhaps the data set were limited to things that somehow worked with the Elemental back story. Even then, it seems more distracting than interesting.

[quote]I plan to play elemental in the sandbox mode only. I played the campaign in GalCiv II and man was it lame. It dragged on forever. [/quote] Agreed, but is that really a reason not to have higher hopes for Elemental's campaign? It would need to be a remarkable improvement over GC2 to make me play it through even once, but I still kinda hope it happens. The 'much fun' trick might really depend most on how the code development and story development processes interact, and so far I'

[quote who="CrazyC0330" reply="1" id="2497407"]... use HOME and END keys to cycle through previous and next unit, respectively. To cycle through all units and cities together, use the TAB key.[/quote] Will there also be a pair of keys for sites so you can step forward and backward through just them like HOME and END do for units? p.s. It might also be good to assign SHIFT+TAB as the opposite direction on whatever list TAB steps through. It's sort of a logical oppos

[quote]Currently the only game I have of yours is Gal Civ 2(Gold Edition). I will remedy this when Elemental comes out. I apologize to all for not making into your Beta program(my fault).[/quote] There will be a 'second beta enrollment period' for folks who missed Beta 1 but place pre-orders before Beta 2 is released. You should be able to pre-order now and expect to find the Elemental beta available to you on Impulse in not too long... This <a href="https://forums.elemental

Replying mainly so I can find this list again easily; several look very handy for puttering with the betas. [quote who="Scoutdog" reply="2" id="2495720"]In GC2, the cheats were in the final game (albiet requiring a "cheat" shortcut parameter). I'm assuming that the same will hold true here.[/quote] I've never looked into the GC2 cheats. Do they also use prime keyboard real estate like the current list for Elemental I'm kinda hoping that Elemental might put keyboard sup

[quote who="Ellestar" reply="82" id="2497327"]Why can't i marry males to other families and keep females? IMHO female rulers should be allowed, like it was in MoM.[/quote] Unless the devs change their plan, the game will include female sovereign-channelers. You can see early art for a female sovereign in an info pop-up. You might be confused by the talk about dynastic marriage mechanics, which currently look like they might force even a female sovereign to send her daughters away for

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="2" id="2494395"]You need to be adjacent to the tile. Diagonals don't count.[/quote] Yea, well, even if I have to buy a non-English understanding of "adjacent" to play the game, I agree with eobet that the UI should be either simply explaining itself to me on the point or making it 'intuitively' obvious. I'm sure there are several ways to tweak the UI in this regard. The obvious one to me is that improvement icons on the Building tab need to indica

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="30" id="2493714"]Any idea when the new seaon will start?[/quote] It probably will be around the same time this summer as they started the first series last summer. Unless maybe that summer-series thing is falling out of fashion with TV execs? I've got series 1 saved in my Netflix queue, but I'm still not expecting to bond with it from what I saw by way of short moments with the initial broadcast. Something special will need to happen to make me lik

[quote who="eobet" reply="1" id="2494317"]I who do not have a numpad at all was really miffed that I can't seem to navigate anything by the arrow keys. I hope that is a bug.[/quote] I've never owned a keyboard without a num pad or had to suffer one at work. Is there some enabling key like NUM LOCK that you need to press to make sure your arrow keys are active? The arrow-only keys on my current keyboard always work.

[quote]The actual thread posting. Commentary along the lines of only having a few distinct units, in a 4X, that don't work. You'd have nothing to research.[/quote] I've been pining so long for an Integrated Metaphysics dev journal that I'm ready to think having almost no mundane research to bother with ought to be the goal. Nothing to research--phaugh. Where's the magic? Can we still hope that it will be interesting and fun enough to put the mundane trees properly in the background?

[quote who="Myles" reply="16" id="2492536"]... Actually, no. In Florida if you take Drivers Ed you get a form exempting you from the driving portion of the test.[/quote] That's another bit of 'improvement' from the idiots in Tallahassee who think that the only real reason to have a legislature is to cut taxes and try to farm out as much public service work as possible to profiteering cronies. I got my license around 1980, after I'd passed driver ed, and I had to take the driving test

[quote who="psychoak" reply="11" id="2490996"]How about command function? Get high level unit, a regiment commander is born from the bloodshed, perhaps captured enemy standard bearers and such as well. They could attribute bonuses, use magic items, blah blah blah. ...[/quote] I've never played the other games you mention, so it sounds to me like you're calling for some kind of unit status between regulars (what we can create in Unit Design mode) and champions (what I suppo

Right now, the latest timestamp in the Last Reply column on my My Posts page is from Dec 26, but my bug/gripe on diagonals and another post on item-dropping both have activity since then. Last Reply info looks normal to me in both general browsing and the My Replies page.

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="9" id="2490888"]Maybe just have levelled units THAT much better. Like equipment gives +50% advantage for level 5s and up[/quote] Something along these lines seems like it might do a better job of doing what Demiansky wants re avoiding 'elite unit spam' while also avoiding weird things like level-based limits on unit equipment.

Gah. I don't want a rational explanation for my preference, supporting or opposing it. It's just plain weird-feeling to see those diagonally-adjacent tiles and not be able to use them. Probably yet another instance where I'm a 'bad' player because my RPG head tends to trump my zero-sum-gamer head...

[quote]Cavemen get no respect.[/quote] That's mostly because they assume they aren't going to get any respect. They just need some self-esteem seminars.

I vaguely recall some positive dev response to this idea the last time it came up. I definitely remember getting schooled by a multiplayer fan (NTJedi?) because I wanted to have the game support unique maps for each faction so we could have something like the Falklands-Maldive thing. I'm still weird enough to think it would be fun to see what labels an AI puts on things when I make a successful map trade, especially if we both name-claimed something like a river or mountain range.

[quote]Diagonal building makes building in horizontal and vertical useless most times.[/quote] Not for me in the betas so far; it all depends on whether that tile I'm interested in is on a 2, 4, 6, 8 path or a 1, 3, 7, 9 path, and that seems sufficiently randomized so far. [quote]And about the organic thing, I can't see why cities that build in diagonal are more organic really (building in diagonal makes very easy to build cities with holes, which looks very very weird for a c

Maybe I'm not getting something about how upgrades might work (I haven't really messed with the unit design system other than to make decent scouts). I'm also probably making some unconscious assumptions that upgrades will work kind of like they do in GalCiv2, only without the basic framework of hull sizes limiting your options. And now that Doopliss mentions it, I'm also not fond of the idea of 'forcing' level-grinding into the game by closing off design options with arbitrary unit l

Don't you have to park a unit in a town for it to recover HP? (The wiki doesn't seem to have any info on this yet.)

I'm confused. I thought the dev plan for "no built-in units" was in part all about enabling players to develop elite units that really stood out in a crowd. What am I missing?

[quote]I also said that the "when" is not controversial, and that I accept the same "when" that the evolutionists propose (a billion or so years ago, give or take).[/quote] I believe the current consensus is at least 2 billion years, and a site in Australia might contain microfossils over 3 billion years old, but it could also be abiotic stromatolites. Or did you mean to "give or take" a whole giga-year?

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="12" id="2490360"]... It's very typical that diagonals aren't adjacent to a given position in a squared based grid as they are artificially "better" than horizontal and vertical. If you allow for diagonal building it's nearly always better to build that way as you get more new tiles to expand (5 instead of 3). Same with unit movement, although there you can just use the solution of "first diagonal movement costs 1, second diagonal movement costs 2" and i