Philocthetes

[quote who="Campaigner" reply="130" id="2490253"]... So In Elemental, I want that if you fail enough quests from one type of questgiver (Mages for example) then for the next 30 turns, 30% of your manaincome gets lost. If you insist in failing though, the next time, your closest shard stops working for 20 turns....[/quote] I would strongly dislike consequences like that unless they made sense in terms of a given quest's story line. "Type of quest giver" sounds too generic a parameter.

[quote who="lifekatana" reply="294" id="2489757"]Number 6. Cite a fucking source please. I ask you again: if all species suddenly appeared, WHEN DID THEY APPEAR??? GODFUCKING ANSWER MY QUESTION.[/quote] Look, I seriously believe that there are no bad words, only bad intentions. But your abuse of the venerable English f-word is really pissing off this particular reader who's theoretically on your side. If you can't ignore the basically good advi

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="7" id="2489676"]Distances. With only orthogonal placement, you have to be close to special locations. I think they want to avoid squid-like cities.[/quote] Beg pardon, but how is a cross-shaped expansion pattern (Scott's apparent notion of "adjacent" tiles) substantially different from an asterisk-shaped one? If anything, it's a worse aesthetic and gameplay offense because it is the worst of both worlds: a rule determined by the geometry of basic

I might have an RTS-aversion problem here, but it makes no sense to me to consider mana spent in a tactical fight as fundamentally different from mana spent on an overland spell. But then I'm a TBS snapping turtle by nature, so I don't remember ever having a conflict between deciding I had a fat enough mana pool to go for a big overland spell in MoM and being able to keep doing what I wanted by way of intervening in combat. If I try to forget about MoM, I still strongly dislike the id

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="5" id="2489627"]A gameplay reason? To avoid X X X X X etc.[/quote] How is that different from XXXX or its vertical analog?

Well, since GoodGame kicked this thread out of bed for a moment, I'll say that I quite like the 0.264 changes to the research GUI, but the vast tracts of mundane research items make me wonder whatever happened to the old idea of making magical knowledge the more important part of researching in Elemental. I'm having a hard time imagining a magical research system that takes center stage from the current mundane research trees without getting 'too complex' for the current target market.

[quote]It sems too me that looking into the secrets of adventuring should bring up clues about ancient adventures, researching civilizations should give hints about pre-cataclysm civilisaitons, researching warfare should leave hints regarding the fate of ancient generals and so on.[/quote] Yea, except the devs are still sketching or still not sharing any back story details about just how serious the Elemental cataclysm was. Is the study any sovereign-hired scholars do based on recover

[quote who="Scorpiana" reply="1" id="2489315"]Instead of just dropping the excess items, an option to sell / convert to gold would also be nice...[/quote] That would be dropping/swapping in a specific locale, e.g. a Traders' Guild building in a city. Another thing I might be mistakenly assuming will be in the game eventually...

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="2" id="2488574"]Yeah, that is a new design choice. You have to be adjacent to another improvement to build the city in a given direction.[/quote] That sounds like I have some non-coder's delusion of what "adjacent" means. On my NUM pad, 1, 3, 7, and 9 are all plain-language adjacent to 5, just at different angles than 2, 4, 6, and 8. Is that maybe about how 3D art will work? I can't think of a 'logical' reason to exclude the diagonals.

[quote]I've studied it as much as any person can.[/quote] Oh, the humility! [quote]But if my memory is correct, I believe the latest figures which aren't disputed by anyone is that there are on the order of a BILLION fossils now collected. Yeah, I know, an unbelievably huge number, but again, if I'm remembering correctly, that's the figure.[/quote] Not unbelievable at all, given an assumption that microorganisms are a valid part of the count. And since we're being all

[quote]But to be fair, trade in item becomes currency once it develops and abstract value. [/quote] I mentioned the Aztec 'currencies' because I'm unable to get off my use value vs. exchange value hobby horse, and most modern people instinctively understand currency as fully abstract exchange value, even if there might be a few metal coins with very limited use value at the bottom end of the scale of currency units. Even when a useful item like cacao beans comes into use as an exchan

[quote who="Finneglot" reply="74" id="2489336"]... Without proper guidance, we are shooting in the dark.[/quote] I have a sneaking (and confusing to me) suspicion that the devs might want us floundering about with just a few details from inside their sanctum. After all, the more info they offer to help us 'shoot accurately,' the less likely it is that one of us will mention a fun target that they hadn't considered yet. Mind you, I'm sort of trying to talk myself out o

[quote]Even if I assume we have 50 million individual fossils to study, that's one fossil every 10 years over the last half billion years. How much could you learn about population drift if I gave you one specimen to examine every ten years, especially if I don't give you a specimen of the same species each time?[/quote] Now that's an interesting number I don't recall seeing estimated in any of my pop science consumption. Some smart folks should add an info box to the Wiki page for fo

[quote who="PurrBall" reply="21" id="2488553"]No, the ribbon is now customizable in addition to the quick access area.[/quote] That sounds encouraging in plain English. Can you float ribbons and dock them on the sides and bottom of windows in 2010. Edit: After a much-needed-scrap-of-a-day being able to bill for time spend in Word, I might have learned how to decently describe the heart of my frustration over the radical ribbon revolution, and it might not be entirely about the

Am I the only one who wonders why the UI isn't doing more to help me understand things like why units move differently through different terrain overlays and how it is that mountains seem to be completely intraversible? I know the beta's young yet, but I'd still appreciate being able to get some empty pop-ups if nothing else. Swampy-looking things with shard, clay, and marble tiles in them? They look different from everywhere my sovereign has started so far, so what do I need to consi

I know what the verb "assume" can do to people, but I still hope it makes sense not to have logged "Can't drop item" as a gameplay bug. I've not played more than a few hundred 0.264 turns so far in a few different games, but I'm seeing only Speed rings and none of the HP or Attack bonus rings. I don't expect to see the shipped game leave me with 4 Speed rings before in the first few tens of turns, but the situation does raise the question of when we'll be able to have units share thei

[quote]I read through the more recent strips and it seems very hit and miss. Sometimes the irony can be, well, a bit too subtle. Or alternatively, cut a bit too close to the heart. I prefer heavy handedness in my social and political commentary.[/quote] zigzag, I might be a couple of decades older than you, and the history might be the difference for a new Doonesbury reader. Plus I try hard to be a raging moderate or a practical lefty or whatever, and I just don't need a lot of encour

[quote]Would you like me to shred something else to make up for it? For instance, I can readily find evidence contradicting the ages, the oldest North American settlement has already hit the 50k year mark. It will also be entirely irrelevant to whether evolution is true or not, and you can happily debunk my non-existant attempt to do so by using the sources I wont have trouble finding.[/quote] I'll just hop into your rhetorical wake here to mention that the ID crowd's complaint that

[quote]Having all that information in the Save Game Name however.... that's a LOT to read to find the bit you're interested in.[/quote] I've been playing GC2 for so long that I almost forgot that some TBS games have an auto-name function for saves. If Elemental adds that too, I agree that it should stay simple, like maybe just MapName-FactionName. The details are all better left to file attributes, especially if we might get rich sorting in the game UI.

[quote who="RisingLegend" reply="13" id="2488020"]... This is definitely something i want to see avoided, because that snaking looks gross but i have also found myself doing it [/quote] Beg pardon, but could you clarify your "this" there? Could be you want to avoid two types of settlement found, or you don't like the snaking even if you can't stop doing it in the betas so far. I'm actually a little torn on the snaking. It mostly seems too 'gamy' in the game, but on the other h

[quote who="GoodGame" reply="10" id="2487884"]While its true that bartering would dominate initially, with national banks collapsing, there's no reason that a free city wouldn't evolve beyond bartering once it was established. I mean the Lore might be of like a post-nuclear meteor strike, and the people only trade in dog skulls and canned goods, but established free towns could quite likely reinvent coinage, once they achieve population growth and trades again.[/quote] Maybe yes

Building a hut extends viable hut squares up, down, left, and right, but in a few different games with several different cities it seems like I can't ever get a diagonal line going. It seems odd.

OK, I guess my OP was slightly at cross-purposes. So the best thing seems to be to completely derail my own thread with a digression about the Netflix UI starting to get spooky-smart. I've been using them since early 2002 and on a whim decided to exempt them from my normal conservatism about giving real info on my interests to an online corporation. I think I might have rated a few thousand titles by now, and that, combined with Netflix's steady work on their customer-taste algorithms

Sometimes I have a name schema going that is the most important thing for a set of game saves, other times I just want to see my last save at the top of the list. p.s. I'd also like to see Map Name as a sortable field that would stack with a filename-vs-timestamp choice, but that's probably too 'computery' for a mass-market TBS game.

[quote]It's bearing on evolution is zip, it's just wrong information.[/quote] For the spectators, this is a fine example of psychoak's strength as a rhetorician trumping his rhetorical love of being 'smart.' Facts are facts, whether or not you have postmodern problems with the etymology of that particular English word. Rhetoric is the high art of speaking (or writing) persuasively in a way that includes facts, but does not limit you to using facts as part of a rigorous logical analysi