Philocthetes

[quote]Essence will return as a stat that determines how many units you can imbue. Remaining Essence will be used as an overall power booster to stats.[/quote] Sigh. This appears to have disappeared from the OP without comment from Brad. Please, could that be an editing mistake? There are so many good reasons to try to keep Essence as a stat, not the least of which is making the game unique in the genre and hence more fun. I'm not married to any particular way it should work,

[quote who="kenata" reply="17" id="2906692"]... A Sion is a unit that the Empire can train after an appropriate building is created. It is a special troop, like Darklings or spiders, so you can't customize them, but they are fairly cool in general, as they have a really nasty special ability.[/quote] Thanks. I've not done much playing on the Empire side and I seem to have gotten lost somewhere about scions-as-offspring and the Sion unit in current builds. Given the plain English meani

[quote]Neither extreme. Some traits require prereqs (such as those that enable spells) so sions won't have access to them. But a lot of traits have no prereq so they are open to both Sions and Champions.[/quote] Does Sion still mean a 'Character' unit created via the dynasty vs. a 'Character' unit recruited from the wastelands?

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="21" id="2905512"]I don't suppose that there's a button to switch to-and-from the cloth map on-the-fly yet?[/quote] The suggestion has been around for ages. Hopefully it is on some dusty to-do list still. Seems so simple to retain a camera angle & zoom setting for both the cloth map & 3D. A thing like that could well get more of us cloth-map biased folks to take more eye candy breaks.

[quote who="yaromir" reply="14" id="2905238"]Dynasty "system" is a side-feature unrelated to the rest of the game...and there are a lot of other areas of CORE gameplay that need improvement. I'd much rather see time+money be spent on empire building/tactical battles/research. In fact, dynasty thing should probably be turned off until it can get major attention (i.e. make it so it actually matters in the game)[/quote] Check

Staying tuned. Very encouraged. Hope the folks who think the devs never listen read this and understand what it says about how y'all do listen.

[quote who="Alstein" reply="9" id="2904257"]... I'd like a hotkey to go straight to cloth map. [/quote] There is one at the end of the zoom/angle hotkeys (4 or 5?). Would be better if there were a matched set of 'standard zoom/angles' on both the cloth map and down in the 3D muck. (Yes, I'm one of those largest-map folks who thinks the 3D layer is for occasional eye candy breaks, not for really playing the game.)

[quote]What?...[/quote] Well, my thinking started with Mr. Reagan telling us that "government is the problem" and has lately involved worrying about a few new GOP governors who might well end up giving the larger party more than a bit of political indigestion. Two of them have Scott for a first or last name. Struggling to get back on topic...Down here in Florida, many of us are very serious about our response to natural disasters. I've privately heckled DrJ for 'cluttering' th

[quote who="DrJBHL" reply="6" id="2903783"]To assume that all Republicans are that way is naive, and not critical thinking. Many Democrats as well as many Republicans exhibit self interest/greed, etc. People are people and vilifying whole groups of people does nothing but polarize them. I think stereotypes reveal our own prejudices rather than the target's actual beliefs. Better to just be aware of the scammers of every ilk and stripe and avoid the pitfalls of walking ar

You can stack units for movement on the main map (forming armies), but AFAIK there is still no way to take, say, 4 spearmen that you build separately and form them into a 4-unit squad that works together in the tactical UI.

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="35" id="2903090"] Mechanics don't matter, gameplay matters. Designers love mechanics, they are fun to talk about, tweak and post about on forums. They are not gameplay. There is a long dark hallway between what is fun to design and what is fun to play. So essence is just a mechanic to me. What is it we want from essence that is appealing to gameplay? Can we ditch the mechanic and still have the g

[quote]... I think that Abeix deserves to be more than just a creature with phat purples. Perhaps he would be a viable mini-faction: he has his one place, the Fissure, as his 'city' and can periodically create and send out small bands of units. Yet instead of just killing him, there would be the option of trying, through a great deal of diplomacy, to make Abeix an ally or, at the very least, not set on your destruction. Perhaps a large quest line to befriend him or render him neutral, followe

[quote]Essence was a great concept, I wouldn't mind having it back. Mana pool needs to go. Having a pool rewards passivity -- if you do nothing now, you're stronger later. That is _bad_ design. ...[/quote] Fine example of how no game can be all things for all players. I loathe the idea of such limits on mana. But then I'm still seriously hoping that FE will include major new options for using mana, like item creation, stupendous summonings, and spells with an open-ended ma

The 'native' spell-checking also seems to have stopped working, at least in FF. Dunno if that change is a bug or a feature... [e classic];)[/e]

[quote]Does it mean that it wouldn't be able to contain concepts like 'large' in English, since 'large' is just another way of saying 'not-small'? How would this work with concepts like individual identity, since individual identity is exclusionary?[/quote] I'm still banging my aging brain on it too, but I'm pretty sure that it is about grammar, not vocabulary. In English, we can say a single sentence like "John's father's large head makes it hard for John to buy a hat for him." Witho

[quote who="Tridus" reply="22" id="2902535"]... Intelligence already does a lot of that, and I'm not sure its a good fit for essence anyway. If letting someone else cast means my own ability to cast drops enough that I can't use my biggest spells anymore, why would I want to do that?[/quote] Hopefully, because the game was able to make that an interesting trade-off for many maps and playstyles. It would also work better if the biggest strategic spells 'normally' took mul

[quote who="mqpiffle" reply="13" id="2902330"]... Care to elaborate?[/quote] Yes, please. To me, the mana upkeep thing is not at all like Essence was. You can lose and reclaim shards, but Essence spent was Essence spent and restored lands felt really precious, nothing like the spreadable spam that we have now. If I'm remembering rightly, the basic fixes Gwenio1 suggests in reply 12 were floating around as soon as (or maybe even before) magic was in the betas.

[quote who="Archonsod" reply="4" id="2902087"]... Not sure on essence itself. I liked the idea of permanent sacrifice to create other casters (shame it was so easy to get around) but on the other hand I prefer the mana system when it comes to actual casting, essence made it feel more like "Elemental : Slight Disagreement of Stage Magicians" than a war of magic. I think perhaps the best approach might have been to use the mana system and simply hard limit the number of c

[quote]*shrug* I just thought it was a "fun" and fairly obscure finding with potentially interesting implications.[/quote] So do I. Lay discussions of linguistic theories--well, I'm nerd enough to think that's almost as fun as picking flowers in someone else's garden. I was seriously having fun when I wondered about just what, if any, 'structural' limits a lack of recursiveness in a language would place on people who spoke that language. That's not least because I've not been

[quote]I'm sorry, but how do you expect me to take anything you say seriously after this statement?[/quote] Because this thread lacks a definition (value statement) about what science can or should produce? That, and the fact that you're obviously having a serious conversation with kenata?

[quote]... It has to be more than flavor text. ...[/quote] The chunk Light quoted in reply 34 jumped out for me as well. I'm even more encouraged to see you wanting to connect that 'vision' level language to game mechanics. I value good flavor text more than the average player, but I know that no amount of spicy goodness can make up for rotten meat, thin gruel, or whatever bad-food metaphor you prefer. That aside, with the Kingdom/Empire distinction being ideological, how does

I'm hoping without much hope that FE will reverse this Inscrutable Decision made in post-relase WoM versions. The global mana pool was a swell decision, but I have yet to read a good explanation of why Essence as a stat/resource needed to go. Used in a formula for spell-casting time, it would make a fine complement to Intelligence as a damage-modifier. Its original use in imbuing champions also seems like a suprerior tradeoff/constraint to mere mana maintenance for spell-casting champ

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="24" id="2901897"]... The 'new dichotomy' is to enforce the fact that the world was once beautiful, but has been ruined. This isn't a change in the flavor of the world, only that we are seeking to actually show that flavor in the game. ...[/quote] Beg pardon, but either you're ducking my question or I didn't put it well enough. Back in the pre-beta days, the Cataclysm seemed to be a result of conflict between a pair of faction alliances that

[quote]... So if people like v1.3 I'm inclined to go to v1.4 where I can do things like make the dynasty system work closer to what I originally intended and start doing more interesting things with the AI and diplomacy/strategic evaluation. ... [/quote] Hah! I knew your love of Song of Ice and Fire would pay off eventually. I don't know if I'll like 1.3 very much, but I like it already just because of your aspirations for 1.4.

Well, you've got a rock solid point on #2. The random name generator is definitely more randomness-oriented than it is name-oriented. And a viable response to the 'city spam problem' would eliminate the need for equally ugly naming strategies like what Lan describes. GalCiv II has a decently large list of star names. Here's hoping that at least FE might make the switch, and put the source in an XML file so folks like you could spend that scant hour or so to get the game to use names t