Philocthetes

[quote who="porternielsen" reply="534" id="2370603"]Question: Is health care as outlined by the governement constitutional? Definition of constitutional is the constitution grants the federal government the power to do it. Please site ammendment or text with an explanation of how that makes it constitutional. [/quote] The Constitution was deliberately written with truck-sized holes in it because most of the framers were smart enough to understand th

I've always assumed that the main reason Stardock forums don't accept direct pastes of pictures or attachments of other files is that storage and bandwidth cost money and they'd rather put money elsewhere. But both storage and bandwidth costs have been declining steadily thanks to Moore's law and the backbone-building binge that's been going on since the '90s. I appreciate NTJedi's interest in a "trusted location" and I'd second that with an interest in simplicity. I would have annota

[quote]the game only have 8 cannon factions[/quote] Minor correction: there are twelve canon factions, 6 human and 6 Fallen. On razing cities, the Great Fire of London took about three days and didn't completely destroy the city. The ancient Romans took roughly a fortnight for just the burning part of their razing of Carthage; they also destroyed the city walls and the harbor. Stone walls and buildings don't burn, but if you're really pissed at an enemy, you can take the time

[quote who="Daiwa" reply="28" id="2369901"]... Oh, so that's all it is. Pshaw. I feel so much better now.[/quote] I was baiting psychoak, not trying to reassure anyone. I suspect he understands that I'm in part more 'conservative' than many ditto-heads. For example, I don't care nearly as much about which party controls the White House as I do about the fact that the 20th century saw a slow, steady shift of power from the legislature to the executive, which I believe to be

[quote who="psychoak" reply="24" id="2369791"]... She's a valley girl, they have a stereotype for being fluff brained idiots. Mentioning her intellect is rather unfair of you though. The current idiot in chief can't talk his way out of a paper bag if the teleprompter goes off. Brains and politicians rarely coincide.[/quote] Oh come on. You know that's a complete bullshit comparison about the She-Devil in Borrowed Couture and the Secret Muslim Baby-eater currently in

[quote who="Wieke" reply="29" id="2369401"]Personally i would be thrilled if they let themselves be inspired by Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. ... Like i said, best storytelling in a 4X game ever, dispite having random maps.[/quote] I don't like to name a top much of anything, but SMAC is definitely outstanding when it comes to a story layer for a TBS civ-mode game. And I think that's because of the random maps, not despite them. Immersive story is relatively easy if you s

This is exactly the sort of stuff I've been trying to type about in other discussions about wanting a building-block story layer (and not a linear campaign story in the sandbox). And I especially hope to see much more than simple dungeon-crawling in the final functionality. Dungeons are just one type of encounter area, and I think they'd be much more fun if they were rare when compared to things like a camp of trolls or maybe even a mad necromancer's lonely tower. Not least because an

I'm mainly hoping we'll get at least part of the magic system in before beta 2. These sorts of discussions deserve a long time to work themselves out. [quote who="Denryu" reply="21" id="2367135"]... I just think it is a much better gameplay option to provide the ability to research spells that enhance turtling rather than a broad stroke of making the game favor the strategy.[/quote] Early on, I had a strong interest in seeing essence investment form meaningful connections like

[quote who="StormSeed" reply="121" id="2367322"]... (GC2 didn't have any problems of this type AFAIK) ... [/quote] There are the All-X strategy (all labs or all factories plus focus) and the Year Zero Win strategy (winning in less than 52 turns). Both of those tend to suck the joy out of the game for me despite their proven ability to yield strong scores.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="29" id="2353964"]... #3 I recommend that sad, bitter, politically correct people avoid Stardock and Stardock products at all costs. We're dangerous men and women here who are always on the cusp of total madness. ...[/quote] On the other hand, if you are at least occasionally optimistic and understand that every in-crowd has its own 'politcally correct' standards for how to talk about things, you might still want to pay to play with Stardock even if yo

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="4" id="2366428"]... I've seen people follow some funny export chains to get from one file format to another (such as creating the model in a program, importing to Unreal editor, then exporting to their desired format.[/quote] So if I'm following this rightly, it sounds like the community here should be able to provide a 'format migration' service that would help get things like kyogre12's Barad-Dur into an importable form? (Given, of course, a sufficien

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="5" id="2366452"]... 3. does it matter? something as simple as a name (i.e. week, munth, year, season, etc. ) can be changed pretty easily. Hardly a selling point. I honestly don't think they are even 100% sure how turns are going to function at release. By that I mean to suggest, I am willing to bet money that the way turns function now, and the way turns function at release will not be the same. ...[/quote]

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="17" id="2365742"]... Tried the direct approach, but it doesn't work with Wii or GameCube discs. Or maybe it does, and I'm just not doing it right..... anyone?[/quote] Beg pardon, Metroid-ignorant and didn't even consider a deck being involved.

Support for independent MP servers sounds like good news for many folks, but the news here mainly makes me wonder if anyone at PAX mentioned the possibility of a referee role in MP and whether there was anything interesting said about very long-running MP games (on 64-bit Ludicrous maps).

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="14" id="2365702"]... and how did you get that screenshot?!?! It's waaay higher-res than anything I've been able to get with the camera-pointed-at-the-screen approach....[/quote] Skip the hardware middleman, press PRT SCR on your keyboard, open MS Paint, and press CTRL+V or click Paste on the Edit menu.

[quote who="andrewArvizu" reply="2" id="2365642"]thanks, i have another questions (sorry about the annoyance) do you have to pre-order now to get into the beta, or will they be excepting later pre-orderers? [/quote] If it works like the betas for the GalCiv2 expansion packs, you'll be able to get into beta 1 with a pre-order made until some unspecified but short period of time after beta 1 becomes available for download (days, maybe a week?). Pre-orders made after bet

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="12" id="2364519"]... I couldn't imagine its any harder than setting up build phases (I wondered how you planned to match construction tiles with the buildings that would become them.[/quote] So, maybe in the Land of Well-Spoiled Players, some "environment-specific objects" might even be animated, so we could design a nice subtropical castle with an eye twoards how cool the gutters and gargoyles will look during the rainy season?

46 images, plenty of 'old' ones and quite a few new-to-me items. If the plan still includes something like the following, then it looks to me like they are working really hard to make the 'boring human-Fallen' thing a real joke. That bony-ass thing looks most definitely like a human modified in eutero for bad business and raised by orcs to help with the attitude. <img src="http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/101/1017772/elemental-war-of-magic--20090824034852395.jpg" alt="

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="14" id="2364217"]... the argument "eh who cares, you can mod it if you don't like it" is the single most frustrating argument I've ever heard. I don't buy games to put in my own time and effort to mod them into something I find fun - I buy games because they are fun to begin with, and I mod them or use other people's mods to keep the experience fresh (although I am extremely picky about mods to begin with).[/quote] This game might finally draw me

landi, daedalao posted another video , a short one on the tile builder that leaves me with a question I'm hoping you can answer: Can you tell if the snow on those trees is a seasonal variable or something that would be permanent when the design is stamped onto an active map?

[quote who="SnallTrippin" reply="22" id="2363530"]... EDIT- As to the post above mine, I would also be super-duper happy with a 'magic'-tech tree that spiraled to the insane. [/quote] Depending on what you mean by "insane," that has probably been the plan all along. Even before the site launched last year, the devs were talking about world-wrecking magic for the late game. In the meantime, there have been occasional bits of typing that indicated the magic system wou

[quote who="NachoAdept" reply="8" id="2361148"]Hmm, wish I had known this. I ordered the Digital version. Well if anyone sees anything would be nice to know. ... [/quote] I'm pretty sure that someone at [email protected] can help you modify your order.

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="16" id="2362723"]like what? ... I finally got a "no" out of boogie bac about the alternate world/underground. But of course it was a no with a '*' suggesting it 'could' still be implemented, but at this time they have no plans for it prior to release. we also got a "more likely to be play by e-mail than hotseat" from Brad.[/quote] Like that.

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="20" id="2362525"]... Looks like a campsite to me, with bedrolls, a fire, a crate and what looks like a pile of hay [/quote] So maybe we will be able to build and populate something like Hadrian's Wall?

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="11" id="2358946"]... Well the term "going gandalf" was coined by players, and the common usage of it, afaik, has deviated from its original intent. The original usage of it I think was just to describe a channeler who focuses largely on himself, his own power, without really having much of an empire or nation, or heroes or army. It has turned into the idea that you control a channeler, without any nation at all; at most maybe you'd have a small band of he