Philocthetes

[quote who="Denryu" reply="13" id="2353514"]... The question is, if units do not have different resistances to different elements, aren't fire damage, ice damage, posion damage etc essentially the same thing? The only way I see them making any difference is if particular creatures or units have specific resistances to those different elements. ...[/quote] Seems like picking damage flavors that had nothing more than cosmetic effects would be dull in the long run. Ideally, I'd like to s

[quote who="NTJedi" reply="201" id="2356734"] ... Morthvargr and myself both provided different quality examples which you seem to have missed. An ultra-powerful channeller during early game means early fast expansion, but slower mid-game and late game expansion. I highly recommend you play Dominions_3 and/or MoM to fully understand.[/quote] Seems to me the better thing to play to explore this question is the beta. You're making a host of

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="37" id="2352675"]... you should of course be able to change your faction's heredity system to better fit your playstyle. Or at least have a custom faction you can use that can use lore from other factions (not like the GC2 custom race which remained "generic" unless you specifically modded it). ...[/quote] I'm all for choosing a lineage model as part of designing a custom faction, but I'm more interested in seeing the canon factions present a decent variet

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="27" id="2347329"]Well, I love good backstory, but since dev time is limited, I would personally prefer to see it behind the factions and certain places, as opposed to creatures. Hard to choose, though.[/quote] If you're typing about dragons, I haven't gotten my point across to you. I want them to be treated on the level of independent powers/factions, not 'creatures.' Frankly, I was quite disappointed when I read the recent dev typing about questing to fin

On the inheritance question, I'd prefer to see the default mechanics map to the back story and I'd hope that the back story has enough variety among the canon factions to suit the tastes of both 'traditional patriarchal' types and folks who expect different gender ideas in a world where magic is more important than upper body strength. But mainly, I'm really hoping that the lineage stuff will be in the first beta because I'm dying to see what that means for the timeframe of the game (

[quote who="Unknown924" reply="25" id="2346582"]... What about making the resources for older weapons more common than the ones required for newer ones? Frogboy said that having control of more than one of a resources makes things that use it build faster. With resources more common for lower level weapons, units that use them would build faster as players would have more of them under their control.[/quote] That actually sounds like a plausible guess for how the beta buil

[quote who="zigzag" reply="19" id="2344435"]... I want my populace to be an unthinking mob. While I have no problems with accepting penalties to espionage and war weariness in the name of freedom, I feel as though I should be making the important decisions, and shouldn't have to submit to the whims of the senate just to get my science and economic bonus. In other words, I would rather have a simpler game that sacrifices the need to engage in internal politics.[/quote] I have no proble

[quote who="Tridus" reply="7" id="2344195"]I guess it's just a question of how complicated do you want to make it. As a refugee in the wasteland, a place of safety is appealing. However it's less appealing then a place with food. [/quote] Isn't reliable access to food and water a basic part of safety? The smilie has me wondering if I'm missing a joke. Sometimes my humour algorithms go offline without notice...

Snapping turtles helped found 'modern civilization' in the Americas.

[quote who="Shurdus" reply="51" id="2343243"]What I foresee is me knowing that I should get two more garrisons + a scroll or two of 'defend against ability X' before I enter the tower. This would very much ruin the experience since exploring and not knowing what will come is what makes this tense. I want to not know I win a battle or clear a dungeon. ... [/quote] I'm interested in seeing canon lore spackled all over an un-modded sandbox game (I respect spackle, it's a friendly me

[quote who="Robbie.Price" reply="2" id="2343324"]ya, I know, it really starts to get political. ...[/quote] That's in no small part because political science and economics were once a 'single' academic discipline, called political economy , and that parent discipline was a direct, and rebellious, offspring of moral philosophy (ethics) . That fact of intellectual hist

The semi-random list in the OP is interesting, but I'm pretty sure it would be more fun if it was modular and not incremental. Unless maybe you changed the verb 'upgrade' to something like 'remodel?' I don't see a clean upgrade path in the draft bonuses and I imagine I'd be very annoyed at having to somehow give up a line of sight bonus because I'd incorporated my skinny little tower into a sturdy basic town wall. Hmph. I'd probably still want a modular approach. Something lik

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="7" id="2343273"]... /scott puts this idea on the backburner and lets it simmer[/quote] /GW discretely puts a jar of Champion Chili Powder near the stove...

[quote who="Aerion Istari" reply="232" id="2343173"]My other though would be this. This board represents a small subset of the eventual players of the game. And, I dare say, the vast majority of these players would be willing to do a long beta. But how many of the REST of the players, not represented on this board, would be willing to do this?[/quote] In the apocryphal, paraphrased words of Marie Antoinette, "Let them wait." Instant gratification is severely overrate

[quote who="ChongLi" reply="44" id="2341650"]... AoW is not at all a worthy successor. MoM does not have a worthy successor, which is why so many people have such high hopes for this game. ... [/quote] What is it you kids type these days--QFT? More and more, I suspcect that a big part of my motivation for typing too much around here and wanting to play hard in the beta is some mostly-unconscious expectations management thing. Sometimes nostalgia can seem rather like a social d

[quote who="Josef086" reply="52" id="2342366"]Don't think I have seen space 1999. I am waiting for a good scifi to come out againt to watch. BSG is over, there is no new star treks, and the reimaged docter who season is yet to even come out in england...... [/quote] Space 1999 was made back in the '70s, but you can get it on DVD from Neflix--16 discs plus 'extras.' It was weird (I like weird) and had a good helping of the weak-actors-with-weak-dialog problem that plagues s

@OsirisDawn: You aren't off-topic when you crit Donaldson. I'm kinda more interested in people's reasons for loving or hating a book than in the book list itself. I never read past the first Covenant trilogy and have pretty mixed feelings about it, mainly because I prefer my anti-heroes to be flirting with evil instead of struggling not to be pathetic. But I give Donaldson a hat-tip for the basic freshness factor of putting a depressed leper in the protagonist's slot.

I hardly know where to begin laughing and/or raging about this unbelievably Dilbert-Is-Real interaction between the the Lego brand management people and the Spinal Tap guys who liked a fan's Lego stop-animation video enough to include it in their recent tour. The story is so damned kinky-- not so much the fun kind of kinky as the confusing folded-protein kind of kinky.

Gah! My name as an adjective! Please, Scoutdog, I appreciate the respect, but never again ! [quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="52" id="2334433"]... I don't have a particular problem with magic following magic rules. What I'm trying desperately to avoid is the "it doesn't matter, it's magic" camp getting any traction into Stardock's thinking. ...[/quote] We are 'in the same camp' on this point, as I suspected for a while. I just finished Harry Potter 6 recently, and wh

[quote who="Thrawn2787" reply="91" id="2335096"]I don't know if this has been talked about at all but what about fortifications? Can we build any, thus giving our troops a tactical advantage in battles? Or might it be like Fire Emblem, where depending on what type of square your unit is on you get a bonus?[/quote] If you're interested in older threads, I kinda wish both Of Fortresses and Enclaves and <a href="https://forums.elemen

[quote who="Zaisha" reply="143" id="2335042"]... Lying: is there any situation it can't get you out of?[/quote] A perjury trial?

[quote who="Denryu" reply="34" id="2334225"]I chose the second option on the first question, because espionage that I ahve seen done with sliders is not fun and is just a chore and a money drain. Obviously that is just an opinion, which the purpose of a survey is to get people's opinion. Saying that you could say the same thing for combat and that it needs to be innovative, I would still put option 1, that it needs to be in whether it is innovative or not. That is because combat is

[quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="40" id="2333276"]... Quite simply, you are missing that science is a means of viewing the world, not a definition of what you find there. If some "magical" force was found to be behind quantum physics (and really, can you tell me there isn't?) scientific knowledge would expand to fit the new information into existing frameworks. ...[/quote] I think I'm getting it now. You're not understanding that my 'problem' is an aesthetic one and we are apparent

[quote who="Brizey" reply="27" id="2333040"]... That being said, as I get older I tend to gravitate towards scifi. ...[/quote] I switch back and forth between 'science' fiction and fantasy constantly. Last year, I fished for space opera titles over at the GalCiv2 forums and had barely gotten started digging through the suggestions before I suddenly started wanting spells instead of stardrives in my fiction. [quote who="LDiCesare"

I could swear there was an entire old thread (like maybe from last year) about options for players to name stuff on the map. But all I could find with some quick digging around is that the subject came up in an April dev journal from Brad on why the game deserves a 3D level below the cloth map . Anyhow, I still definitely like the general idea of landmark names somehow drawing from the event log for an individual game. Honorifics f