Philocthetes

I know everyone's thinking "apple pie," but my mom's trump treat was her pumpkin pie. Oh wait, that's a matter of taste, innit? Seriously, though, I hadn't even considered an 'impossible standard' problem harming Stardock revenue (I gave up regularly reading game sites shortly after Games Domain stopped being By Gamers, For Gamers and started being By Marketers, For Mindless Consumers). There's definitely a self-interest value for us 'niche game' folks in seeing Stardock succeed with

[quote who="Tridus" reply="10" id="2326828"]... Depends on how you define evil. ..[/quote] Which it seems the devs are *not* planning to do for this game...

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="32" id="2328513"]... Science has room for the whole universe. There are more than four dimensions...[/quote] I wish I understood how you're not getting me. Didn't I try very hard to show respect for science and make clear that I simply want 'science' type thinking kept firmly in the backround of the built game? It's like the only word you read in the block quote from me was "scientific."

The alpha is going, this thread is damned interesting and annoying, and still we've had no Integrated Metaphyics journal from the devs. From a 'social science' perspective, magic is a world view first and foremost. Whether or not a competing world view such as science can lead to better predictions and more effective tools is a matter of how the world, in this case a game engine, works. I'm a science groupie from way back. My low-income parents bought our first television so w

This is dangerously close to a subject that makes Scott have a conniption, so I won't say the 'bad words,' but I will say that GC2 made some solid advances on UI-accessible event logging through the expansion packs. I'm convinced that a rich event log with appropriately flexible hooks could be a major factor for both increasing immersiveness in canon sandbox games and helping modders create very strong homage projects for their favorite fantasy novels and films. Connections be

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="23" id="2327753"]... I've noticed that GW Swicord has drastically declined his posting recenrly..... make of that what you will.......[/quote] I drop in an out irregularly on account of a weird excuse for a work life and the occasional need to not even see a keyboard for a day or three. Plus, I like to watch, and when something like the alpha buzz gets the boards hopping, it's fun to just see what other old hands have to say to the new folks. And t

Does anyone know if Stardock actually made that writer/editor hire they were talking about a while back? I'd also very much like to see story chunks associated with champions as well as special map locations, dungeons, quests, and the diplomacy UI. If there's enough story to fill a novel (which is apparently so), seems like nearly everything in the game that can have a story blurb should have one.

[quote who="Denryu" reply="18" id="2327051"]I will say I do not like the idea of an espionage victory condition. I would need to see the final implementation but as a general idea I do not like that (even if there is an espionage system in the game, I can't see how you could have a good victory condtion based on it.)[/quote] I suspect that part of the 'problem' here is the term victory condition. Some unknown share (future poll Q?) of players don't play to win, they just play, and one

I love a good argument about what makes one piece of art better than another, but I've liked the Elemental art direction since I saw my first examples when the site launched so this is a boring topic for me. On the other hand, I'd like to speak up to any other defending fighters in the War on Verbs and say that one large reason that 'related' thread was such a failure is that "to fail" is a verb. Part of what makes the enemy so insidious in the War on Verbs is that they despise (or ju

[quote who="Ron Lugge" reply="10" id="2326129"]... More like changing publishers 3 times, with 3 different visions for the game, and a way overambitious design idea didn't work well for them [/quote] That's more or less my impression as well. I lurked on the MoO3 boards for the forever-time it took them to move through those three publishers and eventually ship a 'product.' What I got right after RTM didn't seem at all like a masses-hate-complexity version of 'the game' I'd been expec

[quote who="Scorpiana" reply="8" id="2326109"]... Sure it is, for certain definitions of 'fun' [/quote] The shudder quotes are terribly apt there. My affection for software testing has been about as close as I've come to BDSM. Your spec, my expectations, the tools we have to use for discussing the conflicts, how it all ends up at the mercy of the folks who can close a bug as By Design...

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="17" id="2326115"]And there I was still thinking about beta this month. [/quote] "This month" is still pretty darned close to 'around Sept. 3-6.' Also, IMO, it wouldn't be all that bad a thing if the beta 1 date moved towards the end of the month on account of an unexpectedly interesting and productive alpha. And I'm saying that has someone who's wanted this game since well before folks around Stardockia started calling the thing 'NotMoM.'

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="21" id="2325786"] Well, I'm not sure how the yes and no parts work out,That was the original prioblem: there was no yes/no system. You essentiallty auto-accepted eveything the AI threw at you.....[/quote] I meant pigeon starting out with a "No" when I strongly suspect that he and I agree. Re the additional Sins detail, that sounds like yet another horrible abuse of language in the UI. If you have no choice but to accept a parameter, you're und

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="19" id="2325235"]... No, it was ridiculous. Often, 5 minutes into the game you'd be ordered to go destroy 15 of, say, orange player's structures within 15 minutes or the quest giver (another player) will be mad at you. Only problem is, you're playing on a large map and orange player is 15 minutes away from you - or you don't even know where orange player is - or you're allied with orange player... The quests in SoaSE are really just periodic demands from

[quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="8" id="2324870"]For clarity, I think this is something like the situation Scoutdog is trying to avoid: "Oh crap, there is an invading army 10 turns from getting their catapults in range of my city. I'd better invest in another level of Masonry to get stronger walls to hold them long enough for my army to come back and defend me." Two turns later.. "New masonry technology gives me better ROADS?!?! Now they can get in ran

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="16" id="2324732"]... I have, and regret it: periodically, the AIs would ask you to do some inane thing like give them a certain amount of resources or kill somebody else. If you didn't do it, your relations would take a hit.[/quote] I guess I wouldn't call that forced. It sounds like an event with consequences; you do the requested deed and gain favor with the other faction, or you decline and lose favor with them. (Although that might feel 'too gamy' to m

[quote who="Denryu" reply="17" id="2324708"]... I am just having second thoughts about deciding right now to push it back to August. Why not wait and se ehow things unfold in beta?[/quote] There're probably some bureaucratic factors involved that will make this idea sound silly, but why not give up setting such faraway date entirely? If they can't live without a date, the PR folks could shift to soft goals like a given season or a given half of 2010, leaving the devs able to wait unti

Edit: I forgot I this thread's owner wants folks to stay on topic. Apologies.

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="3" id="2322767"]... I don't want a game to make me paranoid! I want to have fun. ...[/quote] I want Elemental to work well for a scary-large range of playstyles, and I'm convinved that a strong espionage component will be a big help there. Skullduggery is a major part of many fantasy epics, so it seems to me that the game ought to have an option to include exactly the sort of paranoia that you don't like so folks who *do* like looking over thei

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="13" id="2324410"]... Well, if the quest is something like curing a crop blight or pacifying the Swamp Lord, then I could see not succeeding causing a few problems. Not so much "punishment" as consequence of faliure.[/quote] I've never played SoaSE, so I have no idea what pigeon means by being 'forced' into a quest. My (wildly ambitious?) notion has been that a quest is an opportunity (problem) with associated risks. Some risks might or might not be connect

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="24" id="2321156"]... well, the devs have been rather candid about most everythibg in the game so far (broad stroaks if not the details) and no-one has said a word about religions: it's like the thought hasn't come up.[/quote] I've been a bit curious about near-zero dev talk about ethical and/or religious systems also. Maybe they will work up the Life vs. Death into the two major religions of the official back story. But the recent posting about deliberatel

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="7" id="2322851"]... And I would love or this guy to be the guardian/protector of a swamp somewhere - functioning on a level compared to player channelers. ...[/quote] Sometimes filenames are not much indication of what an artist or dev is thinking, but that word "Lord" in there did leave me thinking exactly along these lines. The combo of the art and that word in the filename makes it very hard for me to see the thing as a 'recruitable' entity.

Being a non-coder and an irrationally demanding computer user, I pretty much expected quests to work along the lines Tourresh suggests and think that an extended beta schedule could help make this part of the game 'highly sophisticated.' I have particular hopes about a 'branching, randomized' quest system being able to work together with the diplomacy UI to make that part of the game more interesting than any TBS I know of has managed so far. The real deal is replayability, though. As

[quote who="KellenDunk" reply="2" id="2321925"]Maybe Geoff and the swamp lord are bitter enemies [/quote] Fine idea, but they could still be parent and child a-la Chronos and Zeus or Zeus and Athena.

[quote who="ckessel" reply="21" id="2322128"]... Hinterland had a neat tradeoff between having a guy at home in his house doing something useful (alchemist, blacksmith, whatever) versus bringing him out into the field with you to adventure. I think Age of Wonders might have had something along those lines as well where someone sitting in a city could cast spells that affected the overall board, but I can't recall. King of Dragon's Pass didn't quite have that concept, but