Philocthetes

[quote]... I have a strong feeling that it IS working and it is working well for the businesses that use it. ...[/quote] You might be confusing financial success with artistic success. I don't follow the biz closely any more because I haven't seen a recovery from the kind of crash that cephalo describes in reply 1, which happened for me around Civ II/MoO III. Since the turn of the century, the TBS genre as a whole seems buried in the work of profiteering hacks, with rare exceptions li

[quote who="Dsraider" reply="113" id="2901807"]...and this is why you don't feed trolls. ...[/quote] ?Does Xia count as a troll even though it is his thread? I'm never going to be able to keep up with this moving-target netiquette stuff... You shouldn't worry about scaring away Stardock devs. They're a very hardy lot. Particularly strong in resisting pleas for more info. [e classic];)[/e]

[quote]2. Fit the theme of Elemental, that they felt uniquely at home in the world we were creating. Specifically the creatures were flawed or broken in some way.[/quote] So the 'new dichotomy' to replace good vs. evil is natural vs. magical? Is magic the real villain in the Elemental world? I was hoping to see some benign or even helpful-to-humans creatures left over from the Cataclysm, but I guess they are all just weapons that got out of control...

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="109" id="2901688"]But his fucking veiwpoint isn't valid. I hate the idea that just becasuse everyone has thgeir own viewpoint, it makes it valid. It's not fucking Valid. Stardock has bent over backwords appologizing and doing what they could to make it right. Still bitching and being fucking demandobots is not the answer. Shut the fuck up, bitches. If you want to biotch, make a different thread. This thread is about hearin

[quote who="Souls-Stream" reply="7" id="2901169"]I care a lot about the mechanic of the spell but don't tell me that you don't care about the visual of the spell too! They're just as much important. ... [/quote] It's likely that many, perhaps most, players agree with you. But there are some of us out there who look on all the 3D stuff as a resource drag that makes newer hardware more important than it should be and consumes dev resources that would be better spent on game mechan

[quote who="StarReaper" reply="105" id="2900137"]I just think the 1% of TBS are engaging ing multiplayer such a bogus unfounded number. Id love for them to post there sources. ...[/quote] I'd love to see those sources also, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that stuff was 'proprietary information.' Marketing researchers want to know as much as they possibly can about us, while keeping us as much in the dark about them as possible. That makes sense if you're thinking about

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="103" id="2900109"]... The traceable part. I doubt it includes statistics from forms of MP that do not require connecting to the central server (Hotseat, LAN, and PBEM). The numbers for Hotseat and LAN are particularly important because the people that find MP nice to do every once and a while with friends are most likely to use those.[/quote] Don't get me wrong. I never read Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics , but I've long understood that stats based

[quote]but i think it blows out of the water that 1% of the active community want MP versus 99% that dont care.[/quote] That's probably true about "the active community," no matter what you might mean by the term. But the 1% number that Brad and others are citing is about the customer base for the 4X TBS genre as a whole (or at least that's how I read the forums; I've not seen a link to any formal survey data). Given my own experience as a Stardock customer since 2003 who neve

I still couldn't care less about the graphics for any spells; it's what the spells can do that matters most, and so far, they don't do much that you can't also do with mundane weapons. The lack of kick-assedness is in the lack of a coherent set of rules that lead to an interesting variety of strategies for spell research and use, and especially in the lack of strategic spells that do more than just tweak stats for units or settlements. Modding is swell and all that, but the base game

[quote who="LightStar" reply="7" id="2899377"]All I can say is "HUH?". That story is almost 3 and a half years old.[/quote] And what's the date got to do with it? Good questions are often worth years, decades, or even centuries of discussion.

[quote]... So, while I personally think that you're right in a way, they are different in a couple of important ways, too. ...[/quote] Definitely. For one, I'm fairly certain that religious sects far outnumber factions in the scientific community, and that's likely because science requires verification by repeatable testing while religious testimony can be based entirely on interior experience. I guess in that sense, I do agree that a mind that thinks with recursion contains infinite

[quote who="ElanaAhova" reply="4" id="2899326"]... In a sence, they have 'made' their own religion.[/quote] Yes, but it is everyone in science, not just the folks clinging doggedly to their favorite ideas. I piss off many of my academic friends when I say things like this, but science is every bit as faith-based as Roman Catholicism. It's just the objects of faith that are different. In theistic systems, gods & other mystical beings are objects of faith. In science, we put o

We're only taking the first baby steps in understanding how we came to have our languages. I'm certain that language shapes consciousness, and I think I can follow the basic argument that "no recursion in a language means there is no underlying biological 'hardware' for grammar." But one of the other things we're starting to barely understand is epigenetics, so maybe there are biological mechanisms in play and the "universal" part of the Pinker-Chomsky position is a matter of degree and not k

[quote]... Anyhow, gamemechanics would have to be changed in order to make playing with massive armies fun, while not making heroes useless from midgame on.[/quote] To me, it would be "finished," not "changed." Way before we had beta builds in our hands, I had a crazy notion that Elemental could become the distant PC-game cousin of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. I wanted to play a game that had all the '4X' bells and whistles but added a functionally important and in

I haven't played much in a while, but the thing that used to make that happen for me was not having enough gildar to recruit the champion. You also might be having problems because of a very low Charisma, and I think it's possible to design a custom sov with extra points for being a weaker recruiter.

[quote]I would have made it a poll but not sure how to do that ...[/quote] Pretty sure the local polls are limited to Stardock folks. They don't even seem part of the forums at all; I've missed some because I almost never hit the home page for the game, just come straight to the boards. Denryu, a poster from the earliest beta days, set himself up with a free version of the service at surveymonkey. No idea how much of a bother it is to use their UI, nor what they want by way of

No.

[quote who="troglyte" reply="15" id="2897398"]... It would be really interesting to see a diplomatic system that had as much depth and strategy as the military sytem, but would be better off as trade wars, political intrigue, and espionage. I don't like the idea of winning "diplomatically" by throwing a bunch of spells around. ...[/quote] That was some rhetorical ranting on my part, definitely not part of a master plan to redesign the game. I'm a player, not a dev, nor even a modd

[quote who="kenata" reply="6" id="2897332"]... While many community members might express their desire for more epicness, they rarely can agree on exactly this epicness looks like. For some, this means battles where units have troop counts in the thousands, while others want larger battle arenas with unlimited units. ... [/quote] You're sort of forgetting those of us who might think that 'epicness' resides in the larger game, not simply the combat math & GUI. For a game to feel 'e

[quote who="StevenAus" reply="2" id="2897286"]Good points. Should I rename this thread?[/quote] Don't see why. You may well be right about the total opinion breakdowns and I could be far more alone in my hopes than I imagine. If Denryu were still around, we could get him to do a free surveymonkey poll for us; I'm too lazy. p.s. It was nice to see a few "no MP at all" posts in the poll thread.

That's only because a bunch of us 'old guard' types have gone to lurker mode or are trying to keep ourselves restrained. I piped up in the poll thread about magic, but I'm equally interested in seeing serious follow-through on early talk about making the victory conditions more like equals instead of Conquest Is The Only True Game and everything else is Just There. A big part of that for me was hoping to see related follow-through on the connecting-simple-systems-for-big-fun notion, w

What's new and different with the magic system?

[quote who="AlLanMandragoran" reply="67" id="2895613"]... I like the smell of my own farts. The sulphur content is just right. [/quote] I haven't read the last book yet, so as far as I know, Moiraine is still dead. Dead or alive, I'm sure she'd look down her nose at that sort of remark. What Nynaeve might say or do in response, I shudder to think...

[quote who="Tridus" reply="64" id="2895027"]... Then I read in the annual report that they plan to backport some of the FE changes into EWoM for people who don't like FE, and its like... WHY?[/quote] My 'neutral' guess is that it's some mixture of defense for the brand and Stardock's tendency to bond with players/customers, plus an interest in maximizing returns on the FE labor investments. My pessimistic guess is that it's because FE is going to be like a dish with a classic

Scott, can you tell us anything more about what appears to be a serpentine/oriental dragon in both that Gamespot video and the 2010 Customer Report? I'm still hoping to see a Very Serious Dragon that can curl itself around a large city's walls and take a nap that makes ordinary sieges look like a playground fight.