Philocthetes

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="7" id="2254874"]God I miss futurama it was one of the most intelligent and funny shows I've seen. I really need to watch the futurama movies at some point before the new episodes air on comedy central. [/quote] Bachelor Chow. Best joke buried in the credits ever.

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="1" id="2254651"]Looks good, except for one thing: "Aether" is a planet in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (It'll be in my Metroid Mod, which, by the way, will be VERY high-quality and should be downloaded as soon ats it is finished......). "Ether" is the fith element that is the sum of the other four. ...[/quote] I know nothing of Metroid stuff and did not mean any reference to it. Aether is the more traditional spelling for the alchemical thing you want discussed

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="14" id="2254713"] ... I came to the conclusion for 3 using an aggregate representation of Channeler power. ... [/quote] The reasoning works for me; hope it applies to the built game as well. Thanks.

[quote who="Thomas Fife" reply="8" id="2254514"]... My avatar is the only avatar-sized pic I have that matchs the filetypes the forum takes. All I have are bitmaps [/quote] If you're running Vista, MS Paint can save as jpg and png.

How many Elements are there? A. Five: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Life B. Four: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (with Life as either Aether or the Sum of the Four) C. Six: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Life, and Death (the 'Life' rune describes an Element with two separate aspects) Scoutdog, Darkodinplus, please suggest edits here to help avoid any unconscious push-poll wording on my part. The order of choices is because my past work writing questions (I've done a fair

I don't see why a commodity-based trade system would make tolls a moot point. Wouldn't it work more or less like the real world, where shipping, say, a load of cars from one country to another entails a cash tariff and not a share of the cars? [quote who="Campaigner" reply="20" id="2254463"]...Many of you guys like Civilization and GalCiv and want the game to take like 100 hours..?[/quote] I think at least a handful of us are actually very interested in the idea of a single ga

The devs appreciate Master of Magic, and item creation there was a big part of building up your champions. My guess is that we'll have two 'levels' of enchanted gear, one for regular troops and one for champions. I'd be a bit disappointed if the game didn't include some basic choices about whether to 'mass' produce gear with basic enchantments or to forge singular items that effectively grant limited spell-casting power.

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="7" id="2252968"]I can see holding off on specific levels of essence since we don't know the scale but we do know a few things about essence. ... 3. Determines the Channeler's power level when used in conjunction with other potential stats. ... [/quote] How'd you get #3 on your list? Did I miss a dev post or did you catch something in IRC?

[quote who="psychoak" reply="2" id="2253245"]... This thread should exist a month from now as an after the fact balance discussion regarding the wieght of various choices in essence use.[/quote] psychoak often makes me think words that are not OK for the underage market. Truth can be a real bitch.

[quote who="Kitkun" reply="3" id="2252891"]... It's been discussed so much here, it took me forever to realize you might think I didn't know about it. ...[/quote] I get it now. My reply must have been from the other side of the looking glass or something. I sure wish the Atari idiots had at least thought of some Be Our Second Cousin deal that would have let Stardock post the PDFs for the MoM manual & spell guide. It'd be great to be able to reference them with confidence that fol

[quote who="Tridus" reply="17" id="2252490"]Well... how does spell research work? Can the channeler wear equipment like normal units? If you need libraries to research spells and to create some gear for yourself, the "uber channeler" won't be uber for very long compared to a city builder. ...[/quote] That's why I've become interested in the idea of champions as alternate 'production points' for things like research. Especially for something like magic, there's all manner of

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="20" id="2251626"]... Actually, I got that data from the "Intro & Background" section of my CliffsNotes: Romeo and Juliet book. Was the only required reading I ever found intetresting. [/quote] Any instructor who put Cliff Notes on a required reading list should be fired immediately. That's really required cheating.

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="12" id="2251053"]... I know I'm being a bit of a jerk about this, but I still think there's only four.[/quote] Persistent, yes, but not rude, at least as far as I'm concerned. From the Lore page : "In the final stages of the war, the powers gathered up nearly all the magic of the world and concentrated them into a series of crystals that represented the basic elements of magic: Earth, Air, Fire, W

At the moment, I guess I'm inclined to believe that we won't have element specialization that's analagous to the spell-book specialization in MoM. Your elemental 'alignment,' if it exists at all, will be based on the type(s) of shard(s) that you control. On a large map, controlling 5 shards doesn't seem at all unreasonable, and controlling 5 different types of shard seems at least plausible (perhaps a possibility that can be influenced by map settings). Picking Call the Void as an exa

Pardon me for the helpless vocab cop moment, but groupthink is a problem, not something you want to do on purpose. Brainstorming on the screen cap, however, is a fine idea, IMO. The whitish ruins(?) in the upper left corner caught my eye immediately also. Dungeon entrance seems plausible. NTJedi, did you think tomb (temple?) because the thing seems to be a light source or at least be lit when compared to the surrounding blasted ter

Re champions defecting, I guess it's a matter of taste, and maybe of setup options. I have about as strong a dislike of champions as mindless slaves as Denryu and Martok have for the possibility of a champion defecting (or maybe just wandering off alone or returning to the Indepedent Power where he or she came from). And on the 'balance' side of the argument, if towns can defect (which at least a share of us think will likely be in the game in some form b/c it is in GC2), why shouldn'

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="2" id="2249964"]The channeler-essence system should alse have an interesting effect on this, as a powerful channeler and a channeler with a lot of cities would sort of be equally tough (if not equal).[/quote] That's roughly how I read the public dev goal discussion so far, but there's still plenty of room for devilish details. My ludicrous desire to see the game work for a channeler who doesn't even want to found a single city ('going Gandalf') has

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="4" id="2250111"]I looked at the cover art and thought of the classical earth/water/air/fire system, and it looks like "life" is in fact the sum of the other four. Life also makes me think of essance, hence the essence cost.[/quote] I wasn't trying to argue, just typing about how interesting it is to me that we can have such very different responses to the same basic set of limited information. It's not like the devs have given us anything substantive to di

Since Galadriel's come up again, I'd like to refer the newer folks to a swell old thread from Ynglaur on Gameplay Types . That thread left me with an enduring impulse to question the deceptively simple phrase "victory conditions" and wonder if the genre would gain by generally shifting to a new name for 'the same' thing that was more like "closure conditions" or "game over criteria." Mind you, that's all tied up with my being a role-player at heart and a card-car

[quote who="Kitkun" reply="1" id="2250042"]'Master of Magic'? ...[/quote] Oh my stars and garters. Master of Magic is the 'spiritual predecessor' of Elemental, and if corporate IP/marketing crapola hadn't ensued, the game might even have officially been Master of Magic 2. [quote who="Scoutdog" reply="2" id="2250065"]Well, by my understanding of midaeval medicine and the Elemental cover art, the fith element is ac

[quote who="Denryu" reply="20" id="2249920"]...Also, earth mages maybe can only summon stone elementals if they are in rocky terrain, otherwise they are limited to weaker earth elementals. I am sure ideas for how to implement the same types of idea for air and fire mages could be thought up.[/quote] Glad to see magic, and our comparatively major ignorance of it in game terms, come up in a 'battle system' thread. Early on, I thought in terms of things like 'earth mages,' but since Scot

I quite like Wintersong's recent set of avatar pics with element runes on the frames. The most I've seen on one pic, though, is four elements. Which got me to thinking... If Elemental has an analog to the MoM spell Call the Void, it should require all 5 types of mana. (Call the Void wrecks an entire city, seriously maims or kills any units in the city, and corrupts surrounding land with the 'fallout' from the destruction.) Any thoughts on other spells that would need the Full

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="10" id="2249887"]... If a mine is super worked (like is fueling a massive war engine off a single iron mine) it may be more likely to deplete than one in the middle of no where that has only been tapped for the last part of the game. ...[/quote] More conext sensitivity is a swell idea in general, even if the depleting mines question is moot so far as the devs are concerned. For example, I'd really love to see at least Mega Events, if not events in

Even with the "Remove" label, that screen cap doesn't leave me much hope that we'll see a Neutral alignment in Elemental. Still, I'd like to be proven wrong by a faction or two on both the human and Fallen sides that have nearly as much in common with each other as they do with 'their side.' Don't even have to call it Neutral and carve out a third set of alignment-dependent functions. All we really need is some backstory and a few AI behavior patterns to put the "big tent" problem in

[quote]Except for a Sauron-style mass butt-kicking.[/quote] And don't forget that Sauron's defeat required a sort of 'essence hoarder' (Gandalf--it had to take essence to come back from the Balrog fight, and it was late-game for him), a crew of champions (the Fellowship), *and* the mass armies that Gondor, Rohan, and the dwindling elves managed to field.