Philocthetes

[quote]... But why would I want to even use a dragon? ...[/quote] I can't stop myself from reiterating my very great affection for the idea that dragons in Elemental will be like 'forces of nature.' Except that somehow we can communicate with at least some of them. They should remain every bit the equal of channelers right to the end of the game, as far as I'm concerned. And at least one of them really needs to be able to get pissed off and wrap his or her unbelievable serpent-style b

On the 'armies moving on their stomachs would make zombies too powerful' channel, the simple fix would be mana overhead for each undead unit. IIRC, all summoned units in MoM had a mana upkeep, possibly in part for balance reasons. Maybe some serious necromancy could create a totally freestanding undead entity, but it seems reasonable to expect that 'undead regulars' would cost some mana in exchange for the whatever 'bonuses' their undead state entails.

[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="12" id="2234998"]...though I recall various Chinese dynasties had a good road infrastructure as well, at least in parts of their various empires. Navigable rivers beat roads anyday: cheaper, faster, and you could carry more for less cost in people and draft animals.[/quote] It might be safe to say the 'Chinese' (depending on what you mean by that) 'invented' most any major pre-industrial tech innovation you can think of, although they sometimes a

I'd like to humbly scoff the 'camps 1-4' items on the survey. There is so much noise on the boards right now that it isn't really safe to assume that any given respondent read Brad's OP carefully and based their choice on his definition of the camps. People could easily have embedded their own or other forum poster's *comments* about Brad's definitions into their survey responses. Mind you, I'm a lapsed social scientist and a pretty staunch critic of the idea that opinion research pro

I wear glasses, but only for driving. I stare at onscreen text for a living. The average age of the U.S. population is increasing, so eyes are less young and micro-font friendly ever year. So, yes, moddability would be a nice compromise, but an in-game ability could help weary-eyed players make the most of our monitor size and graphics card.

[quote]I'm very curious how building the populace of a kingdom is. will i need a female and a male to get a child? will there be limits to how often they can reprouce? so if i have 2 women, i can only get two children in a year? will their be children?[/quote] So far, the plan seems to be for most population 'growth' to actually be migration from blasted lands to the lands that channelers restore by using (spending) essence. I'm one of the folks who would like to see a timesca

How may of yo mama's does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

[quote]Giving every resource/object/whatever a weight property (and maybe even a size category), on the other hand, I like. [/quote] That's the "*this*" that I meant. The caravan talk has been so fast and furious around here lately that it's all a blur to me...

Here's hoping the game will also enable folks to go for a 'minor strategy' approach that emphasizes individual (channeler) learning/experience, champions, questing, and diplomacy over the traditional path-to-urbanism format. Even if I can't go Gandalf outright, I'd still like to see the possibility of, say, founding a small 'champions' guild' with a humble HQ and branch offices in friendly factions' capitals instead of aiming for a full-blown city. Or maybe what I'm thinking i

I set my browser zoom to between 130-150% for almost every web site I visit regularly (including here). Rather than moddability for this problem, I'd really like to see Elemental include the widespread use of sizable windows/dialogs and some built-in options for the font sizes. But I'm used to not getting what I want, so some moddability in this area sounds like a swell compromise.

[quote]just because it is in the thread title doesn't mean you cannot move beyond it .[/quote] Gazing's the OP and was politely asking you to help the thread stay focused. I threadjack regularly, but I always try to respect an OP as an 'owner' if they try some moderator talk.

[quote who="Szadowsz" reply="12" id="2232278"]It all depends on if its a neutral or enemy town too[/quote] ??? I've never heard of a conquered town being 'netural' twoards the conqueror. Or are you talking about possible towns that are not aligned with any of the 12 human or Fallen factions? If the latter, please elaborate. The only difference I can guess you might be considering is that 'converting' people who used to be in another faction might be harder than 'assimilating' people w

I don't have a good enough (mathematical) imagination to have a specific opinion on plans like this, but I can definitely say *this* is the kind of physics I want to see done as well as possible in the game. I'd gladly give up some of the eye-candy physics (i.e. dev time) in exchange.

[quote who="Szadowsz" reply="16" id="2230563"]...but conjuring a firestorm and laughing manically as it sets the forest on fire that your enemies are hiding in works too[/quote] It's exactly this sort of thing that's had me wanting at least one Metaphysics dev journal since Brad's first one on mechanics for mundane combat units. Maybe the name of the game itself has helped me form some excessively high expectations, but that blunt fact combined with other things like regular t

[quote who="Denryu" reply="5" id="2230281"]I agree, I think it would be a lot smoother to caravan NR and abstract MR distribution.[/quote] I'm still basically a Camp 1 person despite all the very interesting counterarguments in this thread. That's mainly because I believe complexity at the modeling level is almost always good for a TBS game, but also because I want to see the genre evolve to include a wider variety of 'action settings.' I consider the UI stuff a fairly separate argume

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="22" id="2230319"]... A pity that the only area where I could "shine" is somehow banned: the story. ...[/quote] I don't really understand what you mean about "banned," but maybe that's because right up until I just read that line, I was thinking something fuzzy about Elemental having the opportunity to build a game where great battles between huge forces were more often than not going to be the first and last such 'time' in a given game. Basically

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="11" id="2230296"]... it makes sense in GC2. I imagine those rings represent radio waves or something similar extending out from their sources (the ships obviously travering faster than the speed of light) so everything within those areas capable of recieving culture (i.e. has mastered the radio or TV) will be influenced by that civ's culture. It doesn't work like that one a single planet ...[/quote] You seem to enjoy a good recreational quib

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="9" id="2230232"]...if its from culture, I'd argue that culture doesn't spread in such clean circles. I'd be curious to see how borders worked like that.[/quote] That makes perfect sense to my social scientist side, but I've played GC2 for years now and those smooth circles are exactly how influence (culture) spreads in that game until it begins overlapping with another major civ's inflence. That's the only time you start seeing 'natural-looking'

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="1" id="2230194"]lottery is pretty rough. But I guess its fair against those karma whores swinging 50+ karma (looks other way)[/quote] It's really worth remembering that Brad's been blunt about the first full beta 'not being fun' and the alpha will be an even more primitive build. I really hope that any 'lottery' winners or folks otherwise invited for the alpha will be able to resign and have their spot given to someone who is better suite

[quote who="arstal" reply="6" id="2228245"]Oh well, I expected a delay, and I know I'm not going to get in, since I passed on Demigod, and don't have a ton of +1's. ...[/quote] The public beta will be open to everyone who's pre-ordered. The invitation/lottery talk is about a *possible* limited alpha, maybe sometime in June.

Beg pardon for sort of threadjacking, but does anyone know whether forum sign-in requires some third-party site transactions? I've been trying for ages to figure out why other folks seem to use Opera with no problem, but I can't get a signin to process. Could it be because of something like my blocking content from googleanalytics.com?

So, if co-op magic gets in the game, should there be a single, generic ritual to enable cooperation on any spell that's on the co-op list, or would it be better to have to research co-op versions of any particular spell like Call the Void? Also, should there be just a few spells that channelers can work together or should the list include any and all Big Magic? I suspect that for spell book simplicity, most folks (devs?) would prefer a generic Channelers' Circle ritual that establishe

[quote who="Mooster" reply="5" id="2227817"]I think that google has to index the page before it can be search. I have created webpages of my own, and when I tried to search thru them using google, nothing came up, so I asked google to index the pages, after a few days, i searched again and it came up[/quote] That's not the problem here. The forums are well-indexed as far as I can tell via searches direct from the Google site. It's just the local fueled-by-Google search that yields tim

[quote]If you haven't played GC2, the non-fleet is a lot like Civ 4 style fights (one unit attacks one unit in the other stack). [/quote] That's why I wouldn't even call a non-fleet in GC2 a 'stack.' A stack moves as a single unit until it's disbanded. Ships outside of fleets in GC2 need to be moved individually. On the other hand, I never even considered the idea of a champion as a necessary condition for using any 'logistics ability' in the first place. That seems...interest

My favorite thing about him is that he fled my beloved home state of Florida. We tolerate an awful lot of fucked-up shit in the name of justice and the free market here, and this fool made our current piratocracy give him the heave-ho. That really takes effort--you could probably fill a small Flordia town with just our crazy-but-not-too-dangerous lawyers...