Philocthetes

I want Storm Giant castles in the clouds too, but isn't the real underlying question here whether the engine will have any 3D mobility for units? I've been poking the devs in a variety of contexts about their lack of response to the questions about stuff that is not 'land-based' in our pre-beta fantasies and if they've responded, I missed it. "Majestic Road" sounds like a great overland spell idea, and again reminds us 'forum geezers' how long we've been waiting for some basic info on

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="4" id="2074882"]... In spite of any jobs I've held as a writer, I am still terrible at spelling. ...[/quote] My own experience and confirmation from several others who've had to 'work prose' in various fashions suggests that no matter how good you were at spelling when you were a young student, steady exposure to the sloppiness of others will chip away at your skills. I first heard this from one of my high school mentors who sponsored the newspape

[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="23" id="2220012"]...Cities, I think, use Essence, so maybe "cost of cities" is a more accurate term.[/quote] I still have some hope that the essence mechanics will organically ensure that maps rarely or never end up tessellated with housing and other improvements. But that would mean spacing via blasted lands and not 'natural' spacing that yields a map like Middle Earth (very sparse population centers) or 'the west' in Jordan's Wheel of Time (less s

Here's hoping that we can indeed extract the baseline map from a game to re-use with other settings and/or tweak with the editor. I've also had that experience of wishing I could try again at a map that beat the crap out of me long before I learned this, that, or the other thing. If there's an internal debate on planes/moons/whatever, I'd love to see a companion thread to the one on the econ mechanics. Or at least a semi-firm dev reply to this question that's been around pretty much s

[quote who="Ashain" reply="11" id="2217253"]...GW Swicord: The games I was alluding to were FF7 (RPG), Starcraft (RTS) and the Halo series (console FPS) respectively.[/quote] Heh. I actuall owned some holiday bundle of Starcraft and a couple of expansions. It was my last try at RTS and apparently the clickety-clickety kept me so distracted that I didn't notice any story content [e classic]:-|[/e]

[quote who="Szadowsz" reply="8" id="2214484"]... maybe knowledge you wouldn't get if you simply conquered them[/quote] Now that's a really neat idea, and would fit with that peacemonger-friendly theme that Scott mentioned recently.

[quote]Make it optional. [/quote] I'd like to see that just for breadth of audience, but it seems like a notion that would have a Camp 3 behind it if it were viable. Then again, I'm not a coder. Vote-wise, I'm already long on board with Camp 1, and I'd like to crit one of the objections to it from Camp 2. Why would you necessarily have less 'strategic' towns just because you have more options for distributing and using resources? There's still the matter of keeping caravan rou

I wanted to hunt up the old wilderness thread for a reference link, and I knew that Geoff the Slug was mentioned in it, so I used the local search box and entered "Geoff the Slug" (quotes included). The search only returned two hits, both for NTJedi's terrain types thread. But when I ran the search from Google proper and added the site:forums.elementalgame.com delimiter, I got four hits for four different threads, including the one I wanted to find. That seems a little broken

[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="21" id="2216018"]Part of "how complex should cities be" may come down to "how common are cities"? If the player needs to manage dozens or hundreds of cities (immense maps, perhaps?), they should probably be kept simpler. If "every city counts", then more complex cities are fine. That said, complex cities are fine even in large numbers if the player has ways to intelligently automate certain functions, or can rely on the AI to do a "good enoug

[quote who="Ashain" reply="25" id="2215983"]...Heh, my point wasn't whether you like him or not, but that you'd know exactly who I was talking about. You and probably 95% of the people reading this i'd imagine [/quote] I scoff most survey data, but the question you guess about here is answerable and interesting. I have no idea about any of the names you've mentioned (games or characters), but I suspect that's because they're in the so-called RPG genre of PC (and/or deck) games, which

Pardon the threadjacking, but landi's sketch reminds me how neat it would be if we could get some scar-art for channeler and champion units. We'll be able to scar the land late-game, but Brad's said stuff about how much he wants the zoom-in levels to be rich. What better canvas to show progress at high zoom than the faces of your faction's leadership?

[quote who="MatBerryman2" reply="17" id="2215302"]...Should I be worried? ...[/quote] I agree with Windish about not worrying, but you might want to contact [email protected] before the beta is posted, at least if you want to install ASAP. If it isn't in your Registrations, it sounds like there was a bump in the system somewhere.

[quote]what have you got against space ponies[/quote] Nothing serious. Mostly that I'd rather see the energy put into more practical stuff or higher-quality silliness. p.s. For full disclosure, I should admit that I know next to nothing about the Space Pony business b/c I have no interest in RTS. I've just seen peripheral noise from that saga and also seen a few folks connect it to our Elemental-local 'problem' with ursines. Shouldn't let a good opportunity for mockery go to w

Please don't feed the Spawn of Space Ponies [e classic];P[/e] p.s. Good touch re the hint-o-racoon--those little buggers are much closer to having a competitive opposable thumb than the pony-spawn are. (If you were thinking Pandas, I recant entirely--that is just not a warlike species compared to the rest of their ilk.)

Careful, or you'll accidentally summon Zyxpsilon the Inscrutable [e classic];)[/e]

[quote]I believe you can see the same thing in Impulse. Click on community and my account/registrations. Something like that.[/quote] Well put that down for my Nth gripe about the Impulse UI. Burying something as important as my registrations several clicks into Community area is just not 'intuitive,' at least for my intuition. Thanks for the info.

[quote]Here is a screen shot of my registrations page on impulsdriven.net[/quote] Is that a web site vs. the web-whatever we see in Impulse? I didn't see anything like 'Registrations' in the Impulse app-thing. Seems odd to have such an important bit of data not easily found in the thing we use to install and update stuff. Am I just too old to see some 'obvious' chunk of graphics I should be clicking?

More dev shops need to be reasonable about slipping schedules when they need to slip. I'm a regular pest on these forums, but I'm entirely OK with seeing the beta 0 date move. And I'm also very happy to see a reaffirmation of the singleplayer experience as the center of the Elemental project. The only possible 'bad' news I see in the post is this business of simplifying the economy. I'm all for providing a simple top-level UI, but I had high hopes that the underlying mechanics would b

[quote]...Corruption is a very big theme for this world, and I'd very much like to a see a progression where people and various minions under your command start to steadily change in their appearance overtime. ...[/quote] That sounds very interesting. I wonder if the modding hooks will enable you to do something like that maybe via automated upgrades. Functionality like that could be used for stuff other than corruption as well, maybe having your channeler change appearance subtly to

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="6" id="2212944"]I'm surprised to hear that the mana is tracked apart from each other. "Fire mana" and "earth mana" show a clear distinction. I now expect multi-element spells![/quote] Interesting how folks expectations vary--I'd unconsciously assumed that mana would come in 'flavors' since the game was named for the elements. Scott definitely implied that mixed-element spells are possible or already exist when he answered my quibble about

The first browser I used was Lynx , but that was way before all you rotten kids and sales people started that dot-com rot. These days, I have to use IE for work stuff, but I never use it for personal business because I fiercely oppose Microsoft's decision to marry web browsing with their OS code for both political-economic and technical reasons. I've also 'had to use' FireFox for Stardock sites because I somehow can't get

[quote]unless someone uses magic to snuff it out[/quote] Yay, the first clear sign that we'll have some countermagic! [quote]These values can be tweaked, but from a gameplay mechanic, Essence lets us give the player cool options without allowing too much cheese. [/quote] Less of a "yay." So far I have a strong impression that you intend to make essence a very limited resource, which is an idea I like very much. I just hope that any 'anti-cheese' uses of essence will ma

[quote who="Daiwa" reply="15" id="2212518"]Nothing jingoistic about numbers. Whether you consider it jingoistic or not, the likelihood of the multitude of Muslims of various ancestry (that better?) buying in to limiting their own population growth as a favor to the world would have to be considered pretty damn small. There is certainly no evidence to support the notion. And certainly no evidence to suggest they'd bow to the dictates of non-Muslim entities.[/quote]

[quote who="Vordrak" reply="16" id="2212456"]...I agree it would be ok for the spells to cost essence if ... (i) FLARE the area of view was permanent. E.g. you would always be able to see the area revealed. (ii) SUBLIME HARVEST the food bonus was permanent. ... would that not make more sense?[/quote] I very much agree with this point. The essence-mana mechanics could be the most important distinguishing feature for Elemental, and it just seem

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="23" id="2210299"]It would be nice for there to be vairous "religious" victories, as they allow a great deal of condition freedom. I.e. put X number of buildings or units or reasorces in holy city Y, sacrifice # of enemy warriors at certain locations, and so on.[/quote] Those sound more like quests than victory/game-ending conditions to me, but maybe one of the ways we'll be able to set up a short game of Elemental is to pick a single quest or small quest s