Philocthetes

If you used TGN tokens to pre-order, Impulse does not seem to know about it yet. But you can sign back into totalgaming.net and verify that the tokens were 'spent.'

[quote who="dctrjons" reply="3" id="2208917"]... Ok it's possible but just will not work for this game. ...[/quote] I'd be a lot more persuaded by your general argument if we weren't talking about a fantasy game. With magic, all things are possible, so the only real limits are dev time for coding and creative time for putting code functionality into the game UI/story. The still-unrevealed essence mechanics are a definite possibility for channeler-to-cham

I don't recall how much of it there was, but a while ago we had some pretty passionate declarations against any sort of supply line mechanics. I suspect that those were mostly from the quick-game/RTS-friendly crowd. I'm personally looking forward to a game that might take me a hundred hours to finish and I'd really, really like to see some functionality along the lines of Climber's suggestion. Maybe it could be one of those things in the Great Bucket of Setup Options, but I'd be just

I suspect some of my fellow control freaks might balk at your suggestion, but I really like the idea of having mechanics that reflect the limits of low-tech communication. Requiring advanced magic and/or special items for long-range communication would at the very least make for some strong differences between the early, middle and late game that had little or nothing to do with whether you'd played as a turtler or started conquering from the git-go. Quests and tactical combat that do

[quote who="Tridus" reply="2" id="2204901"]A friend of mine reported getting charged yesterday too. So presumably that means things are getting into gear.[/quote] Check that thread Wintersong linked. It seems more likely that you're just seeing the results of Stardock verifying the credit card. Real billing will not happen until beta bits are posted on Impulse, which we shouldn't expect to see until sometime in June at the earliest. I don't gamble, but I'd almost bet that the devs wil

I'm in the wait-and-see camp on the 'races' talk, not least because that word is such a sloppy, baggage-laden mess. I started out hoping to see Elemental include Stardock's take on traditional fantasy figures for playable factions and/or some all-new nonhuman stuff of their own. But Stardock has become the TBS analog to a restaurant I trust, so I'm willing to try the new special even if the ingredient list isn't what I expected. That aside, on point 1, Tim4fun's math is off for two ma

Thanks, Szadowsz, that's the post I was not remembering well enough.

[quote who="Szadowsz" reply="4" id="2201775"]...there will be sever based in the final brad says so[/quote] I can't quickly find what I think I remember Brad typing on the subject, but I thought the plan for the RTM version was to have server-based AIs as an *option* for multiplayer. I didn't get the impression that singleplayer games would be server-dependent after the beta.

[quote who="Szadowsz" reply="25" id="2201318"]... Its actually called technological determinism and applies to everything from the microwave to the atomic bomb[/quote] Jacques Ellul just about ruined my intellectual life, except that having read his Technological Society over a decade ago is essential to my thinking now. Tech determinism is even broader than microwaves to atom bombs: writing is a technology, after all..

Re naval stuff, forum posts are not contracts or promises, but in his recent modding thread , Brad said "...the game will, over time, become flexible enough so that players can mod it into all kinds of different land-based, turn-based games." I've been brandishing that term here and there in hopes of getting some confirmation or correction from the devs. I'd also like to see naval stuff at least roughly equivalent to early Civ. I'd even like to see some basic aeri

[quote who="Climber" reply="7" id="2199641"]...Pearl Harbor (& other sneak attack) happens in History; but it is a tactical event that hardly affects the final outcome of a war. The result of a war bases on factors on the strategic level. Ideally, if there is a simple & elegant way to represent BOTH the strategic value of honoring border AND allowing sneak attack in EWOM, I will love that. If I’ve to choose one of them only, I’ll say sneak attack aren&rsqu

[quote]Risk versus reward, if you want the reward, take the risk. When you choose to be employed by a major corporation, you choose to skip the risk and give the reward to the company that's paying you.[/quote] The risk talk is all fancy and semi-persuasive, but what about the fact that no one in this day and age should expect anything from a corporate employer other than (hopefully) pay for work up to the day they drop you like yesterday's copy machine? How is demi-indenturing yours

I'll see your mobile fruiting bodies and raise you one set of mind-controlling spores (ant 'minds,' anyhow). And I'd love to see a mod-bit for a walking fungi warrior. It's about time the kingdom started getting fey-thing equal time with the plants and animals.

[quote who="NorsemanViking" reply="2" id="2191896"]Is that true? I thought Beta 0 was for a selected few, but the next betas was for all pre-orders? ... [/quote] There was some early talk about an invitation-only alpha/pre-beta, but maybe that idea's been shelved. The tentative sched OP says nothing about "private" betas, just a late-stage private debugging round just before RTM.

According to the tentative sched Brad posted, Beta 0 is planned for June, not August, and everyone with a pre-order can participate.

[quote]The Commune of the Fungi[/quote] I'm a North Florida native, and the rainy season is fast approaching. This is a *very* scary idea. Their champion could be Lord Stinkhorn , and then we'd all be in serious trouble--it's just about impossible to concentrate around those things when they fruit. Yech.

In what I'm pretty sure is his most recent dev journal , Brad used the adjective "land-based" rather strongly. I'm afraid that probably means little to no water or air action, other than thematically via the element-based magic. We've also seen steady questions about Myrror-analogs since the forum opened. I try to read every dev post I can spot around here and I've not seen a direct response to the planes/moons/water/air/underground talk. That makes me suspect the

[quote who="Jonnan001" reply="13" id="2188517"]No offense, but I linked directly to a right of center think tank that has data going back to 1981, individually segregated out by state. ...[/quote] If you're speaking to me, I take no offense and apologize for not making clear that I was talking about the jpg link from Dracil. Re the 'data quality' question, well, trust relationships are probably the fundamental question for 21st-century democratic thinkers. I vacillate wildly between m

In the spirit of some of the more recreational posts in this thread, I'd like to seriously point out that 'capitalism' is every bit as much an ideology as socialism. Check the wiki and see if you can explain to me how capitalism does *not* fit the generally accepted use of the term ideology. Perhaps some folks (suffering hangovers from Cold War rhetoric) still think that there is no such thing as a 'good' ideology, so they hate seein

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="18" id="2187750"]... Learning curve is once, having to replay dumbed down design is forever.[/quote] Very well said. [quote who="ckessel" reply="19" id="2187803"]... Is it possible to give someone negative Karma?[/quote] You found the workaround.

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="14" id="2185877"]... The fact that you have no idea where to skip if you are listening for the first time. Do you ever wonder why newspapers tend to have a larger customer base than radio shows?[/quote] Don't you have the tense wrong there about newspapers? The business could be more or less dead soon, save for a small crew of folks who have deep physical needs to handle that same basic object every morning with their coffee or whatever. I'd still be readi

ckessel's question about debugger instructions makes me wonder if the Elemental effort will include an update of (or replacement for) SmartException, which I never could get to work in Vista. Might be good to get those sort of dumps from non-coder beta folks also.

takashi, it seems like we have radically different notions of what "singleplayer" means. Best I can tell, by your definition, there has never been a singleplayer PC TBS game, but I've never seen Civ 1 or MoO or MoM called multiplayer before. And I wasn't whining, I was just sticking up for the (beleagured minority of?) folks who love singleplayer TBS. No need to descend to namecalling.

A basic set of choices like that seems a very good idea (it's kind of missing in GalCiv2, other than being able to destroy a colony after capturing it, and that's in mgmt UI not the invasion UI). Whether you're human or Fallen should affect the consequences of your choice, but maybe not the choices themselves.

[quote who="takashi_k" reply="16" id="2179758"]... The root of video games, the oldest, were ones that essentially had no single player. Stuff like Pong, Joust ... [/quote] Pong had single-player and Joust did not require a second player nor did it require that two players treat each other as opponents. You're trying to define your taste as a technical fact, but it isn't so. Mind you, I do think that "car without wheels" is less than an ideal meataphor f