Philocthetes

[quote who="Ellestar" reply="20" id="2147495"]...Besides, Civ 4 is still much faster than other games like MOO3 or GalCiv, i can finish a meaningful game in several hours if i don't try to micro everything, and i get a fair share of a meaningful strategic/tactical decisions in a process. ...[/quote] I hope Elemental is able to earn Stardock good money by reaching a wide range of players, but I can't help scoffing someone who thinks the TBS genre ought to be limited to "quick" games. M

I've been reading and thinking about all manner of magical transport mechanics nearly since the boards opened last November. I think now that I half-agree with John Hugues' aversion, but that's more or less for the first half for a decently long game on a larger map. I don't do short-game TBS, so I have nothing to say for those modes, but I still think that a few magical ways to move at least champion-level units and hopefully at least small armies should start becoming available around the m

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="19" id="2155059"]... I think good story and ramdomisation don't go well together. For an interesting story you'd have to make sure that all events happen more less like they're described, which means mostly static map. Hopefully Elemental's developers can provide both good hand-made story/campaign and solid random level generation. For story, I generally prefer a good book. ... [/quote] I prefer a good book to pretty much any other entertainment. That aside,

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="14" id="2155257"]... I feel that "love" does explain 'why' somebody might follow orders, though at the same time I am not sure if 'why' is really nessicary considering the guy giving orders is like hundreds of years old and able to throw fireballs, lightning bolts ...[/quote] I guess the real rub here is that language has more 'taste' factors to its interpretation than does math. I can very easily imagining both fearing and loving someone, yet want

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="17" id="2154981"]... I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'rich' randomisation. ...[/quote] I'm not a coder, so I'm not much more sure about what I mean than what I said about wanting it meaningfully connected to the story content and past player actions. (I'm singleplayer focused.) I've noticed now that I'm surely bumping on your emphasis here on "levels," because as I understand it the dungeons are not the core of the game. I think I was having a sloppy,

/helpless rant on [quote who="Climber" reply="11" id="2152914"] ... Nowadays we talk about crowdsourcing, the 'standard option' should be crowdsourced behind the scene; i.e. the default standard options will be automatically updated, according the most commonly used ones (this data is gathered automatically online) [/quote] Which makes me think immediately of another option: Don't Send My Options Data to the Server. Really, I love my always-on net conn

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="15" id="2152727"]... In general, I think that replayability has a lot to do with heavy randomisation of a game (level generation, random events, object placement). Additionally, it's good to make sure that there are no no-brainers. ...[/quote] Simple "heavy randomisation" would be the death of Elemental, or at least its conversion into a mere FPS/RPG of some sort. What we need is *rich* randomisation that is connected to both meaningful (story-level) game me

[quote]A fantasy setting doesn't imply sounding pompous. [/quote] Pompous was not at all my intent, just looking for more, um, flavorful language I guess. Plus I'm still really hung up on having *some* sort of 'honor' mechanics that will tie to storylines/faction identities and apply legitimate, interesting carrots and sticks to discourage players from grinding the color out of the game and turning the boards into a bunch of scoremonster tip-fests.

I definitely want mechanics like this of some sort. I don't think they need to be a replacement for 'alignment,' but I do think the Machiavelli loved-feared dialectic is worth considering. Let's start by putting slightly more fantasy-mode labels on them: Honor and Awe, with Honor being primarily about the consistency of a channeler's behavior, keeping promises, and respecting any major backstory value systems (e.g. building or destroying something like a temple), and Awe being about t

[quote who="Netaddict45" reply="2" id="2142175"]I can't see any channeler being subject to the law.. after all, he's essentially creating the kingdom out of shards of his own essence. Room for a game along those lines, though.[/quote] You forget the RPG-oriented players. A channeler's personal character/identity could make him or her want to honor some form of legal system even if that system sometimes frustrated the channeler's work on a specific goal. Plus, Elemen

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="10" id="2140719"]...So no matter what, there will be a winner...[/quote] Unless the devs decide to replace the idea of victory conditions with something broader like game-ending conditions. The talk so far about a quest 'victory' at least implies the potential of 'winning' the game without doing the traditional 4X TBS sprawl-grind.

I'm still shamelessly fanboi-hopeful that the essence mechanics will be the true path to overcoming late-game TBS doldrums. At least if the AIs are cabable of decently representing the Others to any given human player's choices about how to spend or conserve essence.

Forgive me Dead Horse, but I so want a dev journal on the magic system that I can't help beating you yet again. What-ho coding crew, are the mysteries still far too mysterious to discuss with the starving-for-enchanted-peanuts gallery?

[quote who="CapnWinky" reply="16" id="2139919"]How many people will be allowed to participate in multiplayer on any given map? It would seem to me the number of players it should support should be far greater than Civ4.[/quote] The preview blurb on Impulse said 1-8 players the last time I could get it to display, which wasn't too long ago. Can't repro at the moment, the Impulse servers are balking.

[quote]...I'll be awesome.[/quote] Gotta love those Freudian typos [e classic];)[/e]

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="8" id="2137742"]I'm fairly sure they already expect to have as many options as possible (or at least I hope they do). It will be fun times creating menu UI for all those options that is easy to manage. [/quote] I think most of the settings NTJedi was considering are game setup things and not stuff you'd do via menus in an active game. But your point about a busy UI applies regardless. I'm hoping that one follow-through on the UI flexibility b

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="21" id="2137900"]... I am envisioning a system in which you have a set number of "orders" you can issue each turn to any unit or group of units. You can take personal control of a small commando squad and penertate deep into enemy lines, or move every single (wo)man in your army ahead just one tile. I would still consider this to be TBS, but it is not an every-unit/every-turn system.[/quote] If I'm remembering the long dev saga for MoO3 correctly, this sou

Widely-accepted, schmidely-accepted. Unless we see a serious sign that the devs are reconsidering their plan for the playable factions in the base game, this endless wrangling about orcs or no-orcs is really dull, and sometimes annoying whether or not you are in the 'wish we had elves, etc.' camp, which I sort of am, but less so the more of this sort of stuff I read. I'm particularly disinterested in seeing the devs make radical changes to their plans based on some fear of predicted '

Here's hoping they won't be treated as second-rate approaches to the game, as GC2 does with its heavy pro-war bias in the scoring algorithms.

Most of the replies seem to have missed the OP's clarification. The real question is about micromangement, and it's an old one but a good one. Since no one's slapped my head back to reasonabl-land, I'm still hoping for *trainable* governors/ministers that observe player input for patterns and steadily get better at guessing what you would o if your were managing something directly.

[quote]Unless your'e talking hero linage... which I'm not sure why would matter since they don't really have anything to inherit that you as the channeler wouldn't just give them anyway, but that is ok.[/quote] Plus a truly epic game would need to last centuries or millenia. Heroic lineages could add serious flavor in that sort of context. A decently epic sense of time also leaves all sorts of opportunities for a channeler to reproduce, and there's nothing obligatory about *ra

[quote who="NTJedi" reply="18" id="2134388"]... It's very possible that everybody will name everything since one of the developers seems to like this idea. I see this causing communication pains for email, phone and IM discussions especially when players are not in front of the game and don't have access to view other players maps. ...[/quote] Whatever happens in multiplayer, I seriously hope that the core singleplayer game will not suffer any of the 'multiplayer-friendly' limit

There's some talk related to this in A time and Weather idea and Making Heroes Interesting . I still think something like this could be a really neat part of a TBS game, but maybe not Elemental this time around. The real rub is the calendar problem--there are too many different parts of a game like Civ or Elemental that work on different timescales, so the games are required to apply heavy abstraction, which undermines efforts to do things lik

[quote who="NTJedi" reply="6" id="2132700"]...ON A SIDE NOTE: I see some devs referring to him as the Sovereign and others calling him the Channeller. I see one of the most recent screenshot which uses the term Heroes, yet on the forums we hear the word to use is Champion. So I guess lots of the official titles are either undecided or still being internally debated. [/quote] Part of how I earn my living is the fact that working devs are often to

[quote who="Insanetitan" reply="16" id="2132884"]... Why would destroying a wall have a different spell cost than building it? ...[/quote] Same-spell stuff aside, the devs (or custom spell writers) could come up with all manner of 'logical' reasons that destroying a stone wall might be much harder than creating one. The simplest thing that comes to mind is that the defender has strength with Earth while the attacker does not. Instead of being able to grasp and undo the defender'