Philocthetes

That pricing analysis is fascinating, and hopefully encouraging for businesses like Stardock. I guess it was only a matter of time before commodity software caught up with commodity hardware. My first internal hard drive was just 10 megs and cost a couple-few hundred bucks, IIRC. I still work with the guy who helped me put together that old box, and he just bought a 500 gig drive for about $60, which would have been about $30 in 1985 purchasing power.

I'd very much like to see one of the Fallen factions be all about overcoming their roots as a people made to be weapons and working hard to control their natural violence rather than revel in it. I'm actually hoping that both humans and Fallen each have an 'internal' rivalry in the base factions as well as the larger human-Fallen divide. With six factions each, I think there's plenty of room for ethical and cultural variety for both species.

(Argh. Forum weirdness w/ an edit.)

Pie responds with a vigorous Sweet and Savory campaign, forcing all to admit that dawn to dusk, midnight to noon, first course to last, there is no defense against the Flaky Goodness of a proper crust wrapped around whatever-the-frak you want to bring to the table.

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="7" id="2073647"]There is none. Which is like a free pass for.. whatever! You can't derail a thread that was never on a rail![/quote] [e classic]:lol:[/e] [quote who="burnout1620" reply="3" id="2073620"]Maybe he doesn't want to pay his neighbors mortgage? lol[/quote] None of us do, but we all probably need to suck it up and do something more or less like this unless we want to see our own 'reasonable' mortgages dragged down the black hole s

So can anyone explain why the 'History' I see for Fences has an entry dated 22 Feb 08 but has a version number of v0.95.1583 while my installed copy of Fences is 0.96.037? I saw that and thought there was really no update. And I just gotta say, for clutter-prone folks like me, Fences makes for good desktop neighbors. The snap-to-grid is a bit too tidy-feeling for me, but I can ignore that on account of how overall handy it is to be able to keep too much crap on my desktop and

[quote]A hidden city is also nonsense - even a blind spy can reveal it.[/quote] But we're talking about magic , and even if it were imaginary technology, storylines like SG-1 include devices that can move large areas 'out of phase' so that they are both invisible and intangible. On the magical side, Gondolin (an elven city in the Elder Days long before the Lord of the Rings took place) was hidden physically by an impassible mountain range and magically by the power of

This tags & spells talk is just the umpty-Nth thing to come up that makes me want *basic metaphysics info now*. Not only do we have no idea about the possible details of custom spell design, we have had no real info yet on whether/what the base game will include by way of 'alignment' mechanics. We also seem to have no good idea of just how far from the base game user-made content will be able to go. If the base game has some Good and Evil stuff, but no Law or Chaos, could we add '

Curse you Solam, but I'm damned if I don't really want to see some curse-work of one sort or another in this game. Wrecking the world with overwhelming magical might is just one kind of fun, not at all the same satisfaction as breaking an enemy's pride and power with a slow, inexeorable corrosion of all that they hold dear. Especially if said Enemy has ripped off the Most Important Portable Thing in our realm... (this should probably be a cross-post in CapnWinky's <a href="/33

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="3" id="2070036"]... I think it would be better to have different atributes that arn't attached to any name. Like don't have any kind of 'alien type' but maybe a "intimidating presence" and "climate intollerant" as unit features that go to those units. Rather than 'reptilian' it would have 'scaly skin' and 'cold blooded'. Instead of 'mechanical' it would be... well... no that would be the atribute as well.&nb

[quote]MoM's customization was pretty simple, just name him, pick his skills/spellbooks, and pick his portrait. Honestly I'd be happy with just a few different options to play with in terms of clothes and a color picker. [/quote] Don't forget hull type. Some folks will want to play a female channeler, or maybe even an hermaphrodite or a neuter being (maybe channelers are too special to be able to reproduce). Some readers think of Marion Zimmer Bradley's <a href="http://en.wikipedi

[quote who="Noctilucus" reply="2" id="2066131"]Oh, but give nature a few years or so on scorched earth and you'll see vegetation flourish again - in fact the ash can often work as a fertilizer.[/quote] Has anyone caught a hint yet from the devs about how much time will have passed between the cataclysm and the standard game start? I can imagine anything from last season to a couple of generations ago.

I'd like to see illusion magics as well, but even more, I'd like to see a good chunk of basic info on the current plan(s) for the magic system. Right now I can imagine everything from all five elemental schools having illusion spells to illusion spells being no-go because all the magic is very strongly tied to being fire, water, earth, air, or life. Maybe life is an illusion? Anyhow... I want a rich and complicated magic system more than ever because I really, really like the idea of

[quote]... (edit: i really should learn to make proper quotes, doh!)[/quote] The Quote button at the bottom of each reply will start you out with a full, attributed quote down in the edit box. If you select part of the post (like I did above) and click the Quote button, you get the partial quote without attribution.

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="12" id="2067490"]nameing convention is 100% up to us as players in this game, since we are required to give our mages or whatever the name they hold. I just wish we'd get confirmation on how exactly that works. If you recall (or have read) its still vague exactly how mages are handled. Maybe they won't even get to pick the same spells as the channeler? They could get their own set of 'unit spells' [/quote] I thought we still

Elemental should be able to offer us advances on the realtively primitive diplo functionality in GC2. If all AIs are fixated, maximizing warmongers, there is little point to having richer diplo features because no AI will maintain relationships for longer than it takes to find that soft spot in another player's back. More to the point, this is supposed to be a TBS-RPG fusion. If the AIs can't do some role-playing of their own, I'll consider that at least a minor failure of the project

[quote who="Denryu" reply="22" id="2066361"]... maybe the ladders should be broken down by difficulty level. So keep a ranking ladder for the easy difficulty, the average difficulty, the hard difficulty and the impossible difficulty, etc that way no one will be forced to play in a way they don't want and they can still compete.[/quote] I'm an ambivalent latecomer to the GC2 Metaverse, and I don't think I'll be disappointed if there simply are no scores for Elemental. But if there

[quote]Maybe it's akin to nuclear fallout..[/quote] That's pretty much the concept I meant when I talked about purging 'disruptive magic' above, but I was trying to stay away from the science-stinky language [e classic];)[/e] I'd like to agree with Jonny about the woods on the handful of UI pictures we have undermining a "scorched earth" approach to the game start, but there's no telling how much of that is simply concept art and/or views of territory that has been restored b

[quote]I'd want artifacts to be rare. Really, really rare - as in a couple per game per side. ...[/quote] I smell an important slider for game setup, perhaps as important as the Stars, Planets, and Habitables trio in GalCiv2. Back when I spent most of my weekends around tables playing RPGs, something that distinguished one of my favorite refs was his tightfistedness with magic items. Most of the games in that circle ended up so buried in magic items that I ended up with things like a

Y'all are thoroughly reinforcing my desire to see single-player mode have (at least the option for) 'true' turn-based tactical combat. I almost certainly will try the multiplayer stuff, but I still have no idea if it will hold my interest. But I guess I'm especially weird, even for a crowd like this one, because I'm far more likely to be put off by required click-fits than I would be by required waiting periods. I never was very good at the card game bridge, but I believe that the dummy hand

[quote]Make a new name for it if you don't want the baggage that comes with the original![/quote] Seconded [e classic];)[/e]

One of the 'cheating' difficulty levels in GC2 is *called* Masochistic (I think the top is Suicidal?). I've always taken that as a sign that the devs understand they have an audience to serve there, but it's a slightly weird one. I've played GC2 since pretty much launch time and mostly on equal terms with the AIs (Tough), so between just learning the ropes and keeping my game updated with the steady stream of improvements, I've never felt the need to let the AIs cheat. For the expansi

[quote]shrivelly deflated end[/quote] Sounds like a spell name for the Book of Great Silliness [e classic]:lol:[/e]

[quote]... I therefore think any diplomatic victory condition should be contingent on the allied powers having a combined military greater than any other exterior faction/alliance block left in the game to be considered legitimate[/quote] I tend to agree, but would this idea be 'off' somehow in a single-player game because it could only apply to an AI win?

[quote]Very disappointed, I thought would be like in "master of magic"[/quote] I'm still hoping we'll have an option to run it that way. The term I've noticed devs use is "continuous turn-based," so if it is really turn-based, then we should be able to opt out of the continuous part if we really dislike a game that forces us to keep our hands on mouse &/or keyboard. But I fear that the plan is indeed for what rubes like me would just call "real-time" despite any marketing language