Not to encourage digression into quibbles about an analogy, but my current DVD player is much better than my first one because when I press Stop, it remembers the exact time stamp. I can power down, ignore the box for days, and come back to *exactly* where I stopped watching.
[quote who="CapnWinky" reply="12" id="2050714"]... Not to be the impatient one of the group...but weren't we promised something this week? [/quote] That question points to the fundamental dilemma of the boards during this pre-beta time. Do we want the devs typing to us about what they're doing, or doing more of what they're doing? I change my opinion constantly.
H.R. Giger is just as much a fantasy artist as Boris Vallejo , and some days you just want your art to be more creepy and dark than chesty and light. But a mod for The Inhabited Giant might need some kind of Not For Kids rating. The idea also makes me wonder if there are any giants in the core Elemental canon, and if so, how big are they? D&D giants were puny compared to
[quote who="Gananim" reply="16" id="2050501"]... Is the crux of the problem something to do with scoreboards and virtual penises? I suppose a special mode may be required in that case. I understand that GalCiv has some sort of leaderboard, how does that work? I've played the game but never paid any attention to that aspect.[/quote] I'm also a bit mystified about the passion some ironman fans have for insisting that theirs is the only way to play. The world, and the software I've playe
Wandering monsters seem like a must-have to me. They were fun in MoM and around the D&D table. Capn, re the searching thing, you can add site:forums.elementalgame.com to the end of a search string at any good search engine and get hits only from this forum. That parameter is still one of the 10 most useful things I learned in the last 10 years.
Biggest hope: deep, deep micromanagement functionality paired with truly groundbreaking AI assistance for players who prefer to delegate (I want trainable assistants who can learn 'rules' from the patterns of my play style) Biggest fear: that multiplayer considerations will take too much dev time and/or weaken the singleplayer sandbox mode (well, maybe I'm more afraid of this 'continuous turn' stuff, but I haven't seen it yet)
[quote who="landisaurus" reply="10" id="2050245"]...You don't want to just press 'end turn' for hundreds of turns on end do you? ...[/quote] Maybe not hundreds of no-input turns, but I'd *really* love to have a hundred years go by with nothing significant happening. Ludicrously large maps deserver ludicrously long timelines. [quote who="ese-aSH" reply="11" id="2050302"]... MM is interesting as long as it needs reflexion ; once its just a question of patience and endurance it b
As little as I know yet, I'm convinced that the essence + mana approach is a brilliant innovation and likely will be one of the main things praised when Elemental gets its awards speeches/posts. However, we know next to nothing so far other than that channelers will be able to do those two fundamentally different forms of magic, the newer of which is worthy of the scary priest-kings of pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. Regardless of the special effects for imbueing essence, I'm very, very in
No two PCs or users are the same, but that big fact aside, I'll offer my personal experience to back up what landisaurus says about Stardock and game window management. I'm not sure whether hardware changes or software changes were the dominant factor, but my GalCiv2 "lifetime" has spanned a sub-spec Windows XP system and an OEM Windows Vista box that shipped before SP1, and overall I've seen solid improvement in window-mode functionality. Things can still get a little tricky with Win
[quote]There has been a lot of other discussion of how Gal Civ is unique compared to other sci-fi to fantasy tie-ins since usually the fantasy comes first chronologically but in this case it is the other way around.[/quote] landisaurus, can you share a link or two on that? I try to read everything in dev journals, ideas, and general, and I don't recall anything like what you describe here. I'm particularly interested in whether I missed a dev journal post or something Stardock-sourced
Beg pardon, I wasn't trying to scoff your post at all. I want to be able to build 'mage regulars' and I'm sure I'll end up with some schema or another to categorize them. I guess you caught me doing some passive-aggressive nagging for both more info on the magic front *and* assurance that channelers will not be the only spellcasters in the game.
[quote who="Aeon" reply="15" id="2049436"]... The diversity of factions is one of the great strengths of the Ffh mod. Elemental could do a lot worse than draw inspiration from some of these, but it would be great to see some original faction themes as well. I guess the problem is that it is next to impossible to come up with something original in a fantasy context. The best you can probably hope for is an interesting combination of what has gone before. [/quote] Maybe I'm too old and
We still don't know if any units other than channelers (civ leaders) will be able to cast spells. If they can, which I hope is the case, my guess is that they'll have the same "no canned units" aspect that Brad has already discussed in his unit production thread, so you'll be free to build all those mage types and more. If we can build 'regular' mages at all.
[quote who="ese-aSH" reply="3" id="2049112"]... I think I'll have to wait the release then, I rarely buy a game until I've played the demo (moreover when its to do something which is my job) ... [/quote] Fiscal caution is always respectable. But I encourage you to keep an eye on the boards here during the first days of Beta 1. If you like the impression you get of the game at that point, I think it would be awesome to have a working tester put spare time into the volunteer effort here
[quote who="FlyGuy" reply="9" id="2048416"]Didn't you guys ever player a multiplayer game? ... [/quote] Some of us around here might well have "No" for an answer there. For me, it's barely ever and never likely to if it is real-time anything. More importantly, singleplayer mode is the foundation for Elemental. Multiplayer stuff is 'gravy' not the entree. Edit: I mean no disrespect to gravy. I lucked into a swell high-end country-fried steak lunch today. Gravy is awesom
[quote]what are the conditions to participate beta testing ? must pre order the game ?[/quote] For the full public beta, yes, you must pre-order. But Stardock usually has a window of several days after a beta release to let folks finally decide to pay and join. Elemental is also possibly going to have an invitation-only pre-beta (alpha, whatever). Brad discussed it briefly in this journal thread .
[quote who="Ron Lugge" reply="15" id="2048465"]Um, last I checked Elemental was the prequel to GalCiv -- GalCiv comes after Elemental.[/quote] My impression is also that it's a prequel, or possibly a parallel universe story. The latter is hardly an uncommon theme in SF, in both the sci-fi and fantasy subgenres.
[quote who="Daiwa" reply="3" id="2047560"]...I'm thinking Granholm hasn't visited JU much. ...[/quote] None of us from the center leftwards are likely to spend much time there, given the 'community' love of trash-talk over civil discourse. Not that I'm at all questioning the scoff of Granholm's claims. My basic attitude towards any executive, public or private, is distrust. And I used to teach civics. Every serious citizen needs to keep an eye on the credit-claiming and blaming games.
"It enables my cluttering rather than trying to force me to organize." Bestill my beating heart. It's sweet, and I can't believe it's free.
[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="9" id="2047488"]...Which brings up the more important question: will there be rivers, and will they be navigable? Rivers were the highways of the world until recent history.[/quote] The early word I've caught on naval matters has mostly been that we shouldn't expect serious naval combat. But the new economics is supposed to involve trade routes, and it would be really sad not to have rivers be a part of at least that layer of the map. Plus, rivers as
[quote who="Ynglaur" reply="6" id="2047479"]My only wish for a cost-benefit system is smooth curves. I hate breakpoints from a design perspective, because it encourages min-maxing, giving distinct advantages to micromanagers. ...[/quote] I agree, except sort of about 'advantages to micromanagers.' I'm a fan of micro stuff, but I pretty much detest min-max stuff. I think of it more as giving an advantage to min-maxers, and the micro side is just a detail of how they get to their
[quote who="Noctilucus" reply="22" id="2047358"]... 22. Preferably have a unit limit above 50, some games have ridiculous restrictions on the size of one's armies. ...[/quote] From what I've read, that's definitely part of the plan so far. I think Brad wants a game that can actually let you play something like the battle at Helm's Deep in the Two Towers. (edit) I should have added something about "if your rig can handle that many units." If I were a betting many, I'd say
[quote who="landisaurus" reply="6" id="2046607"]... I just didn't want something like a "united nations" to be turned down by anybody because something like 'modern nations' wouldn't exist. [/quote] I must have been doing a terrible job of trying to support the notion of councils, guilds, etc., while also encouraging people to keep their fantasy RPG goggles on. Maybe it would have come across more as I hoped if I had a 'normal' nickname like The Hand.
landi, I'm not trying to sweat the notion of anachronisms in the released game. And nothing is directly wrong with modern heads. However, I haven't read any backstory that explicitly sets Elemental "after" GalCiv2, or even "before" it in the same linear continuum. The inspirations posts that Brad's made here seem to work very hard to be somehow outside, beside, or otherwise fuzzy about time--which is a darned reasonable thing for SF in general and fantasy in particular. But I
[quote]If they can't channel a projection or something to communicate long distances then they put their master of magic forfathers to shame.[/quote] Correcting for grammar and gender neutrality, that should end "shaming their Master of Magic ancestors." [e classic];)[/e] (Putting someone to shame is equivalent to kicking their ass.) On your more important point, I'm not talking about whether the game might have some non-medieval instruments in the soundtrack or something. I