Philocthetes

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="5" id="2006172"]Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but even GalCiv2 didn't get actual tools until Twilight of the Arnor - and even so, I felt that I had a lot more control just editing the xml. And I'm not even that much of a modder (or even a good one, at that).[/quote] That's basically why I doubted the idea that standalone editing tools would be prominent in the beta for Elemental. And I'm like you, not involved with modding since the base GC2 series has

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="18" id="2005886"]...dog.[/quote] That's what I call my cats when they piss me off. But I don't want to get started on the he/she and/or fur/skin polarity arguments, so maybe this post should never have happened.

[quote quoting="post"]...I realized... what if you dispatch falcons, dragons, and other things in a similar way that you dispatch stuff in X-com. At first I dismissed the idea, but then it occured to me that the entire game could be that way. Dudes wouldn't just sit out in the middle of nowhere when you arn't giving them orders. So for armies to leave hom, they would be sent somewhere with orders. You could place orders, and the armies might move out

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="1" id="2006086"]yeah... its called a beta. I'm sure that a beta for all that customization stuff stardock wants for the game will be released before final retail release.[/quote] Assume what you want, but remember what that verb can do to you and me [e classic];)[/e] I still haven't seen any details on how (or if) custom spell design will work with the core single-player game, much less the multiplayer stuff. If anyone else has spotted in

[quote who="Shadowgandor" reply="14" id="2005875"]I picture a channeler surrounded by thousands of units, led by a strong hero, getting struck by an arrow. Where a hole should be, pure magic essence comes out, piercing everything it hits. As the body starts to fall apart, more and more holes appear, eventually ending with a big bang, blasting a part of the world map, changing the world dynamically. Mountains could be erased, an enormous crater could be created, perhaps even filling

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="2" id="2005705"]I don't like the idea of totally random weather, independent of seasons. It replaces strategic planning with blatant luck...[/quote] I guess that's another notion to put in the Randomness-lovers' bucket. But really, the remark was just an example attempting to illustrate the idea that in a fantasy game, you don't need to feel constrained by 'realism' unless you want to. IMO, a deeply random weather system would just be a different sourc

[quote who="bleeba" reply="25" id="2005499"]... As soon as you set it to a specific time, it will feel wrong for some aspect of the game (movement, seiges, battles, building improvments, ect). If the turn length is kept rather nebulous, its more likely that you can sort of squint your eyes and suspend belief. ...[/quote] Unless a brilliant dev can pull a rabbit out of her hat and give my my 'temporal automatic transmission,' this is pretty much where I stand. I don

pigeonpigeon, thanks for helping me dig into my twitch here. So far, I think we're in a comfortable disagreement. At the moment, I still feel that if my time spent in the Knowledge UIs of the game is roughly equally split between mundane crafts and magic, I'll be a bit disappointed, but I'll surely get over it. I think my main flavor concern is that having a large number of mundane advances during a long game will just make it feel too much like Civ with magic tacked on, and not a "wa

[quote who="psychoak" reply="4" id="2000651"]I'd prefer wizards were individual units, but the essence system makes this fairly irrelevant. We're not going to be training wizards. It would be nice to have the ability to create magic users in some way besides essence transfers to heroes. Being able to imbue rings with specific spells to cast would allow for some very interesting groups if they could be combined together with different sets of rings. You could accomplish

pigeonpigeon, it's been a very long while since I last read LotR chapters, but the wiki page on Tom Bomadil doesn't seem to evoke a kingdom so much as a sort of NPC channeler/demi-god. He's definitely a 'power' in the story, but his turf might be limited to a small household. He seems like a singular entity, as I expect Dragons will be in Elemental, and not the leader of a territory-holding population. Mind you, my whole wilderne

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="12" id="2004143"].. The problem with the steamroller effect is when it kicks in too early. ...[/quote] Perzactly.

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="2" id="2003774"]... I fail to see how this would be an effective solution to your turn X = calendar problem. Both have an important place in Elemental and I don’t think designing the tech system to heavily favor magic over normal tech would accomplish much save for watering down the tech system as a whole. Of course having more details on how the magic and tech system in Elemental actually work would make this easier. [/quote] I didn't think my s

So, is anyone else who's following this thread wondering why the "middle child" of the OP's title is getting all the attention when there's no hope of responding to global warming problems without addressing the underlying facts that we have a world economy with too many people in it? I'm quite willing to duck questions about the role of human industry in global warming if only we'll start talking more about getting some balance between free movement of capital and human rights and do

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="13" id="2003614"]... Afaik, it's been explicitly said that in order for others to use spells, the Channeler have to imbue them, just like a channeler imbues everything else. As I've come to understand it, that's why the Channeler is a 'channeler' and not just a mage of massive power.[/quote] Any chance you can share a link to that? I try to catch all the dev journal entries, and I don't recall any significant detail about how essence will work other t

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="6" id="2000252"]... I'm not necessarily opposed to special named beasts, but I'd argue that they should be extremely difficult, or even impossible, for players to recruit. Instead, they could act as local leaders of the beast faction. ... [/quote] I more or less agree, except I think some Legendary entities like Shelob would be really swell, not merely tolerable. Some, like Shelob, might be solitary, but I really like the idea of others being famed (pe

Gender's just another hull type, if you take the GC2 Shipyards as a rude approximation of what Elemental might have for unit creation. I'd be a bit disappointed if it was not possible from the git-go to build a squadron of huntresses, etc. Re the 'real' Amazons, AFAIK no one has found archeological evidence of a full-blown culture that shuns males. But I did see stuff on some PBS documentary about a gravesite (in southern Russia?) of a high-ranking female whose grave goods included we

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="1" id="1996889"]...If certain forests, deserts, mountain ranges, etc can be home to independent powers, it would go a long way to keeping a portion of the map 'wild' for much longer than normal. It's also a more elegant solution than just saying "sorry, you can't settle this type of terrain."[/quote] I wouldn't say that independent kingdoms would foster 'wilderness' (the land would still be worked, just not by a major faction), but in terms of making t

[quote who="wesleyshaver" reply="2" id="1997798"]Well how about that! Mods feel free to delete this whole thread.[/quote] I disagree. The other thread went quiet before mid-December, and I for one would like to see this 'follow-up' question pursued in its own right.

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="10" id="2002037"]...The subject of Magocracy could be a dodgy one, though, since the only real holder of magic is the Channeler. ...[/quote] Or so we must assume, given the fact that all the dev journal posts since site launch have been mostly about mundane mechanics and not magical ones.

The thread title is more assertive than I might actually feel, but several other discussions since the site launch have led me to a question about my assumption that the game will have two 'tech' trees, with some special units and structures depending on active nodes in both trees. My question is: If this assumption is roughly correct, would the game be better off if the tree pair was deliberately 'unbalanced' in favor of complex magic vs. relatively simple tools for producing goods and makin

I humbly second Mumblefratz's reply 8, and add a shameless plug for Population Connection . Here's hoping the plug is halal for Stardock.

[quote who="Hiriako" reply="14" id="2002745"]... Anyway, I do like the thought of being able to construct waygates which would allow speedy transporation between your own cities and villages. Should this kind of travel be instantaneous, or take a bit of time? I think that depends on the explanation behind it. It's also another place you could develop upgrades, with it being quicker as you expand upon that type of knowledge, or as you place more essence into the workings.[/quote] If yo

[quote]Because I still see everything is MoM style, I'd imagine that when you occupy a waygate, you will occupy all of the waygates connected at the same time. In MoM, when you step on a portal that moved between planes, you counted as being on both sides of the way gate at the same time. [/quote] landisaurus, I'm not sure that waygates/portals and MoM plane-crossing match up here. In MoM, you were dealing with mirrored planes, but in WoT waygates, you were taking a step across a bou

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="19" id="1996188"]... It would be cool to have an "ICE AGE" or "DARK AGE" mode where it started cold with near constant rain and snow, and as time goes and the % of the world that is fertile and habited increases, the weather becomes better. So over the course of the 2000 turn game the world become a brighter, warmer, and generally a better place to live. The idea is that the channeler would be bringing the world back from the ic

[quote quoting="post"]...It's worth noting that one could just play the game zoomed out in the cloth map and never even see an actual unit so people who don't care about this kind of thing don't have to look at it. But people (like me) who really like seeing their units in action can watch the units go into battle. ... [/quote] I played GC2 for a long while on a sub-spec box, so I avoided the 3D views b/c they could really mess me up. I'm also pretty hung up on the largest maps.