[quote who="ckessel" reply="13" id="1992015"]...It's a thought as I thought King of Dragon's Pass had a pretty cool implementation of heroic figures.[/quote] You're making me wish I still had my discs for KoDP. All I really remember was that I liked it very, very much, but not for all that long--it somehow didn't hit my replayability sweet spot. How did KoDP handle the calender, e.g. time per turn?
I definitely hope that the 'rethought 4X economics' plus the tile-based city format will facilitate multiple types of population center. I'd like a map that included villages that will stay villages, and other villages with potential to grow into cities because of reasonable things like having multiple trade routes run nearby. And we need minining towns, mill towns, etc., that all 'connect' to a relatively close city but are not part of its tileset. Fortresses should definitely fit wi
[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="10" id="1990323"]Quoting GW Swicord, reply 7 ... That could be really cool if done well. Especially if their names and skills/beliefs reflect their heritage. It could potentially allow for some LoTR-like stories, even. That said, I'm very wary of it. Heroes dying of anything but combat puts me a little on edge, especially because of the investment of essence that they require. I mean, generals and all the other units dying in Total War often both
Weather of some sort would be swell, especially if player magic can affect it and it can affect food production, trade, construction, and combat. As to channelers being persistent across games, I'm pretty much in agreement with pigeon-squared. It seems both a poor fit with how the game is apparently supposed to start and a potential abuse point for multiplayer folks. I'd much rather have a game that, on the largest maps, clearly lasted a few centuries and was led by an ageless
[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="12" id="1989165"]Well in order to get this thread back on topic I’ve recently though of a new way non-fatal duels and dueling in general could be used in Elemental. Quests could make great use of dueling both fatal and non-fatal for example, to get a dragon (or some other powerful sentient beast) to ally with you it could demand you prove yourself in battle against itself. Granted the dragon would probably need to take it easy on you so as not to kill yo
I suspect I'm usually going to imbue hero units because they seem like good story fun, but who knows what we'll all think after we see this 'essence' stuff in action. I very much like the tradeoff schema as Brad's sketched it so far, but it could unfold in quite a few different ways depending on whether it is a finite resource, can be stolen from another channeler, can be withdrawn from lands or heroes, etc. In terms of 'things MoM needed' but I never could have imagined, this 'parall
That 'strange earthy elemental' thing reminds me of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards . Now there's an interesting theme for an Elemental mod, but not for kids!
I'm a bad petition writer, I guess. I'm after the priority list for Next Released Tidbit. I don't have any expectation that wheedling from us will actually make the process move any faster. Also, I trust that the Stardock teams are all going to have a nice holiday break and shame on them if they spend much time actually working at their PCs until next year.
[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="5" id="1988578"]I think enchanting units vs. items could largely be an aesthetic thing. The major difference could be that items would be transferable.[/quote] Being transferable (and presumably durable) vs. fixed (and presumably killable) seems like a major difference in the, um, major sense of the word. If it isn't transferable, then it would seem like an aesthetic detail of an enchanted unit. Which reminds me to wonder if major magic items s
If the voting is still open, I definitely support the dragons-almost-as-forces-of-nature take. I hope they are almost never involved in a combat, except in the very last moments of a truly epic game *or* as some analog to GC2 Mega-Events, e.g. having a dragon decide to curl around the city walls of your capital and take a nice, long nap. A super weapon or unit would at best have a chance of waking such a dragon up, and then you'd be back to square 1 about why you couldn't talk that great bein
I'm a frequent threadjacker myself, and a great fan of digression for its own sake, but I'm hoping to keep this thread down to just collecting user names to support the core plea for more magic info as soon as possible. I'd be happy to join in on the wrangling about 'how many options are too many,' but I'd prefer that someone start a fresh thread for it. What I'm really asking for here is a dev journal with a title like Integrated Metaphysics, and from what I see in several other thre
Things like a reserve system or anything similar to a 'professional military' in the modern sense don't seem to jibe with the Elemental context. It's a fantasy game that begins with a few maybe-demi-gods and a wasteland with a completely disorganized, devastated population. Things like patriotism only make sense if you've had a long history of competing nation-states. Maybe if an Elemental game can last a few hundred years, we'd start to need things like that, but seems like much of the early
[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="2" id="1985906"]Flexible (open) vs Rigid (structured) is the same argument that I was trying to make less casually . I am interested to know however what you think would be a fair requirement to cast an off the wall crazy spell that might not be allowed in a more structured (linear) magic system? [/quote] Apologies, but I must start with a terms-quibble: I wasn't at all trying to be casual, although I might have been too terse. I
[quote who="Denryu" reply="20" id="1982497"]It would be nice if loyalty could be based on at least two criteria. Love and Fear. (+ others?) ... Your actions would however have ripple effects throughout your kingdom. ...[/quote] I'd love to see a 'Machiavellian' game mechanic like this, *especially* if the decisions were by town/city and towns/cities responded to each others' situations. I also think an alignment system for towns/cities might work well with this kind of dyna
[quote who="FlyGuy7" reply="10" id="1986114"]Not mad. We should stop these fighting thing because might make Stardock foruns look bad. I just wanted to give my opinion in peace. Yea, the thing about my english is that if it were generally bad there could be less complaining about it, because it would cleary show that is someone foreign and needs to be respected dispite that. Also because I wrote a "wall" like said. I've seem many worst spelling than mine, even from whom has it has native (pro
3. A game calendar that describes the longest games as taking hundreds of years (so you can have things like a faction retreating to a hidden valley to spend a generation or two preparing for war, a la Gondolin in the Children of Hurin). 2. Layers of complexity for micromanagement so you can end up with insane numbers of field units and population centers on the largest maps but choose to manage them with lots of delegation, lots of your own twiddling, or somewhere in between. <p
[quote who="NorsemanViking" reply="4" id="1986730"]There's also another method, much better then these 2 mentioned; the Europa Universalis/Hearts of Iron method (Paradox entertainment). It has sliders for upkeep and reinforcements. It costs you gold and draws recruits from your manpower pool. It also takes time and depends on the territory; hostile or friendly, and supplylines.[/quote] To me, this sounds like a way of implementing the hybrid approach Kuloth described. Wouldn
Well, I'm hoping that there won't be a hard cap on the number of hero units. I'd rather see any limits there based on things like your budget and perhaps channeler leadership skills. So when you're starting out, you can only manage a few, but if you make it to the end-game on a Ludicrous-sized map, you could get to a scene like when Mat Cauthon blew the Horn of Valere in The Great Hunt. A small horde of heroes seems like it fits thematically with the ambition for worldwrecking end-game magic.
[quote who="CenturionJixra" reply="21" id="1986627"]Could you please elaborate on this? Are all of the results awful or just some of the results (such as female infanticide and a huge oversupply of males)? Is the resultant deceleration of the nation's population explosion (which, if kept unchecked, would eventually lead to violence and starvation) one of the bad results? Ever seen the movie Soylent Green?[/quote] Female infanticide (as well as exposing crippled males
[quote]No creating colours that "you can't make with the spectrum of light".[/quote] You've hit the nail on the head for my objection. First, in my understanding of 'real world physics,' there's no serious biology, much less psychology or parapsychology--compared to the particle accelerator crowd, all that other stuff is soft science at best and often outright faux science. Second, it ain't really magic if there's no possibility of a Lovecraftian Colour from Space. I like many of the
[quote who="Tamren" reply="10" id="1985811"]So when one side gets ahold of a superunit, all of the related anti-superunits would naturally migrate to the enemies of that side?[/quote] I hadn't thought of anything like that or gotten the impression Darkodinplus did, but there are plenty of other 'elemental magic' frameworks include opposing pairs (mostly all boiling down to fire vs. water and earth vs. air, I admit). Why not have something like this also. Except the 'side' thin
[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="8" id="1985284"] Actually I was shooting for a scenario similar to player A has a dragon in his army and player B doesn't but other than the dragon it's a fairly even match. Obviously player A is going to send his dragon to kick player B’s ass it would be nice if player B had the capability to create a limited number of very powerful units or weapons in an attempt to level the playing field. Of course these units / weapons wouldn’t be as power
Tamren, I don't think I'm communicating well enough yet. I'm not saying I don't think we need a *system*. I just don't want it to be seriously limited by 'real world physics' ideas. I completely agree that for the MP side, we'll need to be able to understand each others' contributions, but I'm not sure I want the code to force us to make that easy. I've mentioned it before, but I really think that if you're picking tabletop RPGs as models for the magic, I vote for the Hero System (whi
[quote who="IQofSpam" reply="13" id="1981931"]...It's my personal opinion that the essay part of the Writing section is a little out of whack. I think that they're looking for people who follow the silly "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then thell them what you told them" format, which I adamantly did not adhere to, because it's stupid. My college writing professor has said the same thing. He's also said that I'm a gifted writer, which is hilarious becau
Here's hoping she found a good custodian for the rest of those funky show ideas that Gene had buried in his desk. They were both well ahead of their time, and the rumours I've seen suggest that Gary 7 and Earth Final Conflict were not alone in those drawers.