Philocthetes

[quote who="Lord Reliant" reply="9" id="1981202"]Hasn't this discussion already taken place many times before? It's like deja vu all over again! Tokens are dead, but can be used up with help from SD (mostly on old games and SD ones).[/quote] Yes, but finding things on the forums isn't always easy, especially for newer folks (or folks returning after a long hiatus). Plus with the forums being informal, it's fairly easy to see things like Zubaz confusing me when I thoug

[quote who="Lord Reliant" reply="23" id="1984177"]Indeed. And the economy, politics, religion, and favorite sports teams.[/quote] Don't forget food, sex, and television. Everyone's so agreeable about them.

[quote who="CobraA1" reply="16" id="1977802"]"The Google Analytics stuff is just creepy, and getting darned near as ubiquitous as doubleclick.net tracking cookies." I've got mixed feelings on this. As somebody who does a bit of web development, it is nice to see how many visitors you're getting, what browsers they're using so you know what to design for, etc.[/quote] I've known some Web devs, but the last time I got to look over that their working shoulders was when the

Here's a live link to CondarF's swell thread . Thanks again, Condar.

The talk here has been very interesting, but I for one hope that the magic system is, well, magical. If the magic design is too concerned with 'physics,' we might as well be working on another science fiction game. Sure, maybe some spells will have effects that behave almost exactly like a real thing such as fire. But if all game magic works like that, it'll be less fun for some of us. I *want* to do the kind of context learning that Tamren seems to feel would be a bad design choice for the g

Air weak? Snort. Try breathing without it. Plus, balking at the art is just noticing that the Air image has a more dynamic layout (an empty center with balanced whorl and crystal in upper left and lower right). The others are just dull phalli in comparison.

I'm pretty sure that the devs are balancing their interest in our random carrying-on about a way-unfinished fantasy TBS game with wanting to know what we think about specific design decisions. So, in some ways, it makes sense to me that we know pretty much nothing about how essence and mana might work in the game. But I've already long lost track of the number of posts (my own and others) that made me wonder "Is this just way, way beyond consideration for Elemental?" If you think that

[quote who="Zubaz" reply="6" id="1979927"]Tokens are always good for Stardock games.[/quote] If you're responding to my reply 5, that wasn't my point. I thought tokens were being phased out, as in no longer for sale even though we can still spend unused ones. Do you mean we can buy more any time we want to?

With buildings that pretty, I'll almost certainly spend more time zoomed-in than I do in GG2. My addition to the art sample begging: I want to see some of those 'stylized' things you mention. Towards the bottom of my pet peeves with GC2 is the relative paucity of zoomed-out ship and fleet icons (there's no consistent way to distinguish hull types or fleet sizes. Will Elemental be able to generate that sort of icon based on the architecture of the 3D-level objects? Or will it at least

[quote who="ckessel" reply="5" id="1979374"]Well, an army has a chain of command and there can only be so many leaders. If you're going to run a small army, it's reasonable to have a cap on the number of leaders that army can have. Given there's 1 leader for generally a bunch of regular troops, it doesn't make sense to have hundreds of leaders unless you have thousands and thousands of troops.[/quote] To me, that's not a hard cap you're describing, it's a ratio. In other words, w

I kind of thought the OP was a suggested complement to the basic essence investment tradeoffs. The essence question is fully personalized--it's about the channeler unit. Seems like Darkodinplus is wondering if we'll have a sort of empire-level analog for that in the 'normal' unit and magic item production systems. And it seems like such an idea could fit in well with late-game worldwrecking magic as a general theme, and also has potential for integration with quests, depending on how they'll

I'm sort of like pigeonpigeon. Your thread title and Big Picture subject really caught my attention, and I didn't have anything to say about the strip-map concept because I've barely started thinking about how quests might play into the game (I've been mostly playing GalCiv2 the last couple of years, no quests there). I don't have nearly as detailed an imprssion of the 'Master Quest' as pigeonpigeon seems to--in particular, I haven't caught any dev talk about a skirmish mode at all. I

[quote who="kryo" reply="2" id="1980351"]Hm, did they completely change the scoring system on the SAT recently? There used to be only English and Math, both scored 100-800.[/quote] Depends on what you mean by "recently." From the Wikipedia just now: "Old scores may be recentered to compare to 1995 to present scores by using official College Board tables[26] , which in the middle ranges add about 70 points to Verbal and 20 or 30 points to

Maybe Stardock-only tokens in Impulse? More than half the reason I bought my TGN tokens was my interest in the-project-formerly-known-as-NotMoM, and by the time the Elemental pre-order was an option, tokens were on the way out. I appreciate Stardock's desire to earn more by helping others publish and distribute, but I'd still like an option to 'invest' more directly in future Stardock titles.

[quote who="kryo" reply="2" id="1977397"]Known issue with the (third party) postbox we use. IIRC we had some plans to implement a spellcheck for everyone via google, but it's not a high priority due to the already heavy load on the web team.[/quote] That really should be 'third or fourth party,' at least if you're admitting that you think IE should be the browswer we all use for the forums. I only use IE when I have absolutely no other choice. In Firefox (my 2nd-choice browser, mostly

[quote who="Rhishisikk" reply="6" id="1977302"]... PLUS, let's call on Konman the Barbarian from another thread...[/quote] Can you give a thread name or link? I can't get any search hits for "Konman the Barbarian" at site:forums.elementalgame.com

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="6" id="1943753"]...It'd be like learning a new game entirely for every faction, and an utter horror to balance. The way different factions spend and use their money, whether their benefit is greatest from trading or domestic production, or even magic, could of course be different...[/quote] This might not be a problem if there was an underlying 'global game economy' that did not give a fundamental trade privilege to any particular resource and unde

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="16" id="1976554"]You know if the devs give us even 5% of the options we've asked for so far on these boards, the process of choosing my game options alone is going to exhaust me [/quote] Well, for a while now I've kind of thought that a good 4/5X game maybe should be able to start with a 'minigame' that sets options for full game, at least when players are new to the game. Even using something as simple as a Windows wizard-like thing to step th

[quote who="MOM_FAN" reply="10" id="1976544"]... Something that ties in with death and destruction is one essential game mechanic: How is the scoring to be done in War of Magic? ... [/quote] I've been trying to watch closely since long before this project had a street name, and I'm still wondering if the dev plan includes a scoring system at all. I'm a bit conflicted about whether I want one or not, but that might be mostly because Stardock seem to have lost affection for the scoring

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="12" id="1976530"]I think a duration for most death curse effects is a great idea. If there were any permanent persistent effects, then a player who takes over the world by crushing everybody else could simply be overwhelmed by everlasting curses... And that would put me off.[/quote] That really depends on the details of a specific curse, and we don't even know yet if we'll have in-game spell customizations, much less anything about a generic/universal

When I said "some sort of cap," I should have said "some sort of cap, other than a fixed number." Especially because I really hope that the essence-for-turf thing will indeed provide some interesting ways to limit city sprawl and any related micromanagement. garysax's wilderness thread really caught my eye because I think that especially for the fantasy genre, the game really does need to make wall-to-wall cities impossible. And I dont mean sprinkling the map borders wit

On word-use grounds, I have to agree with pigeonpigeon. It isn't a duel if it isn't to the death. But that's not to say that formal, non-lethal contests might not have a place in the game. Many real civilizations had ritualized combat that had could have real political effects without killing the participants. Penelope's suitors trying to win her by using Odysseus' bow and medieval European jousting come to mind.

[quote who="delad" reply="11" id="1975755"]...This is Elemental: war of magic and not elemental: sim fantasy kingdom[/quote] Woa. You're making me understand my irrational pre-alpha obssession better. It started because of the TBS-RPG 'fusion' thing. But I have to admit that I've so far had an unconscious desire to see Stardock produce a 4/5X 'thing' that builds a bridge between the Civ/game and Sim/toy modes. I'm a little afraid that such an idea might actively offend the devs, but t

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="23" id="1975819"]I just want my heroes to be important to my armies. I feel like if a regular trooper becomes a hero, then the hero is only a little more important than the regular red-shirt. I want my heroes to be awesome guys. Not as awesome as my channeler, but more awesome then just a promoted guy.[/quote] I agree about wanting distinctly different officers/administrators and heroes, but I don't see that necessarily in conflict wit

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="9" id="1975923"]And perhaps another category of user-made content that is on the same level of quality as SD content, such that if you ran across the content and didn't know better you'd just assume it was included in the game. Personally I would be inclined to add in a few custom-made races like elves or dwarves or sentient pigeons, so long as they are done well enough that they pass SD's own internal quality control tests.[/quote] My last post was ba