[quote who="landisaurus" reply="5" id="1973213"]that is pretty awesome. I'm surprised 'warlord' is so big, since I don't really remember anybody saying it. ...[/quote] Hmm. I think that the 'word cloud' thing is being a bit stymied by the Stardock 'forums cloud.' Looks like the hits for Warlords might be because cross-forum areas like Off-Topic and PC gaming are accessible via forums.elementalgame.com.
At least spells seem to be getting as much as much attention as ursines. Also interesting that water seems to be the standout element at the moment. [quote who="Tamren" reply="2" id="1973156"]Is the word cloud for the forums as a whole? Oddly enough Channeler seems to be the least mentioned worde I have come across. At least in the ideas forum.[/quote] Good question. I don't always pay attention to whether a thread's in Elemental general, Dev Journals, or Elemental Ideas, but
Well, I'll admit no small part of my weakness for this silly family of arguments is nothing other than quibbling over terms. I'd not have bothered with any of it if the RTS genre had been called RTT (real-time tactics). I just haven't been able to think of "strategy" as ever having a right-now aspect to it--for me, it is long-term thinking by defintion. Tactics are what you use in "the now," while strategy is what you use when you're thinking about the future.
[quote]Not enough to be worthwhile eh? Well it all comes down to the useful complexity issue. Its pretty obvious how much is too much. But then how much is too little? The current system as it stands does work is just far too simplified, its abstracted to the point where things no longer make sense.[/quote] There is no 'obvious how much is too much,' except for individual players. IMO, devs and critics are better off if we all focus on an assumption that underlying complexity is good
I'm still leaning to having single-player games end if you lose your channeler unit, and I think the idea is even more appropriate for multiplayer. If we do end up with dead channeler = game over for you, in multiplayer, I'd like to see something close to a MAD option where a channeler who has studied appropriate magic can use his or her dying breath to lay some seriously bad vibes on the channeler whose forces have dealt the deathblow, or perhaps on whoever you think is your greatest enemy.<
Careful thinking about a choice of actions is just nowhere near as popular as instant responses to stimuli is. You can see this in areas other than computer 'strategy' games, such as the steady decline of scripted TV shows in favor of semi-organized camera gangs following hopelessly vain people around some vaguely themed set of situations. Thankfully, the total game market is big enough for a nice little niche for people who want to be able to take several hours over 3 days to set eve
[quote who="Tamren" reply="9" id="1971578"]It really depends on what you mean by "necropolis". Is it just a dead city with no one around to maintain it or a city full of corpses and or zombies?[/quote] Good point. Certainly the classical Egyptian notion of a necropolis was closer to a "gated community" that excluded the embodied (living) than it was to a zombies-at-home sort of scene.
[quote who="ckessel" reply="12" id="1971433"]I'll be really bummed if Karma has much impact on beta choices . I lurk much, post a little, but I'm not out looking to karma whore. But, hey, if it'll help, I'm a Stardock customer from way back. I bought the original OS/2 Warp version of Galactic Civilizations...[/quote] I think you might be confused between the original (and still unchanged AFAIK) plan for public beta 1, for which a pre-order is the only qualification, and the
[quote]But on modyfying the AI: Brad Wardell said that he may make certain parameters of the AI modable, so users could influence how the AI works, but on how much that will be, we'll have to see.[/quote] IIRC, the way GC2 works relies heavily on detailed content in XML files that *are* player moddable. It might not be plausible to get an AI scripting tool for Elemental, but perhaps the XML files that the C++ routines use will include traits that you can tweak to change combat or city
Sounds like a neat idea to me, especially if the feature could generate a full coat of arms for use in things like the diplo UI and simpler crest versions for tagging units &/or map features.
[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="4" id="1970782"]...The only things we've been promised about combat so far is the vague "continuous time turns" and total war scale battles. ...[/quote] As someone caught in the embarassment of Impulse whining related to GC2 2.0, I feel obliged to point out that nothing we read on these forums from a Stardock staffer is any sort of "promise." If we start using that word regularly, especially in trying to hassle devs about past
[quote who="Vandenburg" reply="16" id="1969449"]Well, if you're a compulsive min-maxer, I guess that could drive you crazy. But from a normal gameplay perspective, it doesn't matter. You're in a desert and your army of heavy armored Mammoth riders now gets a penalty. That's not really hard to grasp for a beginner of the game. (Mammoths -> Ice Age or at least winter/cold -> in desert -> bad idea. Nice logical chain.) That you can't completely understand (
psychoak, was there no way in Civ 4 to have 'normal' turn processing (like I remember from Civs 1 & 2 & maybe 3)? I never bought it because my local 4X friends called it to task for being a lying resource hog that needed way more PC to run decently than the box claimed. I've been flirting with getting a copy now that I have an adequate Vista box, but I'd think my money wasted if I ended up forced into a click-speed fight with my own PC.
[quote who="Tamren" reply="5" id="1970415"]...Empowering someone to use 100% of thier brain could be considered life magic killing because that the same thing as having a seizure.[/quote] That's the kind of point that I haven't seen much yet in the death/life magic talk. Cancer, after all, is basically unlimited growth, and lots of people assume that life=growth. I'm pretty sure that what we'll end up with is a major magic school, Life, which includes very evil practitioners,
[quote who="Nights Edge" reply="10" id="1933115"]The opportunity for a gorgeous animated rim-fall is surely too great to pass up?[/quote] I'd waste time watching it. And I'm really glad to see the reply from BoogieBac.
[quote who="Nathaniel Richter" reply="12" id="1970203"]It's been a month and I'm starting to get twichy with all of the waiting for insight into the technology system of this game. I feel as though I am already addicted to this game and it hasnt been released yet. Bad sign for me, good sign for SD.[/quote] Indeed. Also, awesome thread folks. I think Nathaniel is really onto something simply by encouraging some more thought about SMAC. This game seems to have a chance of bei
re searching, you can also just add site:forums.elementalgame.com to the end of your string at Google or any other decent engine.
[quote]Additionally, a large part of the attraction and fun-factor of Civilization like games is the city creation part, especially looking for good places and exploiting them. With your mechanism you remove that (imho very fun) game concept and replace it with a random system.[/quote] I don't think you're reading the suggestions quite right. At least as I see it, nitey's idea is not removing traditional city location methods. Something like 'seed villages' need not oblige you to buil
I helped with the threadjacking here, but I'd like to see more ideas about how shards should work--especially from folks who might want something other than (or in addition to) the oilfield/coalmine model. If we had a Shard Mobility slider with options ranging from Jewelry to Geographic Feature, would it be a train wreck for the AIs? Would any shard mobility at all just be too much complexity? If not, I still want it.
Pardon me for having started doing 'online' nonsense with a modem that required a Bell standard handset, but what the frak do you kids around here mean by FTW? I thought it meant "fuck the world" for a while, but I've finally bothered to try looking it up and I'm utterly confused.
Wow. This sounds like a potentially major twist for the basic colony/city rush phase all TBS games seem to share. In all the other Civ-kin games I've played, you either had predetermined city sites or you had settler units that could found a city almost anywhere. I very much like this hybrid notion where channelers could spend essence to influence a potential city site, but at root we are working on a map where the population centers all have a core tile that the game chose in response to pla
I used to tell my students that what I demanded from them was reasonable, but that didn't keep me from having boundless expectations for every stupid little essay assignment. I wanted a genius to make me feel stupid for having misunderestimated her. That's roughly how I feel about 'managing expectations' for Elemental. On the complexity point, if I really got a cake and could eat the whole thing eventually, I'd get a game that was aimed at a 128-bit future when you looked deep under t
To start replying with a bit of digression, the 'mega' thing tends to mark civ-unique or even globally unique projects, like a Hyperion Shrinker in GC2 or the Apollo Project in Civ. But it seems like some of what you're proposing is a list of improvements possible for most or all cities to build, and Siege Tunnels seems like a fine place to start with something like that. We haven't had a general city improvements thread yet, so why not dig into both sides of the question? The first t
The GC2 combat viewer does include a sort of AAR readout that you can scroll down to review every shot fired in the battle. But you still need to know a lot more than you can read in that exact UI context to get much value out of the info and it doesn't include any feedback as rich as "your civ-wide bonus in area X is what saved you from attack Y."
You can mod techs in GalCiv2, so it seems reasonable to expect spell mods for Elemental. And I like the idea of being able to mix in some themed user-made spell books with the builtin stuff (I guess I'm still assuming we'll have something similar to the shelf-o-spell-books model that MoM used).