Philocthetes

I think the best reason to mention the Wheel of Time in this thread is that "as opposed to" might be better as "in addition to." WoT included the Ways, portal stones, Skimming (kind of Ways-like channeler-made rapid movement), and Traveling (temporary channeler-made teleportation gateways). The portal stones stuff is certainly too much bother for a TBS game, but I don't see why the game couldn't support analogs to the Ways, Skimming, and Traveling. Investment-oriented players (heavy e

[quote]Master of Orion 3 overlapped the credit value, to much money and it becomes a negative value.[/quote] MoO3's worst problem was overlapping their own buzz. Sooo many years in development, suuuch a craptastic outcome...

[quote who="psychoak" reply="15" id="1967486"]When you just add bonuses, you lose a huge amount of creativity. Elephant mounts with multiple archers in the nest. You can't have distinctly different attacks coming from distinctly different opponents. Armor wont help against an elephant, the toughest breastplate ever made is just a trash compactor when an elephant runs your ass over, it will stop arrow fire though. You can fake it in some horribly lame manner, but i

[quote who="The Wicked Flea" reply="7" id="1968219"]Their point isn't to hide the code from the public, but their competitors. Stardock AI's are some of the most advanced, human-like players that I've ever seen. Why give corporate competitors a potential leg up on it? (Not that I'd be against writing DLL style AI brains. Anything like that is a good idea, I'm just playing something of a devil's-advocate here.)[/quote] Maybe the competition is the main factor beh

I should have known that with nearly 7 billion on the planet, someone had already hand made a bear-drawn chariot fig. [quote who="Luckmann" reply="5" id="1967169"]I refuse to use such noble animals as the bear for plows, carts or chariots! Are you insane?![/quote] Well, that's another interesting question for a possible 'next-gen' tech tree. I was thinking a linear set when I muttered about Herding, Harnessing, etc. But maybe you should be able to flat-out skip some crafts if

Some folks elsewhere have talked about wanting some sort of 'open' tech trees. Seems like the Animal Husbandry branch could be a good place to work something like that out, at least in terms of variety if not endlessness. Instead of Tech A inevitably leading to branches A1, A2, and A3, why not have the root Animal Husbandry craft simply enable you to develop a specific craft for each type of useful animal you encounter? That way, if your people worshipped bears and thought riding them a horri

I'm nearly positive there'll be no dragonriding in this game--Brad seems to have a proper respect for dragonkind; you might be lucky to have one treat you as a pet, but trying it the other way 'round should lead you to a quick tour of the dragon's digestive tract. Unless the game manages to include a huge number of *optional* complexity layers (which I'd like but don't really expect), I'd prefer things like cavalry be single units and that any mount variations have fairly simple effec

[quote who="Red_Nemesis" reply="25" id="1966292"]I haven't been very active, so I'm sorry if this is blatantly obvious to everyone else. Will there be singleplayer? This thread almost makes it sound like there will only be multiplayer outside of the campaign. I can't imagine a real time strategy game requiring an internet connection, so I'd be shocked if that was the case.[/quote] I wouldn't make any bets on schedule details at this point, but I agree that it now sounds like the 'full

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="5" id="1966099"]... Also, there should be hotseat online play. thats my 2 cents[/quote] I'm really old in Internet years (just turned 44), but doesn't hotseat = only have one, non-networked PC to play on? I mean how is the seat hot unless someone else's butt was there right up until yours was? I still have no idea if I'll want to do much with multiplayer anything, but hotseat vs. online seems like asyncrhonous vs. synchronous to me, a

[quote who="JamesMoriarty123" reply="16" id="1966166"]If you guys haven't read :- Frank Herbert - Dune Raymond E. Feist - Magician ... [/quote] See, it's lists like this that keep me convinced that Samuel R. Delany is right about the 'root' genre name. SF = speculative fiction. SciFi and Fantasy are subgenres and sometimes they overlap, at least for some readers. I'm sure many, many folks balk to see Dune called an epic fantasy even though the no

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="9" id="1966129"]...That sounds awesome, but trying to imagine a player in that situation, I don't think a super project is really feasable then. Because if you could afford a super project, you could afford just to build army to beat the guys off your walls.[/quote] That seems to assume that cities can only produce one thing at a time, which I doubt will be the case for Elemental. GC2 supports 3-part production, and I'm hoping that the tile-

[quote who="KnutAreMykland" reply="18" id="1965959"]a postapocalyptic earth would have a much higher growth rate then 3% each year. Once a person is in a well nurtured enviorment and with a fertility age of 16, with 1 child each year for 12 years, that is alot more then 3% each year that we have now in our overpopulated world.[/quote] The operative 'persons' here are the females, and 1 child per year for 12 years will definitely reduce their lifespans. Plus, breeding patter

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="5" id="1965072"] Quoting GW Swicord, reply 2Why not let the bears wander back off onto their own paths for a bit and focus on subjects that don't stir such intense feelings? At the risk of fanning the flames, I still can't believe that light-hearted bear jokes and ubiquitous use of bears in examples managed to stir intense feelings. [/quote] I can't either, which is why I thought it might be time for some, ahem, hibernation. [e classic]:-|[

[quote who="taltamir" reply="16" id="1965248"]This thread really got me thinking. If I understand right, you could spend a lot of your personal power reinvigorating the land, making a nice territory full of cities, perfectly aligned for max density, and full of farms and roads and no bandits. as one of the posters described. Or you could leave your terrain barren and instead focus on making yourself or a few choice heroes more powerful... I just figured a "rewards for being bad" kind of scena

pigeonpigeon has made me pay enough attention to notice that the runic text on several of the Artwork images in the Media area appears to be identical. Frogboy included the shaman image in a recent post, which made me rashly assume that it was 'fresh' stuff and the rune-words might include some new backstory info. [quote who="Eplekongen" reply="4" id="1964887"]Oh, so that creepy shaman dude is like, The One!?[/quote] This question makes me wonder whether devoted followers migh

If this fight goes on much farther, we'll all lose. I'm not doubting bear merits--heck, I'm a 'zoftig' gay man, a bit of a Poohist, and we all know that truth and bear scat have some sort of fundamental relationship, at least in the woods. But enough, already. LR, Luckmann, you both have plenty of more useful things you need to be typing about around here. For example, even with all the extraneous bear-blather, the Animal Husbandry thread is darned interesting. Why not let the bears w

[quote]He might be talking about someone else than himself, eh?[/quote] Well, I guess sort of, but I went to high school long before everyone carried phones and pretended to write using a num pad. So I had a rash assumption that if "anyone else" was "anyone other than my friend X," Sammual would have written it that way to start with. Plus, I thought you were being snarky, which your followup suggests was a mistaken impression. Re the billing question, I pre-ordered wi

I think I have some ideas about why the devs might be keeping whatever they have in mind for the magic system mostly to themselves, but if they could even think of a few themes or questions they wanted us to kick around, it might be very helpful. I like many of the ideas posted so far, but I have no clear impression about channeler spellcasting other than that by late game, they should be able to do some massive terrain changes and maybe do some of the other global things you could do

[quote who="Simplicity123" reply="19" id="1964769"]I hope this is the plan... Otherwise I won't even be able to use the Beta. [/quote] I imagine that like all public betas, the more time you have to volunteer, the more you'll be able to contribute to the initial dev effort. But I don't think you need to worry about being excluded from the 'full' beta if you can't commit to a heavy multiplayer schedule. It sounds like the server-side stuff might need what amounts to a 'sele

[quote who="Eplekongen" reply="1" id="1964718"]Did you?[/quote] Sammual said "anyone else."

[quote who="Eplekongen" reply="9" id="1964391"]It would also be cool if your heroes kept gaining more pre and postfixes and you could choose wich ones you wanted to be displayed on the unit "Lord-Commander Humpadumpa, Conqueror of the Forbidden forest, Defender of Tinytown and Herald of the Growling Kittens"[/quote] The editable name fields in GC2 all have a character limit that is way lower than what might be said when announcing a Hero of the Hour at a court ball or diplomatic funct

Say, CondarF, any chance you'd be interested in translating the text around this bit of concept art?

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="21" id="1962639"]What do you mean by that? I haven't played GC2 for a while. Mind explaining what that means? [/quote] I forget how many updates ago we got it, but there's now a handy little change to the main map calendar--you can click it to toggle between showing Day-Month-Year format to just showing turn numbers. It completely changed my ability to think (and post) about the pace/phases of my games because I just never got good at remembering what

[quote who="Ragnar1" reply="19" id="1961696"]It would be far better for SD and PI to aquire other companies, grow larger and change the industry's attitude. [/quote] I agree with the "change the industry's attitude" part, but I suspect that there is some level of growth that is just too much for the kind of quality many of us long-term Stardock customers want from both our software and the people who support it. Revenue growth is swell, and perhaps a fully-staffed se

I like pigeonpigeon's idea of an 'epithet generator' as well, especially if it can use place names from the current game--"Humpadumpa, Defender of Tinytown." I'd also like a way to name major chunks of geography that aren't towns or cities, e.g. the river that starts near my capital, the biggest mountain in my territory, the Forbidden Forest in the back country, etc.