Philocthetes

[quote who="Tamren" reply="1" id="1942944"]I think elemental goes a long way towards solving that problem. Everything has a cost, you can colonize the world if you really want to but you will have little or no power to do anything else.[/quote] I have hopes along these lines, but I think it is way too early in the dev process to say stuff like this with such certainty. Unfortunately, a given dev design goal does not always yield the expected player experience.

Damn, but I love ideas that make me revisit my past assumptions. I'm, so far, seriously 'conservative' about my 4X TBS fixation. I've never done multiplayer because I've never had both easy access to a LAN and friends who loved a game I loved at the same time. And MMO-anything has pretty much read like so much BS to me, even well before I saw the painfully insightful episode of South Park called Make Love, Not Warcraft . (I kno

[quote who="landisaurus" reply="5" id="1953250"]I think creating your own spells is going too far as well. However, I completly believe that a "tree" should exist that includes cross-element spells. I mentioned some ideas for mixed spells in another thread, though I don't remember where exactly.[/quote] When I was playing MoM back in the day, this was more or less my only major complaint. I almost never put all my spell book picks into one school and always wondered

[quote who="Nights Edge" reply="6" id="1951034"]It'd take a bit of digging, but I recall reading that one of the game's choices will be how much effort you want to spend on attracting heros. I assume Stardock have some alternative to MoM's fame system.[/quote] You know what can happen to us both when you assume, but I want to agree. Even though they couldn't secure rights to the MoM name, I believe Stardock are pretty serious about building the Child of MoM that will make its parent p

[quote]Lousy writing and (for the most part) even worse acting?[/quote] I was mainly meaning in comparison to shows like the Stargate stuff, which I've pretty much watched completely but would have to say is on average way more badly-written and badly-acted than Trek stuff, or even just the Enterprise subset. But I guess what I'm more interested in is why a given 'basic Trek fan' would single out Enterprise as some especially great disappointment. I got into Voyager, but it ne

I'm no great fan of sub-genre names like 'steampunk fantasy,' but I deliberately avoided mentioning Martha Wells' Il-Rien stuff in the 'best epic fantasy' thread because I was trying to respect the genre boundaries. Her The Death of the Necromancer is a fabulous example of mixing fantasy motifs with Victorian melodrama, and that includes talk about how new-fangled iron railways disrupt the much older power of the Fey. In the broadest sense, I see no fundamental conflict between a fan

[quote who="arstal" reply="11" id="1951371"]People didn't want to switch to Vista due to the bloat? [/quote] Some of us had to anyway, and we're going to be cranky for a while after Win7 comes out if Vista doesn't get some service packs that give us some functional parity and spare us the further Mac OS-wannabe UI changes. Me, I'm hoping the luck of my work situation means that I can both afford and justify a 64-bit box within the first couple of quarters after the Elemental b

I've been wondering about some similar things for a while now, but hadn't gotten around to as direct a notion as 'non-combat heroes.' I think that might clarify things for some other folks as well. Given that the game plans already include some serious Basic Big Decisions about whether your channeler should stay very strong as an individual unit or sacrifice personal strength to increase territory and/or enhance other units, it seems like the hero-unit subset would almost naturally ne

[quote]And no one has mentioned the *original* pulp fantasies yet? Conan the Cimmerian and Barsoom!?!?! Heathens, all'a ya![/quote] Don't make me sic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser on you!

[quote]I forget the name of the Author but the story of Thomas Covenant was as much a pain as it was a fun read. Maybe I was just to young to really appreciate it. But the story was good. I just hated the main hero. I hate somebody who always whines.[/quote] I totally ducked mentioning the base Covenant series because I had pretty much the same early-teens reaction to it. I've gotten much fonder of 'anti-heroes' since I read those, so maybe a re-read is in order. [quote]Really

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="7" id="1952614"]Edit: Also, aren't we supposed to stay away from political topics?[/quote] I believe that guideline has been made moot by the merger of all the different Stardock forums. Off-topic is everywhere now, including the sites like Joeuser that have tons of political talk.

Thanks, lads. Cache dump was what I needed, and the Hand doesn't look that odd over at GC2.

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="15" id="1952802"] You'll grow in power over time, but you'll (supposedly) never recouperate spent essence. It's supposed to be the balance between lots of imbued units/heroes and a truly powerful channeler, and an aspect a skilled player will have to learn. And while it's not been stated, I think it's fair to say that you'll not be spending essence for run-of-the-mill battlefield magic and the like, so don't worry about that. I think you'll be spendin

[quote who="kerovon" reply="19" id="1950606"]This brings back memories of Master of Magic. I remember going through it, creating a translation key for the runes in the spellbook, and then at the start of each game checking to see if I got the really good spells.[/quote] I'm impressed that folks figured out a trick like that, but I kind of hope Elemental has a similar system of spell books that you *can't* decrypt except by in-game research. I really liked not knowing exa

Now I'm a newbie with a sub-million Stardock member number... I see the image swap on My Account pages, but when I tried a couple of posts, I still see the Gangster Psilon I've been using since I started posting regularly at GC2. Am I doing anything wrong other than being impatient?

Testing...

[quote]No upkeep at all (unless there is any non-gold upkeep). It would be neat to play a faction like that, although there would obviously need to be a detriment to such a faction as well to balance it all out.[/quote] Seems like food would be a minimum input for human and Fallen units. If something like a no-currency faction is possible, I'd imagine the balancing details would need to follow from the back story for why they have no currency. I hadn't thought of a super-zealo

I'd be happy enough with an improved version of GC2's Timeline tab that provided sorts and filters and could export to XML or plain text. An option to take automatic screen grabs and assign them Timeline-based file names would also be swell.

[quote who="Feet" reply="25" id="1950828"]I'm not in yet. I'm not sure if they take the money yet, but just in case I'm waiting till after Christmas to pre-order. Times is tight, yo.[/quote] They will take your order now and not bill until the first beta release becomes available, so you have from now until beta 1 to change your mind. (I saw some chatter about an oopsie billing or two, but I think that's been fixed at the online store and the people who answer sales@stardock.

Galactic Hunter reminds me about a wild hope I have for GC3 that might also be plausible for Elemental (espcially given that the engine work here is engine work for there also). Modern folks have a very hard time imagining an economy without any form of currency. But Elemental will include trade in use-value goods, apparently as an important part of the larger economic system. I'd like very much to be able to design a furiously isolationist faction that had no interest in gold other t

[quote]Companies should be focused on increasing their sales, not stopping piracy. [/quote] I believe this policy will serve Starock very well in coming years, and give them an advantage over game outfits that do not agree. [quote]Why are digital downloads of games typically priced identically to boxed retail product? [/quote] I suspect that some of it has to do with the surrounding details of distribution agreements--why would a big-box store want to sell your discs

Seems like this thread has found a really big basic question for the game. How does using a channeler's fundamental essence to expand usable map territory relate to siezing rival territory through force? Is the fundamental limit what your channeler can personallly sustain, or what your channeler's subservient units can defend?

I surely don't want to see any computer version of dungeon crawling as a part of this game. I disliked that stuff more than enough when I could work around it as an in-person RPG player. Until we have AIs truly worth the name, I don't want a computer game to pretend that it can emulate a good human RPG GM. Emulating second-rate refs might be a good place to start, however.

[quote who="Sorceresss" reply="24" id="1948527"]What an odd over-reaction ! I do not promote only 4 "races" : Men, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs. If they project to have TWELVE "factions", so what if 2 of them are the classical Elves & Dwarves ?! I would compromise at having one of the 6 "Fallen" factions presented as bloodthirsty Dark Elves.[/quote] I said before that I've been elf-obssessed as an in-person RPG player. What I think we're still missing here is enough

[quote who="psychoak" reply="25" id="1946883"]I'm hoping the tactical battle map scales with army size though, so small. [/quote] That alpha grab looks distinctly zoomed-in to me. Brad's ambitious--maybe they're going for something like the icon-level vs. 3D level on the GC2 map, only instead of popping a sub-process window when you move units in to engage, you just zoom in to the very finest levels of the grid. On the RTS-angst front, it does seem that Gamespot still tags the