doogles

I haven't been back to a Stardock site in probably a year, and I haven't played a Stardock game, other than Elemental, in probably two. I don't know how long I'll stay, but this statement made me really re-consider things: Elemental: War of Magic was a game we had very high hopes for. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment both to us, as well as to many of our customers. Stardock's success in its nineteen years of existence has been because pe

I am a skeptic and overtly negative, and have already stated my opinions on the topic of releasing too early - so take this all with a grain of salt. I hope that you don't come away from this thinking, "Elemental has problems because the street date was broken". The game simply wasn't ready. The street date being broken may have added to the problems, but this game needs work to be up to Stardock's quality. There's nothing else that can be said about that. Peop

[quote who="Publius of NV" reply="1" id="2701417"]I've seen the same thing, and reported in it a couple of threads, this one for instance. I completely agree the AI should play by the same rules, and that was one of the great things about GC and GC2.[/quote] Bear in mind that in GC, the AI actually had a huge advantage over the player: no need to research to see which stars had planets. I also think GC2 AI had a similar view into where resources existed, but this one I can

Hmm, I think that this needs to be addressed in some way (and I suspect it's already being looking into). It's way too much of an exploit to be able to build a farm while simultaneously building something else beneficial for your town. I expect this will be addressed, but until then I'm gonna just go ahead and "cheat" in order to enjoy the game :P Maybe I'll just halt all other production in my city in order to ensure I'm still getting the right feel for the difficulty lev

You need food for your town to grow, and you need farms (or some other building) to get food. In my recent beta4 game, I have fertile land near me, and I could cheat by just buying it outright, but I can't do it the "right" way by actually going to the city and choosing to build a farm. Is there a tech I need to research or something? The farm isn't even an option in my building list.

100% agree with OP. Along similar lines, the spell interface (when casting or selecting one to research) could use some kind of HOMM-like tabs so you can quickly "jump" to a given spellbook. If I go crazy on the spell research, I don't want to have to thumb through thirty pages of spells. If there's a way to do this and I haven't seen it, I apologize for the comment.

I had the same feeling, and I've played GalCiv 2 quite a bit. I think the big difference here is that we see a MoM-like game and expect certain behaviors out of it that aren't there. It's missing a ton of noob-friendly things, but I'm hopeful this will come with the campaign. As I recall, the GC2 campaign did a decent job of introducing you slowly to the core mechanics. But if Elemental is similar, there will still be things that you won't readily grasp without looking

I find it tough to get gold every game so far, but then again, I'm very new to it. Could be I just don't know the right strategy. Thing is, though, I worry that there is too much based on luck unless you rush in one particular direction. If you're saying I should wait on my city until I'm near a gold mine, that could take a very long time. If I should hope to get gold in adventures, well, that's just not realistic. I see a good number of adventures and notable lo

[quote who="John_Hughes" reply="34" id="2696176"]"I haven't been able to get caravans, sadly" Select Diplomacy on the 2nd turn, then wait till it completes, 3-4 turns, BOOM you have Caravans. And now who has the thin skin. Your all worked up about a response meant surely to be in jest. I know Brad awaits today and the release of SC2, he Beta'd fcol. As to the starting Gold issue. What is yoru hurry. I think that perhaps the chap that stated RTS's have spoiled

I've had this CTD at least three times. I've never gotten the armor successfully.

Reading over the thread, I still kind of think having a maximum cap to a city is important. If a maximum city can produce every single building, then eventually every city will just level up to max. Seems like there should be more tough decisions to make. Maybe a combination of housing labor and some other system should exist, such that a dedicated player could still have cities that do everything, but it would cost them in some way: tons of cash, tons of added dangers, etc.

[quote who="Satrhan" reply="25" id="2692332"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 11 I'd like to come up (or hear a) solution to this age old issue. One solution that has been brought up a few times before is using the population as a workforce. Each building requires a certain amount of people working there to be able to function. So if you want to build something you will need to have enough unemployed people in that town. This would allow the bigger cities to have lots o

[quote who="LDiCesare" reply="30" id="2695357"]Yes, my first post was probably too aggressive. But it's how I felt. If some players try the game, start it, play 10 minutes and feel so frustrated they want to quit, then maybe there's an issue that needs addressing. Right now the gold income curve from cities goes like: Phase 1) irrelevant - must earn all through adventuring Phase 2) balanced Phase 3) overflowing, partly due to caravans - hard to say

Agreed - something's up with the clothing. Even if there's a good reason, it at least needs to be made clear.

[quote who="eteq" reply="29" id="2694562"] To be fair, the OP began with "This is unplayable. Farewell." That's at about the same level, even though subsequent posts made the point much more effectively. I'm personally very happy with any level of communication and interaction with the community - far better than anything else out there. I think you need to cut them some slack given the long hours... [/quote] I think OP could definitely have worded his conc

I think "It's not at all intuitive that you can give items to other units" should be added to the list - I had no idea about this one :P

Wonder if this is related to the issue I recently saw - I was unable to equip boots to my sovereign which I'd bought in her main town. I just figured it was something I didn't understand (UI is definitely not great at explaining things) and moved on - like maybe boots were meant only for specific types of troops or something.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="10" id="2689285"]Starcraft sucks. You have to mine resources to get stuff. You should just get stuff... [/quote] The OP's point was that issue X removes all choices in situation Y. Obviously having a lack of choices in a game is a bad thing most of the time. Reading the thread, I really don't know if OP is correct, and I think he could have stated it in a much more professional way, but that's hardly an excuse for a childish, pa

Hmm, reading what I just wrote, I'm betting having the peasant sit on the resource didn't make it stay after all - it just was something I tried, and believed it would make the building stay, but the bug with getting income even when the building vanished is probably what was really going on.

A few strange issues to report, all semi-related: Pioneers stacked with another unit sometimes consume the wrong unit (peasants and great bears so far) when I tell them to build on a resource out of my influence. If I don't leave a unit on a resource, the building simply vanishes. Doesn't seem to matter if I wait around for it to finish building or what, it just vanishes the turn after there isn't a unit directly on the resource. However, after loading