Odd I play at 1680X1050 and it shows up fine but I have a 8800 GT.

Are your drivers updated to the latest version? That seems to be a cause of a few weird issues. If not, be sure to bug report it in the proper area if you haven't done so already.

Okay.

Useless buildings: Slums(needs "much" more housing), Estate(needs more prestige), Mansion (needs "much" more prestige, Bank(needs "much" more gold), Tax Office (20% at least),

Perfect Features: Food, Villas, Houses, Average Tech Rates, Huts, Forges, Granaries, Barracks, Armory, Refined Housing (tech), Refined Farming (tech)

Near Perfect: Unit Training, Unit Design

It needs to be said that Conclaves (and its clones), Monasteries, and Town Councils are only Useful in a Size 5 city with at least 4 Schools or Universities. Its currently only possible to build one Conclave in a city (which makes sense) however it displays that 8 are possible ... instead it should display that only 1 is possible. If more than one Conclave were possible to be built, then Monasteries would automatically become the most useless building in the game, right before Banks and Tax Offices.

The idea of Veterancy, and the fact that Elite gives double HP (usually 20), is epic and awesome.

The Fail-ness is that currently Veteran, Expert, and Elite troops, while theoretically having extra HP, currently always have 10 HP.

Currently Road Construction Costs 10 gold per turn. WHAT!?!? Is Road construction SUPPOSED to be that expensive?? On the same note, currently Cities and Roads cost 0 maintanence. I suppose its to help testing, but still ...

Lots of bugs with City borders, City movement in general, among others, but City based bugs are the MOST annoying ... especially moving units out of a city.

Currently the limits on what building can be built when (as far as city size) makes a decent amount of sense ... however Pubs (and Taverns) should be allowed in ANY size city (imho). Also, it doesn't make alot of sense how soon we are able to build Monasteries, Conclaves, Galleries, and Town Councils ... given the "nature" of the building. I mean ... its just not efficient to build them before either size 4 or 5 ... and even then PROBABLY only in the capital (since I "think" that the Palace allows for more squares in a city).

Since this is a complete rewrite (with refined ideas) of a previous post, I'll again say that a Civil Engineering Office should be allowed at Refined Administration. I don't care what the materials cost is, but it should use 1 space, and provide +4 (or +5) space, to give a net of +3 (or +4) space. In this way it functions similarly to the palace by having the ability to stretch your cities into grand Metropolis. I would advise that the limit of Civil Eng Offices equal the city size. So a size 1 can build 1 and a size 5 can build 5.

There should be more Magic and Adventuring techs.

Weapon Variety and Balance is non-existent, of course. I know that its not going to be added for awhile (like boats and horses), but it sure is painful.

There should be a Diplomacy tech which allows for Roads to be built to Friendly Rival nations, as well as Trade Routes to be established.

A way to handle Experience Points (rather than 50 points per battle)

There should be a constant value of experience gained for enemy Combat Value. My numeric placeholders would be 2 x combat value. This experience should then be adjusted based upon number of kills and ratio of strength. However being stronger than your opponent should not cause less experience to be gained, although being weaker than your opponent should increase your potential experience points considerably.

This experience is then split into the participating units, proportionally based upon total damage dealt to the enemy x (1.10)^n where n equals the number of enemy soldiers* killed. *for killing a company, n would equal 10, and so on.

The actual experience that each unit gets is decided by taking the previous value that the individual unit recieved, and multiplying it by ( 1 + total enemy combat value/ unit's combat value).

In this case, if the individual unit is one third the power of the opposing army (that was defeated), then its experience gained is 4 times as much as its "share" of experience. However, if it dealt no damage to the enemy, then it recieves 0 share of the experience.

//example

You fight 10 enemy soldiers. Lets say it was a company of infantry with total battle rank of 150. We then multiply this by 2, to get 300.

Lets say you fought against them with a company of archers and a Champion. Lets say the Archers did 70% of the damage, however the Champion got all 10 kills.

The archer would have 210 base experience while the Champion would have 90x(1.1)^10 or 233 base experience.

Lets say that the archer company had a battle rank of 50, while the melee Champion had a battle rank of 200. According to our equation, the archer would get 210 x ( 1 + 150/50) or 840 experience. The Champion would get 233 x (1 + 150/200) or 408 experience.

However, if the archers only dealt 30% of the damage, and the Champion dealt 70% of the damage and killed all 10, then the Champion would get 953 experience and the Archers would get 360 experience.

As another example, if that same champion of battle rank 200 fights a spider of battle rank 30, then it would get 76 experience. (30 x 1.1 x ( 1 + 30/200)) = 76 (rounded) ... I would prefer for experience to at least store 2 decimal places during calculation, and round to the nearest whole number before applying to the unit. Then units would only store experience as integers. Also, Units should probably level up as a whole.

When I start a new game, I see only white color instead of a cloth map. Win XP Professional (32 bit)  Athlon XP 3800+, NVidida Geforce 7800 GTX.  I will try the game on a different computer.

[edited for formatting purposes  -Rosco_P]

I know how computers work just fine, I'm a certified technician and I've still managed to open my case up and switch out a power supply before I realized that it was plugged into an outlet that is controlled by a switch that was in the off position.  It makes sense to cover the basic problems first, right?

@ John Hughes ... the reason that the "total" experience is different is because it deals with the relative strengths of the units.

This is where  Experience x (1 + Their Strength/ Your Strength).

In this model, if you are weaker than the opponent, your portion of experience will be boosted more-so.

In many games (Fire Emblem among them) if a Stronger unit gets the kill, then he gets less experience (than if a weaker or equal unit got the kill).

What I am doing here, is a similar system, only using many buffers in order to not penalize the "stronger" unit TOO MUCH for getting the kill, however I am still giving the weaker unit more experience for equal effectiveness because it deserves it.

In the case of support units, I suppose theoretically you could try to calculate the amount of damage the Support spells caused, however we have an alternative option.

This alternative option is to take Mana Spent on X and divide it by Damage done by X. if 50 mana was spent on X, and X dealt 500 damage, then value would be 0.1

If the value is less than 1, then you multiply the number by the experience that "would" be gained by X (in this case the archers), take that value and add it to caster experience, and subtract it from Archer experience.

so if the Archer "would" have gained 100 experience, and the Mana/Damage value was 0.1, then 10% of that experience is taken away from the archers and added to the Caster. In this case, Archers would get 90 experience and caster would get 10 experience.

If, however, the value is equal or greater than 1, then the caster "steals" all of the experience. Meaning that the caster would get 100 experience and the Archer would get 0 experience.

Well, each kill increases the total Exp by a stackable 10%. The "lower strength units get more exp" is just there so that lucky kills still mean something, since in most games if you just rolled three 20s in a row to crit the Boss, your going to get a Helluva lot of Exp. given the examples, there are three basic factors that would allow for XP. One is number of opponents (number of kills). The other is percentage total damage given.

Think of it this way, if you shoot someone in the arm and then in the gut, and they are lying there, and someone else shoots them directly in the head, how is that going to feel? How is it going to feel compared to if you see someone lying, bleeding on the ground, and YOU shoot them in the head. Different memory? Which one is more memorable? Which one would be a more scarring experience? This might be why actually making the "kill" usually counts for extra experience ... getting the final "kill" is always somehow important.

Anyways, if your peasants die then they are gonna die ... Its an age-old adage that the higher level you are the slower it will take to level, but that is no reason to not fight with your Ace. Extra HP for overcoming the Odds is only meant to reward the lucky survivor, a badass is still going to get a decent amount of Exp ... they will get a fair Exp for the battle they fought, and they get extra exp for each kill to boot. Since this is continuous turns, as well as the level at which the RNG factors, I would say that "min maxing" Exp is going to be the least of your problems.

I would focus more on minimizing my losses (going with the strategy that has highest success rate of victory ... as long as that victory involves no significant losses) rather than maximizing my HP. Also, I would rather have one bad-ass leveled unit than several decently leveled units. Increasing Combat Speed is Uber by the way, I just love it.

I wish I could code, to add this experience system to my Beta Build right now ... getting 50 exp per battle is just annoying. Especially since everyone involved gets the same amount of Exp no matter how many are involved. Champions winning a fight = 50 exp. Unit winning a fight = 5 exp. It is redonkulous. Well, somehow something different is going on, cause killing a Sovereign or a Troll (at level 1) can bump me up to level 3 in no time flat. So its hard to say what is actually going on.

Relative Strengths of the units just means Combat Rating. Combat Rating is (of course) an imperfect system, however I would rather have an imperfect system be integral to the experience calculator than having a seriously flawed, in no ways accurate system.

Personally I like systems where getting the kill matters. I guess its some-what run-off from Fall From Heaven 2. In FFH2 if someone atacked you with a HUGE number of units, it doesnt matter how weak they are, if you won, you were going to get ALOT of Exp. Having a (1.1)^N seems like an awesomely valid system to get similar results while not being "quite" as numbers dependent.

There are a lot of ways that you can try to determine Exp by "how hard" the battle was, and almost every such system is easily manipulated. For instance, if your % health remaining at the end of the battle helped to determine total Exp gain ... there are a lot of ways to "game" that system, even if many are risky.

Now, killing a "Big Bad" can sometimes be harder than killing an army of weaker creatures. Therefore, some instances will simply not give "enough" experience for the participating Champion. Therefore, certain scripted boss battles should have a set amount of "bonus exp" that victorious champions wil receive atop their normal experience. This can be 50, 100, 1000 .... whatever best fits. For instance, if a Sovereign leads an army against a Dragon, and kills the Dragon (NPC, not player) then that amount of determination and investment needs to be rewarded. Thus 5000 gold "Dragons Hoard", 1000 "personal prestige" and 10,000 experience points for the Sovereign (On top of all other self-inherent rewards).

It seems a pretty good bet that this system will never make it to GOLD. So I guess when a system does

get applied we can revisit and see what makes the most sense.

Hmm, there was a bug like this in older NVidia drivers that was causing too much memory to be used and the texture memory was getting blown out.  What level anti-aliasing were you using? Can you get it to work with just 2X if you were using a higher level?

I've contacted NVidia so that they can check to see if this is a bug in their drivers or if it's something that we need to fix in Elemental.

Well I can play other games with aliasing no problem.