There should also be the RPG-standard 'compare this item with the one I have currently equipped' tooltip, and allow the player to change hero in the shop without clicking out.
8 Replies
8,415 Views
Pnakotus
3
Posts
101
Replies
10,140
Reputation
SotS UI is a UI so terrible turn length and required micro blows up once you leave the early games. The one thing SotS2 has to do is make a UI that is workable and decent; using it as an example of good UI is mindblowing. That said the Elemental UI has room for improvement. I'd like to add a prevalence of tiny, tiny buttons in ribbon-strips for no reason - when making a 'unit card', the pose and background selection is tiny and shows
14 Replies
65,159 Views
Stardock ForumsIn other news nationalism is stupid. Is anyone surprised? The hilariously ignorant attitude to the Roman Empire (is anyone speaking latin today, lol) is only matched by the irrelevant nonsense (we have commerce, trade and diplomacy! ISRAEL RULEZ SOMEHOW). It even ends on a massive distortion; that they're 'still here', as if there was no diaspora and Israel wasn't invented by the UN after WW2 and backed constantly by the richest and most powerful country in the world
35 Replies
26,918 Views
Excuse me? How is putting everything at 10 relevant to comparing absolute values? Someone with everything at 10 would probably find it very difficult to be matched with anyone. If you're talking about the 'likes genre' sliders, they're basically meaningless unless RTP knows what genre a game is (it doesn't). How much someone likes action games is totally meaningless when matching up a game of Sins, so it can be at 10 all people want. I simply wouldn't bother disp
10 Replies
42,251 Views
I'm not sure it's just match probably that's relevant, though - for instance, Demigod is a game that is very competitive, so people might prefer competitive matches there, whereas another game they might not be as fussed with regard to that criteria. Demigod is also very latency-sensitive, so people might want to know if someone is a '75% match', but that their connection is much worse - whereas with Sins, this element is nowhere near as critical. The system already allows you t
10 Replies
42,251 Views
RTP is based around the idea of 'similar people', by comparing interests, competitiveness, etc. However, the only way to change is to change your 'profile', a non-trivial task, and we all have 'moods'. For instance, I'm a 'lots of fun, reasonably competitive' profile at the moment, and it'll find me partners based on this. However, it doesn't say what features have suggested a buddy and which do not - for instance, it won't inform you that it suggested Annatar because he's
10 Replies
42,251 Views
Oh. :) It generally works both ways, but Demigod's login required the username, and since then I've been wondering if my account is some kind of cross-connected antiquated SDC-hybrid monster.
3 Replies
1,742 Views
RPS balancing is a different issue than randomness. Civ4's combat sucks because Civ combat always sucked because integer + random means who knows who's going to win. RPS balancing means you often have very contrived and forced counters (sometimes very hard counters) so that you 'need' xyz units to fight abc units or you lose. What they have in common is they're popular because they're conceptually easy. I'm hoping Elemental is less random and more logical than either
17 Replies
80,147 Views
Now Stardock have said they count on people making custom races, which is good; custom races are great stuff. However, GalCiv2 has custom races, but the things like styles, avatars etc were added later and are quite hackish. The 'xyz custom race style' STILL previews as 'xyz base race it was based on', even years later. The race-select screen has an icon for every base race, and another for the last used custom race, with other buttons for loading races. Is
0 Replies
3,703 Views
Martok, really? I'd been told the AI tends to suicidally attack you for no reason less, and will ocassionally even keep trade deals going for more than a few turns... which is a great leap forward if true. Sadly, it sounds like it might be an exaggeration. Kryo, players who use new or unusual strategies aren't cheating... they're sploiting or glitching. Properly managing your economy is 'cheese' and having the right units for the job is 'unbalanced'. &
64 Replies
153,665 Views
The chat/invite windows seem to be the issue. Setting up your profile and updating it (or viewing profiles) works fine for me, but sending an invite, adding a friend, closing a chat window and such all result in the program becoming briefly unresponsive.
3 Replies
1,026 Views
Not sure if it's the same issue, but the menu elements get stuck on the top layer of display when RTP has a brain explosion. I'm trying to add someone from a chat, and it fails due to timeout, but while it's trying the drop-down menu stays visible.
21 Replies
9,196 Views
Yeah, it's just taking the name from the executable. It doesn't recognise World in Conflict either; indeed 'scanning your start menu for installed games' didn't turn up anything. I guess over time a database of executables/genre/number of players/etc information would be useful.
2 Replies
1,037 Views
When signing in for the first time, RTP accepted none of my logins. I actually assumed I'd forgotten and requested a login update email, but I was right, and those details didn't work. Restarting RTP let everything work fine. Is this common? Oh, and the 'your login is wrong' placeholder message is too big for the default window size. Anyway, this raises an interesting issue I've encountered before. My account was originally
3 Replies
1,742 Views
In addition, it's worth remembering that any developer should pretty much ignore forums. Listening closely to 'fans' (ie, incredibly narrow sample of one type of possible customer) generally leads to crap. Thus, whatever morons in youtube comments are saying today, it's not really relevant. The mobility of different kinds of customer in the market is an interesting topic, especially since 'omg whut is teh best gamez' sort of thing you find on forums basically ignores 99% o
29 Replies
105,096 Views
I'm very wary about this. First, the diplomacy in Sins is really bad and needs changing. That's fine. But 'diplomacy tech'? Diplomacy ships? Cluttering up the game more isn't necessary to fix the mission-based diplomacy (hell, allowing the player to accept missions or propose them would pretty much instantly fix the diplomacy as it stands). Yet Another Tech Tree and single-use ship doesn't sound like a good direction to go. Entrenchment was grea
39 Replies
86,365 Views
Bah, the quote button doesn't work. :) No, I haven't played Empire (I got tired of buying broken CA games some time ago) but I have heard that the diplomacy is much improved. From what I hear it's still sub-GalCiv2, but it's a step in the right direction.
64 Replies
153,665 Views
Do you mean the tactical battles or the strategic stuff? They're both horrible but in different ways; even on VH/VH you could defeat fullstack armies losing 9 guys if you knew what you were doing, because the AI never adapted to what you did (and the combat mechanics were broken, which didn't help). Every battle, same tactics, same result. The strategic stuff on the open map was pretty poor (you built a fortress where? you refused what offer?) but really comes back to CA try
64 Replies
153,665 Views
For me, 'good AI' doesn't mean 'plays to strengths in fixed way' or 'follows preset gameplans' or 'has extra knowledge or resources'. 'Good AI' is that which is able to make sensible decisions, 'intelligent' decisions. Every half-baked RTS has AI that can beat humans, using prefab strategies, omniscience, bonuses, reaction advantages, mutlti-tasking, etc... but games like GalCiv2 have AI that make decisions - sometimes mistakes - in a reasonable way. I've never had a game of
64 Replies
153,665 Views
So you have an accouncement about RtP. It has a link saying 'go here to signup'. The link goes to a page that has nothing mentioning signup at all. The user has to press 'download' and then enter a mailing list that is for news, not the beta, to 'sign up' for the beta, with a text blurb being optional. There's no information about how, when or in what form you'll be notified of anything. It all seems very unclear. What's wrong with 'beta signup' but
2 Replies
1,509 Views
Reply to
Important Elemental MP tidbit from PAX - Hosting own servers
in War of Magic
Elemental Forums
Elemental Forums
I think it's safe to say that AC was simply very inefficient. As noted, many older games had very, very bad netcode, with poor error tolerance, high lag sensitivity, unnecessary data movement, etc. Modern games are often far superior even as they are more sophisticated. With regards the Stardock servers, I doubt I'd ever want to use them anyway.
29 Replies
126,668 Views
Sacred 2 has a lot of pretty terrible elements; the horrible voiceacting (although I think the over-the-top Inquisitor and Shadow Warrior VA is pretty funny) and the nearly non-existent story that only bothers to tell the player whats happening around halfway through. It also has no respeccing and totally worthless tooltips; the 'customise your moves' idea is good, but when you have a choice between 'make it damage more' and 'make it damage more often', with no numbers, it's totally imp
36 Replies
158,080 Views
Oh yeah, the costs should still increase in a linear way, so that to catch up to 'swords 27' is non-trivial. But rather than having endlessly diminishing returns of +0.0002 bonus, just use the difference as a modifier. This also would mean that getting swords 27 when everyone has armour 20 probably isn't worth it, as the bonus/cost would be bad at this point. Once everyone else reaches swords 24, it's more worth it.
99 Replies
321,153 Views
This is probably a dumb question, but does adding it to your cart and 'buying' it (since it says it doesn't charge you until release) count as 'pre-ordering'? I pre-ordered Elemental in this way, but there is nothing to indicate I actually have a 'pre-order' (no preorder icon on Impulse, no key, no email, etc). For all I know I'll just get charged on release day and recieve no pre-order benefits. EDIT - It'd be pretty funny if people didn't get Majesty Gold
13 Replies
28,755 Views
This is why the karma system is meaningless; someone can be lucid and recieve karma for good ideas, and then openly troll for days and... have the same karma. If you posted heavily, you could constantly alternate between being ignorant, obtuse or offensive and then reasonable and your karma would consistently go up. The posting in this thread is literally trolling, but his karma will not decrease, and next time someone likes one of his ideas it'll go up. :)
68 Replies
238,667 Views