Pnakotus

Reply to Very happy about random techs and infinite research in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Can't you solve the scale problem by basing the bonus off the DIFFERENCE in techs? Instead of 'sword 27 = very slightly better than sword 26', 'sword 27 = effective vs armour 27, less effective against armour 28 and very effective against armour 26'. In this way, techs are like 'skills', and it doesn't matter how good your armour is - only how much BETTER it is than their weapons, for a floating bonus different for everyone's tech level without needing a system whereby it's nearly

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Just post more. More posts = better chance of someone clicking +1 = more karma! Throw out more ideas at random, because if one of them is right everyone forgets the rest of them being wrong and gives you karma for your 'insight'. It's the forum game! :)

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

It shouldn't, given how the karma system works. :)

Reply to SD plans for MP (europeans take note) in War of Magic Elemental Forums

It seems pretty unlikely they're going to demand anything remotely near 1Mbit/s up. That'd probably cut off about 60% of the western world and there's really no reason they'd need it. The point regarding bad press is that there are many limits that already exist in PC gaming like memory, GPU, etc. Games still let you TRY, even if it sucks, and Stardock is even mad about scaling so that anyone can play their games. If Corridor Stroller 2: Shotgun Massacre had a popup

Reply to Total War Type Battles in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I wonder how much time would need to be spent on the AI in a gridless combat system to make it challenging or intelligent? The battles have always been the best part of TW games, but the AI has always sucked. We've all killed full-stack enemy armies, over and over, using the same tactics and lost seven guys (particularly bad in Rome). They left tactical combat aside in GalCiv2 because making the AI not suck would have been difficult and I imagine the MoM/HoMM style combat th

Reply to Shadow Complex in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

Don't forget QA and technical support that needs to be provided somewhere along the line. That said, PC developers porting to console often run into problems with the level of reliability required on console - it's okay to release a buggy mess and patch on PC, but this will not float on console. Sure, you can patch, but the market has a totally different expectation and a buggy game will lose sales in the critical first days/weeks.

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Define one dimensional thinking, and then define 'five dimensional thinking' and how this leads to 'AI must cheat and get invincible armies and mega-bonuses to make GREAT GAMES because some nameless person on the internet says so based on nothing'. Clearly, '5th dimensional thinking' means no critical thought or logic at all! Back in the days of M.U.L.E., the 'game' was like Monopoly and about competing with your friends huddled around the same computer. That's a very diff

Reply to What was the Magic of MoM? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

This thread needs more links to pirate software?

Reply to SD plans for MP (europeans take note) in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Frankly, regardless of whether someone wants MP or not, saying your game has 'MP... if you pay enough for your connection' is going to leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It's probably begging for negative press, too.

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Yes, and they've sucked for 20 years. This is not relevant to your outrageous claim that you need absurd 'AI get giant invincible army when player is winning' to make a 'GREAT GAME'. Hell, CA games do that already with magical materialising rebel armies (that would take the player many turns to recruit) teleporting down from the Freedom Star. How FUN that is! But I guess since you're apparently a recognised troll and haven't addressed even a single point, this is par

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Top selling != is good, sorry. And if you think CA games have good diplomacy or AI, you're living on the moon. They're FAMOUS for their horrible AI. I'm not seeing how 'more difficulty levels' is relevant. Finer graduation of difficulty is a good thing, surely? The statement that you need to have cheating AI with handicaps to 'make GREAT GAMES' is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Got any, or just more tota

Reply to The AI SURPRISE! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

If the idea is that if you win enough, the AI get's random giant bonuses/advantages to level the playing field, the idea is bad. If the idea is 'copy the 'kill all players AI' from a Total War game', the idea is bad. If the idea is to punish players for winning, the idea is bad. GalCiv doesn't have this problem. Only a game with poor victory conditions (or stupid 'kill all players' diplomacy) could suffer from it. Whoops, that means CA games! :D I

Reply to Winrar 3.9 released in Personal Computing Elemental Forums

Sadly 'scenes' doing 'releases' love to enforce their 'rules', regardless of whether it's relevant anymore. Hell, if you're doing bundling (which is a good application of archiving) there's no reason to apply any actual compression at all, or to use any given format over another. Windows supports zip natively, so if it's for ease of download, put your pile o' files into an uncompressed zip for single-file download and forget about it.

Reply to SD plans for MP (europeans take note) in War of Magic Elemental Forums

It's not really 'hardware', just 'performance'. People trying to play modern games on crap connections ARE really annoying (at least in latency/throughput critical games), but if they're saying '128kbit/s up means no multi for you' they're just going to piss a whole lot of people off.

Reply to Winrar 3.9 released in Personal Computing Elemental Forums

Oh we've got a live one. I bet he checks hashes on everything he downloads too. OVERWHELMING RISK OF TRANSFER ERRORS! :) EDIT - By 'standarised way of sharing' he means 'the piracy SCENE enforces meaningless rules out of conformity'. Turns out hashfails on individual blocks are detected and discarded by the client, as already mentioned? :)

Reply to SD plans for MP (europeans take note) in War of Magic Elemental Forums

In a turn-based game, I really can't see upstream bandwidth being a big problem (beyond any mod element exchange system, which may be what they're talking about). Some games are latency or bandwidth critical, but I really can't see Elemental being a game like that.

Reply to Winrar 3.9 released in Personal Computing Elemental Forums

Seriously. What's more annoying is that almost everything available is compressed in some way, which takes xyz seconds/minutes to decompress... and generally isn't actually compressed much at all. I downloaded the new vps for Freespace the other day and they're compressed... and some of them are seriously two meg smaller, yet it takes a step, an extra piece of software and time to decompress it. It's absurd. I keep an archive soft installed for this reason only; if Win

Reply to Shadow Complex in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

I'm just talking about the decision process, not the facts. After all, Starforce was able to scare/bully smaller developers into using their horrible DRM with horror stories of piracy and mirages of extra sales through this kind of reasoning. Regardless of whether piracy is really the big deal the overblown scare stories like to portray it as, the attention it's given is going to colour the actions of decision-makers. And if it's as easy as 'make it for console instead', esp

Reply to Winrar 3.9 released in Personal Computing Elemental Forums

7zip is only low compatibility because it's relatively new; the 7zip format is better than the RAR format, and 7zip works with both. 7zip is also free. Being free means it's gaining penetration relatively fast - it took many years for rar to take off (and it never really pushed zip out of the space anyway). 7zip has also had a 64-bit version for some time, and is extraoridnarily lightweight. Not seeing any real reason to use WinRAR. We all used it back in the d

Reply to Shadow Complex in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

It's pretty easy to say that when you're not the one making million-dollar decisions between developing for a platform riddled with piracy (whether or not, and to what degree, this really reduces profit is another question) and one without. I agree that developing for the 360 is probably easier, but this is probably not the case for the PS3 (and I've heard many cross-platform titles run into problems porting to the PS3). The solid frameworks (fixed hardware, network infrastructure

Reply to Winrar 3.9 released in Personal Computing Elemental Forums

Is there a reason to use WinRAR over 7zip?

Reply to Shadow Complex in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

Wait, is this really about how evil it is to move away from PC gaming when it comes to RETRO PLATFORM GAMES? Oh dear. Turns out more and more companies are focusing on console platforms. This is news, it's not a terrible curse to damn evil directors to hell. It shouldn't even be surprising. The argument that if you start developing games for platform abc means you can never choose to focus on xyz more profitable platform is childish. Aside from ni

Reply to Space Empires as Inspiration in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

The SE series - as has already been said - has some interesting ideas and a satisfying level of complexity... totally obfuscated behind a worthless UI. There are a few ideas worth taking - like complex treaties, actual trade etc, being better than GalCiv2's - but much of it is so different in tone to Stardock's games as to not really work. Of course Stardock can make effective UIs (even if you have to poke them about it) and doesn't ship unworkable bugfests (er, except De

Reply to Terrain Modification in War of Magic Elemental Forums

You'd think 'raise/lower' and 'change climate' would be all that's necessary; you can't make a river just by dropping a bunch of water unless the terrain is cooperative.

Reply to Kotaku: Stardock to Roll out Impulse Phase IV in September in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

Let's hope it lets you authenticate pre-exisiting installations and doesn't break win7 archive compatibility for no reason? My ISP loves the current 'lol redownload' philosophy, and I'm pleased to have half a dozen Impulse games running and authenticated on my machine that Impulse totally ignores and won't update. :) The new store is going to be a big improvement, but the real problem with the current store is less UI and more the servers involved. Each game shouldn't real