Tamren

Tamren

Joined Member # 3089516
11 Posts 352 Replies 813 Reputation

Oddly enough, causing a disease outbreak would fall under the wing of life magic. Curing a disease outbreak could be either life or death magic. A disease is not meant to kill. All a disease wants to do is exist, killing off all of its potential hosts would counter productive. Normally what happens is a percent of the infected die off and the rest develop an immunity. Dealing with disease using live magic would amount to keeping people alive until they can build that critical mass of

24 Replies 24,479 Views

Thats a great book! When I first read the book it suprised me how much of it didn't actually deal with any of those three. When I brought up the example of spanish vs the aztec I was specifically talking about combat between the two parties. It could be that disease allowed them to "win the war". But without the advantage of guns and steel the spanish probably would have gotten fubared after the first battle or two. The aztec had more than enough troops to simply suffocate them by wei

44 Replies 22,769 Views

So I was thinking about equipment breakage. There are varying degrees to which you can implement such a system. The first is to have no equipment breakage at all, the second is no equipment breakage outside of combat and so on. Having to deal with the weapons of your troops rusting away is far more attention to detail than players need or want. And even if we wanted that level of realism we could not get there in a single leap. -- So whats the advantage of equipment breaking?

44 Replies 22,769 Views

I once read in the news about a woman who had falled asleep in her bed and woke up later standing in the parking lot of a supermarket while loading groceries into her car.

49 Replies 168,991 Views

Its even more annoying once I remembered all of those places where free move would have helped. Greh. The weapons were a pain to figure out as well. The lava/magma/plasma whatever cannons confused me for the longest time until I realized how they worked. I don't remember using missiles more than once in the campaign. Unless you launch like 10 of them at once the enemy point defence can swat them down like flies. They always struck me as somewhat useless.

22 Replies 106,644 Views

If you want to case in point the lack of tutorial, I beat the game without any knowledge of that. And some time later I also read a walkthrough of the game which made no mention of that and all navigation was done with in-game waypoints. And I was hardly stumbling in the dark, I remember points where I was charging and targetting weapons manually.

22 Replies 106,644 Views

Nexus was awesome but the tutorial was brutal on newcomers. The biggest thing that throws people off is that you have no way to control the flight path of your ships. The ONLY way to move ships around is to get them to move towards waypoints or entities like other ships. You can't simply say "go that way".

22 Replies 106,644 Views

Ooooh. Well in that case... Let me fire up the burners and see what I can come up with by tommorow. Also Pigeon, what I mean by "magic is everything" is that magic can be anything and everything depending on who you ask, much like art in general.

28 Replies 18,700 Views

In a closed setting you also have to be careful to give your magic a cost. If you don't then magic is essentially free. People would have nothing to stop them from solving every problem with magic. Conversly you have no good reason to stop them from using magic when it would do a lot of good.

28 Replies 18,700 Views

Its also relative to who is trying to understand it. What is technology to us can be magic to someone else.

28 Replies 18,700 Views

If I could snap my fingers and produce a fireball, I could probably teach you how to snap your fingers so you could make fireballs as well. The thing is, neither of us know how it works or why. If a third person were to come in and say "oh yeah thats magic, you are pulling in energy from the Ether" well what the hell does that mean? It would still be magic to us. This "magic" works in a predictable fashion, and because of that you can teach someone else to use it. But what keeps it fr

28 Replies 18,700 Views

Sweet. Whenever they remove Tages the game should be well patched, so I will then do whatever it takes to get a fleet of carriers and swarm over my enemies like a school of pihranas, mwahaha.

51 Replies 127,861 Views

As Wintersong said, magic is a system of technology that can not be explained and or understood. If you completetly understand how magic works, the mystique is gone and it becomes just another form of mundane technology.

28 Replies 18,700 Views

Sorry! I use a program called Pidgin for chatting and the internet as a whole has pretty much corrupted my book learned vocabulary. Thats just the way the internet works. [e digicons]:dur:[/e] -- Your completetly right in that development should happen in steps. You can't simply reach for the stars and get there tommorow. But then again, no matter how far you go, you will never get closer to anywhere without a destination in mind. Man would not have walked on the moon if he h

44 Replies 22,769 Views

Thats a good point pidgeon. Back in SMAC the very best developed city tended to be near the center of my empire. These core cities are the only ones who have the industrial power to effectively build units. It was extremely annoying that all of my units pretty much started thier careers as far from the enemy as they could get. With wonders it makes sense to be able to create sub-wonders. All you have to do to balance the system is set a ratio that limits the amount of wonders based on

57 Replies 56,047 Views

Half arsed is right. The console port of Mass Effect was pretty good. The interface was certainly an improvement. Problem is something the newer Nvidia drivers just grabs the game by the spine and breaks it in 20 places. Neither Bioware nor Nvidia seem to be doing anything to fix the problem. And us people on Steam are still missing the DLC.

16 Replies 59,628 Views