Aeon221

Research Trading -- Breakin the Law, Breakin the Law! in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

In both Civ3 and Civ4, the ability to trade for techs was game breakingly powerful. A disciplined and experienced player could maintain a full cash economy focused entirely on military conquest while using threats, conquest, and tech brokering to stay at or near the top of the tech tree. This was bad, and resulted in Firaxis changing what techs could be traded for (from 3 to 4, removing the ability to exchange techs for cash over time and resources), adding a restriction mechani

Reply to Tactical Battles -- How to make them the bestest! in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

[quote]The actual thread posting. Commentary along the lines of only having a few distinct units, in a 4X, that don't work. You'd have nothing to research.[/quote] Perhaps we're having a communication disconnect. I posited initially that, due to technical limitations, there would not be an infinite number of units on screen. And due to the preference for more complex graphical displays in tactical battles, that number of units would inevitably be a subset of the number dis

Reply to Multiple Maps in a Single Session in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Obviously it isn't really all that useful for the main campaign -- but as a blah blah blah anecdotes blah blah blah, I really expect modding to be rather important to, at the least, a significant minority of players. And since the whole goal is to be the hottest modrod on the planet, this is a feature that absolutely must be in, because it's something that literally every other possible contender lacks, despite literally every modder wanting it!

Multiple Maps in a Single Session in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

One of the major sticking points for fantasy and rpg mods in Civ4 is the inability to create multiple maps for dungeons, planes planets and shops that could not be displayed on the overland map. It'd be extremely handy if, in Elemental, it was possible to tie all sorts of maps to one another, in a variety of ways: a daisy chain, overland/dungeons, land/sea/air. It'd also be nice if those off-maps could be randomly generated using scripts that differed from the scri

Reply to Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

[quote]The game already use a "flow" system. You don't stockpile anything, but gold. Not even mana.[/quote] How rude of you to ruin the voyage of discovery for all these fine folks! This was developing into a real page turner! But, since the jig is up, I guess I should mention that just about every turn based game since Civ1 has used a flow model for building and research -- with the obvious exception of that terrible series known as HoMM.

Reply to Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I noticed that several people brought up realism claims in favor of stockpiling (stuff can get stored), so I pulled the same (stuff degrades). For rather obvious reasons, neither is a valid argument in a video game, and several other posters have taken the time to point that out. [quote]This goes both ways. Stockpiling models can be modified to eliminate these concerns too. The problem with this entire discussion is that it's so abstract. This conversation might be a better one to hav

Reply to Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

You folks all realize that un-utilized assets cannot be stored indefinitely, right? On a timescale consisting of years, everything other than stone or metals will decompose in a relatively short number of turns. Furthermore, having resources stock up indefinitely rewards players who do nothing other than hit the end turn button, and penalizes those who are active about using their resources. The lazy should never be rewarded over the "hard working".

Reply to Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

If you check my OP again, you'll note that I viewed increased fragility as a plus rather than a minus. Stockpiling allows players (including the AI) to disassociate their ability to fight from the reality on the ground -- after all, a player who has stockpiled resources for eleventy billion turns (where eleventy billion is any integer greater than zero) is fairly invulnerable to shocks to their resource acquisition network, and thus to raiding. To pull again from Sins of a Solar

Reply to Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

You're assuming that upkeep is linear rather than geometric, that a large empire would have the same average upkeep per unit as a small one, and that efficiency gains through superior placement or technology do not provide sufficient offsets against sprawling empires with less exacting placement. You additionally make the assumption that it is a bad thing for large empires to be rewarded with units/structures otherwise inaccessible to smaller empires, and that land is the sole source

Stockpiling Sucks in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Stockpiling resources in order to build something is never interesting. Never. Not even a little. In games like Pharaoh and Children of the Nile, the essential element of the game is the player waiting for resources to stockpile, on many occasions for a far longer period than the total time necessary to set up the infrastructure necessary to acquire said resources. In other games, such as Sins of a Solar Empire, players specifically manipulate the system of resource stockpiling in order to av

Reply to Tactical Battles -- How to make them the bestest! in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I disagree entirely, and I offer up as examples the Total War series, Armageddon Empires and Magic the Gathering. Strict numbers limits, aided by harsh upkeep costs, represented respectively by money, resources and time to pull a card, do a far superior job of dealing with the problem of size disparity. They also minimize the necessary micromanagement otherwise resulting from large numbers -- both AE and the TW series allow units to be grouped in armies. [quote]Not

Reply to Sid Meier’s 10 rules for game design in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Too bad Sid didn't think to apply some of those commandments to Civ4.

Reply to Channeler Customization: Continued in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Please do have the spreadsheet option as well as the story stuff. Picking RPish attributes is cool the first couple times, but after that I definitely prefer to have all the available information in a single location where I can compare costs and benefits.

Reply to Tactical Battles -- How to make them the bestest! in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Think of a deck of Magic cards. There is a limit of between forty and sixty cards, with a hand size of seven. Meanwhile, there are a functionally infinite number of magic cards. The limitations force good decks to specialize, and require the player to constantly make decisions about how to manage their hand. Rather than restricting the player, the limitations act as a spur to build diversity and general creativity. Consider slot limitations in armies as being similar to

Tactical Battles -- How to make them the bestest! in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Most people on this forum have probably played quite a number of card, video and board games. There are a number of valuable mechanisms we've all seen in these game types that could be used to build a durable and entertaining tactical battle system -- in other words, totally unlike the snorefest of the HoMM games. I'd like to say at the start that several of the games I use as negative examples are very good games, and several of the games I use as positive examples are very bad games

Reply to Relationships should affect the value of trade (and other ideas) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

There's no reason to have provinces over cities in Elemental, and the system works just fine either way. I do agree that legitimacy of rule is a key concept that I hope elemental will explore. I'd also really enjoy having an undercurrent of democratic insurgency. It'd be nice to see the common people fighting for self-determination in the face of their tyrranical magical overlord.

Reply to Relationships should affect the value of trade (and other ideas) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Negotiated peace treaties like that are more of a game balance mechanism than anything. They prevent you from just bulldozing all your enemies in a single blitz -- an all too common strategy in Civ4. As fail as pulling for real world examples is for video game arguments, I'll go for it this time -- it's unlikely that a conqueror could replace all the low level individuals necessary for the day to day running of a territory or city in a warzone, and even less likely that individuals in that te

Reply to Relationships should affect the value of trade (and other ideas) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

In EU, you hold territories you conquer "in fact", rather than "by law." To possess the territories "by law," which allows you to recruit troops and develop the territory, you must negotiate a peace that awards them (or it) to you. EU had hard limits on the number of territories that could be awarded in a treaty, and also required a warscore (basically, the sum total of the value of your victories, defeats, territories captured, territories lost and war exhaustion) at least as high as the val

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else Elemental Forums

I ask you all to hail me, your new vegetarian overlord. Sure, you might have gotten some mildly incriminating data about our worldwide conspiracy. But get this. We pretty much count on the majority of the folks not in on the conspiracy being mind bogglingly stupid. I mean, after all, you aren't scientists. Most of you are folks like the OP, who can barely string two sentences together without hurting himself, his keyboard, or the English language! <p

Relationships should affect the value of trade (and other ideas) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

The current journal mentions checks to see if the relationship is at either a minimum or maximum value for a treaty to be enacted. I noticed that it lacked a check to increase (or decrease) the value of trade based on relationships between states. Positive relationships should impart a positive modifier to trade, and negative relationships should impart a negative modifier. War would, of course, cut off most trade. Real world analogues abound, so I won't bother listing them. <st

Reply to Hinterland in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Since I was a hardcore Starcraft MPer back in the day (where do you think I got this username, eh?) it's not shocking that I think of time as a valuable resource that can be used to force people into making rough decisions. I do really want to push the idea that the population should never ever ever ever ever be a faceless set of numbers whose sole purpose is generating resources. At the very least they should be ready and willing to riot and rebel, or take up arms agai

Hinterland in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Hinterland is a pretty fun little game, check it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterland Now that you're up to date on the what of Hinterland, it's time for the relevance! Elemental is a game about heroing around, conquering and fighting and such. Hinterland is too, but at a much smaller scale, where your blacksmith is also a weekend warrior helping you smack skellingtons around.

Reply to Elemental Ideas. No, really, ideas for elements... in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Iron: It is hefty, and you can smack people with it. Arsenic: Throw it at people and they die! Magnesium: Burns like a motherfuh^h^h^h^npleasant thing. Oxygen: What plants need. Less of. Or something. Anyway at least it is good for people. Helium: Causes people to talk funny. Me, I'd love a game that took a serious peek at the actual elements and thought up creative ways to use them destructively. Or even just a mechanically adept group t

Reply to Economics, and Free Market forces. 'free' buildings in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

As to whether the suggested system is viable in the game, I haven't given it much thought. As previous posters mentioned, I would also like to see a bit less determinism on the part of the player in favor of a more engaging populace -- far too often, games present the populace as an unthinking mob totally at the service of the player, which does a disservice to the people of the time presented, and our own. After all, parliaments and republics have had a major role throughout world history, f

Reply to Sea Dragons in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Dragons are cliche. I vote for something altogether more terrifying, more sinister, and generally more dastardly. The Giant Horned Sea Beaver!