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Reply to Wonder Building in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Unlike in 1999, developers these days have the balls to tweak things like wonders after release, through patches. If a weather paradigm or something equivalent in power makes it into Elemental and people start kicking up a shit about it on the forums, it will be nerfed, just like, for instance, cristo redentor in Civ4. Based on this fact I think that the "fixed wonders are a bad idea because they can end up overpowered" argument is weak. As for how the tech system influences wonder ba

Reply to How do you feel about potentially "game unbalancing" random events? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Hate 'em. Thankfully GC2 let you turn them off.

Reply to Valkyria Chronicles and others in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

There's good guys who are pure as newly-fallen snow and bad guys who eat babies regularly for all 3 meals of the day. The difference from normal is that the bad guys score some victories every now and then, instead of looking threatening at the start then being punching bags for the heroes to smack around. They feel threatening, as opponed to incompetent scrubs trhat leave you wondering how the rest of the world needs your help to do anything against them.

Reply to Campaings, experience, and relative balance in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Haven't played AoW, but in HoMM the problem was that the enemy armies and their growth stayed more or less the same. Make the enemy grunt units more numerous (plowing aside hordes of these bastards that used to be a challenge can be satisfying as hell), replace them with just upper tier ones, strip your hero of his usual resources and force him to fight alone or with limited, unreplenishable support, or some combo of the three. These all seem like good solutions.

Reply to Specific vs Focused Technology Progression in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I guess the fundamental disgreement we have is that you've played 4x games that you've enjoyed, but where you think there's an always optimal, all-trumping tech path. I haven't. I might have been unclear here: Unless the game has design flaws that ruin it no matter how research is handled, I don't ever think I'm debilitating myself by changing up my research orders from game to game. I go along different paths not for the sole purpose of trying to squeeze out replayability, but to rea

Reply to Specific vs Focused Technology Progression in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

[quote]I would agree with you if we lived in an ideal world where computer games were perfectly balanced But that sad truth is that in every single game I've ever played that uses research, no matter how well-designed or how much I enjoyed the game, I always end up finding a number of technologies that are good enough that most of the time, I spend most of my research getting to them. I'm not talking about a single crazy overpowered technology that essentially breaks the game. I'm talking abo

Reply to PC Game Piracy Examined in PC Gaming Elemental Forums

I swear, piracy-related topics on indie game forums like Stardock's are the absolute fucking dregs of the internet. 420chan > these topics Bareback exchange > these topics Stormfront > these topics

Reply to Specific vs Focused Technology Progression in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

If, under a specific research system, you find that replayability suffers because you keep picking the same tech path, that's your own damn fault for never mixing it up and you shouldn't bitch about how it's the game's fault for offering less replay value. If your argument is "but but one specific path is clearly optimal", the following counterarguments apply: 1) In a game where there are a lot of viable ways to win or even ways to fight wars, how can there even BE an "always

Reply to Retreat option in battle in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote]But, my infantry should be able to try to occupy the enemy long enough for my heavy cavalry to get away, too. Retreating should consist of more than just pushing a button - it should be integrated into the battle system so that your choices and orders determine the outcome of a retreat.[/quote] If your infantry is no match for the enemy cavalry, why should that tactic do you any good? The cavalry would logically just beat the dog shit out of the infantry in front of them then r

Reply to Idea: new approach to balancing difficulty level and AI in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

The first version of this post was too hostile. You just described rubberband AI, an ooooold idea that you don't need to write so much text explaining - any experienced gamer knows what it is. I hate it because it punishes the player for doing well, and makes the incredibly counterintuitive move of gaming the system to make yourself look weak while preparing some unstoppable burst a viable, even top-tier, strategy. Traditional difficulty levels should be the default. Perhaps s

Reply to Retreat option in battle in War of Magic Elemental Forums

How about this: Something can only retreat if it moves faster than the opposing force on the strategic map. So: If retreat is handled as "the whole army has to retreat", the option is only avaliable to whichever side has greater strategic speed (neither side, in case of a tie.) If individual units can retreat, the ones which could outrun the enemy force on the map can do it.Everyone else has to stay. So say a human army has (these are arbitrary strategic speed figures, no idea

Reply to Rarity of spells in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I don't konw if I'm reading this right, are there people in here actually defending blind research, and saying they used that option in SMAC? If so, keep the spellbooks predicatble just to spite them. As for the issue of randomized spellbooks itself, it depends how well stardock balances the spells with each other. Ideally, randomized spellbooks wouldn't hurt at all, because there will be enough good, viable spells that I won't mind losing some, and a lack of clearly superior

Reply to The mechanics of warfare: Armour in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I prefer variance to be much smaller than that. 1d10 by itself is bigger than I'd like, even without factoring stuff like critical hits, critical misses, and no-cap throws. Figures like 1d6+2 sit better with me. I don't want a chance, however small, of a scrub grunt scoring a lucky hit on an elite soldier and one shotting him. To me, that defeats the point of a tactical combat system: to give you control over how the battle plays out, giving you an advantage if you're skilled or a dis

Reply to Gameplay Types in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

[quote]1. Diminishment - Game starts with palyers immensely powerful, but they tend to diminish in power over time. This could be accomplished nicely with finite resources, or dwindling resource rates, the permanent expenditure of power, etc.[/quote] Elemental will have random events, right? I figure, a great way to do diminishment would be to give you a nice, big empire and crank the frequency of bad random events way up through the roof. Maybe they start extremely common, like with

Reply to The mechanics of warfare: Armour in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Pity that so few things in FfH2 have damage of any given element, rendering such weaknesses and strengths largely moot. Anyway. I don't want armor classifications such as light, heavy, plate, etc. Armors should be differentiable from other armors based on their stats alone. A chainmail might have good protection vs. slash and thrust damage types, shit protection vs. crushing blows, average encumbrance and production cost (at least for the period of the game before enchanted items beco

Reply to Anyone else worried about combat? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

For those who haven't seen the pic (I had to look it up): Anywho, I've always been a huge fan of real-time-with-pause battles where you control everything. The Infinity Engine games got me hooked on that stuff, and the word that elemental will be using something similar to that is what got me interested in Elemental in the first pla

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Fuck, why is anyone still even arguing over the graphics? It's such a minor point, graphical quality is so unimportant in a game that's fun to play. If you think D3's gameplay is good, you shouldn't give a damn how it looks, let alone how other people think it looks, unless you're a shallow braindead graphics whore yourself (just one who happens to have a hard-on for SPRITES instead of LENS FLARE) I devoted 2 sentences to pointing out that they suck in my original post, and later a br

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote]PS. if you don't appreciate the graphics of Dominions you've never tried your hand at sprite art; KO's work is craftsmanship, most graphics, no matter how impressive, are just uninspired dross made to distract the attention of Ritalin-addled zombies.[/quote] Hard to make =/= good

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote]You're basicly arguing that Dominions 3 would be better, if it wasn't Dominions 3.[/quote] Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to tell the topic creator. That, and "Elemental won't be dominions 3. Instead, it'll be good." I'm not trying to convince you that SP D3 is bad. I'm trying to convince someone who has never played D3 that SP D3 is bad. And I'm doing that by pointing out the serious problems I have with a fundamental design cornerstone that makes D3, D3.

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="Luckmann" reply="18" id="1944361"]Exploration, expansion, exploition or extermination has nothing to do with 4x.[/quote] ...that's what 4x STANDS for. Google 4x game and you'll see tons of confirmations. [quote who="Luckmann" reply="18" id="1944361"] The problem is that you wanted cinnamon cake, and then for some reason went out and bought a blueberry muffin. It's somewhat like complaining about Red Alert 3 lacking the option to auto-resolve, or Neverwinter N

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

.[quote who="Luckmann" reply="10" id="1944338"] Dominions 3 isn't 4x.. [/quote] It has exploration, expansion, exploting and extermination. Not that your stupid semantical quibble has anything to do with anything. [quote who="Luckmann" reply="10" id="1944338"] This is like saying that "everything ever done for the NES looks like shit" , just because the graphics are ancient. [/quote] They kind of do. But like I said, I can ignore this if

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I stand corrected on the "no telling your guys who to attack" bit. You can order them to attack certain classes of units (infantry, archery, cavalry) or enemies at a certain distance (closest, rearmost). Still, grunts can only be given a single order. They're locked into their targeting for the whole battle, unless they were ordered to attack a specific unit class and that class gets completely wiped out. It's only the leaders of your armies that get 5 scripts. And of course, you have

Reply to How is this game like/unlike Dominions 3: The Awakening? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Dominions 3 kinda sucks, at least if you're into singleplayer, and I hate multiplayer 4x gaming so I couldn't tell you how that is. There's a big wealth of different civs, all with a large variety of tools at their disposal, but they all go to one end: conquering everyone else. No builder victory conditions in D3. So to make that formula work, you need good combat. D3 doesn't have good combat. Battles between armies play out automatically, in battles where every unit is displayed on a

Reply to Anyone else think its a mistake to let the game end when your wizard dies? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

It's too early to say whether or not this is a good idea because we don't know how hard it is to kill an avatar All I can say for sure is that the whole "OOPS THE RNG DECIDED THAT THE MOOK WHO ATTACKED YOUR AVATAR WITH 1% ODDS OF SUCCESS GETS TO WIN TODAY, HOW ABOUT THAT" thing won't be a concern in tactical battles where you control everything your side does. If you have your avatar pick a fight with an enemy he seriously outclasses and you control the battle yourself, you'll win 100

Reply to Re-thinking 4X economics in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Will it be possible to upgrade the equipment of units? Say I make a unit that takes a while to train, and he has crappy bronze equipment because I don't have anything better to outfit him with. He beats some people up and gains experience from it. Then, I get a new metal, or a new kind of mount, or both, something like that. Will I be able to keep him useful by giving him these new toys? This is important because it sounds like it will be hard to slap together an emergency def