diamondspider

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Slainangel52" comment="110" I was referring to the need to make the battles super short overall for the sake of keeping you from getting bored waiting for other people to finish. I don't want the battles simplified to the point that they only take a couple minutes to finish because to me that lessens the fun of the game as a whole. [/quote] I agree with this. On the other hand, a robust morale mechanic can make all but the most balanced battles resolve fairly quickly. <

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Slainangel52" comment="110"]If you've got a 30 second timer then a battle needs to be able to be played out well in that 30 second timing.[/quote] 1) Don't forget that the way chess clocks work is that your timer only counts down during your own turn... there are 2 different times kept, so you can think on the other person's time also. 2) As stated, in large battles the time allocated to both parties can be scaled up very easily. I've found extremely complex b

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

...also note that we all know that autoresolve ALWAYS sucks. I've never seen one work even close to well, so that just isn't a solution for anyone beyond the most casual forms of play.

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Wintersong" comment="108"] Elemental's main focus is single player. Repeated like many many times by Frogboy. He also said about doing a good multiplayer or not bothering with it if not being done well. Which has more priority of those both statements? I'd vote for the third: compromise.[/quote] I agree... since they have chosen to include it, they should to it well... Doing it halfway isn't going to many anyone happy with it. As he pointed out, there IS a substantia

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Slainangel52" comment="106"]Hooray for oversimplification and watering down of systems in the name of tolerable multiplayer. I'd rather see multiplayer only be autoresolve if the cost for having it is the destruction of single player battle enjoyment.[/quote] Does a chess clock water chess down? Answer: no. Brad makes good points about why Gal Civ was not and should not have had MP. One problem is that it's hard to team up when you are on different sides of a galaxy. <p

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="lswallie" comment="101"] ... Seems like a lot of time and dev resources went into this auto-resolved/3min feature.Also to meet a 3min goal I am assuming strategic options and complexity in tactical battles had to be removed to meet such a time limit. So I must ask. Why we need tactical battles? I am thinking of HoMM here. Yes some skirmishes were over in mere minutes but some could go on to 5-10min? Hopefully the auto resolve feature is poor and a player would never want

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I'm not really liking that the source of Empire power is death. Individualism vs. Statism is an interesting paradox to explore, but putting death on one side and life on this other is... odd, to say the least. I don't mind the life vs. death part, but trying to color those who are empowered by death as less than evil seems less than well thought out.

Reply to Elemental: Beta 3 High Level Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Get script error when trying to edit my prior post. Wanted to edit "c) resistances or vulnerabilities to ..."

Reply to Elemental: Beta 3 High Level Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Grove12345" comment="43"] didnt expect such a quick response to this request. Really this was a big deal for me, glad to see that it was put in the game in just a few weeks.[/quote] I agree... very important! <span style="font-family: "Verdana&qu

Reply to Sunday morning random thoughts in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

My feeling on using the pure Magic path is: too similar to Warfare path. Why? Because to get experience I need to kill stuff, and to kill stuff I need to build an army. Then, to build an army my choice is to wait for mana regen and spell cooldowns with magic, or wait for money/supplies/iron for troops. The end result is a very similar army, with little differentiation. While I think summoning is ok, differentiating the troops would be very nice. Generally, I feel what is needed

Reply to Brad’s June Elemental flame thread in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I've been playing this new beta and can't for the life of me get a Dungeonmaster. It seems a lof of the Adventure tree is based on recruiting specialty NPCs, like Assassins, Heroes and such... I've yet to figure out how to access these... anyone do this? I hate to say it, but this version of the beta is a lot less capable of my providing feedback on that the last one. The magic is somewhat testable, but by the time a city or two is build, my essense is so shot, and it is so hard to lev

Reply to Brad’s June Elemental flame thread in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

...I can't seem to get post editing working here, so to add to post 117: I noticed that the Int stat is woven in via formula into magic spells... perhaps this approach could be use for the other stats. Of course that would require e.g. combat move abilities to plug Str in to; Con could be used formulaicly in elemental resistance, etc. I particularly like abilities that have related formulas using more than 1 stat (see Fallout 1-2 for details).

Reply to Brad’s June Elemental flame thread in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Hound" comment="93"]ITEM #5 DETAILS AND EQUIPPINGConcerning the details, it still feels like there is much needless complication in them. In Sovereign creation, you assign points into these RPG DnD stats, but you can't even see them in the details. Furthermore, each stat seems to only affect one secondary stat. STR affects attack, DEX defense etc. If the RPG stats only affect one thing surely they are unnecessary. We should be putting points directly into Attack, Defense etc.

Reply to My Level 4 town in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Magnnus" comment="56"]I really don't like the new city building, and feel that this patch is a huge step backwards (sorry). [/quote] You do make one important point that I certainly agree with. If, and because we don't know yet it really is IF, there aren't enough buildings on the other trees to give reason to fill the city for those paths, multiple gardens do have the benefit of not requiring high civics to get the needed food. Then again, there may be spells,

Reply to My Level 4 town in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="John_Hughes" comment="52"]With it available so early, an extra 25%(?) build time boost doesn't really matter at that time. Pop. growth (prestige) and food are the main limiters then anyways. [/quote] 25% build time might not seem like much, and it's true that if they cut the number of buildings down without increasing build times, this building just got weakened. However, if you build one of these fairly early in a city, and save, 25% of the maybe 100 t

Reply to My Level 4 town in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I agree that until all the trees are open, we can't really tell much about balance. If we do find that, at that point, we are forced into clone cities and having to always start with lots of civics in order to get to other stuff, that will be a problem.

Reply to My Level 4 town in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Tried out 2a... awesome! Almost having fun now ;) Only comment is to make sure that the starting resources are settable... I sort of hate having all those supplies and metal. Lots of imbalance I can see in the king builder too. Some of the weaknesses are too good a deal, others are a lousy deal. Seems like if it takes a whole level to get +1 in a stat that spending points on stats early is pretty tempting. +1 move being only 10 gold with a low level tech also makes spending these preci

Reply to Elemental Beta 2-A Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I'm not against a small amount of inherent defense, but it should be small. As it is now, even a limited military is hard to build, so if I'm investing in that, I don't want a big city of farmers to cancel that advantage.

Reply to BigDownload’s Elemental Interview with Brad Wardell in Elemental News Stardock Forums

The more I see consoles and even most PC games going towards very shallow game play (FPS games, the shallowest genre I know of, seems all the rage) the more I agree that there is a growing market for complex strategy games, including turn based games. I've always loved these kind of games, but in the rush to appeal to the masses, I've noticed them declining a bit over the past several years. At the same time, newer gamers are riding up the ladder towards wanting more sophisticated prod

Reply to Elemental Beta 2-A Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I agree that making finding food resources important to growth is dangerous. Any feature that gives a large advantage to starting luck is one that will turn me off. I found that using the current system made it unwise to create more than 3-4 large cities. That's because growing them to be big enough to benefit from the more efficient building is expensive... they also are not at all easy to hold! Troops are expensive and slow to create. They also die quickly. What is true is tha

Reply to Elemental Beta 2: Player Input #1 in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Great game folks! I've been playing these kind of games regularly since about 1987 and this looks like it is on the track to being my all time favorite. I could list tons of minor issues, but I have confidence those will be hammered out. I do have two big issues that I'm worrked won't be addressed.... mostly because other Stardock games haven't addressed them too well, for my taste. 1) Random maps are essential, but without a certain amount of starting balance, they can lead to

Reply to Interested in Multiplayer Beta Testing? in WOM BETA Builds Elemental Forums

" Yes I intend to test under Beta 2" - diamondspider (need beta account)