Dr Franknfurter

Reply to Leaking essence in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

It's semantics if leaking of essence above your normal maximum power, in proportional to your essence and therefore level and strength was replaced with emitting heat, or in this case... almost magical radiation exposure... it's still proportional to your sov strength, of which level is a poor indicator but essence is a good one. Either way it: neither has too use up effective essence (so again no tax, no loss of anything) nor would it stop it functioning in the same way, but the pool... Radi

Reply to Leaking essence in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I don't know about all the different directions... initially my thoughts were "uncontrolled power". It's power above the maximum you can control. To suggest that your sov has grown so powerful after a battle that he's doing things without realising. Also, the pool would be on top of max essence, that wouldn't change, you couldn't die from it, nor would it lessen anything else you can already do, nothing would be any different from how things are at the moment, except you could use thi

Leaking essence in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

From Cerevox: [quote]Not leakage like loseing it, leakage like regular people leak heat. Random stray radiation coming off him. Only if your wife spends lots of time wrapped around you, she should absorb a lot of it. Actually, it would be kinda cool if that applied to anywhere the channeler spent a lot of time or units that spent time near him. Just being near the channeler a lot should make a unit stronger.[/quote] I'm just thinking of how that could be applied in game as a c

Reply to Neutral or just Faking It in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I suppose one mechanism for making wandering monsters would be if your normal summons could become neutral when their upkeep runs out. You could manipulate it, move it to a neutral location first, then cancel it's upkeep. But you can't gain any exp from killing them, or a reduced amount, to prevent spamming cheap ones for a mana->exp conversion. It's interesting, but there would still be the odd problem of balance and costs... perhaps one option would be to flag them as 'confused' an

Reply to Demon studies in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I don't *think* the devs have written anything off in elemental. Personally I think a lot of this can be resolved to your choice of words. If there are giant spiders. In real life with magical spiders (otherwise impossible due to the rate limiting factors to size in invertebrates being limb joint resource allocation at atmospheric oxygen concentrations) They may be called demons by some, magical, or simply strange and interesting mutants. In elemental they would be a non-sentient race... whic

Demon studies in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Wall of text... eventually about demons: I was just playing x-com apocalypse, one of my favourite old games. Still great: tactical combat, turn based or real time, variable sized overland map, an economy of sorts, diplomacy, rival factions, multiple maps, rpg-like exp gain, research, manufacture and base building...etc One thing that struck me, I really like researching toxic weapons, how you have to learn about each alien first before you're able to develop a weapon against t

Reply to WMD Spells in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

On the topic of mutually assured destruction... how about a diplomacy option to ban a spell, everyone has to 'bank' at least one spell. In the event of breaking the agreement everyone starts firing? So maybe to make it more certain that none will cast armageddon you bank 5 rain of fire spells... or something... just something a little more interesting than 'diplomacy hit' to have everyone start firing on you. Or a general ban on area spells, everyone chooses their favourite area spell

Reply to Zoom Levels and Pretty Graphics in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I suppose one point here is that penalties for playing at a particular zoom level should be reduced. I mean that in sins of a solar empire, if you play at a high magnification you can focus fire, judge damage better and use abilities in more interesting ways. However, you can only ever be at one place at any time, and therefore become blind to any event outside that gravity well. (notifications exist, but are very annoying to the point of uselessness... you will have dozens of 'an allies plan

Reply to Bidding and Pooling in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Very well thought out ideas, I hope they're implimented in some form. I'm not sure about a few things, would bidding allow you to easily mess with the AIs in the game? set them all against each other for a small amount of gold while you protect yourself? Either that or they'd be weighted against you and you'd just find it annoying how each event would go badly for you, irrelivant of your actions. I do like the mega events in Sword of the stars, I'd have liked a similar system

Reply to Spells & Magic in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Concerning spells, research and your focus... how about combining elements from every area. You research spell areas slowly (based on mana diverted to research or whatever), unlocking higher tier spells and giving you spell points to spend on which spells you want. So after 5 rounds/tiers of fire research you have 500 points and access to spells that require 2 shards, so you can buy cheap cantrips requiring no shards, level 2 and 3 requiring 1 shard and 4 and 5 requiring 2 shards.

Reply to Synergy and efficiency as routes to specialisation in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I can see that, if you get decreasing returns to synergy you should have decreasing costs as well for 'off-topic' builds. The only thing is that you could maintain your bonus indefinately by pairing buildings that are synergistic with constructions that are 'off-topic'. A flat rate for 'off-topic' buildings ensures that generalists don't have bonuses. I suppose if the bonus reduces every 'n' tiles or every 8 buildings you could allow a free 'off-topic' build. So with 500 wizards tower

Synergy and efficiency as routes to specialisation in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

How do you make towns special and different? If the bonus for each building is always the same there are limitations. So, in conquest of the new world they had a mechanic where each production building gained an efficiency bonus for farms/iron mines equal to the number of tiles of that type, +n% per tile for the first few tiles, n/2% for the next few etc. capping at 40% bonus. The interesting point was that non-synergistic buildings (wood vs iron production) would decrease the bonus by n%.</p

Reply to Archievements ??? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

double post...

Reply to Archievements ??? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

That's what I was thinking with the 'defeated the necromancer' black cape option. Or holy wings or maybe special tracks, auras or anything that makes you look more impressive while providing no or next to no bonus. I would like some things providing a bonus, but for it not to be unbalanced the penalty should be greater. so if it's a bonus to global fire spells the AI should notice the greater value of fire spells or should have free spells or a free shard.

Starting options and difficulty in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Starting options in gal civ2 have settings for event frequency and major event. Sins has quickstart, settings for different rates of income/culture spread/research speed etc. So, how about elemental has some of those, whichever are thought best and some new ones? such as: "starting major event" enables a random event in the first turn or on turn 5 or 10. Playing with a major "production disabled for 100 turns" event would be very different or "a Necromancer has risen" type eve

Reply to Archievements ??? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

you mean the interludes? I liked them, although found they were distinctly functional... caused lots of planet growth. If you mean something else then I found it easy to forget. Still, I love the extra sense of acomplishment with achievements. I wouldn't want any or many achievement to make the game easier I think everyone is agreed on that. Making the game harder however, isn't as objectionable. Still I suppose bragging rights should always be the main thing. Either that or presented

Reply to Archievements ??? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

(I think he's refering to Demigod... not quite stardock but the shared forums makes it easy to mistake GPG for stardock)

Reply to Archievements ??? in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

This should probably be in the unique cities post, but for achievements ala demigod... I would much rather if achievements earned in game could allow you to play with a 'gimped' character against even harder enemies. If you've earned many victories the game can't be too hard and require you getting a large bonus, although you should be able to capture the bonuses or half the benefit should be to you. Picture this: Normal mode unlocked through playing tutorial Hard unlocked from a

Reply to An idea for unique cities in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Just want to add encouragement. I'd love for the characteristics of a city to be varied and not all set on founding. Also, having base and derived stats, or other seperations could be interesting. I suppose you could make it as complicated as you want for calculating population growth or production as long as you don't add new things. Say if you had your races default values for health/education/craftsmanship/magical aptitude/belief in you/etc. of 11/13/11/11/11/etc and have them leve

Reply to Some thoughts about micromanagement in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

small comment but master of magic had bugged spells and growth formula's, alot of the spells didn't work and those that did weren't as intended. Sometimes trying to reduce an enemy city's pop would cause a pop explosion. Still I did like being able to do things one tile at a time, but 'cleanup' spells and 'corrupting' spells would be nice to be able to leave on automatic repeat cast... or similar. I'm not sure where I stand on micro/macro... I think you need a significant amount of mi

Reply to Regions/areas and victory conditions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I've never played dominions3... so i'm not sure how close the idea is. Although if you can see bits that worked in another game you could probably say what you liked or didn't like about it based on your experience? Edit: Just glanced at the strategy wiki of scales/god design in dominions 3 "Every province has a set of scales that measures how the land is influenced by divine might", quite similar in some ways to what I was thinking. Although I wasn't thinking of using it as a faction

Reply to Regions/areas and victory conditions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Just thinking about a way of implimenting that... how about a few variables hidden at the start for weather? it could begin at any value, -100 or less for iceage, +100 or more for burning deserts with any changes in this resulting in changes over time to the landscape and regions. I did like the warming start to ffh2 although resources being destroyed or swapped, rather than revealed was a little annoying... although interesting. I would prefer if the changes were visual mainly and more gradu

Reply to Regions/areas and victory conditions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I suppose what I was picturing first was something akin to Conquest of the new world, where "gold vein" was an object on the map at the centre of a circular mask of boosted gold/mineral production. The same with fertile land. You had a decreasing bonus with distance. So in reality if placing a single farm you'd place it directly on top of it. Which would be quite similar to elemental now, with a mask of 1x1. In conquest outside the mask/region was normal production, elemental would be 0 or mi

Regions/areas and victory conditions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I was thinking about different resources and wondered about how big they can be, a single tile, 2x2 tiles, how about if some resources are presented as regions, say a 5x20 area or larger in shapes defined by the contours of the environment. Breaking up the world into magic rich areas, fertile grounds or more interesting ideas (wasteland, toxic, plague ridden, draining, corrupt). The difference would be that you'd either gain a benefit/penalty simply by controlling that region or would gain ac

Reply to Customized spell ideas in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I was just thinking more about what you'd be getting out of this system. I think it'd be a rock-paper-scissors situation (with some twists) Even with identical fire magic sov's Going full power with a hero or two and a small army should beat another small army with some elite troops (firebolts could pick them off or your lancelot with a flaming horse could do it), but lose to a large army from sheer force of numbers. (also should be on equal footing with another going