[quote who="Frogboy" reply="2" id="1937531"]Until you've built up your charisma/diplomacy skills, best to stay the heck away from a dragon.[/quote] After 30 odd years of negotiations.... "Very well manling, you words sway me. I shall consider your offer of alliance. But first you must do for me a single task." "What do you require ancient one?" "Find me a girlfriend" [e digicons]8C[/e]
So where did we leave off? Ah yes, you just finished casting a very powerful spell. But thanks to my sense of humor and lazyness the spell description and name were not very helpful. So to get a better idea of what this does you skip the useless spell description and turn to the page that details what the spell does in terms of game mechanics. Unfortunatly due to the aformentioned lazyness I didn't fill this section out either! The enemy channeler can sense that a huge amount of ma
[quote who="Luckmann" reply="21" id="1938111"]When I research "HaxxOr Weapon 18" I want it to under all circumstances (except, arguably, expense/cost) be better than "HaxxOr Weapon 17" or "HaxxOr Weapon 15". Some would argue that the way it works in GalCiv2 is "intricate" or "advance", but when I have to look up weapon efficiency on a chart; my fun ends right there and then.[/quote] If you implemented everything I talked about here into a game, there is no question that the data will
Thats not to say that powerful magic couldn't make a city rise out of the ground. If not a city then a tower or fort.
Just think about it for a second. What is the path of logistics needed to arm a single soldier with a longsword? Well first of course you need the metal, then you need to forge it into a sword, then put it in a sheath so the soldier doesn't have to carry it all day, and only then can you give it to the soldier who marches off to battle. In reverse you must gather up fallen weapons and bring them home, this requires some sort of transport. Each soldier in your army can carry a small ex
Anti-logistics. Picking up a sword and bringing it home works just like bringing a sword from home to a fight.
If I have time I'm going to try making an army of space marines, just to see if I can.
Elemental Forums
3 words, rule of cool.
So when we left off we had a small group of elite human swordsmen staring down a group of battered inexperienced hammerorcs. The enemy channeler is starting to use his powers to strengthen his force. After a lightning shower some wolves appeared on the battlefield. The first thing you notice about them is that the group of wolves and the group of orcs are seperate units even though they have combined into one unit of mounted infantry. Mousing over the wolves results in a tooltip that
Something similar to my standing Order 31? I think a mix of both would be perfect. The whole point of automation is to take over from us to handle tasks that are no longer fun. There are situations where the computer could take over completetly. For example you could have campaigns or scenarios that are entirely focused on one of the 4 Xs. Its still important to have an economy in a war focused scenario but a good AI could take over and let the player give his all on the war front which can b
If you try to use player interaction to improve the behavious of AI opponents then that wouldn't work. The only way to truly test the AI is to give it total control and observe how successful it is based on the results of its own descisions. If it is acting "stupid" then you need to give it access to more and or better information so that it can make better descisions. If you have any hand in the process whatsoever then the end result can only be in essense a stupid version of you. You are mo
Progress! I now have an outline in my mind for the third "half". I must admit I thought this "gamer thesis" would only take me two posts to write out. But as Tolkien once said, the tale grew in the telling, and you guys are awesome for carrying it this far. I can only describe some of my previous discussions as trying to clear a minefield with a baseball bat. Before I continue with the main weave I want to catch up on a few loose threads I didn't have time for. [quote who="kei
[quote who="Spartan" reply="10" id="1935969"]If there is going to be a topographical movement system then there must be some kind of stamina subsystem in place in order to prevent endless chase downs. Moreover I also think that if a retreating unit drops below 10% strength it should auto disband. Additionally that calls into question effects on movement due to weather systems.[/quote] Rome Total war worked a bit like this. Units got tired if you made them run too much and this would m
Aw man that sucks. I have a hard drive that died out of the blue after making very loud noises. Wen't from working fine to instant dead in about 2 seconds. It still spins but before I can RMA it I have to recover anything I can. So I bought another hard drive and its insanely noisy, so that one is being RMAd right now. Its a pain.
Dreamers unite! Mwahahaha.
3 words. Dire sky sharks.
Depends on what you mean by simple. I really don't like the idea of all infantry being pigeonholed into a speed of one map tile per turn. Its okay to abstract the mechanics under the hood but they have to have a little complexity to begin with. Lets say your lightly armed scouts had a speed of 2-6. 1 is normal marching speed. 2 is about jogging speed. 6 for infantry is an all out sprint. 2-6 means that your scouts can maintain a speed of 2 without getting tired. 6 is the maximum speed
Weight is balanced by speed. But weight has its advantages. Even if they don't have spears, heavy infantry are resistant to cavalry. To understand why just run into a waist high concrete barrier at full tilt.
Yeah exactly. You know its a flail, it looks like a flail, works like a flail and hurts like a flail. It is not simply a picture of a flail with the number 10 beside it. Simple things can convey this to the player. Idle animations are a good one. Troops with nothing to do and no enemy in sight will do things like stretch and take practice swings with thier weapons. Flailmen standing in formation are spaced far apart, when they take practice swings they cover a lot of ground. More tellin
Hmm interesting. Its especially important that we don't have units that outrun other units because one unit has a speed of 2 and the pursuing unit has a speed of 1. Impossible chases between units with difference in speed of 5% are also annoying.
Well you could sum that up as "impaired vision", the unit in question would have a bleeding eye symbol above them to indicate the problem. It would also apply if they got sand in thier eyes or something like that. Direct X 10 is capable of rendering "god rays" and you might have less of a top down perspective that allows you to see the burning sun in the distance. Graphics tech keeps rolling on and on so something like this happening isn't as unlikely as it sounds.
Very nice indeed. That solves all of the concerns I had when I first tried Impulse months ago.
[quote who="keithLamothe" reply="5" id="1934763"] - The computations involved have to "scale well" with large battles, i.e. cpu/memory performance. As long as you aren't building a Reality Simulator (TM) this is probably fine, but it can get out of control.[/quote] Scalability is the key point to all of this. I could explain the minutia behind each and every figure in every unit in my mock battle up top. But because the combat involves groups of people, these details become less
Standing orders could also apply to unit production. For example: Order 31 is as follows: "each town must raise and maintain a single unit of spearmen not to exceed 10% of the total population. Up to half of the soldiers may be militia if there are not enough workers to fill the current production quota. They must be armed with equipment up to the current standard, if the resources required are not immediatly available then the next best local option will be taken until supplies can b
Aren't you forgetting that the grand vizier in MoM was horrible? If you turned him on, all of your towns will act just like the rest of the computer controlled towns. If I could get him to stick to buildings that would have been perfect. But leaving him on always resulted in huge amounts of redundant troops. I could garrison a town with 6 regiments of elite longbowmen and he would still build basic cavalry instead of a shrine. Along with "template" governors we should be able to custo
