AG3

Reply to FIIIINNNALLLLY! in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

With regards to monsters taking out cities, I just hope it makes sense. By that I mean that the monster attacking should be one capable of actually razing buildings for it to make sense. It looks pretty stupid (and is extremely annoying) if a lone wolf, no matter how hungry and rabid, manages to raze an entire level 5 city. Razing buildings/the city should be limited to human(oid) foes and giant monsters. Huge golems, dragons, you know, big things. Even a civilian population could take

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

There are a few things that bother me about city building. 1. You need to build too many houses early on for the city too really develop, but far less as technology progresses and you get higher capacity housing. Naturally this is just a beta so it'll change, but last night I had a city that got to level 5 (1000 people) with only 2 villas after having researched improved housing a ton of times. My other cities were overflowing with them since I had built tons of them back when all I co

Reply to Tactical Combat discussion continuation in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I'd rather see that the retreating side loses control of their troops as they try to escape (as was mentioned). Some of the escaping troops will be killed by the attacker, others will desert and not return to the army at all, and what's left over after that is still usable afterwards. Of course, retreating is exhausting and should be limited to once per turn (or maybe every other turn), so if you get attacked again on the same turn you fight in a very fatigued state and can't withdraw

Reply to Winter 2010 Q & A with Brad Wardell in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

I refuse to believe someone who is constantly belittling Elemental even before it is out of beta can be affiliated with Stardock. Obviously you must be a fraud [e digicons]:P[/e]

Reply to Small GalCiv II updates? in GalCiv Journals Stardock Forums

At the top of my head: - Giving constructors a command that makes them find and go to the closest starbase they can put a component on, so I don't have to scroll all across the map to find the ones that got new slots after a particular tech was researched. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if they can't do this already, but at least I didn't see it the last time I played... - A buy building (and maybe ship) button on the colony list screen, so that you save a click and som

Reply to Ubisoft is dropping PC DRM but.... in PC Gaming Stardock Forums

Cue someone cracking it or making emulated servers and we're back to stage one with only legitimate customers being negatively affected by this. Joy.

Reply to The importance of optimization in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote] And 64 Mb is ok for Windows 2000, probably for XP too. [/quote] You have a strange definition of "ok", methinks [e digicons]:P[/e] . I had 512 MB ram with WinXp and while it certainly worked, having to use freeware programs to free up as much RAM as possible in between games was a real hassle, not to mention the massive swap file writing to the harddrive whenever I tabbed out of a game. After I installed 1.5GB in that PC, it was like entering he

Reply to The importance of optimization in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Servius" comment="10"] I pray every night that my pentium II, 250megs of ram and my voodoo II video card can run this! [/quote] Can you even run anything past Windows 3.11 with that? [e digicons];P[/e]

Reply to The importance of optimization in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

But if everyone makes super-optimised games that run on lower end systems, how are the computer part manufacturers going to sell all those new and more powerful parts they keep developing? Support your local (?) hardware manufacturers; make your code a bloated inefficient mess today! (really though, I'm just looking for an excuse to spend money I shouldn't be spending on an i7...)

Reply to Elemental: The MUST HAVE 2010 TBS requirements in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote] Crazy magic battles. Rather than the late game being about mopping up, it’ll be about great powers doing insane things with magical spells. World changing things (think Populous).[/quote] This was good about Master of Magic. The longer the game dragged on, the more powerful/overpowered some of the spells, global enchantments and summons you researched got. Eventually you had the (not so) instant win Spell of Mastery which would break any stalemate, but wh

Reply to How to have a civil online community in Everything Else Stardock Forums

Just follow the house rules or get kicked out. It has nothing to do with "freedom of speech" or liberty or growing a thicker skin or... whatever really. When you join a forum, you agree to follow a set of rules and to behave in a civil fashion towards other members. If those rules don't suit you, prepare to find somewhere else to vent your "opinions". I really don't see what's so hard to understand about that. Don't like it? Door's over there.

Reply to Attn. Techies: Is this normal? in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

I've got 11 as well, the biggest one taking 106MB of memory at present. This is on a clean (less than a month old) Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit install. I take it that it's pretty normal. At work we use Vista (bleh), and those computers usually have around 6-8 instances of svchost running at a time, from what I remember.

Reply to Master of Magic video demo in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote]Also opens up new pathways to attack your opponent or hide your strength. It just adds a lot of interesting possibilities.[/quote] Using plane traveling armies to bypass enemy defenses and avoid having to build ships if an ocean was separating you from your enemy was fun... except when the entire army got locked in the other plane because someone cast Planar Seal and you to your dismay discovered you had no disjunction spells researched to remove it... Also, having

Reply to Master of Magic video demo in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Oh wow, I still have the original CD for this, as well as the manual and the spell booklet that came with it. My dad bought it for me while we were in an electronics store many many many years ago. I have no idea how many hours I spent playing this game, but it is most definitely one of my most favorite games ever. All those combinations of spell books and abilities and heroes and oh my. You really felt like a powerful wizard with some of the more overpowered spells. Stream of Life + m

Reply to My god Dragon Age is good in PC Gaming Stardock Forums

Spent over 110 hours on the game since it was released. I'd say it is probably one of the best games of this decade and well worth the cost. Hopefully we'll be seeing some good DLC come out for it too. The story isn't stellar as far as originality goes, but it's good enough, but what really makes the game is the party interaction and the voice acting. This is a game no fan of RPGs should pass up.

Reply to Saving my birthday on Impulse... in Everything Else Stardock Forums

It is utterly retarded though. Last night I was checking out Alpha Protocol on Steam, and it asked me to confirm my birthday. Being sort of on auto-pilot (it was 5 am...), I changed the month to November (which is when my birthday is) instead of the year, which meant I entered November 1 2009 as my date of birth. Steam then kicked up a great big fuss telling me in all caps "Sorry, but you're not permitted to view these materials at this time", and any subsequent attem

Reply to Designing units in Elemental discussion in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I think it kind of depends on how resources are handled in the game. Do you harvest the resource and stockpile it (or the products made from it), or do you simply have it available and use it on demand? Does each city need their own resource for making gear for units from it, or is it empire-wide or regional? The next question is how easy/hard is it to lose that resource? Are resources generally located far from the cities that use them? How likely are you to lose a resource in the fir

Reply to Some kudos to Gas Powered Games in Demigod Journals Stardock Forums

Yes, yes, all software should be 100% bug free on release. Guess what? 0% actually is. Stop harping on about "should've been fixed before release", some things simply can't get fixed before release unless you want to keep the game in beta for several years.

Reply to Bees attack Gamestop. Mr. Wardell, did you do this? :P *link* in Demigod Stardock Forums

I don't believe in coincidences... ;)

Reply to Blame us, not rage quitters in Demigod Stardock Forums

Players who concede should not get favor. If you do this, you will end up in a lot of situations where people will decide a match is not developing favorably from the get go and they decide to "cut their losses" and get out with what favor they can and look for easier prey. Making surrender more legitimate than ragequitting is ok, but it should not reward favor, because it will only encourage it the second winning is unlikely, to the dismay of team members and opponents alike

Reply to Enable Hardware Acceleration in XP in Demigod Technical Support Stardock Forums

That would probably be because there are some games that don't like hardware sound acceleration with on-board sound cards, and thus it gets turned off for compatibility reasons. I've had to do it myself a couple of times, but since I'm using the Windows 7 beta almost exclusively lately, this isn't a problem I've had with Demigod.

Reply to A way to fight piracy other than DRM. in Everything Else Stardock Forums

Actually, it's not always that easy, because it ISN'T necessarily illegal in the country where the server hosting the website is located. That's what the whole Pirate Bay case is about; deciding whether what they are doing (indexing torrent files) is illegal. If it was as easy to do as you make it out to be, it would've been done ages ago :)

Reply to Friends playing Demigod in Demigod Stardock Forums

If one retail store starts selling the game early, then the rest of the stores in the same general area have the choice of either keep honoring the release date and lose a lot of "early" customers to the store who started selling the game early, or break the street date too and compete on equal terms. So this is how it often goes really; one store starts selling early and the rest of the stores nearby soon follow. Gamestop sell their games early quite often, not that it makes it any

Reply to Elemental & Civilization 4 in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I hate to harp on about this matter, but... will I be able to buy Civilization IV from Impulse if I live in Europe? When I tried buying Civilization III it told me that it was North America only (which was the case for all of 2Ks games).

Reply to Stardock's Impulse Nears Millionth User in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

Slightly more on topic though; grats on almost 1 million customers! Hopefully you will get many more :)