1861

Sorry about all the asterisks in my previous post - I cut and pasted it in my iPhone and it caused an odd issue. Please ignore them and I’ll clean them up when I get home and can use a real computer.

1862

I sometimes wish that more games had a changing set of managerial tasks as you progress through the game. Something small-scale that is important (and fun!) when you manage a few villages, like commanding individual workers, feels kind of menial once you have a worldspanning empire.
I know that players hate having choices taken away from them, but maybe this could be coupled with opening up other, new, choices?

Something like if you in Civ only controlled your workers up until you had, say, three cities, then they were all automated. Instead that would be the point when the tech-tree decisions opened up.

I had my hopes up for Spore (didn’t we all?) but we all know how that turned out.

Does anyone know if there are any games like this? I can’t think of any.

1863

Those old spacesim 4x games… Imperium Galactica was it? They had you in charge of a small squadron of ships at first, and later the game opened up wit more research, more ships, bigger stuff to do and so on.

Deuteros did this as well, didnt it?

1864

If I hadn’t wasted $60 on Starcraft 2* I’d have picked up the LE of Elemental. But, alas, me coffers are running low these days so I’ll have to settle for the standard, non-star belly edition… blech. Guess the question now is, do I go for the retail box or download-only? Does the retail box come with anything other than install media? Maybe an actual printed manual, for example?

  • Pre-owned copy of SC2 available for cheap
1865

Wouldn’t you need to give them the Battle.net account as well?

1866

So are there any threads about the different factions, and do the factions play differently? Or do you create your own faction, and what can you customize?

1867

Unfortunately, yes. I did something similar with an MMO (can’t remember which one now) where i had to log into the account, remove my CC info, change the password, change the email address (to the buyer’s email)… a total drag. I suppose I’ll keep SC2 just to hang on to the Battle.net name. It’s my own fault for buying a game I was 99% sure I wasn’t going to enjoy. But it was an impulse buy prompted by coercion by a friend! arg

1868

There’s five races per faction (5 kingdom, 5 empire) as well as the ability to create your own. It’s supposed to be quite extensive, but I don’t believe the race creation tool was available in Beta 4 (I may be wrong, but it wasn’t available via the main menu).

Ah, here we go. Here’s a Dev journal regarding custom factions. although it’s more of a how-to rather than detailed information. The game supports custom factions with their own tech trees, abilities, etc.

1869

“A Dance with Dragoons”. Heh.

1870

Does it have an infinite research time?

1871

Never heard of Deuteros, but yes, the first Imperium Galactica did exactly what you say. I loved it, personally.

1872

That doesn’t… tell me anything.

Is there some preview where it describes the factions/choices you can make when creating your faction. I think the killer thing for me in GalCiv was the just drearily bland races. The interplay between their supposed differences and what you actually did in the game wasn’t near enough to interest me.

Stardock! Make a website for the game that doesn’t suck!

1873

Sorry, Enidigm, it was all I could find. There’s more info out there, but Brad has been very prolific with the dev journals, so there’s a lot to search through.

I think the differences between races in a faction is going to be more along the lines of Civ IV rather than AOW:SM, at least initially. Stardock put in a lot of flexibility, though, for future updates. Brad talked about it a few months ago in a Dev Journal, but I have no idea which one it was in. He mentions the ability to have completely different tech trees and the like for the various factions, and races within a faction. As of now, though, all the Kingdoms share the same tech tree and all the Empires share a different tech tree.

While races typically contain broad bonuses (at least they did in the Betas, there’s no telling if those were final or not), there’s a lot more customization available during game time than a game like Civ IV. Gameplay diverges based on what’s occurring in game. Someone who manages to get access to multiple magic shards and focus on sorcery techs is going to play differently than a Civic/Military empire builder.

If I’m sounding vague I apologize, but the Betas weren’t really representative of that kind of detail/gameplay. While I’ve been in the beta since Beta 1, most of the stuff on the 24th is going to be new to me too. :)

1874

Yes, it sure did. Wow this takes me back…

Deuteros is an old ST/Amiga space game. In the beginning, you can barely make a spaceship going to the Moon and back to Earth. You mine the crap out of the two, so that you can expand the ship & move around the inner planets. Then you explore past the asteriod belt and BOOM you get attacked by aliens. You will then get stuck coming up with the scarce resource to build weapons to zap aliens & slowly take over the outer planets.

Then you reach Plutos…and your jaw drops because there’s a warp gate or something there, and suddenly you can go to anywhere in the universe you want!

I stopped playing here, 'cos I didn’t know what to do next.

This is the only game that would make me find an Atari ST emulator. While I love the Atari 8-bits to death, I don’t really miss the ST.

1875

The fiction novel for Elemental (entitled Elemental: Destiny’s Embers) is ranked at #55 at Amazon, in the strategy guide section. Does this novel have a strategy insert or something shipping with it? I wonder if people know what they’re buying :p

1876

I have to say, I’m glad the deal that would’ve allowed Stardock to call this game Master of Magic 2 fell through.
I’m very cautious about the game after reading some of the impressions about the various betas/alphas, but I do still have hope this might end up a fine game.

I can also see the possibility of another GalCiv, though - don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think GalCiv was horrible or anything, but it had major issues that prevented it from being a proper replacement for MoO, at least for me.

Same with Elemental - they made THE mistake from the X-Com-successor-book-of-game-design, taking several features that worked brilliantly in MoM and changing and/or removing them because they felt they were much better game designers and/or this feature obviously wouldn’t work in a game made today and/or this feature obviously required too much time/energy to be implemented.

I can live with that in a game that’s merely inspired by MoM - like it was easier for me to dismiss those spiritual X-Com sequels because they weren’t TRUE sequels, after all - but if this was MoM2, i’d be a lot less tolerant.

rezaf

1877

Sooo… how about this preloading for preorder customers? :p

1878

Preloading should be happening soon. Early access starts Sunday night or Monday.

1879

Stardock never wanted to call Elemental “Master of Magic 2”. Stardock wanted to make Master of Magic 2, but when the deal fell through, they decided to make a 4x fantasy strategy game of their own instead. But if it hadn’t, they would have tried to make their sequel faithful to the original.

1880

The beta has been turned off for installs in preparation for release. As the other poster said, Sunday/Monday is the target for early access. :)