Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Ive known some complicated games that did decent with AI by making the AI moddable by the players. I think Dom3 (ok maybe Dom4) should have gone that route.

I think that any game developer should recognize the areas they are leaving light, and make those areas moddable.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

dom3....the best TBS fantasy game.
what do you think about mod fantasy Fall from heaven 2 ? there's some likeness with elemental?

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

I played a lot FFH2, and it suffers from the civ4 combat system : you make a ubber stack of doom with most of your units in it, and try to attack first, as fights are solved during your turn, the ennemy can't retaliate before his turn. It's the level 0 of tactics/strategy, but all the rest is quite nice if you enjoy civ4.
I don't know elemental, but the fights can't be that bad...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Loved GalCiv2.

Frankly I don't get all the "MOO2 was so much better!" posts. It was a great game back in the day but I sense a lot of serial historical game romanticizing going on... (what?! on a Dom3 message board?!? OMG!)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Hhhmmm not sure if that's a fair comment to be honest. I happily admit to having enjoyed older games much more than any new ones myself, but think I made some valid points about one of the major shortcoming of Gal Civ II (and there are several IMO) which others seem to agree with. So just saying we only prefer MoO over Gal Civ II because we are all old romantics isn't really a solid base to argue a point from. Even if we are actually all old romantics :)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Hey V, good to see you around. Hope you hop in a a game or two! :) FWIW I dug up MOO2 this week and killed a day and half on it. Assault shuttle and nuetron blasters! Engine boosters and inertial stabalizers with shield capacitors! Tractor beams, emission guidance systems, plasma webs...still fun. :)

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

Baalz: Unlikely I'll be joining any games... I really just check back every few months just to see if there is ever plans for Dominions 4. :rolleyes:

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

There's no question that Stardock is hard at work on Elemental, he talks about it all the time in the Demigod forums.

Brad has had his hands FULL with problems on Demigod. It's a great action-oriented team mp game but it has had nothing but problems with online play and that's fatal for a team-oriented online mp game, so the game's had a rough launch. In a recent post he stated that most of the online problems are behind him now (I and many others would dispute this, but don't get me started) and as a result he is moving over to focus on Elemental, so it appears that the new game is going to get more attention now.

The reason, of course, for the emphasis on hosted servers is all these problems he's having with Demigod where players are wholly unable to figure out how to handle port forwarding, NAT, proxying, and all ther other complexities that are essentially required to understard in order to play online. It took me over a month before I could get my configuration to work online ...

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

PBEM doesn't require any such networking knowledge and is classical for TBS games. Granted, they should be designed with PBEM in mind. I posted early in elemental development a suggestion to allow PBEM. I think the players liked it (it got positive responses) but it was totally ignored by the devs. A shame if you ask me.

Re: OT: Stardocks Fantasy TBS
 

This is a shame, I heard nothing but good things about you from other players. Perhaps you'll come back to dom3 and try something fresh at some point (new gametype, nations etc)