Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Sombre? This thread has kind of revived my interest in 4X games, and you seem to have good taste in games. I'm curious if you have any recommendations for games that *DO* have what you call "soul." Dwarf Fortress?

-Max

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Civilization IV (especially its Beyond the Sword expansion and Fall From Heaven 2 mod) is the gold standard for 4x games right now. What Final Fantasy is to jRPGs, what Half Life is to FPS, and what Halo is to homophobes Civ is to the 4X genre. Thats not to say its everything for everybody, but it is the best place to begin if you have an interest in that genre.

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

If you want to play Civ 4 I'd advice to jump directly to the Fall from Heaven 2 mod. It's very deep and very dark. The manual is a piece of art, and the intro has a background music that makes you almost tremble in fear, it's so thrilling.
Together with DotA for WC3 and Counterstrike for Halflife, it's probably the best mod ever made for a game (Though ME2's Third Age mod also seems to get a 'big' one...).

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

I think a game with "soul" is a game for which it is prohibitively difficult to make a good AI. :)

Consider Dominions and FfH2. They're both great games, with a huge variety units, spells, effects, world spells, races, and flavor text. In particular, all of these little bits interact with each other in interesting and complex ways, and if you bring the wrong set of powers to a battle, you will be completely wiped out (e.g. a niefel giant vs light infantry, or a group of fire mages vs an unprepared niefel giant). Each race plays very differently, and it can feel like an entirely different game switching from EA Arco to LA Ermor, or from the Ljosalfar to the Infernals in FfH2.

Now consider Gal Civ. In terms of gameplay, races are only distinguished by the modifiers they get to certain operations (e.g. +20% missile attack, or +10% population growth). The technologies you can research change these modifiers slightly, and only rarely introduce actual new abilities. Combat barely changes through out the game, and the 3 different types of attacks might as well be labeled A, B, and C for all the color and unique properties that they have. So when you research the great new weapon at the end of the tech tree, your attack bonus for weapon A goes from 140% to 160%. Yay. This simplicity and boringness is nice though if you are trying to write an AI, since all you have to do is maximize the product of all the various modifiers. You don't have to worry about teleporting enslave squads and SC equipment and Horrors and miasma dominion and poison resistance and unrest causing rituals and so on.

If a game is filled with meaningful, interesting, and complex decisions, and the player constantly has to think, then I would say it has soul. If the player's decisions can be easily automated, then the game doesn't have soul.

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

I found a Q&A on Gamespot, after reading it, all interest i had in this game vanished like a puff of smoke. It was all i could do to finish reading the artical. i'd say calling it soulless is being generous, but thats just me.

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

no soul...

sombre you took the words out of my mouth. that perfectly describes my sentiments regarding most of what stardock has put out.

EDIT and on the what has soul/what is soul conversation:

alpha centauri: diversity in army units (not galciv's rock paper scissors). story associated with each faction, and with the game world in general which unfolded as game progressed. the cut scenes when gaining new technology were also very cute. (the galciv robot is completely and utterly stupid).

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Well, I respect your judgments on Elemental. I haven't had a chance to play it myself, but we all like Dominions, and so far according to the people who have played the game, Elemental is soulless and terrible, so I will just keep my money.

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Mindlessly judgemental of a game that is not nearly finished yet. Meh. What are you, some sort of reverse shill?

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Oh wait, these guys have not played Elemental? Then I find their reviews to be soulless and lacking depth.

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Hmm..

Most of the information is found in the dev journals, just off the main page.

http://www.elementalgame.com/journals.asp

Omnirizon, units should be pretty diverse. The unit model is that you manufacture equipment, and equip and train people to use that equipment, rather than having generic units or RPS. It should be quite a lot different from Dominions, but I can see some definite similarities to kitting up thugs.

Here's one of the dev journal entries related to that.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/329473

Doesn't sound very much like either Galciv, does it?

Here's another.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/354240

All I know is that I'm going to try my best to kick the @#$% out of it in the beta period. Some of you should do the same.. although it will definately not be the least bit fun until at least the next entry period, which my guess will be January.

Do what you like. Not everyone liked Galciv much.