keithLamothe

Idea Threshing: Building units from other Factions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

This came up on the general forum and seemed worth batting around here in "Ideas": Initial Problem: if a player gains control of a city populated by another faction, can they build the units of that other faction? Solution 1: yes, no restrictions (e.g. MoM) - con: leads to endgames being very similar as big players get every race Solution 2: no, they may only build units of their starting faction (e.g. Dom3) - con: it's a very rigid lock-in (if that'

Reply to Keep Wilderness - No city polluted worlds in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Thanks very much for the info, BoogieBac, that sounds like a hybrid approach from the "limited number of valid settlement sites" approach from Kohan 2 (that's just where I encountered it), but with the nice touch of allowing the player to tradeoff for more sites.

Reply to Resources - About cities in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Good ideas. I'll try to summarize and respond: 1) Prevent Massive City Spam - I don't know what they're doing about this, but having a setting that controls how far away from an existing city a new city has to be would help. Or have "settlement sites" that are the only places a new city can be built, but I'm not too fond of that one. 2) Prevent every city from having everything - They're doing something pretty interesting about this; from https://fo

Reply to Wanted: Fezzelwick's Flying Fortress of Doom in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I'm all for the conversion of uncomfortable amounts of kinetic energy into explosive force. The object can be large, or just travelling at a very unsafe speed, or both.

Reply to The sky above the clouds in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Yea, the MoM conjunctions had very minimal graphical impact on the game (your mana income display would have the word "conjunction" in the appropriate magic color). They could range from negligable impact on the game to giving a player a nearly unbeatable head-start against wizards of other colors. Doubling all income from your nodes and halving income from nodes of others can get pretty important ;) But typically that wasn't the impact.

Reply to Spell Conjured Perminant Units like in MoM in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Most fantastic creatures had a mana cost per turn (Zombies had no upkeep cost). A summoned hero had normal gold upkeep costs as if you had found them normally. Fantastic creatures had a number of differences from normal units: - didn't gain experience - didn't reduce unrest in cities (no police functions) - could be banished by some spells including the Great Unsummoning that would try to banish every single fantastic unit in the entire game. Higher

Reply to Other planes (that don't cause MoM-brand problems) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Yes, each scenario may or may not have additional planes, and those additional planes might be very different from scenario to scenario. The question is "what is the range of possibility for a scenario's planes?" And yea, I'd be a bit surprised if we didn't see the "Elemental" forces of the world take a fairly noticeable role.

Reply to Other planes (that don't cause MoM-brand problems) in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

One thing I'd like to see made possible (at least for modding) is a plane with extremely dangerous NPCs, lairs, dungeons and whatnot that the players would be ill-advised to even make contact with until they had really killer armies. Would be fun to go around busting lairs populated with insanely powerful stuff beyond the ken of the normal world. Would also be cool if said plane-of-NPCs-of-Doom could send invasions into the "real" world if provoked by the wrong (o

Reply to Wanted: Fezzelwick's Flying Fortress of Doom in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Flying mountain... Move over opponent capital... Neglect to pay upkeep cost on flying enchantment... :)

Reply to Elemental Suggestions/Ideas in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

"Now you must live with your choice and adapt to the consequences" You mean I can't just reload? ;) More seriously, I'm really in favor of the system where the amount of "picks" put toward a given spell tree affects how many spells of the various rarities are in your "research book" and available to research. If you really want a specific spell, you need to take enough of that magic type to get all the spells of that rarity. If you leave a gap, the missing spells s

Idea Threshing: Persistence between Campaign missions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Some devs mentioned this today on the irc chat, so I thought to discuss it here in more depth. Not sure how to format it, but here goes. Initial Problem: In a multi-mission campaign, how is the player's effort in an earlier mission reflected in a later mission? Traditional Solution (in GC2, at least): no persistence of any in-game resource between missions, generally just story progression Alternate Solution 1: have a sequence of missions take place on a

Reply to Micro managering in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

An indirect management system is very interesting. It also provides a game mechanic skeleton to build up a more immersive interface where the mayors, viceroys, generals, etc are all distinct characters to be interacted with, with their own personalities and agendas. However such a system (even without said character personalities) is quite complex to implement and tune for fun. Also, this is a fork in the road for the design of a 4x game. If you go with indir

Reply to PBEM in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I'm very much in favor of this, as it allows much larger player count games than can realistically happen if everyone has to be online at the same time.

Thanks, and suggestions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Esteemed Ladies and Gentlemen at Stardock, First, thanks so very much for taking on this project. I like Sci-Fi TBS but Fantasy settings have so much more potential for me. MoM is great, but current technology allows for something truly special. You have quite a challenge ahead of you, and I trust that Stardock is up to it if anyone is. Second, thanks for asking our input. I don't know where to start because I can see so little of the conceptual a

Reply to [Bug] Custom Candidates Not Receiving Party Platform on Issues in TPM Support PolMach Forums

By the way, worst to worst you can edit your candidate's issue values manually by editing the xml file, but that is a bit of a pain and of course allows you to cheat with massive values if you're so inclined. Glad to hear the fixes are done, thanks so much for responding promptly.

Reply to PM2008: Share your strategies in TPM Strategies PolMach Forums

I've had a fair bit of success with a custom candidate with: - max initial money to get a good base of money-making hq's up (plus enough left over for at least a 3-point-per-turn clout producer) - zero comeliness and intelligence, I just avoid the tv show appearances altogether; I may have to revise this at higher difficulties - max charisma because I give speeches constantly to build awareness, change issue priority, and build political capital - Right now I'm

Reply to In PM 2008, how can you spend more than 100 pts on the issues? in Political Machine PolMach Forums

By the way, you can manually edit a candidate's issue values, the default candidates are found in the game directory, the custom ones in your user directory, for example: C:\Documents and Settings\keith.lamothe\My Documents\My Games\PolMachine2008\Candidates\KeithLaMothe.candidatexml Vista users would find a somewhat different structure. For my single custom candidate, the file looks like this (after editing, but all I changed was numbers) : (note, I had

Reply to Space Rangers 2 Reloaded/Reboot/v2.0 in Space Rangers 2 Stardock Forums

The d3dx9_31.dll issue only prevents planetary battles, but that is a problem still. My fix was to take the version I had in my original SR2 directory (d3dx9_37.dll, I think) and rename it to d3dx9_31.dll; kind of a hack for backwards compatibility, but it's working quite well.

Reply to Space Rangers 2 Reloaded/Reboot/v2.0 in Space Rangers 2 Stardock Forums

The people with the rights to distribute the expansion in the US may not be the same people with the rights to distribute the expansion in the UK. In other words, Cinemaware (the US folks) were ok with digital distribution of the expansion, but 1C (the UK folks) were not. Stardock can't make them be ok with it, so it's not Stardock's fault. Just a guess, though.

Reply to Space Rangers 2 Reloaded/Reboot/v2.0 in Space Rangers 2 Stardock Forums

odaharry, I'm not sure they've made it available through SDC yet, but I've gotten it to download through Impulse just fine.

Reply to Space Rangers 2 Reloaded/Reboot/v2.0 in Space Rangers 2 Stardock Forums

Just the expansion. For reference, the original game was about 1.2 GB.

Reply to Problem with the Library in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

lol, sorry. Then let me try this: "you entered too much text into one of the form fields when submitting the mod"

Reply to Still on Schedule? in Political Machine Stardock Forums

I've emailed support@stardock.com about it, and I figure I'm not the only one ;) They'll have it fixed soon, I'm sure. By the way, the official announcement that TPM2008 is released is the top story here: http://www.impulsedriven.com/news.asp (story itself: http://www.impulsedriven.com/newsitem.asp?id=1060) So the silence is over :)

Reply to Still on Schedule? in Political Machine Stardock Forums

CariElf, Midnight releases would be a real pain... The game does appear to be available now, but when I try to register TPM2008 in Impulse I get this error: "Your account is expired. (ref: 103)" I don't think it's a problem with my account in general, as I just registered and installed the Space Rangers 2: Reboot expansion through Impulse and it worked just fine. Should I send something to support about this? Thanks, Keith

Reply to Space Rangers 2 Reloaded/Reboot/v2.0 in Space Rangers 2 Stardock Forums

Alligator02, I got a serial number by purchasing the game here: http://totalgaming.stardock.com/games/?id=sr2x (if you want to use tokens) You can also get it here using the new Impulse system: http://www.impulsedriven.com/browsecatalog.asp (if you want to use Impulse; no token purchases here)