This past week saw the second anniversary for forums.elementalgame.com, and it made me want to check in with folks who were around during those first couple of seasons, mainly to ask who you miss seeing numerous, regular posts from.

I miss a variety of people. Some of them are still posting a few scraps and others seem to have turned lurker or left entirely. So, to the folks who were around before the betas rolled out, who do you miss reading regularly on these boards?

I'm as interested in...

I appreciate the value of a refit as part of getting ready for release, but the change to a black background for the forums is awful, at least for readability.

The new home page looks sharper and the black is OK there because it isn't a big reading thing. But please, please, please tweak this tweak so we don't have to read white on black forum threads for the game's life cycle.

Thread looked open from My Replies list, but the main lists show the lock icon. Thread itself is definitely locked.

Denryu's done some interesting polls via SurveyMonkey, but I'd like to see some current opinions on a 'simple' question that has been around pretty much since the Elemental boards launched in late '08.

Yes or No: Should having your sovereign die mean the game is over for you?

If you can stand it, please keep your answers to a single word. If you want to argue the question, please start a fresh thread or pick up with one of the old ones related to the question.

My answer is "Yes."

Edi...

Right now, the latest timestamp in the Last Reply column on my My Posts page is from Dec 26, but my bug/gripe on diagonals and another post on item-dropping both have activity since then. Last Reply info looks normal to me in both general browsing and the My Replies page.

The 0.23 patch did not get a kosher instance of the game running on my machine. I can still get going via deleting the FamilyTree file(s) and restoring after the main menu displays. My overall performance seems a bit 'buggier,' although I don't think it's fair to call anything a bug if you've manually mangled your installation.

So, given that it doesn't seem right to try posting 'real' bugs, I'm curious to see what changes other splash->CTD sufferers have seen between 0.22 and 0.23. On the...

In Brad's journal asking what folks think about extending the beta schedule generously, he inlcuded this picture:



The filename is SwampLordPaintingFinal. The big thing in the painting looks to me like a very plausible candidate for Geoff the Slug's (single?) parent.

The beta schedule post also includes a (deceptively?) simple question about the number of players in a game, and already there are renewed posts about how 'empty' a 64-bit map would be without tens and tens of major faction...

I've just been involved in some minor threadjacking in the July FAQ and even though I kept aiding and abetting digression over there, I actually think it might be worth trying a new thread to host some discussion of fantasy fiction in general and what titles folks might most like to see as dog-eared copies on dev bookshelves. I'm also nearly as interested in reading about authors, titles, or series that folks might wish had never been in an Elemental dev's hands.

J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the R...

I wanted to hunt up the old wilderness thread for a reference link, and I knew that Geoff the Slug was mentioned in it, so I used the local search box and entered "Geoff the Slug" (quotes included). The search only returned two hits, both for NTJedi's terrain types thread.

But when I ran the search from Google proper and added the site:forums.elementalgame.com delimiter, I got four hits for four different threads, including the one I wanted to find.

That seems a little broken to me, but I'...

Two questions:

1) Did/do you ever consistently misspell a civ name?

2) What's your favorite regular misspelling you see around the forums?

My replies:

1) Typing-wise, I *still* seem to want the Altarians to be from Altair (a real star name). The Drengin were also Dregnin to me for too long.

2) My favorite civ to play is the Thalans, and I get a regular chuckle when folks make them extra-alien by typing Thalian.

There's a very long thread page in Elemental Ideas. When I try to view it in FireFox, the last bits of the last post are cut off and there is no reply box nor final page boilerplate (other than the (c) block, which looks to be outside the table that contains the posts & reply box).

When I view the page in Opera, I see all the text of the last post, and the page bottom I'd expect to see without being signed in.

Has this particular argument found some character or line limit for thread p...

I'm pretty sure that the devs are balancing their interest in our random carrying-on about a way-unfinished fantasy TBS game with wanting to know what we think about specific design decisions. So, in some ways, it makes sense to me that we know pretty much nothing about how essence and mana might work in the game. But I've already long lost track of the number of posts (my own and others) that made me wonder "Is this just way, way beyond consideration for Elemental?"

If you think that sooner ...

One of the bonuses listed in the UI for choosing a Neutral alignment via Xeno Ethics is "A bonus is applied to ground invasions against all non-neutral alignments." I have two more questions, amazingly belated given how long I've been playing.

1. Does this by chance apply when you defend as well as when you attack?

2. Does 'non-neutral alignments' mean everyone who hasn't gotten Xeno Ethics and chosen Neutral or just the other Xeno Ethics folks who did not choose Neutral?

Yes, I'm that ...

In a thread at the GC2 forums, ozo said "And please tell me Elemental doesn't require that monstrous program and that it can be patched without it...."

I wish I could have given him a soothing reply, but I have accepted that if I want my Elemental, I have to (at least eventually) accept Impulse. I don't like it either, but I've been turned into the most pathetic sort of Frogboy worshipper ever by the nice big post today over at the Elemental forum.

So, I'll almost certainly end up stomachi...

Elsewhere, Mormegil said:

Life and Death Magic are drawn from the same source in Elemental, but how they are used, and what spells are available to you are determined by your sovereign nature. If you are "Good" you get Life magic spells, if you are "evil" you get death magic spells.

First, I just have to channel my inner toddler and want more, more, more, now, now, now.

My immediate practical question is where are the neutrals? From my aesthetic biases, life magic should be fundamentall...