It is important to me as a player that you also place quite a bit of focus on creating additional content for the game - not just mechanics. Races that are unique, instead of carbon copies, would be a start. And no, I definitely WOULDN'T count campaign maps into this, unless they're significantly different from sandbox and last more than 1-2 hours.
I agree with this.
What is needed is a way to respond to an attack (ala Magic the Gathering instants). This is something we're looking at and we think would add to the fun.
And this, that sounds like a great idea. Although you would have to limit the scope of when these instants could be used to prevent tedium/cheesing.
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="44" id="2782881"] For marketing reasons we can't go into great detail on what's in the expansions. The bullet points are just examples of what we are doing.
[/quote]
This is understandable too, but it might be helpful if you said it in the original post, because people take what you say as fact. You're the CEO after all.
However, in time, it became untenable because we couldn't cap any of this because, at the time, the game engine wasn't as flexible as it is today. So users ended up making 1000 gold per turn and 1000 research per turn. When I'm making AI and game mechanics, I work with what I've got and thought I had found a satisfactory work around for the limitations -- only 1 of these buildings per city. Of course, that didn't work because players would just build multiple cities. So then we made cities have an administrative cost. But then it just slowed down the game so we started putting in maint. cost on some buildings but not on the early ones (like merchants). But that didn't work because as long as you can get something for nothing (a merchant in v1.0) there's an incentive to crank out lots of cities which corrupts the balance.
Now, fast forward to now. Now it's relatively easy to add new types of resources and I can get in the concept of specialists which are essentially your population -- every 10th citizen can be a specialist which you can then be used to have a merchant (instead of using food) or a study (instead of it costing gold) and so on. Right now, the ONLY resource I have to work with that doesn't "store" per turn is food which is too limiting. As a result, you end up using food, materials, metal, and lots of other resources in weird ways to try to achieve balance.
Analysis like this makes me feel like my money is in good hands.
And last but not least,
Unless you're charging $30 for these, they're patches, not expansions.
I still expect two free $30 expansions...[anger]
I agree with this to some extent. I don't necessarily expect you to give me $60 worth of free stuff in addition to all the other work you're having to do to fix the game. I can identify with ebonstone's worry, however, because the expansions do seem like they'll be a bit small in scope, but without further details it's impossible to really say at this point. I'm not sure how you can produce a full expansion in 2 months, though, even a $20 one.
I would like to eventually see Elemental get as much content as possible, though, just like GC2 did, so I would be pretty happy about either a very expanded 2nd expansion, or a 3rd expansion, even if I had to pay for them. If, say, expansion 2 became a $40 expansion and I got it half off instead of free, or something. Or if the first 2 expansions stay free and there's a third expansion for $40 in a year and a half.
edit: my first quote is all jacked up, it should be Heavenfall post 38, not frogboy.
