dalamb

Reply to Possible to upgrade units in the field? What to do with defunct units? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="greggbert" reply="15" id="2753322"]Forward scouts! Spread our your older obsolete units across your frontier and use them to push your view as far into enemy and friendly territory as you can![/quote]I should have thought of this; I play a fair bit of Civ IV, and spreading out cheap warriors to "fogbust" is a common tactic there.

Reply to When to expect 1.07? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

More specifically, "posting this game sucks in lots of threads" is spam, and thus sucks.

Reply to Why wouldn't you pick all the spellbooks? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

So, a summary of what I think people said (along with my commentary/questions) : Having all the element books is great because they each provide a powerful summonable creature. (sounds good to me but has to be balanced against whatever else you could do with the points; is it enough by itself if all the other criticisms are true?) Having more than one element book is useless because the spells are all duplicates of each other. (well, there's #1 to

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="dalamb" reply="128" id="2749659"]I begin to think that researching Lost Bounty very, very early is tremendously important, so you place more cities near food. Especially since my experiment suggests food bounty can pop up underneath existing improvements. [/quote]I later discovered that this is a very bad idea, since Lost Bounty only shows new resources inside your current territory -- if you take over more later, you'll never see new resources there.

Reply to Possible to upgrade units in the field? What to do with defunct units? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I, too, would really like to see units merging into squads. With regard to disbanding units -- yeah, you get citizens back, but you've lost all those precious gildar, which so far I never have enough of. With regard to upgrading -- it'd have to have a cost: perhaps the difference in gold and metal from the original to the new? And perhaps costing some training time?

Reply to Why wouldn't you pick all the spellbooks? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I just wanted to make sure I understood a couple of things people said: There's something wrong with shards not working (outside of some mods, apparently)? what specifically is wrong? not increasing essence and appropriate spell damage like they're supposed to? If so I can save 100xN guildar and not bother building near them -- until it's fixed! If I understand correctly, each spell book has some sort of summoned creature, and each caster can only summon o

Reply to Understanding City Improvements, Resource Nodes and the Usable Tile Limit; Also Influence and Town Halls! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I did a brief experiement. Settled capital on turn 2 adjacent to a farm and with a 1-tile gap from a lost library. Border popped on turn 14, so that looks like 12 turns. Was able to start the LL and it definitely didn't appear on the city build queue. So, the advice about how to use the 2 separate queues is really valuable in the early game, when getting going faster (presumably) makes the most difference. Warning: if you're trying this sort of experiment, make

Reply to Understanding City Improvements, Resource Nodes and the Usable Tile Limit; Also Influence and Town Halls! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Ooh, amateur game designer -- with emphasis on "amateur". Not sure I can manage my way out of a wet paper bag, though. A few detailed questions based on a 2nd reading:[quote]Usable Space: A measurement of how much space a city has to build with. You can find this in the city detail screen.[/quote]If you mean the "Open Tiles" number on the detail screen, they actually mean "square" -- but it's misleading. I currently have a level 3 city with 28 tiles occupied and 27 little

Reply to XML Files Roadmap in WOM Mods Elemental Forums

Has anyone figured out how to extract the tech tree from the XML files? I poked around with English/TechTree_Amarian.xml, and am puzzled. From my limited familiarity with XML I'd have expected some form of nested tags to display the tree, such as Civics Specialization_Amarian Administration_Amarian Entertainment_Amarian

Reply to Understanding City Improvements, Resource Nodes and the Usable Tile Limit; Also Influence and Town Halls! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

In reflecting on my own reaction to the game and to people's comments in various threads, it seems to me that our various reactions can be fit into three categories that we need to think about differently: Things that are clearly "broken" by some reasonably objective criteria. For example, the stuff about resources flipping from one city that has the relevant improvements to one that doesn't violates "

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="phazonfreak" reply="134" id="2750638"]As for the elemental ones, fivecoins said that you obtain them by researching the Master spellbook, I haven't had the time to check it out myself. If it's true, then it might be sensible to stick to the one preferred elemental book and get the other ones later in the game.[/quote]I don't see the elementals in the Hiergamenon. Arcane Research > Arcane Mastery > Advanced Spellbooks gives you the Enchantment book; Master Spells "allow

Reply to Understanding City Improvements, Resource Nodes and the Usable Tile Limit; Also Influence and Town Halls! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

CreeDakota: I think most of your suggestions make sense, though I haven't quite been able to think them through, but I'm not so sure about #1. I think having a resource inside your city walls is quite valuable; I've had resources outside be destroyed because I didn't have the gildar to build troops strong enough to protect them and didn't notice the nearby monsters in time to teleport an emergency stack to do so. Something that valuable ought to have a cost, I think. &nbsp

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I seem to have lots of questions the last couple of days! If a minor faction city has only a resource you can't use, e.g. ogre village if you're Kingdom, what is the value of capturing it, since you can't improve it? Just the minor increase in influence radius? Strategically it might prevent a nearby Empire faction from making use of it, I suppose, but if they're far away that might not be an issue. Does anyone have any advice on when it makes sense to lea

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Right -- I forgot about Nature's Bounty. However, if you have N high-food cities, the first N "nature's bounties" still go best in those cities rather than in no-food cities, don't they? So with 1 food city I could have used an Enchant slot for it, one for another city, leaving room for a familiar, arcane weaponry, and arcane armour (or, later, additional summoned creatures). I begin to think Imbue Champion might be worth it just for the extra Enchant slots on the champion

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I took a closer look at my food production after reading this thread and performed an experiment. Most of my cities produced -1 or -2 food because of huts, and my farm city produced +7.2, for a total of +1. I built caravans connecting two of the cities to the food one. What I didn't understand before was that trade adds a percentage to food produced in the city -- it doesn't add food directly. So the two cities producing 0 base food got no benefit from it directly but

Reply to Elemental FAQ for beginners - please ask your questions here in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I think these are more about strategy than about mechanics, so I hope they belong here: In the early game (before researching the more-food-resources Adventure tech) I've usually had only once city with any food resource nearby. Is that the only one in which it makes sense to build food-improving resources? or can granaries and irrigation help cities without such a resource? Each city can only build one caravan, so if I want to improve a food-poor city I apparen