I'm writing this with the new.kindle fire hdx. 

I've seen reviews praising it. It is very light. It's even lighter than the iPad Air. But I'm not liking it.

First, the keyboard hi is terrible. As I type this, there is an additional row of commands right under the keyboard (which you can hide but they shouldn't be there in the first.place, it's.just bad UI.

The auto correct.is.even.more.obnoxious than ios. For.example.if I type ios it wants to,change it to it's. It wants.to change hdx to hex. And only the manual selection of the word.I typed from its suggestions will fix it.  

The keyboard layout is similarly bad. The spacebar is skinny with the period button right next.to the spacebar. The delete key is also down next.to the spacebar. Needless to say, typing is.not.fun.

The screen itself is pretty but like all android based tablets there.is, for.me, a noticeable delay between when I touch the screen and it reacting. It is probably.around u nd a 100's delay but it's.noticeable.

Where it is nice is, of course, as a kindle. I am firmly entrenched in Amazon's ecosystem. So it.does work well for reading. I prefer my Kindle Paperwhite for most reading but anything with illustrations works.better here.

Bottom line, as a tablet, very mediocre. As a Amazon ecosystem consumption device, quite.nice.

Windows 8 comes with the new Start screen which is, especially if you have a tablet, a good way for people to organize their apps.  What it doesn’t come with, which is a bit surprising, is a quick launch bar (like iOS and Android have).  Launch8 addresses it.

If you have Windows8, definitely give it a try.

-> www.stardock.com/products/launch8

Civilization IV designer, Soren Johnson has launched a new studio called Mohawk Games.

• Press Release
• Website

It’s been founded by Soren Johnson, Dorian Newcomb and myself.  Soren, as CEO comes up with what games we’re going to make and is also the creative director for the company.  Dorian, the art director of Civilization V is in charge of how the games will look and feel.  And me? As President, my job is to make sure Soren and Dorian have the necessary resources necessary to get the job done.

The first project is code-named Mars which will be using Oxide’s recently announced Nitrous 3D engine. We won’t have anything we can publicly show for awhile but I think strategy gamers are going to be very pleased with it.

As an industry, we’re entering an exciting new age. With retail finally officially dead (as far as PC games are concerned) and with 64-bit, multi-core game development finally having arrived, we are finally free to create some amazing, innovative strategy games that are also commercially viable.

During the retail age, people bought their games at the store and if the game wasn’t at the store, it wasn’t commercially viable.  As a result, game developers were either “indies” making very small games or they were huge (>$20 million), AAA titles that were increasingly “safe bets” in order to get onto store shelves. 

Now that PC gamers are comfortable going to Steam, you can create exciting and new types of games. These games can take a bit of a risk because there’s infinite shelf space for well crafted games.  And with a reasonable budget (still millions but nothing like $20 million) combined with 64-bit (for handling gorgeous scenes that were getting very hard to do in a 32-bit strategy game since they have to hold all the world in memory at once) we can have games that are both innovative and visually stunning.

That’s Mohawk’s mission. To create awesome core strategy games for this new age of gaming.  We’re in for some exciting times!

I have finished extracting he honey!  First 3 people to respond here will get some! (must be in USA, can't ship honey overseas).

I'm typing this on my iPad Air.  So far, big thumbs up.

i had an iPad 3 which is what I used most morning s and evenings to post and respond here.  The air has two major improvements over the 3.  First, it's noticeably lighter which makes holding it much easier.  Second, they shrunk the sides of it which makes it easier to reach the keyboard.  I'm able to yep probably around 50 word per minute on the Air versus maybe 30 on the iPad 3.

if you have an older iPad, I recommend it. I actually chose this over the iPad mini retina and am pleased with that choice.

My old friend Steven Den Beste wrote this awhile back:

Let's talk about the Third Amendment for a moment. Remember that one? Probably not; in this day and age it's something of a Constitutional joke. "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."

Remember now? The Bill of Rights which passed Congress had twelve clauses, and ten of them were almost immediately ratified by the states. Amendment Three was one of those. Why did they bother?

It's because memory of the Revolution was still current. It was only a few years after the Revolution succeeded, remember, and memory of British tyranny was still fresh. The British had done this, and the citizens of the nascent United States wanted to make sure their new government didn't.

The reason the colonies revolted was because the King of England was viewed as having become a tyrant. Having fought a bloody war to become free of his tyranny, the founders wanted to make sure the new government they created did not in turn become tyranny. Trading one tyrant for another wasn't what they had in mind. So the Constitution contains layers of mechanisms to try to prevent tyranny. And the last and best of these is the Second Amendment.

Remember how the shooting revolution began? The Battles of Lexington and Concord. Rebels in the Boston area had been stockpiling weapons, powder, and ammunition near Concord MA, and the British got wind of it and sent an armed column out from Boston to seize the stockpile. Superb espionage by rebel forces detected this, and word spread through the countryside for the militia (remember that word; it's important) which formed up and fought against the British force. The main battle was fought at Lexington MA, which repelled the British and caused them to retreat again back to Boston.

The "militia" was all able bodied men in the area, who were to show up with their own rifles (or muskets). Weapons of that era varied quite a lot, and of course they were muzzle-loaded using black powder. It took a lot of training to use such a weapon effectively (especially rifles, which were much more difficult to load than muskets) and that's why it was desireable that the men have their own weapons. It was assumed they already knew how to use them.

The earliest battles of the revolution were fought by such militia formations. Another was the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was only later that the Revolutionary Army was formed, and began training at Valley Forge.

Having just won their revolution, in which privately owned firearms played such a critical role, and mindful of the potential for their new government to potentially become tyrannical, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to make sure that the people of the United States would have the means to rise in revolt once again, should it become necessary.

That's what it's really about. It's not about hunting weapons; it's not about the "National Guard" (which isn't a militia). It's about everyday law-abiding citizens having the ability to resist a tyrannical government. And with that deterrent in place, we've managed 230 years without our government descending into tyranny (though it's come close).

 

I’m on as Draginol.

My love this game for so many reasons.  If you’re in it, friend me, it’s so much better when you are playing with friends.

For me, being “into” guns really adds to the enjoyment.  I am playing mostly as an engineer and I’ve upgraded to the ACW-R (Adaptive Combat Rifle) which, it turns out, I have in “real life” (though in real life it’s semi-automatic of course).  But it’s really cool to play the game with a weapon you actually own.

The game also has the CZ-75 pistol. I have that in real life but haven’t made it up the latter in the game yet to have it.

If you have BF4, look me up! Let’s play!

So I've continued to look into why it seems like the AI is able to get around monsters easier than humans.

I know what the code says but I also know what I see with my own eyes.  

I've finally reached a conclusion as to why it seems like AI players don't get attacked by monsters as much -- it's all in the movement.

Elemental games are based on a simulatenous move system. This is a hold-over from War of Magic which was a multiplayer game.  

The attacks, however, occur based on hit detection. That is, a unit moves into a tile, it sees if there is a unit there and if so, a hit occurs and that is worked out.

If human beings were fast enough, they could avoid getting attacked by monsters simply by moving their unit before the monster moves into that tile. As a practical reality, humans aren't fast enough.  But you know who are? Computer players.  

Picture this scenario:

for i = 1 to number_of_players

MoveUnitsforPlayer(i)

Where the monster player is the last player to move.

So what happens is that a monster will target say a pioneer on turn 50.  On turn 51, the AI player moves its unit and the monster moves to the tile the AI unit was in (missing it). This is exacerbated when they are off screen since movement is instant when there's nothing to animate.

That said, I can assure you that the monsters do attack cities just as often as human players. Statistically, it's the same amount and I have added code so that the AI will occasionally when when one of its cities gets destroyed by monsters to better communicate that yea, the AI has a real problem with monsters city-wise.

But unit wise, it's going to take some thought on how to do this.  Most of the easy solutions would result in late game turns taking much longer (everyone moving at once is great).

I may, just to be a bastard, reverse the order of moving so that the monsters move first.

I brought in frames of honey and extracted the honey from them. I then took the depleted frames back outside and soon discovered that the bees had followed me home.

Deadly Foes update released!

v1.4

Stardock is proud to announce the release of v1.4 of Legendary Heroes, the expansion to Fallen Enchantress. Version 1.4 adds dozens of significant enhancements to the game including but not limited to:

• The original Fallen Enchantress scenario has been added
• A host of new summoning spells
• Enhanced AI for handling the new summoning spells
• Significant improvements to late-game performance for multi-core PC players
• Rebalancing of monsters
• Stability improvements
• and more!

Elemental is a fantasy strategy game set in a time where civilization is trying to recover from a devastating cataclysm. Stardock released the second game in the Elemental series in 2012 (Fallen Enchantress) to positive reviews and a terrific player response. The Legendary Heroes expansion, released this past spring, refined the game mechanics of Fallen Enchantress.

Stardock has continued to improve and enhance the popular expansion with regular updates.

For the Complete Change Log: https://forums.elementalgame.com/448478

To Get Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and Legendary  Heroes go here:  https://www.elementalgame.com/fallen-enchantress/purchase

To learn more about Elemental visit: www.elementalgame.com

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