Calax

well... amazon will give you three omnibusses (Ultramarines, Blood Angels, and Soul Drinkers) for 30 bucks plus free shipping (I think on the shipping). THen you can give away the other two books to people who you want to seduce into the Warhammer cult!

well... Killing Ground is a direct sequel to the third book. but they're both pretty good. It should be said that the three last books are actually more of a trilogy, the second book in the series causes the events of the third book to start and the fourth book is what's happening AFTER what happened in the third book.

That'd just be to hard to implement because you'd end up making two stories that'd be mostly exclusive.

define superior... and thematically some things don't make sense in games, for example: Jedi driving around in specialized tanks, that... well, they're basically the same tanks but reserved for Jedi. Also, cloaked tie fighters, terminator robots, vader having a cabal of dark jedi at his beck and call... and how many people have flown side car to Lando now? I mean sure, the movies are the most definitive source of cannon, but you can't really take games as cannon in anything JUST because they're non-contradictory (heck the books contradict themselves quite a bit). I mean more often than not, the story line of the game is fan-fiction with more holes than a window screen, rather than a real story. Except for when they are based on the movies (Rogue Leader, Rebel Strike). The Rogue Squadron series wasn't based on the movies... if they're based on the movies than so is EVERY SINGLE GAME released. Rogue Squadron was based on books that were based on comics that were splintered off of Xwing/Empire Strikes.

Uh... WTF happened to the Star Wars section on the boards?

I'm busting my way through "The Killing Ground" which is the most recent Ultramarines novel.

you simply cannot make something TOTALLY destructible. if you did, you'd end up with a world that was flat and glassed pretty quickly with some players.

the biggest reason you see more console games advertised is because it takes less money to get the system, and because most PC games are ports and/or using the internet for their primary marketing campaigns. Because most PC games WILL have an internet connection on their system that they game on.

define superior... and thematically some things don't make sense in games, for example: Jedi driving around in specialized tanks, that... well, they're basically the same tanks but reserved for Jedi. Also, cloaked tie fighters, terminator robots, vader having a cabal of dark jedi at his beck and call... and how many people have flown side car to Lando now? I mean sure, the movies are the most definitive source of cannon, but you can't really take games as cannon in anything JUST because they're non-contradictory (heck the books contradict themselves quite a bit). I mean more often than not, the story line of the game is fan-fiction with more holes than a window screen, rather than a real story.

to the china wow censorship thing http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=85420.0 that's got the changes that were implimented for the censors. In terms of inventory items. One thing China is having to deal with is that WoW has become something of an industry over there. There are several companies dedicated to the farming and selling of gold, which turns out to be more lucrative than farming.

... They usually won't put that level of detail into how they're setting up the politics. Rather, they just make the villian so obviously evil that politics won't really come into it beyond "You=good, them=bad!" As to the Saudi's not having a link between religion culture and politics you MUST be joking, if they didn't have that link then we'd probably see at least one saudi king who doesn't support islam. Heck anymore, religion plays a LARGE role in defining a culture, particularly in that area.

well... what I got from the game was that Al-Assad was supported IN SECRET by Zakiev. The Ultranationalist movement, and the Coup were (to the rest of the world) unconnected. The only strings attaching to them were Zakiev's support for both from behind the scenes. Al-Assad wasn't seen by the Ultranationalists as their leader at ALL. That said...

well... I don't know, but I think Totally Games would be called in to make new space sim games.

I'm not sure there are any developers out there that actually look at WoW's numbers as a goal. Only in their lofty dreams. And all of SOE's titles cut off in that chart after 2007, presumably when Sony stopped sharing numbers. The only real negative thing I see here is WAR and AoC taking huge hits after the initial rush. That seems to be a trend for the market, after the first month you get a huge drop. Now if developer's anticipate and don't blow all that initial capital, they should be able to stabilize and keep going. I imagine it's a tough thing to work on a spreadsheet. Champions Online is aiming for 100000 subscriptions before they declare success (and think about making Nemesis online)

That's rather harsh. You seem a bit cranky today. I don't think it's doing anything new with it's classes. There are four base classes, and at level ten, you decide on one of two specilizations. Aion is popular because it's from the makers of Lineage and because people in China can't play WoW. Actually, China is allowed to play WoW again, but Blizzard had to get far more censorship put into it.

http://kotaku.com/5332704/lucasarts-teases...-it-aint-x+wing FRACK! then again, it could still be tie fighter.

well, if they're going off of what I said, I don't know what you'd do, you can't repudiate all of society because then you'd just end up in jail for breaking some law and you wouldn't have any major morals.

Well... you could set it up so that on your site you have it set up in a hierarchy of people, so You're at the top with a list of everyone under you. Then it's tiered so that you're able to go down the chain of command and see who is under them, and maybe the really high up people have the ability to edit their pages so that you don't have to do all the work. Admittedly I don't know how fast you'd be able to do the game like this given you've got several people with shifting schedules. At some point you'd probably have to jump in and take over peoples theaters to keep it moving if something happens. Actually, overall I don't think that this would work very well with a larger number of people... probably 3 directly under you and 3 each under them, otherwise you get into a case of having to many people to coordinate into a cohesive strategy. With the smaller number of people you can keep prevent fifteen strategies for the battle field that conflict.

The reason Aion is getting so big is because the hype-machine behind it is pretty good about telling you how it's different and new. If you actually look at the WoW boards there's usually somebody saying that it's gonna be able to push WoW off it's pedestal. I think it's doing something new with the way the classes are dealt with but I'm not sure. That said, probably the only thing that could throw WoW would be something like ToR. By this I mean a game that's based off a franchise that already has a fairly large following behind it. Warhammer did this to a degree and some of their ideas were pretty good (public quests for example), but from what I heard if you weren't active in PvP you were kinda left out at the end of things. I think WoW is going to start seeing a drop off in it's active subscriptions soon becuase in part of the fact that the Chinese government is getting angry with the way it works, but they're also having trouble with how to keep things fresh and not get people so overpowered that you've got the players able to act as raid bosses from the original Endgame. Also with things like Champions Online and Aion doing interesting things with the traditional class system, and with ToR doing serious story telling in their MMO you're probably going to find that Blizzard is going to either have to do a SIGNIFICANT overhaul of WoW with the next expansion, or they are going to start working on the sequel.

I think the reason people played it is because it's really boring but you don't realize it until you've spent four hours in it. The way it was hyped you thought it would be something like homeworld in terms of fights, but really all it was was something similar to HoI but with a star wars theme. Sure the space battles were controllable but they weren't exactly very fun, and the ground battles were simply done off screen with you viewing the results. Add to that the fact that it was fairly unintuitive and you found that people viewed it as very boring and not what was promised. I mean I'm sure wargame enthusiasts (those that LOVE HoI and it's sibilings) love it, but to the general public it's pretty boring and to complicated.

well alan, what you could do for the battle maps you're showing us is to use little boxes with things like "X Corps" and then somewhere else on the site have a listing of the makeup of the group... and maybe have a history showing when and where units were detached and attached etc.

The thing about inserting politics or real world things into the game world and comic book worlds, is that it automatically puts an arbitrary date upon the game, thus it stays relavant to the current time ONLY and as soon as the particular hot button item goes away the game looses it's value and people will not even remember it or like it very well. We can see part of this phenomenon in the idea behind Batman:Holy Terror (where batman goes to Afghanistan and attacks Osama Bin Laden, as written by Frank Miller). I mean we don't have many games that really play on the current events. I mean there are things like Full Spectrum Warrior, but that really didn't catch on. *shrugs*

Can we just set up a site called "Alans AAR's!" or something? then you could get like a round table of generals who help you plan your strategies?