Elemental: War of Magic Q&A
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Speaking of influence, here's a hypothetical question for you: let's say you have three different cities in close enough proximity to each other and your sphere of influence is connected and around all three; are there any benefits to doing that?
It doesn't make a difference from an economic point of view. Where it does make a difference is that in the game - and this is something that's nice versus our other games - there is actually a monster player effectively. If you play D&D, imagine one of the AI players being the dungeon master. And that AI's job is to kind of throw a monkey wrench in there for all players - AI and humans playing the game. But it can't spawn any creatures onto a tile that's owned by a player. So if you can make your territory contiguous, you don't have to worry about monsters and such spawning on top of you, so to speak. So one of the early goals is to make it so that you build as much territory as you can around your cities so that bad guys can't spawn on your territory.
Back on research for a minute because I think it's pretty important; when you research something are your results hardcoded as part of a branch on the technology tree or is there some randomization in there?
Well there is some randomization in the sense that every breakthrough has a percentage chance of being available when you make the breakthrough. So, for example, you don't get to research farming per say; what you research is civilization, or you research warfare, and when you get done you look at the various technologies that you have prerequisites for. And then it rolls the dice on the likelihood of a percent of that technology showing up. It's all based on a 1 - 100 percent chance. So when you highlight over a given tech it will say what the odds are of it showing up - some (most of) them are "certain," some are "likely," and some are "unlikely" and there's actually technology that are rare or don't show up in every game. You could be playing 20 games and all of the sudden there's a tech that shows up that you've never seen before.
