Michael

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

I suppose I can let my imagination run wild and agree, ok yes. your archers just used special arrows to destroy my tank battalion .... 0_o or something ....

But alliances are totally useless. They serve you no use othen than to keep some of the AI from attacking your cities outright and harassing you nonstop.

With some of the harder difficulties alliances with other factions is downright stupid.
They will NOT help you if youre under constant siege. They constantly pester you requesting you give them your advanced tech for tech thats now basically useless to you and they are smart enough to deny giving you their advanced tech for anything short of a kings ransom.

So basically, alliances in this game are about as useless as a rubber ducky squeak toy in a devil may cry game. Oh youre fighting the legions of hell? why dont you squeak them to death? Why would capcom put something so gimped and utterly useless in a game like that? Exactly.

Like I said, not a MAJOR gripe, I still play the game occasionally, but cmon, the constant "please trade me ion cannon superwapon technology for my awesome salsa recepie" gets a bit old after the hundreth or so time.

No doubt, your salsa is probably very awesome, but damned if im giving you the plans to this death star for some ground up peppers and tomatoes.

Alliances could have been a bit more FUNCTIONAL, as it is, is feels lazy and badly implemented. Im about to whoop diety and ive yet to give in to any extortion requests from the AI and have had maybe 1 in 100 tech trade requests that actually benefit me.

Basically, you can beat the game each and every time and never ever ever ever EVER have to use an alliance. That imo is a wasted game mechanic in my book.

But its whatever, like I said, not a killer issue, I still play the game time to time, just has potential to be so much better and deeper gameplay.

*shrug*

Its ok, the game isnt without its teeny tiny problems though.

I mean cmon, archers bringing down your bomber flight group? Youve GOT to be fucking kidding me. Ive had instances where a single galleon has destroyed one of my battleships. Srsly? A wooden ship with antiquated colonial era cannons brought down a tungsten and steel alloy BATTLESHIP with missiles, radar and other state of the art weapon systems? Uhh ..... no.

I also dislike how on harder difficulties the other factions go to war with you more than they go to war with each other making the difficulty curve downright stupid.

Making an alliance with another faction is pretty useless since if you get attacked, your alliance troops can be ONE square away from the attackers and yet they will do NOTHING to assist you.

They just try and con you of your tech and do nothing to earn it. In all honestey, its in your best interest to accept any peaceful treaty offered to you, and just deny any requests you get for tech trades, as they are rarely in your favor.

Oh, you want me to give you advanced space flight for religion? piss off. Atomic theory for horseriding? Dont think so. Railroads for pottery? Dude what?

Also, kind of sucks that you cant go past the year 2100, some games just break down into a war of attrittion where youre fighting every faction (without having used nukes yet), everyone hostile to you (almost everyone) is demanding tech or 90% of your gold reserves to make them stop fighting you for a measly 3 to 5 turns or the ones not yet hostile to you are constantly asking you to trade your high, end game tech for their weak and now useless early game tech.

These small yet incredibly stupid game decisions made by the devs keep the game from being "stellar" and just put it around "average"

Its a good game, fun little timewaster, just has a lot of questionable design decisions that will have you going "oh come the fuck on" more than once.

"Question readers. If it had to be on multiple discs would it matter? Seems like the same amount of hassle compared to having to install the game just to play. Just saying."

Metal Gear Solid 4 was the first game I bought for my PS3 (my machine is primarily used as a Blu Ray player)

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y11/mike777/DSC03566.jpg

I also played Lost Odyssey which had like what, 5 Discs?

Both are a whole bunch of meh. The MGS installs were a fucking joke. Long ass install before you play the game, installs before each "chapter" and loading screens in between each level, I wasnt really impressed on a technological level with the PS3 as a gaming machine.

On the flip side, swapping discs out of the 360 is also a pain in the ass.

In the end it just boils down to how much you want to play the game. We always overlook stupid crap like horrible voice acting, iffy graphics, dumb design decisions, short single player campaigns or the absence of multiplayer in all our favorite games.

I dont see why we cant overlook hardware limitations as well. I imagine if youre a hard core FF fan, the thing could come with 20 Discs and most wouldnt care, just as long as they can play the game.

anthonyjh, cause its already been done before.

It failed for very valid reasons. The average attention span for your average FPS player is somewhere between a walnut and a rock.

Planetside went down the toilet because people didnt want to pay to play what basically just boiled down to every person playing how they saw fit with little to no unit cohesion.

It basically just boils down to either everyone doing what they wanted to do, or everyone rushing one particular objective and lagging the dedicated servers they had so bad it was nigh unplayable.

Joint operations failed because no one in their right mind was going to foot the bill out of their own pocket for a server back then that could hold 160 slots considering that the brou ha ha for the game died down shortly after it was released.

Im not trying to shit in your cheerios, im just saying, this has already been attempted twice by other devs, and in both instances its failed horribly.

anthonyjh, Its possible. Funny thing is, its already been done before. Planetside has around 400 players on a server at one time, Novalogics Joint Operations had about 160, both games sucked donkey.

This aint nothing new to PC gamers. Its been tried, tested and failed horribly. Demanding that kind of unit cohesion from 250 strangers let along 8 in a squad is laughable. Real question is, whos going to foot the bill for server hosting? Cause you dont honestly think the average ps3 player is going to be able to host 249 players on his DSL do you?

Wait I know whos gonna pay for the sever.

Its you. =D

If you really want to see what large scale battles feel like with that many people online at the same time, go sign up for a planetside account.

Be prepared to be underhwlmed.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Mag is going to fucking suck balls.

Obviously no one reminded Sony that Novalogic and SOE had a little spat years ago over who held the world record for most players online at one time playing an FPS/MMO type game.

Novalogic said they had it with 160 players online for Joint Operations, Sony claimed they had it earlier than Joint Operations with Planetside.

Problem is, no one cares. Both games were complete shit. When was the last time you jumped into a 150 player Joint operations server? When was the last time you logged into your .... hahahhaa ....... planetside account?

No? Didnt think so.

Youre going to make the gameplay objective based to keep players focused and obeying commanders? Good luck with all that. No really, it aint gonna happen.

Either A or B.

A.) Mag is going to get released and be universally panned for sounding good in theory, but being total shit once fully realized.

B.) Mag will get scrapped once the game goes alpha and they realize they bit off more than they could chew.

Whos going to PAY for a 250 player FPS/MMO account? You dont think its going to be free do you? I seriously hope they arent expecting some kid with DSL to host a 250 player room on his connection while mom trolls craigstlist to get a new daddy for little johnny.

Same shit, different year. Sony goes blah blah blah. And its nothing but "future potential"

yeah, future potential to be a bunch of lame SUCK.

"Imagine being able to create your own superhero or supervillain in teh DV universe and fihgt alongside
help batman take on the joker . Imagine being a villain and helping all the inmates at Arkham Aslyum espace and attack the batcave."

How about I imagine that every game SOE touches has pretty much turned to complete shit?

How about I imagine that the sony keynote has me eying the horizon in anticipation of finally using my blu ray player for actually *gasp* PLAYING GAMES!

Lame. Under fucking whelmed.