I'm really looking forward to the 3-B Beta. I've been playing since Beta 2 and the game keeps getting better and better which each release. The new city system seems worlds above the Soverign waving his fingers and farting out a billion cities everywhere

This release is the big one for me though. The Tactical battles are going to make or break me recommending to my friends on buying the game.

Have you considered letting your sovereign reclaim essence from the champions they embued with it originally?

Seems to me that would be a very interesting mechanic if applied to the 'dark side' faction. Kind of a vampire-ish motif. Make it so they could only reclaim 80% essence back from each one or establish diminishing returns so that each time you reclaim essence, you get less and less back to establish some bounds on it.

Could add strategy, flavor, and differentiate factions gameplay-wise more than currently.

Almost every multiple continent game I start ends up with zero shards on my starting continent.

So yeah, some civs are isolated.

Just a question, and I apologize if its been answered already, but do spells that require a shard consume the shard?

edit: ty magnus

No, shards are just an enabler for certain spells, not an ingredient.

Possible issues with this

If we can't see the resources, we wouldn't know to try to grab the area before some other faction does.

Need something to stop us from building our city on what would later become a special / valuable tile.

Well I had read on here that the new beta 3-B would out today but it's 9:30 EST and it's still not on impulse does anyone know when it will be?

They say it will go up tonight. I mean Stardock will have a late night!

see here is all we know...

Midnight now- I can't anything productive happening on a 16 hour day, so guessing early next week now.

The last screenshot with the trade screen catches my interest. What exactly is 'Perceived Value'?

Obviously, this is some sort of estimate of how much the trade is worth - a number of games use this same model. My question is - and I acknowledge that I'm probably splitting hairs, here - perceived by whom? Is it my perceived value? His perceived value? Is it mine on one side and his on another? Some abstract number based on how many gold it takes to create that item?

I've played a number of strategy games that have used this method 'count up the value on either side, if what is offered is greater than what is asked, the AI accepts.' And it rarely if ever works out in a way that's interesting or fun. In my experience, trade with an NPC almost always takes one of two forms: Either I precisely count up the exact number of coins to match the value, and not a penny more, or I spend several times more money than the item's worth before the NPC will fork it over.

The whole reason why trade works in real life is because there isn't a single objective measurement of value. Instead, I have mine and you have yours. We can trade because I may have an item that I value at 5 gold, and you value at 10 gold, and you may have an item that you value at 5 gold and I value at 10 gold. By trading those two items, we both come out ahead, because before we had items worth 5, and now we have items worth 10, for a net profit of 5 coins each.

Is the trade system anything like this? Or is the AI going to always hold me to the same universal standard of value and make trade a boring exercise?

I haven't seen much on garrisons, civil defense, or anything else that affects tactical combat when an enemy attempts to raze your cities, or vice versa. What thought has gone in to this scenario?

Please pardon my ignorance if some of this has been discussed. I'll gladly take direction to any of these conversations. It just seems more pertinent now that wandering monsters can also attack your cities. I have a number of questions, including the following -

Will I be able to garrison units for the sake of defense?
Will I have other defenses, such as patrols, automated defenses, terrain or weather effects, etc...?
How far will cities extend for the purposes of getting aid in a defense?
    To the control area?
    Just the city tiles themselves?
Will what my city is composed of affect the tactical battlefield at all, in layout or in advantage?
I've seen walls in the demo videos, will these be considered in my city's defenses?
    What other components of the city will be taken in to consideration for defense?
How will spells affect the upcoming combat?
Will spells have a use in shaping the tactical battlefield in general?
Can spells affect cities in ways other than helping to raze them?
Can a spell convert/conquer/raze a city unassisted by tactical combat?
Can diplomacy be used to affect a city the you want to convert/conquer/raze?
I've heard spying mentioned, can you incite riots, migrate in to a city culturally, or establish conspiracies within cities as well?

I'm drawing on experience from games like Civilization 4, Age of Wonders 2, Disciples of the Sacred Lands 2, and of course Sins of a Solar Empire for a lot of these questions. Are any of these or other games inspiration for or indicative of city defense or the expansion/exploitation/extermination of cities in the game? If so, then how so and what differences can we expect to see from their predecessors?

Semi hidden resources could work and is more reasonable as a solution....

example: 'You see some strange formation of rocks disallowing you to build on them.'

               After the technology is investigated:

'Oh this strange rock is iron'

consequence: If the rocks are exactly just rocks and nothing more, you ll never know that, except if you research all the resource revealing technologies.... hehe

'You see ruins of an old civilization and books with unknown sympols that may be lost knowledge' : After you research all the possible revealing technologies, the message could be like that:

'You see the ruins of an abandoned village and the books you found were written by illeteral farmers that tried to write down the amount of provisions they had..' 

Concluding: I am just throwing some ideas which might be cool, might also not....

Oops, I replied to the wrong topic.

This is a nice way to do it. On that matter, I hate how hidden inns and stuff get in your way. I HATE INNS WHERE ARE MY BULLDOZERS

i like the way master of magic had that you could choose a spell or two from a certain book depending on how many of it you picked. something along those lines would be a nice touch. besides that, if you're going to include any spells from the get-go, they should be simple but essential ones, like changing the land and what-not (and maybe a simple attack spell for kicks? )

It seems perceived value is trying to do what your 5 gold/10 gold example suggests, considering how one tech is worded about how you increase the perceived value of your goods or something of that nature.

There seems to be some sort of base value, but somehow any modifiers for perceived value will change that (assuming they aren't both equal rank techs, I'm guessing). So perhaps it's a mix of both. One thing that would help is some sort of understanding of need and excess. Like in my current game, I'm low on Metal and I'm trading with someone who has a ton of it. Maybe my trading partner should jack up the price some since it looks like I have a major need in Metal. However, he's broke in gildar. That way, he values gildar highly and values his metal highly based on my need. I have plenty of gildar so there's likely a chance we can make something happen.

On the other hand, if I'm trading with a nation that has both gildar AND metal, it wouldn't work. He'd up his price on metal based on my perceived need, but since he has plenty of gildar, he won't value it very much at all. Perhaps, however, he'd want a tech (say I have armor and he doesn't so he has nothing to use all that metal on and I have the tech but no raw resources) and we could still trade.

I think a need-modified value system (on top of the perceived value aspects) would help bring your example to life in the game.