I was just thinking about this very same thing recently, as it is one of my main gripes about the GalCiv games.

I like humour. I like fun; that is why I play games. But I'm also one of those dorks who likes to be able to immerse
myself as much as possible in whatever I am doing, and the jokey text in GalCiv, especially from the civs, is really
distracting. It's a reminder that I am just playing a game, and almost like if you were reading a fantasy novel and
having one of the characters refer to another as "dude." Not that extreme but a similar thing.

That being said, there's no right or wrong answer here. I fully acknowledge that not everyone is that interested in
investing themselves that much in a silly game, but I do hope it is toned down in Elemental.

  I like being immersed in the environment and lore.  I would like to let Blizzard retain the title for silly humour in fantasy games.  I would like the comments dark, acerbic, morbid, fearful.  At least in some places for Elemental.  With hereditary rule, the Dynastic system and Factions this game can rise to great heights.  Seems like Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, Richard the III are just scripts/mods distance away.

Humour's a high art and comic relief done well is very nice in many 'drama' contexts. A character with a dry or dark wit should say dry or darkly funny things sometimes.

Silliness, though, is a specific subset of humour. I admire it, and am myself a member of the Silly Party who has occasionally voted Very Silly.

I'm still glad to hear Brad say that the base game will not have the same kind of silliness that's peppered all around the GC2 interface.

GW my friend, it was an explosion of intuitive will and as such I was not in a short term/long term consequences frame of mind at the time. But yes, my first thought was for the spiders...I love the little guys, but 1000 huntsmen growing palm sized all over my room wasn't an option. I figure 100 probably eluded my grasp to contend with the mosquitoes.

Well, I got home from a hot day at work (labouring job) and was exhausted, so I crashed on my bed...woke up 10 mins later wondering why my whole body was ticklish. Muma huntsman it seems, had carried her brood onto me and decided to do a runner...as then did I

I'm gonna throw in a vote for silly here (kind of pointless now, but oh well). Pop culture references are pushing the bounds, but adding a dash of the funny in here and there can greatly enhance a story, like how action movies have funny bits (but hopefully less so).

It's part of human nature to use humor as a coping mechanism-it's why we mock people we don't like, and why some of the funniest people I know have some of the worst lives. It's what we do.

Finally, there's precendent for having some funny in serious games. Age of Empires 2 (not anybody's idea of a barrel of laughs) had some great taunts and hilarious cheat codes. I can still remember sending over an "All hail! King of the LOSERS!" message after crushing an enemy's army.

I do NOT like silly

But I DO like funny

"I am out of gum" is silly and breakes the mood

perk : +70% pop "Don't ask" is funny and does NOT break the mood.

You can have humor withing the limits of the story line and be quite funny without breaking the mood.

Just my 2c

We need mostly serious in the game itself, which is good since that is basically what frogboy said, but someone should put together a slapstick mod with jokes crammed into everything. Would be great for a quick break from being all "Conquer the world" and stuff, to get a chance to cast things like 'rain of nachos' to make the other army move slower due to being too fat to run.

The corny jokes and puns should stick to mods.

And on an unrelated not, your avatar gets hotter every time i get on these forums, wintersong. Whats her secret?

Yeah, I always felt the same way.  Humor is ok but I would prefer it to stay in context with the game universe and not bring in references to the real world or get too silly.  Definitely not a deal breaker but not my preference.  At least we can mod the stuff out.

If it weren't for the book deal in progress, I'd certainly suspect a jape. He's been working with professional editors and publishers who are almost certainly sticklers for the distinctions between silliness and comic relief in an epic fantasy novel, and the market for fantasy novel silliness is a 'niche' kind of like TBS games...

As long as silly is serious, I'm all for it.

Silly shouldn't be "lolrandum" stupid-silly, it should be in the context of what is serious.

I.e, silly shouldn't downplay the seriousness.

I really did not like it in GalCiv2.

It completely killed any interest I might have had at 'getting into' the universe, so I really don't care about the Drengin or Yor or whoever the races were, they were all just 3d models to be manipulated/squished underfoot.

Similarly I'd just stop reading the tech info, as it was invariably a mildly funny-to-unfunny quip about the technology.

I've never played GalCiv, but I like a little sillyness in a game. I liked the little touches in Rome: Total War... A few monty python lines hidden in a few select descriptions made for a nice laugh now and then.