Ok, in the recent journal entry, It was stated that all Empires use death magic, and all Kingdoms use life magic. Well that's all well and good, except in an earlier journal it was stated that all Fallen factions are "Empires" and all Human factions are "Kingdoms"...Does this mean that every human faction will use life magic, and every Fallen faction will use death magic?
--It's not really a big deal, but it's kind of hard to believe that not one fallen faction has "seen the light", and not one human faction has "gone down the dark path" (From my experience with humans, I find this highly unlikely )
--or does this simply mean a re-defining of the term Empires/Kingdoms to now refer to their respective type of magic used?
...DISCUSS!!!
I found this annoying as well, Scoutdog, is there anyway I could get a link or an outline as to what the endurance system entails?
Well, basically all an "endurance" system means is that you have two different health-realted numbers: your HP, which decreases when you take damage, increases over time, and kills you if it reaches 0, and an endurance number that stays the same until you take a certain amount of damage, then goes down a little and stays there until you take that amount of damage again, and so on. When your HP recovers to the point where you lost an endurance "point", it stops healing even if that is not your full health. You cannot replace endurance lost through simple healing, but there can be other items that do. The colsest example of this that I could find is the "energy tank" system in Metroid, but there you can refill a tank just by getting extra health, whch would not be included in a real endurance system.
I have also seen it done with two bars in the HP screen: one on top that acts as your "real" HP, and one on the bottom that acts as your endurance. When you took damage, both bars would decrease different amounts, but the HP one would regenerate up to the top of the endurance one. (I saw it in an otherwise rather crappy SpireMan 3 RPG).
Sounds way too complicated and unbalancing. Multi-figure units need all the help they can get to survive against the powerful single figure units (like great wyrms, great drakes and sky drakes).
I'm just hoping we don't have multi-figure units to begin with. Making a pretense at formation combat and actually doing formation combat are two different things. I prefer the latter, real regiments of individual units.
Psycho, just because somebody agrees with somebody else does not make them into some sort of conspirator. My advice is to grow up, or everyone else will ingore you.
It does when it's off topic to me. So pffft on you. Obviously you can't ignore me or you wouldn't have posted your childish drivel. IGMO. bwuahahahahah You also don't "CONTROL" EVERYONE so posting statements like "everyone else will ignore you" is also stupid and ignorant IGMO.
Guess you didn't see the screenshot?
I said "like great wyrms etc". You can't honestly say there won't be any powerful single figure units. The swamp dread pictured in the screenshot is likely an example of one.
It also isn't enough that they are difficult to produce. They might, after all, be your enemies (in caves, dungeons or swamps).
master of magics combat resolution was actually very good. It produced very predictable results the vast majority of the time, while allowing for that one off chance to give you some hope that just MAYBE you might take that big nasty thing out with whatever you could throw at it in a dire situation (granted, the AI didn't offer enough of a fight to grant dire situations. but multi player it did)
Did you actually look at it or does your MoM point of reference completely rule your existence? Not once has there been indication that regiments will be faked as single entities. References to units and production have been indicative of the opposite.
The screen shot does not indicate that they are single entities and will regenerate to full strength as they heal. It suggests the opposite, as the health indicator for those eight shows 20/24 health. Your assumption is without foundation.
I apologize ahead of time for this monster post, but there are just too many things I feel a burning need to respond to or comment on... Most of these quotes are ChongLi's but there are some other appearances. Forgive me for not attributing them individually.
But that is not the point. The point is that pretty much every counter to a killer stack is itself another killer stack. A killer stack with a different composition, but a killer stack nonetheless. The point is to allow to allow people to choose between fielding a small elite army, a huge rabble, or some mixture of the two. This is straight-up impossible to do with a MoM-like system.
You are assuming here that paladins and peasants will be the only two units in the game, when in fact there will be many more. By the time you throw in the other weapon and armor types, mounts, special items, heroes, fantastical creatures and magic, the above statement becomes nonsensical.
You're making the same fallacy as above again. In addition, there are many more things to consider. One is that population is going to be a resource in Elemental, so fielding an equal-cost army of peasants compared to paladins would be a much higher population drain. That means fewer people to till your fields, generate taxes, work in your factories, etc. And you alluded to another important consideration in this quote:
If you send 9 Paladins against a much weaker force, you will probably not lose any Paladins. If you send an equal-cost army of peasants against that same force, you will likely lose some peasants. It's far easier to whittle down the numbers of a large army of weak troops. The difference between MoM and Elemental here is that dead units in Elemental will not be magically brought back to life (unless you actually resurrect them with magic, maybe) - they remain dead, and a sunk cost.
I couldn't disagree with you more. It adds an entirely other aspect to the tactical nature of the game. Combat between different size armies require totally different strategies. You will need to take into account the sizes of your army and of your opponent, as well as the compositions of both. With harshly limited stacks like in MoM, the only consideration is composition.
That is potentially the most egregious comparison I've ever seen in my life. Civilization does not have tactical combat in any shape or form; it has strategic combat.
Right, because the game is forcing you to make every decision you'd have to make in the course of a game? The game dictates your strategy when it forces you to choose pretty much everything about your kingdom before the game even starts. In the proposed system for Elemental, you have choices. There's a fire shard to your west and an air shard to your east, but you only have the forces to take control of one - which do you take? That's your choice. Just like it's your choice to try to wrest control of shards out of other people's hands, or to actively search for certain types. The only thing it does is it makes each game more situational. You have to mold your strategy based on the conditions of each game - and that is something I think every strategy game should strive for.
He tried to type endurance, was pretty obvious. And alright, so decimals shouldn't be in these types of games because it's aesthetically unpleasant, but mechanics that are totally arbitrary and immersion-breaking? Ok, right.
The only example there that I might agree with is super mario bros. No FPS is purely skill-based, there is always some element of luck. And Tetris most certainly has a huge element of luck. The order in which the pieces come can make a huge difference. Sure, the better you are the better you can handle a poor sequence, but it's still relevant.
You're inferring things from the screenshot that are really not that clear at all. For one, that screenshot was made public on the day of Elemental's announcement. Taking it as gospel for how combat will function is probably not the wisest thing to do. Especially when a dev specifically voiced regret over the fact that that screenshot was released at all. Even though frogboy later reused it in a recent dev journal, which was a little odd...
All we can really infer from this is that extraordinarily early on in the development process, they displayed groups of soldiers like they are shown in that image. Is that one catapult? Are those 8 individual people? Is it some abstraction? Who knows! And Frogboy has specifically mentioned that he wants battles to contain thousands of units - and that he wants us to be able to watch it play out in all its glory; and that units will be trainable in groups - what size is your choice. And he mentioned that he might call a group of 20 units a squad, and a group of 300 units a legion... And that you can combine different groups together to form an army, much like combining ships in GC2 to form fleets. All of this leads me to believe that they are not going the MoM route, thankfully.
Guess you didn't see the (8) next to the name or the 8 figures standing there in a single tile square (with a selection indicator around them).
Look, it's pretty clear that we want 2 completely different kinds of games. I want a small, tactical game like MoM. You appear to want a huge strategic/tactical game like the Total War series (except turn-based instead of real-time).
I don't think you can make an objective argument over which one is better (with the exception of waiting for 1000 units to take their turn, yuck!). Stardock is going to have to decide who they want the game designed for and that's it. Hopefully it will be moddable enough that one of us is not left out in the cold.
Tell that to this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=bZeIOM50gT0
Actually, I am beginning to think that since people will be a resource, that number miiight just be to display the population "cost" of the unit, and is irrelevant to the actual performance of the thing. But I agree with Pig: The screen's probably outdated already.
Even assuming that anything in that screenshot will be relevant to the final game, all that tells us is how many units are in that troop. For all we know, if you had trained 30 knights, that number would say 30. If you had trained 300 as a group, it'd say 300. If you had trained 3, it would say 3... And even if they are displayed as one group and attack as a whole, the mechanics of how results are actually determined cannot be deduced from this screenshot. And it's hardly worth discussing a screenshot from the day of announcement - the fact that it's that old tells me that this image is probably heavily manicured and doesn't really reflect any actual mechanics (considering we know most of those mechanics were not even really in the game yet...).
No, you're right you can't. But that's exactly what you've been trying to do all along... It's the only reason I bothered responding in the first place.
Also, we won't have to wait or 1000 units to take their turns, because units will function as groups, and each group will have its turn. And its continuous turns, which I think means that it more or less plays out like real time, but with turns running in the background. It's not going to play out like a 1000-unit HoMM battle, that would suck.
Why didn't you say so?
Guess your definition of unit is different from mine. I consider one unit to be one entity that you issue orders to, whether it be 1 figure or 1000.
By continuous turns, do you mean real-time with a pause function (like Baldur's Gate/Neverwinter Nights etc.)?
Brad said to try the Corporate Machine to see what continuous turns are like, but i haven't been able to get it up and running. I believe its probably like Baldur's Gate, never played nights
To me, if you are commanding 1000 men with one click of the mouse, it really is no different than 8 men. It's just a graphical abstraction.
I have to say: this makes no sense whatsoever. Care to explain?
But it isn't necessarily just a graphical abstraction. I could train a single 'unit' of 500 swordsmen, and you could train a unit of 100 identical swordsmen. They'd both be units of swordsmen, but they wouldn't be equal... Therefore, 'units' consisting of multitudes of individuals is not just an irrelevant graphical abstraction, as it has an effect on gameplay... We also don't know how combat is going to work. For example, it could work like in Medieval II:Total War. Each squad consisted of some number of units that all followed orders as one. You can't pick out and subdivide squads into smaller groups and give each separate orders, but when it actually comes time to fight, the number, experience and equipment make a huge difference. Squads in M2:TW are most definitely not just graphical abstractions to make battles look like they consist of more combatants. The number of combatants within each squad is extremely important and the same could be true of Elemental, for the same reasons or others.
Going that direction is an abstraction. Having a single symbol represent an entire army of many individuals is the quintessential abstraction. However, having all the individuals of an army displayed, with some individuality, that is much less abstracted. It is of course somewhat abstracted, that is inescapable. Moving from Civ-style units to M2:TW-style squads is a massive step away from abstraction.
A bit of a late reply, but what can I say. I just don't bother checking past the first page of threads very often...
There is no logical assumption that leads 20/24 health to indicate that health meter is for a multi-figure unit. It appears to be full, there is no appearance of missing men, and two rows of four fits rather nicely on that tile. There is a unit of three like infantry also in view.
Assuming it is not, the number of men would need to be 9, leading you to an uneven hit point distribution and one missing figure from a 3x3 formation. A multi-figure unit that reforms in such an odd manner? Perhaps it is ten, and they round down as the Civ games do, knocking men off the figure as soon as the damage encrouches on them until the last figure. Reasonable, but defining?
It's just as likely, if not more so, that the individuals are actual individuals, and that there are four hitpoints missing from a group of eight soldiers. Individuals that die individually and can be formed into regiments of a less than fixed size.
Oh god... scoutdogs idea of a game makes me woozy.
The devs have already stated that there will be huge armies and that "A large untrained army fighting a small elite force should be truly epic to behold". I think its fair to assume that you recruit individual men in large numbers to create an army, and not a civ4 style abstract unit. I may be wrong, but some of the alpha screens suggest that as well. Considering tactical combat isn't yet in this argument is pointless.
As for what I hope it is, I hope we have large armies of individual men. The alpha screen shows that thier are multiman units, so we seem to be on the right track.
Considering the game is designed to scale with your PC, maybe units can be abstracted or can be shown 1:1. That would actually make a lot of sense in terms of conserving CPU power.
Jesus... look at that. All to avoid individual units. What, prey tell, is the issue with the regular system Scoutdog? Basically here you use an overly complex technique to "fix" a simple abstraction... wtf?
Since people are a resource, you'll get the recruiting factor any way this thing goes. It's only a matter of whether that factor is abstracted or realistic.
Uh... Total War did it with Shogun on a bigger scale than Elemental is likely to be at... The information requirement is zilch, your troops are actual troops and must be reinforced with actual troops. Other than that, the work load isn't any higher than it would be with an abstraction. At most, they let us control the size and composition of our units and give us modification after the fact. Great versatility for a little more effort.
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