Greetings!
We’re glad to see the beta has gone out relatively painlessly. For those of you who have been with us since back in the GalCiv I betas, I think you will agree this one went off a lot smoother. After a decade or so, you eventually start to get the hang of this.
That isn’t to say we are free of hicups. There’s people with video issues. There’s people who can’t even get the game to run. That will be our big priority next week.
Our favorite part of the development cycle began with Beta 2. This is where ridiculously rapid changes to the game start to occur.
Given the notoriously massive suckitude of Stardock betas, we now have the collective opportunity to roll up our sleeves and decrease the crappiness of the game from nightmarish to merely painful.
#1 City Improvements
These are trivial for us to add. And we’ve only started touching the capabilities here.
Examples
#2 Research
The research screen is still pretty rough. The tech tree button is disabled and there’s too little information on it.
Feel free to discuss different ideas on what information you’d like to see. How you would like to see it presented. Bear in mind, we are not going to toss out the general research concept (the one in there came from the 9 month beta 1 cycle and we like it as a game mechanic).
#3 HUD options
Beta 3 will have a Head’s up Display toggle that will allow you to get information about your cities.
#4 NON-HUD Information
That said, we don’t users to have to use a HUD to get basic info at a glance. Thus, feedback and suggestions of looking at a unit, city, etc. and telling if they are defended, how strong they are, the general output, etc. We have our own thoughts on this but we’d love to hear yours.
We do NOT, however, want to have units running around with flags or other things of the sort. We want subtle (non-HUD) and hard core (HUD).
#5 Visual Distinctions between Factions.
The Beta 2 series will begin to show how factions are different from one another much better. However, we’d love to hear your thoughts on making different factions more distinct and interesting. Bear in mind, from a RAM point of view, it’s not practical for every faction to have a completely different building design setup (when we’re all 64-bit then we can talk about that).
#6 Other types of World Resources
The Beta 2 series will start to add horses as a global resource that is used to create mounted warriors. But we’d like to hear your thoughts on other resources that one might control – rarer ones.
We have plenty of ideas of things about a given kingdom that might be affected by this or that but we don’t want to bias the direction of suggestions. I will say, however, we want to stay away from the GalCiv “Approval/Happiness” concept.
The XML allows us to create any type of resource, define a graphic, a 3D tile, and what stats it changes and how much. The random generator will make use of it automatically (and this same thing will happen through modding no doubt). So it’s not a big deal to add more resources as long as they’re fun and not simply there for the sake of “complexity”.
Ideally, we can define resources that are all very rare and thus would only occasionally show up in a game (but yet every game would have a couple of these different rare resources).
The Beta 2 series will start to re-enable the other technology trees. Right now, building up your kingdom has limited choices because you’re effectively a mundane. The Magic tech path takes the view that rather than building up your cities with improvements you can also do things to enchant them to do better. It’s just an alternative direction (or you can mix and match).
Next build will be next week.
UPDATE!
One thing I've been reading on the forums has to do with weapons and defenses available. Right now, a lot of them aren't in (for instance, you only get daggers on melee weapons) because we still have to update the UI to handle the different types of damage and defense types.
For instance:
So a club does blunt damage, a dagger does piercing damage, etc. But we need to display this in a way that easy to understand for the user so that when they go into battle, these modifiers can be understood.
UPDATE #2!
Great stuff in the comments area! Keep it up! Now you're getting into the spirit of the beta. We'll look at all of this and see which things make sense to put in, which things make sense to put in after release and which things make sense to put in some future update.
Nice to hear this is going to be in the game. Last I heard you were against damage types and were only adding the tags for modders to work with. This should make things much more interesting whenever it gets in.
great way of showing what this is about.
I'm very pro, I haven't played the Beta (yet) but to me this is a must ahve in a game like this, Heroes haas it too.
Have been really enjoying the beta, my first post after following the game for ~year, so it shall be long & ranty.
Other Peoples Ideas
City Management
> Adjacency improvements + limited combinational upgrades with chains == YES, differentiates city's and adds strategic level
> A Black Market for gold to < x > resource == YES, this means that a cavalry unit of the horseless kingdom is possible while being as rare and important as it should be. Ditto for the dude in plate armor among the leather clad hordes.
> One per faction improvements == YES, gives a huge amount of flavor to a particular city.
> Combining 4 (x1) tiles to one big one with mild bonus == YES, makes city planning more strategic
I for one am enjoying the city planning currently, and I believe combined with map choke points and tactical battles happening on a map that reflects WHERE an enemy attacks a city should open a deep level of strategy and tactics not seen in this kind of game. In TBS games, other than not attacking over a river, when has it mattered where you choose (or were forced) to meet the enemy?
Gameplay
* Guilds or some other building to train NPC's on their non combat skills would keep them interesting and relevant longer.
* Place named macro features of terrain == YES, all kinds of flavour
* No happiness / approval mechanic == GOOD THING (democracy is not for mere medieval kings, let alone demi-god wizards)
* REALLY need some more frequently spawning low level monsters; feeling kind of psychopathic killing all these random NPC's.
World Resources * Resources to produce gold, prestige, diplomatic favour, & definitely extra awesome metals / woods. * Multi use resources load of fun -- specialize with additional add-on buildings? * Like the idea of a Wild Magic Rift randomizing resource; throwing in a little positive chaos. * Mini-resources on tiles is a good thing, makes city planning more interesting and adds depth for the 1 unit buildings.
My Ideas
Interface:* In a city, how many tiles do I have access to now, how much more pop / prestige do I need to get access to more tiles? Displaying this information cleaning will significantly increase the ease of strategic planning and hopefully help ward off micromanagement issues.* For Sovereign / others I want to be able to see their base stats easier. Different screen / toggle button for the stats to show the Strength, Intelligence, Charisma, etc.
Mounts & Beasts
* Split up beast types so that they can be "mounts" or "war beasts" or "both". You would need to have breading grounds / lairs / resource tile for creating resource units, but could have 2 war bears in a squad, or have bear calvary (REALLY want to vote for some bear calvary here). This would work well for many of the various fantasy mounts mentioned here (tigers, wolfs, raptors, boars, etc)
This also would allow for just war beasts so you could have armoured ogres, with a VERY slow breed rate to create the resource. It would also means that "barding" type armors would be more useful: Do I create hugely expensive Bear Rider Paladins or do a couple of cheaper Armored War Bears?
I read this and thought that it would be cool if you occasionally gave birth to horrible children who grow up and became traitors or turned to the dark side and became your enemy etc...
I didn't read through every post but I haven't seen this talked about yet in the couple of pages I did read. One thing that bothers me is that terrain seems to have no effect when it comes to building other than for lumber mills, harbors and special resources. If I plant a city in the middle of a desert or swamp that should have an impact. There should potentially be restrictions, bonuses or negatives applied for the terrain you are building on. Put a lookout on a hill and it can see further, a garden on a desert and reduced food, stuff like that. Right now I barely even notice what the terrain is, it should matter more in my opinion. It would even be easy to color code the tiles of where this occurs. Green = good place, yellow = reduced output, red = no.
I think I would like more city management options that change the very nature of the city. For example, right now, it seems as if each city is essentially the same since they share the resource pool: some gardens, some houses, some defense, some research, some economy... maybe a little specialization in one area. Kind of... boring. I don't know if I like the idea of adjacency, per se. But I do like the idea of specialization. For example, my city has a mine, why not have more mining-centric buildings available to build? Piggy-backing specialty buildings off of local resources to give your cities a regional flavor (and look). But it doesn't have to include building adjacency.
I also like the idea of upgrading existing buildings rather than building new ones as an option. I know houses "automatically" upgrade, but I am thinking more user directed upgrade paths. Tribal Council -> Town Hall -> City Administration Building -> Imperial Center of Government
I would like to see some disruptive tech options available. Like, maybe a "???" choice occasionally on breakthrough that is sort of like a "goodie hut" option. It could require an additional investment of whatever: materials, crystal, $$$ and gives you a random tech in the sphere or potential access to an off-tree tech with a possibility of failure.
mundane: tin, copper, iron, gold, silver, gems, arsenic, mercury, helium, charcoal, peat, sulphur, magma, tar, springs, ancient glyphs / monoliths, dogs, elephants, camels, dolphinsmagical: dark-iron, mithril, adamantium, arcane steel, imbued earth (fire, ice), energy/electrical vortex, maelstrom, imprisoned souls, magical waters (of youth, of power, of scrying), dimensional rift, oracle, blood altar
and some unique resources from the lore...
Great game folks! I've been playing these kind of games regularly since about 1987 and this looks like it is on the track to being my all time favorite.
I could list tons of minor issues, but I have confidence those will be hammered out. I do have two big issues that I'm worrked won't be addressed.... mostly because other Stardock games haven't addressed them too well, for my taste.
1) Random maps are essential, but without a certain amount of starting balance, they can lead to many hours of effort only to realize that your opponent is 50% more powerful due to the "snowball effect" of early start luck.
Example 1: One game I played I had 3 Champions with research point boosting appear within the first 30ish turns. Another games I have lots of Gilder and other Champions show up. The result? In the RP boosting game, at about turn 100, I had approximately twice the army power as in the other games.
Example 2: I started with no beaches and 3 deadly monsters locking me into a bottleneck, thereby limiting my ability to grab goodie huts severely.
Some randomness is fine, but the amount of randomeness here could easily create many games that are like finding a 20 planet in GalCiv right away, while my opponet gets jack for 50 turns as far as good planets.
Not sure how to fix this, but unless it is fixed, I'd predict that as many as 70% of games could be decided not by skill, but by starting luck.
Pre-balanced maps? Maybe, but unless Champion spawning can also be pre-set, this may not be nearly enough.
2) Tactical battles bogging down the game. I've seen many games take different approaches on this, and have no good solution except to both make sure that the tactical battles can be done without pausing the game for others, as a well as making them not take too long. Sword of Stars, for example, has battles that can take 10 mintues just to track down the final ship in a system while the other players are waiting.
It's the cheap way out to say that auto resolve is the solution here. Auto resolve is currently killing my champions (and children) nearly every time, even when with big armies.
These issues are the only things that I can see could sink this game if not addressed well, at least for multiplayer.
Please put tool tips or even better when we mouse over a building or ability or spell give a DETAILED description of the item/building/ability/spell etc. And don't be vague as has happened in other games. I have had some people in these other games (usually MMO’s ) that give vague descriptions tell me that part of the fun is to figure out what these item/building/ability/spell etc, do. I don’t agree, I would prefer to play the game than experiment to find out what a basic ability even does and how it affects my game play.
Somes ideas:
- in another thread, I have suggested to give each new city a specialisation, such as +X% research/tax/food per city level.
Each specialisation could come with a small city background text for flavor.
- what about having some buildings *groups* sharing a building limit ?
For instance, instead of having 1 school/university max, 1 market max, ..., you could have 1 slot / city level for all 4 tiles buildings. This would force each city to specialize somewhat : do you want 3 schools to maximise our research bonus (more so if you get a city with a research specialisation from my other idea), or do you want to build one less school because you really need the gold from a market ?
The end of turn/move function is cumbersom, often requiring several clicks. It would be better to know how far you can move this turn, next turn (as suggested above) and if it is your move or the npc move.
When I obtained the 'arsenal' improvement in the research screen, it caused windows to crash harshly.
Would be nice to have an easy way to swivel the screen to view from different directions.
General: Additional complexity (types of resources, units, etc.) would add to game immersion. I get an 'overly simplified' feel to the game at the moment. Perhaps that will pass in later betas.
Game plays well on my 1 year old laptop but is not playable on my 5 year old desktop. Processed very slow on desktop.
Overall, very nice!!
So this was my original suggestion, but I sat down with graph paper, and I don't think it's going to work as written. My new suggestion is to do this:
I think this would make city building nontrivial and interesting.
QFT - This is needed. Enough said
As far as the tech tree is concerned one thing I want included (which may already be planned) is when I can use a technology. This means knowing the "House" (or Villa or Mansion) tech can only be used by me in cities at the town or whatever growth stage or higher.
I guess this mostly applies to Civilization tech type, as that is the only one I can think of with restrictions outside of a tech tree structure itself.
I've been toying with the idea of having world population as a dynamic global resource that will grow or even shrink over time.
A population cap would help limit city spam as the recovering world only has so many people to populate the cities. City prestige would play a larger role as each nation would have to compete with eachother for people. And prestige would play a role even after maximum city population has been reached as people would start migrating into other cities, enemy cities included, if they have higher prestige.
Of course spells could be used to lower enemy cities prestige. Or even more subtly to lower an allied city's prestige to get the people to abandon it. Wars could leave cities empty which would create an interesting dynamic where late game developed nations could suddenly have a population shortage even if they would have access to powerful magic. Then it would truly be a war of magic.
To add to this, adventurers need to make money too. By, well, adventuring. All of these characters should be people who have readily identifiable lives that you as the player just so happen to be able to hire. However there should be plenty of them roaming around who are not hired, and not looking to be hired (i.e. you can't just pay them a bit of money and bring them into the fold). The merchants should trade between settlements and cities and grow wealthy. Adventuring bands should go around killing monsters, hiring (temporarily) themselves out to players, and exploring, as well as buying new equipment to further that end. Mercenaries should acquire a band of armed men and gradually increase their size and number, being able to hire out their mercenary band more and more. Thinkers should... think, and stuff. I guess thinkers could create unique artifacts and/or books and sell them to the highest bidder.
And when (and if) they get old and rich, they should retire somewhere. Set up a mansion/fortified house/keep, and raise a family and be the source of new quests (based on their occupation and moral philosophy).
If you want to have a living world though, you really, really, really, need to bring the characters to life a little bit. And that involves more than just a little bit of lore in their description block.
People like to manage their cities. I like that. In Civ, in MoM. Just not in Elemental.
In Civ or MoM, I have CHOICES to make. Typically in MoM, I'll build 1 building at a time. In Elemental, I'll spam 4 housing and 4 gardens, clicking eight times in various places in order to get more population which, in itself, is worthless unless I build other buildings. Ok, exaggerating a little, but only a little unfortunately.
The whole building houses and gardens is unfun. Building mines, forges, even granaries and farms on special terrain, is much more interesting.
Right now city building in Elemental provides very little choices. When you have finished building something, you don't stop and ponder as in Civ or MoM, thinking "what next?". You just look at your money and resources, and if you can, you spam one more food-production or housing square most of the time.
Automating housing/minimum food is really needed, the rest of city management is ok although I'm not sure it scales well.
Well as far as rare resources i'd say go for some of the tried and true. Instead of just iron mines how about gold, silver, and diamond for extra gildar income.(Ala Civ) For truely rare resources how about Mithril or Adamantine mines (ala MoM) for the ability to make magic weapons/armor for ones characters/troops. (With the correct research and buildings in place.)
As things currently stand one can make gildars really only from a merchantile route it appears. give players a alternate route to make coin via mining (ie gold, silver, diamond mines) Comon give players a reason to play that slow ugly miner Sovereign and you know that are players that are gonna want to play a rich mineral dwarven nation etc.
I'm sure most here remember the joy of finding a rich spot for a town in civ that had 2-3 gold/diamond resources all in a area one city could use.
Thanks can't wait for Beta 2A and beyound!
It would be interesting to have some metals available in the mountains, rather than just on the flatlands right now. This may just be an artifact of the fixed map however.
Two things are screaming at me right now in the beta.
1) disparity between the information displayed on the cloth map and 3D world
Some resources are not being displayed on the 2D map that I can see on the 3D map. Usually this is near the edges of the Fog of War, but not always, some goodie huts don't appear on the 2D map.
Furthermore it would be nice to be able to control the point at which it switches to the 2D map. I'd like to be able to zoom out a little further sometimes while still being all 3D and such, other times the reverse.
Finally it would also be nice to be able to rotate the camera. (Nice but I understand if its not possible)
2) All the city improvement animations are synced.
Not sure if this is a bug but I was looking at one of my cities last night and all the farmers were doing exactly the same thing at the same time in every garden in my city. Some kind of random delay on animation starting might be appropriate.
As far as the points raised in the OP I am a bit concerned about city building right now. Other than space there seems to be no penalty for city spam. Furthermore it is quite possible to create vast cities that do almost everything. I think there needs to be stronger bonuses for specialised(no damnit Chrome I am NOT going to spell that with a 'Z', you are wrong) cities.
Training troops also seems a bit wrong. If I have the resources there is not difference between training up a bunch of armed and armoured to the teeth soldiers compared to the same number of troops armed with a single spear each. This is a bit insane even if you just think about the amount of time it would take each of them to get dressed, let alone trained in their weaponry.
Cloth Map Zoom Level will do that for you, default is 90 iirc. Shifting to the left means more zoom-out before shifting to cloth map mode.
And yes, it does look awesome.
If possible, a minor variation on speed -- they aren't just time delayed from each other, they also do things at different rates.
Quoting Ron Lugge, reply 171Not sure if this is a bug but I was looking at one of my cities last night and all the farmers were doing exactly the same thing at the same time in every garden in my city. Some kind of random delay on animation starting might be appropriate.If possible, a minor variation on speed -- they aren't just time delayed from each other, they also do things at different rates.
On a very picky note, if you look at a L3 or bigger City, you will find the chimney smoke and the building flags going in totally different direction. Actually, not all the buildings Flags fly in the same direction and the chimneys seem to....
#1 City improvementsLike the idea of benefits from adjacency. Don't like the requirement that most structures must touch each other. Limits city planning and ability to keep city organized. Would prefer ability to build anywhere within your current radius. I think to keep city management fun it need to be reduced. Do away with most of it. First cities need some base defense value. One farmer shouldn't be able to walk in and take over an undefended city of 1000. Even peasants can fight a little.Population should be the key to a city. The output of buildings need to be linked to population. Thus you need tech building and production buildings...but how much population you have effects their output. So you need a somewhat balanced city.I should NOT have to build farms and houses. Don't these peons do that on their own. Let me focus on the fun stuff like castles for defense and temple to attract more pop. Let the people build their own basic stuff organically. It is NOT fun to build farms or houses. I want to focus on the strategic elements of my city. Building basic infrastructure for every city is unfun. What I build should effect how my city grows, not whether. It should grow over time regardless of what I do, but the right choices will grow it faster or make it be more focused on a certain aspect.I also don't see a point to custom placing buildings at this point. It gets tedious. It would be much more fun to let me customize my defenses...where my walls are, the size and shape of my castle....things that effect is strategic value and let the computer handle the placement non defensive structures. Let city management be customizing you defenses...not managing the sewer system. #2 ResearchThink the current research system is great. Just needs fleshing out and balancing. Would like to see a tooltip pop up when I mouse over the building (explaining what building does) that a particular research will unlock so I can weigh the benefits more easily.#3 HUDCities need to be displayed better...having hud show their resource production and build qeues would be nice. Would also like to see city info displayed in w tooltip when mouse over a city.#4 Non HUD#5 Visual DistinctionsThink a lot of this could be done with unique city centers. If the city center is unique enough then regardless of the other building I can tell by looking what faction owns a particular town. One or two other distinctive buildings would be nice. Maybe something common like farms that every city will have. And would be fun to see each faction with their own unique crop.#6 Other world resources.First and foremost non-horse mounts. I don't want to be limited to my people only choosing horses as mounts. Some unique mount types would really let you customize the look of your army. Could include wolves, tigers, elephants, unicorns, pandas, zebras, whatever. Just want the variety. And some variation between various mount bonuses would be cool.Not sure if stone is in game...did see where could build quarry but not sure if enabled. Stone seems like a resource that should be needed for certain buildings...like castles and walls.Would like to see an improved iron replacement...like mithiril or some variant that lets you make iron based weapons but with improved stats...maybe extra tech to use. Like the idea of refined metals as well. Or blended alloys with multiple metals.Some world resources that give you access to unique army units would be cool. A wood you can hire ents from. A marsh you can hire trolls from. A cave with a dragon that will defend the town as long as regular sacrifices are made to it. Maybe allow some interbreeding. Gold seems obvious for extra income. Silver for extra income...and in a pinch you can make weapons out of it. A resource that add hit points or other bonuses to troops created there. World resources that would improve a defending towns defense would be good. World resource that gives a town a significant sight bonus to see approaching armies.
I was thinking of this as well.
I was thinking of this as well. Here's a mock-up I did.
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