Greetings!
I just never been keen on auto-resolve features. And I am a little disappointed about tactical battles being only 3 min. Seems like a lot of time and dev resources went into this auto-resolved/3min feature.
Also to meet a 3min goal I am assuming strategic options and complexity in tactical battles had to be removed to meet such a time limit. So I must ask. Why we need tactical battles? I am thinking of HoMM here. Yes some skirmishes were over in mere minutes but some could go on to 5-10min?
Hopefully the auto resolve feature is poor and a player would never want to use it knowing that they could still eek out a victory if they played smart.
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows that casual players never visit gaming forums.
Seriously though, give them a little more credit. Just because you can illustrate it with an intimidating chart doesn't mean this system is all that complicated. Nor is it really important to understand unless you're modding or making a custom faction with very specific goals in mind. I bet most people will pick the faction with the coolest heraldry-description combo for their first game.
The battles in Master of Magic were also pretty short.
I'm not really liking that the source of Empire power is death. Individualism vs. Statism is an interesting paradox to explore, but putting death on one side and life on this other is... odd, to say the least.
I don't mind the life vs. death part, but trying to color those who are empowered by death as less than evil seems less than well thought out.
Problem is, how do you have multiplayer if a battle can take 10 minutes+? One guy has 4 of these battles and the other two have zero... 2 guys sitting around and twiddling their fingers for 40 minutes? Not going to work.
I found the "RTS" idea interesting, but can see why it didn't work. What I'd like to see instead, is turn based but with a "chess clock" sort of option.
1) at the start of the game, a setting is picked between fast, medium, and slow battles. Fast battles give something like 1 minute on each clock + x seconds for each unit over y units total in battle. Medium could be something like 2 minutes base with more seconds for x and y. Slow might start at 5 minutes base.
2) When someone's clock runs out, they automatically retreat. Also, they can't attack again that turn (or some such to stop them from jumping right back in again).
This, along with battles that don't impact other players being able to be fought simultaneously (like in Civ IV), would allow downtime to probably be kept bearable.
Hooray for oversimplification and watering down of systems in the name of tolerable multiplayer. I'd rather see multiplayer only be autoresolve (aside from hotseat or PBEM in the cast of player vs NPC) if the cost for having it is the destruction of single player battle enjoyment.
Does a chess clock water chess down? Answer: no. Brad makes good points about why Gal Civ was not and should not have had MP. One problem is that it's hard to team up when you are on different sides of a galaxy.
On the other hand, I ONLY play Civ IV multiplayer these days. It rocks and catering only to the SP people would be a pretty big mistake with Elemental... in my opinion of course.
I've played 1,000s of hours of turn-based games, and having an adjustable timer (which should be able to be turned off also if destired) would take nothing away from the game play whatsoever.
I agree... since they have chosen to include it, they should to it well... Doing it halfway isn't going to many anyone happy with it.
As he pointed out, there IS a substantial cost to SP by going MP... just the realities of economics.
Ultimately, however, I get the feeling that Elemental is more about providing a toolkit (at this point). Much can be grown from that toolkit, but having a toolkit focus is largely about providing flexibility and power to the tools so that both SP and MP modules can be make that are terrific.
If you put in a timer, you need to alter the gameplay to the point that people can actually accomplish things within that time limit. If you've got a 30 second timer then a battle needs to be able to be played out well in that 30 second timing. Chess is a battlefield that doesn't change and the "armies" on both sides are equal in every match. This is not the case for varying army compositions and ever changing battlefields.
In any case, I wasn't really referring to your timer idea when I said simplification in the name of multiplayer, I was referring to the need to make the battles super short overall for the sake of keeping you from getting bored waiting for other people to finish. I don't want the battles simplified to the point that they only take a couple minutes to finish because to me that lessens the fun of the game as a whole. Part of the reason I don't play civilization that much is because of the combat system. I don't want a battle of hundreds or thousands of soldiers to be so simple it can be completed in a few minutes, if speed is your issue that's what the autoresolve is for.
...also note that we all know that autoresolve ALWAYS sucks. I've never seen one work even close to well, so that just isn't a solution for anyone beyond the most casual forms of play.
1) Don't forget that the way chess clocks work is that your timer only counts down during your own turn... there are 2 different times kept, so you can think on the other person's time also.
2) As stated, in large battles the time allocated to both parties can be scaled up very easily.
I've found extremely complex battles in games like HOMM, and still made mistakes after thinking for 20 minutes... so, it's important to be able to turn the clock off. On the other hand, master chess players can make no mistakes even with only 5 minutes to finish a game. It's really the only solution to dealing with "skill" vs. "downtime".
Blasphemy!!! Words like that will get you Lynched around here, Wallie.
The ONLY thing holding GalCiv2 back in my eyes was the LACK of Tactical Battles. If GalCiv2 would of had Tactical Battles I would have said it was even better then MoO2...
With that being said;
I agree with you in that I'm not a fan of "Auto Resolves" either, but, Frogboy has stated from the Start that the player will be given the "Auto Resolve" option at Any Time. This is for those people...who Don't want Tactical Battles or who just don't want to do them All the time. Even I my-self may Auto Calc a battle every now and then if it's a completely one sided victory in My Favor. The only way I would never, Ever, use Auto Calc is if it cost me Troops that I could have saved had I commanded the battle My-Self.
The "Unit Threshold" is there so people who Do Not Want Tactical Battles can set the Threshold so High that Tactical Battles almost Never Happen. If you Don't Want Tactical Battles, You Don't have to play them. Most of us however DO Want Tactical Battles. In fact, if not for the fact that this game has Tactical Battles I don't know if I would have bought it or not. The Tactical Battles are a BIG DRAW for me to this game. (that and it being a upgraded, re-made, MoM)
According to Frogboy the Player will be able to chose to end or "Auto Resolve" a battle at Any Time, whether it's on turn 1 or turn 10 of a battle.
Please, DON'T PUT ARTIFICIAL LIMITS Into the Single Player Tactical Battles. For Multi-Player All the Battles could be Auto Resolved and I wouldn't care, but, for my Single Player Experience I WANT MASSIVELY LONG BATTLES ON A EPIC SCALE....PERIOD.
@lswallie: Please, Don't take that as me yelling at you, I wasn't. I just Really Want Epic Battles. 3 Minute Battles are Not Epic.
[quote who="Slainangel52" comment="110" I was referring to the need to make the battles super short overall for the sake of keeping you from getting bored waiting for other people to finish. I don't want the battles simplified to the point that they only take a couple minutes to finish because to me that lessens the fun of the game as a whole. [/quote]
I agree with this. On the other hand, a robust morale mechanic can make all but the most balanced battles resolve fairly quickly.
Don't forget that either in a situation where your troops break or you run out of time, it isn't the end of the world. The battle can be rejoined the next turn. The exception is key battles like city battles... I don't see how those can be resolved quickly, so I do agree that trying to rush things that should not be rushed would be a mistake.
And MoM was made HOW LONG Ago? This isn't the early 90's or late 80's...and this Isn't MoM. MoM was a Masterpiece, but it was quite limited for it's day. Honestly, Elemental blows MoM out of the water in Every Way-Shape-and form. If they would have had the technology we have today when they made MoM I'm sure MoM would have had better battles.
While there's nothing I care about more.
I like large and epic battles also... I also wouldn't mind playing a 50 turn battle on a 5 minute timer. This timer would obviously be off in SP, so I could take my sweet time with it.
Eh, not to mention that you control a couple of units in MoM compared to EWoM. If I go to battle with 6000 units against 10.000 units...well that battle should last MUCH longer than 3 minutes. Now that I think about it, I don't even understand that how could a late game tactical battle last for a few minutes? What if I've got 200 unit groups in my army for example? [Ex.: 100x10 and 100x50 units]
I can understand the goal of keeping tactical battles short.. In a game of this size hours long battles could really cause many to shy away... I will wait until we get a chance to test the tactical system before I commit any further to we need longer battles... for the record I have no problem with longer battles as I am one who will enjoy that as much as the adventure and civ building aspects of the game..
I'm dying to see tactical battles! This will make or break my buddies in buying this game (the only reason why they didn't get GalCiv2).
I will chime in with Raven and Tormy - do what needs to be done in MP. but I am anticipating end-game battles in SP to be 30 minutes to an hour at bare minimum, and on games that I have possibly spent weeks playing on a huge map - multiple hours possibly. Hopefully, that is still going to be possible.
I do feel that MoM got the pacing on tactical battles about right, for the scale being dealt with. But as we get into thousands of units conceivably in a battle, even ten minutes is far too short and far too "unepic" for the conclussion of a game that you have spent possibly 30+ hours building up for. Even a ten minute battle, I am going to be feeling like "that was IT?"
Possibly there will be an option for people who want tactical but not long battles to autoresolve at any point during tactical combat? That's the best compromise that I can think of.
Am I the only one who thinks this 3 minute thing is a goal for a typical battle, and not some hard cap? The way a lot of people are writing it's like at 3 minutes the battle will end. But that would get pretty annoying with large armies ("sorry, next time you battle you can move the other half of your units").
You can attempt to design a system that encourages battles to keep moving without a hard "sorry combat's over now" clock. For that matter the time limits could just be turned off entirely in single player, since if you really want to spend 10 minutes analyzing your next move for some reason, why does the game care?
For multiplayer I know there was ideas like the time bank, but you could also go with a "movement clock", where you get 15 seconds per unit to do something with that unit. That'd force you to act and keep things moving, but the time scales up as your army grows.
Tridus - I'm with you. I wish folks would hold their tongues until they have at least played the tactical combat...this Saturday morning quarterbacking must drive Froggie & co. crazy.
That's actually how Sword of the Stars did it. It was easily possible to have a "battle" last over 10 turns because you had a few hundred ships in your fleet and you were attacking a planet with another few hundred. And it would cut you off when the time limit expired. Obviously the defender could repair everything during his turn, and if his production was high enough rebuild some ships for each new battle - while the attacker couldn't. It was a horrible, terrible, stupid system
But yeah, nothing Brad said makes me think it's a hard cap (which I pointed out earlier to another poster too). Honestly, I don't think they actually did a test with thousands vs thousands battles to see how long it would take. I imagine for 3 minutes they mean a much smaller fight - but we'll have to wait and see how it works out. It has to scale somehow if it's not a hard timer.
TBH, I think people are pulling these numbers out of the air without being realistic. How is an hour at a "bare minimum" even remotely feasable for most people? Can you save in the middle of tactical combat and pick it up again later?
Even single player, the game has to be accessable at some level. A 3 hour combat that you can't save during is not "accessable" to anybody but the most hardcore. For it to take that long you're either spending 5 minutes figuring out each move, there's 50,000 units involved with no decent UI for moving them in groups, or the combat system is designed to drag things out.
(Also a pet peeve - "epic" has to do with scale and intensity. Not time. Something isn't "epic" just because it's really long. It could be, but most of the time trying to make it "epic" by making it long just succeeds in dragging things out and making it tedious.)
another double post. Someone send a repair crew!
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