But that's exactly the type of thing people are asking for with these super god mode champions they're advocating. If players can do it, an intelligent AI can do it too. It's hardly "War of Magic" when the "war" part doesn't apply because the AI has a god unit that nothing you create can fight except your own god unit. If your god unit happens to be far away when his gets to your capital... oh well. Better luck next time.

It's pretty silly to say that we can do it, but the AI should have to give you 3 turns advance warning before it does the same thing. If that kind of choreographing is necessary to protect the player, then it probably means the idea itself isn't a good idea.

(This type of thing happened in AoW 2 if you knew what you were doing. Do Shrine of Magic quests in the first map of an element until you get a Blade of the Void, manage to hold your hero long enough that he gains a few levels... and you're off to races. By level 30 the unit is so completely broken that it's a one man army and nothing except a similarly built hero can stop it. It made the last level boring because you could regain access to your strongest heroes from earlier in the campaign and with 3 of them there was zero point in building any kind of offensive army at all. Just build defenders and let each hero be their own army as nothing the AI could throw at them could act as more then a speed bump. They toned down the stat growth curve in AoW:SM to try and make it harder to build invincible heroes.)

I took that high rez pic and with PS, counted and marked each unit. The number of individual soldiers (even the dead ones)  on that screenshot is actually very close to 550...with around 400 of those on the empire side (the side the dragon is killing). I assume there are more kingdom soldiers behind the hill. Assuming equal sides, this would be around a 400v400 battle.

I think you can't compare this to the total war games. You can easily get 400 soldiers with simply 4-5 units in TW. Obviously the sense of "epic"  scale is very different between these two games. I'd just wait until the tactical combat is released before passing final judgment.

(each colored cluster represents 20 individuals)

Please do not make Raven a primary game designer ._. 

Badass and awesome are great, and I understand that there will be imbalances in the game. But if you ever want to even "kinda" appeal to the competitive players, there needs to be a sembalance. Now, it could be like Demigod where "most" of the skills are overpowered and each Demigod FEELS really strong and powerful. But since everyone is (mostly) "equally" overpowered, it works out great. I can work with that. 

400 v 400 battles sound fine for me...

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I also think that Champions shouldn't count towards the group limit. A powerful champion should be able to fight a large group *(20?) of average soldiers and come out ahead... once. Maybe two or three times if you give him spell-support or he is just REALLY badass. But he shouldn't be able to solo an entire army without investing SIGNIFICANT resources both on him before the battle and with significant Combat-Spell support as well. 

I just think making Champions a "free" unit just makes SENSE and it's a self-balancing scenario as long as no nation can get more than a few particularly strong Champions. Eventually, just like a real life great general like Napolean, you would want to keep track of which enemy armies had Champions leading them and which didn't so you could prepare accordingly. 

Um, I don't know where you're finding this information. My post was just that champions don't have to become irrelevant if we had armies numbering in the thousands of troops. If by late game in large maps 1,000- to 5,000-strong armies are fairly commonplace, then individual champions that can hold their own against hundreds, maybe a thousand soldiers at the most extreme, would be lots of fun and a great way to keep champions relevant.

Nowhere, ever, did I say anything about a god champion that can't be defeated by anything besides another god champion. If someone were to send a very powerful champion at me and I had no army, no champions and no magic to do anything about that champion, then what the hell is there to complain about? If everything I have in the whole game is off somewhere else, how do I have any right to complain about someone walking in with a champion and destroying my capital?

The original plan for combat in Elemental was to have massive battles between thousands of troops, with sovereigns who could hold their own against very large numbers of troops (no numbers were given, but we were given the impression that they'd be quite formidable in combat), dragons that could all but win the game for you themselves... And other fantastical creatures that would be significantly more powerful than regular troops. The paradigm we were told Elemental was going for was huge numbers of mundane troops, speckled here and there with small numbers of extremely powerful fantastical units. I think it's perfectly reasonable for lat-game champions to be comparable in strength to some of those fantastical creatures (thought not as strong as dragons)...

Yeeeessss! THAT's what I love: an AI which can kick my ass...from time to time!   (Would be AWESOME if you can program it!)

I mean, people can't complain that AIs are usually too weak and complain when it's not.

And let me be rude here: from threads to threads, we read those whiners...

- Huh! There must be a fertile tile at my starting location everytime!

- Huh! I can't spam cities, I won't be able to win!

- Huh! I want my horsemen, archers, knights no matter which faction I take!

- Huh! I want to win everytime against the AI!

- Huh! I want my sovereign to be able to defeat monsters right at the beginning of game!

For Frog's Sake! Let these guys use the difficulty level setting, play on easy (or use the autosave to replay the turn) and win all their games like it's a walk in the park. A lot of good it's gonna teach them in life if they can't even accept to loose A GAME so that they can improve their thinking.

That's the spirit!

A super-champion doesn't come out of nowhere.

Where were you while it grew in power? Didn't you take allies? Haven't you got an army able to conquer the enemy shards and lower his power? Didn't your adventuring skills allow you to recruit enough champions and monsters while the enemy put everything he had into its sovereign?

THESE are the real question!

You lost a game? Your fault! Improve your skills and play again!

(and for info: even in AoW2 I must care for my level 30 champions for, oh yes, they are mortal! And I know it too well since I'm at half the campaign these days)

Actually chief, I gotta agree with lwarmonger. If I can do what you describe to the AI then yes, I fully expect them to be able to do that to me. If I'm not able to defend against it then I didn't learn how to play the game very well did I?

The boss answered it right there, my friend, "Teleport". If a high ranking uber mage type can blow up armies with volcanos I would expect him to teleport or learn to fly or something too eventually.

I agree it would be silly to have to give a warning of some kind. But if I can do it and learn how to do it I would fully expect the AI to be able to do it to me.

For AoW 2, getting a champion to be overpowered like you describe was both a valid tactic, and also bore-lined on abusive, but if it wasn't fun people wouldn't have done it.

No AI is perfect and we can't expect the Elemental AI to be "perfect" either. Frogboy is super smart but he can't pull off the impossible and make the worlds first living and learning AI. As far as the AI goes I want one that's CHALLENGING!!! People are going to moan and complane one way or the other if it's too soft or too hard on the player. Don't coddle people by nerfing everything, make the player LEARN.

Besides, this is why we have Difficulty Levels, Correct? If I had the game on "Easy" I wouldn't expect a tactic like Frogboy describes above. If I was playing on "Hard" then I woudl fully expect it. Just make it scalable for stupid people and we're all good

AMEN BROTHER!!!!!

Exactly.

Its a matter of the number of units a single player can comfortably control at one time, and then striking a balance between all the many different types of units. We should focus on the sense of scale, and not the actual number of individual soldiers.

In TW, a player controls 20 units, and each unit roughly varies between 20 - 200 individuals...which is a close ratio to Elemental's 1 - 20 individuals per unit.

But, as you see in the battle screenshot, I would argue that a unit of 20 men in elemental looks just as epic as a unit of 200 men in TW. Again, its the sense of scale thats important and not actual numbers. In TW the larger numbers don't mean much when your playing. They all look like a glob of pixels at normal playing zoom level anyway. In the battle screenshot, since there are less men with more space in between, you can actually see and appreciate each individual soldier. Again, its the sense of scale.

So going back to what Brad said, image trying to balance a TW unit that had 20,000 soldiers with one with 20. Thats what would happen if we tried to balance a unit with 1 soldier versus a unit with 1,000.  Balancing a unit with  1 soldier versus 20 soldiers is more realistic (which in TW terms would be a unit with 20 soldiers versus one with 400 soldiers). The reason we can't simply stuff more men in each unit is because the base unit is 1 individual soldier. In the TW games, the general's bodyguard is the base unit with around 20 soldiers (at start).

So to answer your question, 400 is favored due to the game's sense of scale.

This conversation has been derailed by teleportation. Ever since Frogboy's example, that's been the core complaint from people who want champions to be mildly glorified soldiers. So let me say this in bold: teleportation is the cheese. The problem you have isn't at all with powerful champions, it's with champions who can show up at your door out of nowhere and knock it down. I hope to all hell that it will be absolutely and completely impossible to ever do that. Teleportation is way too easily abused, and needs severe limitations or to be left out entirely. I'm not quite as concerned about teleportation within one's own territory, but even then it should be expensive or limited (only teleport to closest town, maybe). You should absolutely not be able to teleport within enemy territory, or at the very least it should be prohibitively expensive and range should be miniscule.

I wouldn't want the AI to be able to teleport up to my door, whether it be a powerful champion or an army. Even more, I wouldn't want to be able to do that to the AI. There is nothing at all that the AI could do to defend itself against a player who can teleport powerful units or armies around willy nilly, that would be completely broken.

You're the only one throwing around the word "god" here, Tridus. No one here at all, as far as I can tell, is advocating unbeatable champions that can only be stopped by other unbeatable champions. As far as I know, I'm the only one who ever really even gave numbers at all, and let me restate them:

If late game armies could reach well into the thousands, as was the plan up until recently apparently, then a champion that can hold his own versus a few hundred up to maybe a thousand troops is not that ridiculous. If I have a handful of armies of 1,000-5,000 troops, plus my own champions, my own fantastical creatures, and my own magic, and a champion that can take on something like 500 troops challenges me, then chances are that champion will die. I wouldn't need my own champion to kill it, I could kill (probably even utterly annihilate) it with an army), and either kill or hinder it with magic. Or I could kill it with a Slag, or some other fantastical creature in my employ.

If army sizes are going to max out at ~400 soldiers, then clearly a champion that can take on ~500 soldiers is not ok. But a champion that's been a significant investment of an empire that can take on 50-100 soldiers on his own? Is that so unreasonable? If yes, we will have to agree to disagree. If it sounds reasonable to you, well - how about that! That's roughly the same ratio as in the previous example! 

I guess I can't speak for others, but I don't want to be able to develop an unbeatable champion as part of some infallible strategy that always works. But I do want to be able to focus my energies into training up some extremely powerful champions that can take on decent fractions of a large army. Doing so, of course, would mean sacrificing in some other area - perhaps the gildar used to buy their equipment or recruit them could've been used into equipping an army or developing my cities farther, perhaps my sovereign will have less essence and thus less magical ability...

I'm worried about artificial army size limitations, though. ALL army size limitations end up in Stack of Doom problems, and I thought that we had gotten past that. If I can only fit a finite of units (by which I mean, squads/platoons/legions, etc), then there will be a major advantage in amassing an army composed of all your most powerful troops; such an army would be undefeatable by anything but another Stack of Doom.

With max army sizes of 200, or 400, whatever, regardless of how many troops I can actually maintain, then massing hordes of poorly armed/equipped troops would be a dismal strategy. If I'm confronted by a max-size army (let's say it's 400 for now) of upgraded troops, then even my 800 peasants might not do much. After all, I can only send in my peasants 400 at a time, and his 400 troops, each with leather armor and real weapons will probably win pretty easily. And he'll probably beat my next group of 400 peasants almost as easily as the first time. Whereas if I could've sent my 800 peasants at once, maybe I'd have had a fighting chance! But no, arbitrary hard caps forbid it, and thus an entire strategy is irrelevant. The only advantage to fielding inferior units is that you can field more of them, but with arbitrary army size limitations, that one advantage is lost somewhere in mid-late game (at least on larger maps).

Agreed! Just let it cheat if needed. Civ IV cheats like crazy on all higher levels... still a great game

There are defenses for that though (spell defenses on the city, attacking their shards so they can't cast it).

What you said is that you should have a champion that only another champion can take out. If I'm going the millitary route, that means I've got a big army almost by definition... which under your own idea is worthless against that champion. You've created a super unit that only another super unit can fight (again, by your own post). Sorry, but I've seen that in games before, and it doesn't stay fun very long.

Don't worry, some of us are thinking about multiplayer. (But this is a bad idea in single player too.)

Why is that? As I recall the Sauron thing, he wasn't defeated by magic.  He was defeated by a guy with a sword.

Oh come on man, you know damn well as good as I do that he got Ultra Lucky with the swing that cut the ring from Sauron's hand. Entire Armies couldn't stop the guy but one lucky swing that cuts off his finger and his whole evil empire comes crashing down? It's called Drama and Fantasy man...it's a book, not a Strategy Game

Quite true.  In fact the accruing of afflictions granted players who didn't have a good opportunity to build supercombatants to "wear them down" through the inflicting of increasing afflictions upon them, gradually hobbling them and rendering them impotent.  Then there is the "thug swarm" tactic, pretty much hitting the SC with 5-8 thugged out heros, who combined are about his equal.  Then you could also use a large army as a meat shield while your (physically weak) spell casters targeted spells on the enemy army's leadership.  Taking down supercombatants could be difficult, but not impossible.  You just needed to work at it a bit.  In elemental I'd think it would be both easier and more difficult.  Easier because there are significantly less differences between the factions (so you don't have an EA Neifelheim with a bunch of supercombatants, vs an EA Ermor, who has a bunch of aging mages and legionaries... although even there they have a lot of balancing moves they can make), but harder since experience is much more of what a SC is, and the only way to get experience right now is combat.  In Dominions 3, many units started out as thugs, and after equipping them with a few items they became supercombatants, or they started out as regular units and could be moved up to thug status with only a couple of things.  In Elemental you really have to grow your champions through experience in order to turn them into SC, so the ability to quickly adapt your strategy to counter a couple of specific SC's would be significantly less.

That being said, the more magical items and spells with varying effects we get into the game, and the more our champions are defined by traits/items/tactical combat, the easier things will be to balance.

Champions should never, in any way, shape, or form, be "super units". They will be powerful units because they can use magic, wear increasingly powerful equipment, and gain stats from leveling up - and that's exactly how they should stay. The *only* consideration is that a late game champion has viable utility in tactical combat *if* he's part of the "stack size" limitation. That utility is not necessarily about how many units he can take out by himself, since some spells function as "force multipliers" (friendly buffs, hostile debuffs).

The only "super unit" the game might possibly have is your Sovereign, balanced out by the fact that if he dies, you lose. Something is going to have to done about teleporting back for 1 measly essence if losing a battle, that's pretty laughable in the end game especially when shards will give you an essence bonus and an improvement will as well.