It took me all night but it was worth it. That was a city. Brigands took it out.
There were so many checks to make sure that “monsters” don’t attack your city that had to be taken out in order to make the monsters have teeth again.
So we’re going to create a new option “World Difficulty”. If World Difficulty is normal or higher, then monsters and other such things will take out players if they can.
Before, monsters were prevented from even going into your zone of control.
As we clean up the bugs in preparation for beta 3B (due today or tomorrow) I have some pretty serious qualms still that need to be addressed before release which I’ll outline below:
#1 It is NOT engaging enough. The UI, over the months, got so streamlined that there’s just not enough interaction between your Kingdom and you. There’s a lot to do but little game-provided direction to take you there. The pieces are there but the player is left to just “know”. That’s bad.
#2 The UI requires far too many steps to do stuff. It just needs a lot of love still.
#3 The magic spells aren’t compelling enough yet.
#4 Tactical battles require too many clicks (you move your guys each turn to the tiles they can move to, you don’t “auto pilot them”).
I am pleased to say that tactical battles are pretty decent, though visually buggy (it’s very difficult to choreograph all the animations and strikes in an interesting way. This is the first game Stardock has done that actually has animation like this and unfortunately, it shows.
We can do idle animations great and we have a lot of great animations. It’s the fighting choreographing that we’re sucking at. We want battles to look good but believe it or not, this turns out to be very very hard if you want to have any sort of complexity. I now know why so many games have such repetitive attacking. When there’s two objects (attacker and defender) it’s nasty stuff.
I miss phasors.
4.0 was made in a more mmo style game play then to a rpg.
Lol? Not everyone is going to play 14 player games and yes, a lot of us are patient. I can't tell you how many times my wife, brother, and friends stayed up late on successive nights playing 6 player Master of Orion 2 LAN on the largest galaxy setting (we're talking games that took 5 nights to complete.) Some tactical battles took 45 minutes, but it never bothered us.
To me, it seems like more work to take multiplayer TB out than to just leave it in and not do anything with it. Leave it in for we patient people and worry about doing something more interesting with it later.
I imagine there is a simple solution to this. Just have "world difficulty level" that corresponds, when raised, to both higher monster strength and higher monster aggression but then have a like check box next to it that allows the player to break world difficulty into categories if the player wishes. I always think back to Fall From Heaven 2 when it comes to options: more options are better!
I hope there is UI improvements in regards to army management.
Seem to have trouble with groups of armies, there should be group selections when selecting units (possibly group by type and so on as well).
Any clue about the time we must wait for the tactical beta 3B release???
Probably later in the evening tonight.
Then for me will be tomorrow..
Thanks.
I have an idea for this.
At this point you've got a forest with wild game that only a hunter can use.
Why not make it so other players can use it for the forest that it is?
Basically the hunter gets to use the plots with a bonus, and because other players can use them as well he can also get the bonus in conquered cities of non hunter players.
One other thing: am I alone in that I find it strange that the sovereign has an ability that gets projected to his population?
I'd think 'hunter' should be an ability of the faction. The population is hunting the wild game, not the sovereign.
Just like the leading of a group with best possible speed should be a sovereign (or hero) ability (it's now a faction ability, and not even with all heroes, just the sovereign).
The game has to make sense, so abilities of things should be properties of those things, and not of others.
O yes, and then the difference between the regular forest that just hampers movement and the super forest that keeps on giving materials and never runs out. And that's also located conveniently outside of the regular forest.
Why not make the regular forest chopable with a one time materials boost? And locate the old regenerating superwood forest as patches within the regular forest? Any axe wielding unit can chop the regular wood (or it is automatically chopped by the population of an expanding city, adding 1 or more turns to the build time). The superwood on the other hand cannot be cleared this way, although a unit might get materials each turn if it tries (but not as much if you let a city do the work)
Oh, and on the tactical battles yes or no:
Of course there should be an option to use or not use TB on both SP and MP games. I can understand if there's a reason not to have the TB's in right from the start for MP games, though I'd advise against it. Not everyone understands the way Stardock handles the development process, and they're used to the game + 2 patches approach of most other developers. Whatdoyamean it'll be there around patch 7.4a*?
Not having TB's can be more challenging vs the AI and/or faster.
And to anyone who thinks that TB's are always fast in the hands of experienced players: If I've got a weak/fast unit and you a powerful/slow one, then I'm going to run around the terrain until the time or turn limit is reached. I wouldn't want to give up on that unit because of silly things like it's 3 am or so. Which might be a reason why the host might need an option to enable/disable options like these on the fly, possibly with agreement of all players.
* for comic relief only, not a planned patch level at this time
Wow, you know how scary it is to read this? Particularly from a game that is supposed to be a spiritual successor of MoM and has the words "War of Magic" in title!
I say forget everything else, and work on making this part work.. if everything is wonderful but the magic syste/spells is weak, you still failed totally. Probably the only other part that is as important is TC which works hand in hand with the magic system
On the other hand a slightly weak diplomacy system, dynasty system, monsters system probably isn't going to hurt much.,
I think you need both more spells AND more diversity. They are not mutually exclusive you know. Obviously more spells means you can create both more vanilla type spells and more diverse spells .
Again looking at MoM, they had lots of spells, and yet had no problems with creating diverse spells.
I think that making a good game should come first. Fortunately the developers agree with me. The magic system is a part of the game, but it is (and should be) integrated with the rest of the game. Something they still need to work on.
These are some good ideas. Having access to every spell isn't good for replayability.
The current system is really missing a way to have degrees of knowledge and power in spell casting. You just have int and mana (and essence and wisdom I guess) which defines how good you are at spell casting and known books and technology that defines what you can learn. There should be guys who are masters of fire magic that get bonuses with it and have the potential to learn virtually every fire spell. There should be others who are dabblers and will only ever have access to a handful of spells. And of course many places in between. It shouldn't be all stat based either as you should be able to build a guy who is very good in one area and only dabbles in another. Hope you have some plans to implement something that allows these kinds of setups for v1.0.
I never tried 4.0 as I didn't like what I heard about it so can't really talk about which system is better (pretty sure it 3.5 for me though). Regardless of whether you like the system or not it nevers hurts to look at the spells for inspiration which was the original posters point. There are many good ideas in bad system, the game as a whole doesn't matter in regards to Elemental.
TB is what makes the game fun. Without it what would be the point? Might as well play CIV.
[quote who="KellenDunk" reply="97" id="2682971"]Quoting Bellack, reply 78Quoting Gorstagg, reply 13Quoting Frogboy, reply 8All the ones in the official list at least. But I think we need twice that many. I'm guessing this was in regards to spells. Yes, you will Need a LOT of different spells. An example of spells/powers that may be inspiring is 4th edition powers, for all 26 classes. Each power in a sense functions as a spell, in that it's an attack of some kind or some variation on it. And there are thousands and thousands of powers now for all the classes.Maybe glancing through them, for inspiration... would be worth your time. (An easy way to do this is get a DnD Insider subscription, download the character builder, and then run the Quick Character option, set them to level 30, and then go look at that classes levels and read the various spells.)See in 4th edition D&D they really made it so that a fighter has an attack, and a wizard has an attack.. neither run out of power. But those same classes also have encounter powers.. powers usuable only once per encounter, (simple math to avoid extra complexity, by 30th level a character will have 2 at-wills, 4 encounter powers, and 4 daily powers, and 7 utility powers. But as they go through the progress, levels 1-10 is heroic, and building their base powers.. level 11-20 is Paragon, kingdom level events, and you begin to replace earlier level powers with new ones, encounter and daily, and level 21-30 is epic level, you still are replacing earlier encounter and daily powers, but now the powers are appropriately epic. And going up to epic level the at-wills scale up and do more damage now.) All of that just gives a great way to provide interesting combat experiences.. of which you should be able to find things that are just super compelling.. more so than just a fireball.. and so on. And this is great to hear about the monsters becoming aggressive! Thanks, I'm really excited now! I perfer the 3.5 combat to the watered down 4.0 any day. 3.5 is the version that got watered down.. 4.0 distilled it. [/quote
No the rule systems before 3.5 were simply broken. Everyone that I knew that played had to have homebrewed rules just to play D&D before 3.5. In fact my group game up with rules to fix 1.0 and 2.0 that eventually looked a lot like 3.5. (I mean very close. My group tried 4.0 and it just was not very good for us.
yea, battles in Rome and Medieval 2 kick ass.
Personally I am slightly anticipating Shogun 2
(I skipped over Empire and Napoleon)
Napoleon is a good game, it's what empire should've been originally. Of course I only recommend it if that time period of warfare interests you. I would've bought Napoleon if they hadn't already gotten my money for Empire. So I go without because they dont deserve another $40 from me
hmm
so Napoleon is completely standalone? I've been on the fence for buying Napoleon for quite a while now.
Yea it's completely standalone, it's like the used the money from empire sales to finish it an release it again. The only drawback is the Grand Campaign isn't there when compared to empire. They are a series of smaller maps to conquer with the final one being a larger one of europe itself. But still not pulling in all the provinces and whatnot you had in the empire campaign. Everything is better optimized, the AI is better, graphics are better. If I could have the empire grand campaign on the napoleon engine it'd be awesome.
Ah I see ... well since I don't really feel like taking advantage of the poor naval tactics of the AI, it sounds like a blast!
Agreed. I always turn off animations after a few games. Unless you want to invest significantly in having lots of different attack animations and sound effects, that all happen quickly and convey information quickly then. I might leave them on.. make them nice, but don't fret about it.
I did the same thing with Advance Wars and stuff too. And AW has really cool attack animations, but just one for each unit which makes them... repetitive. But awesome the first few dozen times.
Static meshes gliding accross the ground and killing you as they stand beside you, motionless, like the episodes of doctor who involving "weeping angels"?
Nah, give me animations, thanks.
It could always just be an option when creating the lobby/game. "quick battles" - on/off
simple as that.
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