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.
This makes me feel better, I would hate to see the tactical battles in single player having to change to cater to the MP crowd.
Yeah, I'd definitely say leave tactical battles in MP.. some people might not use them much, but you'll piss off a lot more people if you take them out completely (it's a major, major feature) in the beginning than if they just require a bit too much clicking. Wanting to change them later for MP isn't the best reason not to include the current iteration at start.
Excellent. More difficulty options the better. I loved it in FfH2 when AI players were beaten early on and I could laugh at them. I hope that the monsters and third-parties remain a consistant threat as they can be a serious impediment to growth, which can only be a good thing a the larger the realm the more gameplay becomes pedestrian, I find.
MP tactical battles are a must IMO. Theres nothing worse than creating a huge force and then sending them off to war and getting a big screen saying "YOU LOST! All your troops were killed in action (they probably got stuck on a rock and nobody was there to command them out, oh well)."
That direct control in the heart of the conflict is what gives personality to your units.
i want elemental to have multiplayer but TB can really slow the game down.... i wouldn't care much if we were not able to use it till they allowed a better way for it to work on multi.
Agreed.
If Tactical Battles slow MP to crawl, there's no point in having them in the initial MP mode. Of course a on/off choice when creating games would be ideal.
YEAH!
You must read (of course you already did! ) those last posts on page 3 of Playing with monsters.
They tell a tale of epicness and impending doom due to monsters.
To put other causes behind the spawning and multiplication of monsters, you could use something like ecodamages did in Alpha Centauri (the more industrialized your cities, the more native life and more and more powerful would appear) but change the reason. That could be something like the more extended your zone of influence (especially when beginning to cover those wild lands we'd like to see: Forest of Fangorn, Swamps of Lustria, the ruins of an ancient doomed metropolis like Sarnath (Lovecraft), haunted desert tombs...) the more you risk that ancient races (satyrs, panii like in Dom3's Pangea), ancient cults, ancient wizards or necromancers feel threatened and use spells to take control of monsters and sent them against you.
The manual of Dom3 says about Pangea:
"The loss of ancient magic and traditions over the ages is quite apparent in this nation. This loss is a cause of growing grief, and dark vengeance is available to the Lord of Pangea. The global enchantement "Carrion Woods" unleashes vast and vengeful powers upon the world. Vines and roots turn into slithering and growing entities strangling the living in their sleep, and reanimating their corpses as marionettes of vines and bonesknown as manikin"
Nothing to take literaly but something to get inspiration from!
As for the animation thing- one possible "lazy" solution would be to "Tekken"-it.
Use flashy hitsparks to hide the animation errors. In Tekken, when you hit someone, usually there is some sort of loud hitspark that masks the poor hit detection.
May not fit the game at all though , and may come off as a bit cheezy. Might work better for magic though.
As for MP and tactical battles: here's an idea. Instead of setting a unit threshhold, why not a size of stack threshhold and a relative power threshhold? Two variables. Or replace the power threshhold with a surrender mechanic like AoW: Shadow Magic did.
Make it where you tactical battle if both stacks are in each side's top n sizewise and one force isn't x% greater combatwise.
If you spend all game building a giant army to have a final showdown against the other guy's giant army... isn't it awfully anti-climatic to just see a results screen and no battle? I dare say that's not fun.
It's one thing to offer people the chance to auto-resolve. But TBH if tactical battles are flat out disabled in multiplayer... I won't be playing multiplayer. That's a deal breaker. It's no fun to build up an empire only to have the computer decide off screen what happens to it.
(It's also inevitably going to lead to someone saying that with such a major feature missing at release, the game wasn't released in a completed state and thus violates the gamer's bill of rights.)
Magic needs a catch. The reason it isn't engaging so far is that it's the same ol' same ol'. There's nothing new about it. Probably, Frogboy feels that it's wrong because he's hailed Elemental as the next 'big thing', so to speak.
So, here's an idea that just now came to me. It may be doable, it may not be doable. I figured it's worth saying, at least.
Thus far, magic seems to be, easily, the salvation and/or damnation of the world. It's a bit of a missing factor - the energies of magic are not wholly part of the world. Whenever you cast spells, then, you bring those energies back into the world. Sometimes, the energies linger - for better or for worse.
Each spell you cast leaves behind some traces of its type. Casting spells of a fire book leaves fire traces, water leaves water, summoning leaves summoning, etc. Each book stands against another, so that their traces neutralize each other. So equal numbers of fire and water traces would flat out to zero.
More traces are left with the more spells you cast. This buildup becomes a great font of power - as you cast a bunch of fire spells, there is so much fire energy in the air you can cast spells for free (by draining the traces instead of using mana) or have spells that are simply more powerful (a fireball with a lot of fire energy packs a hell of a punch, compared to a fireball with no traces of energy of any sort). Some spells have such a horrendously high mana cast that they will require you to burn through a lot of energy in the area to cast.
Eventually, there would be so great a buildup of certain energies (air, fire, etc.) that your area of influence becomes a certain domain. This domain gives passive boosts to units, and certain units and magical beings will be drawn to your territory (IE, having a domain of air would attract flying creatures. Of earth, sand golem-type creatures). The energies become so rampant, so powerful, that their influence causes occurences aligned with their books. Air domains will create sporadic storms, which will impede enemies and strike them with lightning. Fire domains burn enemies and penalize defense. A summoning domain randomly creates very weak units, powerful only en masse.
Thus, magic isn't the same as 'everyone is the same person with the same spells'. You get to choose which books to use, which magic to populate your kingdom with. Do you focus on just a few sorts of magic? You'll be far more powerful in them than others, but you will only be able to draw power from those particular types. Or do you not care about having the domain, instead wanting to be able to hurl every single spell in the game?
Do you choose power through variety and adaptation? Or do you limit yourself to just a few particulars? Be a battlemage whose magic is focused solely on destruction, or be a summoner whose very breath binds magic into minions? Or be a little bit of everything, jack of all books but master of none? The choice is yours.
Your #1 concern has been mine for a while. As you aptly put it "there is a ton of stuff to do, and nothing to really guide a new player to do it (or to even know it is there.) I think you also list it well as #1, because this is critical before release. A well-scripted tutorial to take you thru all the apsects would be OK, but it would really be better to make it much more automatic, things brought to the player's attention by the game. Not that the correct action should be too obvious, but at least at easier settings there should be some prompts about things that you may be neglecting. Or something similar.
The tactical battles are fairly critical for my friends and I. Having a new game that could replace AoW:SM was what got most of them to spring for a pre-order.
I've been thinking about this a while and I guess this is a good a place as any. I thought it would be cool, if it would be possible, to play a game with no actual opponents other than the world it's self. It would be fun to level up, spread out and explore, adventure in the world and only have to worry about the monsters and minor races. It would be a niffty and unique option. Something I obviously would expect to see till release, but some I'd like to have.
@ xecranThat might be interesting, but a game without an end is a waste of time. ... *Cough World of Warcraft ...*cough
If you had an objective like build to a certain point, or survive for x turns, that would be very interesting indeed.
Very good to hear, but why would bandits go out of their way to burn a city to the ground? Wouldn't they grab goods, a few women, light a few fires, then take off?
The original colonization handled "native" raids in an insightful way. Instead of obliterating a settlement, they would attack and if they succeeding in killing the defenders, they would kill a few colonists, grab some goods, then flee with their gains. Eventually, if they attacked frequently enough and won, the settlement would run out of colonists and be destroyed.
I'd like to see something similar in elemental. Monsters could sweep into a city if they thought they had a chance to win, the ctizens would flee into the country side if the defenders were killed, and the monsters would take whatever they could carry. It doesn't make sense to me that bandits would stand around after they got what they came for and pound the buildings into dust. Different creatures might take prioritize different things to steal or cause different degrees of damage. Trolls would take food. Elementals would take mana crystals and such. Bandit would take gold. Once the raiders are done, the people would trickle back into town to continue their lives (though some may decide not to come back.)
You might even create a special option called "evacuate" for newer cities. When a large group of monsters are coming and you don't have enough defenders to reliably beat them, you might hit the evacuate button and your citizens would flee into the country side ahead of time with whatever valuables they could carry. After the baddies have taken what they want, your citizens return, though you obviously lose a hefty period of time where your city could have been productive.
It's a pretty common mode in strategy games, usually dubbed sandbox mode. Mainly used for testing out different combinations, or in the case of RTS games, build orders.
This!
Also for neutrals hurting settlements - hitting presitge and destroying a single random building are a good way of making the faction suffer without it being silly.
It's encouraging to consistently see Brad noting the same problems that I see when I play, namely the UI is click-heavy and still not that intuitive and magic is just not there yet.
Magic is especially problematic right now. But am I the only person who thinks that more spells is NOT the answer? There are already a ton of spells available and the magic system and interface makes choosing and using them extremely micromanagement heavy; its easily the most complex single piece of the game. You have to figure out what each spell does, you have to remember what each icon stands for, you have to choose new spells on a regular basis (or be very confident queuing them), you have cast when you have mana, etc. Maybe I'll feel better with some UI improvements but right now I dislike magic entirely as it requires so much work to figure out and use. More spells would be fun down the road once things get worked out but right now I actually think LESS spells and a simplified interface would be preferred.
I realize most of the people on this forum are hardcore players who want tactical battles to take 30 minutes and will always want "moar spellz!!!" but remember there is a huge group of casual players who make up the majority of Stardock sales and if they get turned off by an overly complex and un-intuitive magic system where they spend 80% of their time fighting the interface and only 20% of the time actually playing the game its going to cause problems.
Super complex and extensive spell books can easily be added in via modding for the hardcore players, but if casual players get turned off to the "base" game because there is too much complexity to the magic system its going to hurt sales, I can guarantee it. Particularly if the game gets the reputation as a hardcore player-only game.
It's almost like magic needs an "easy mode" option or something.
Given the sheer amount of $$$ being spent on multiplayer, it's safe to say that we're taking it seriously. However, what I am not in favor of is simply taking the single player stuff and making it MP. I'd rather add more modes later like a dedicated Arena mode and such.
Tactical battles are a make or break deal for a lot of people. I am one of them. Honestly, I don't need SynchKill animations like Warhammer40k. In fact the retro style of only the attacking unit moving wouldn't make me cry that much. But not having TB tactical battles would definitely make me not recommend it to friends. Even knowledge that they would come later would be bitter. Since it makes it feel like you pushed an incomplete game.
Honestly, would prefer a coop campaign if you have to scrap some features for Versus.
I have to agree, without tactical battles for my friends and I multiplayer will just not be played and it will be difficult for me to talk other guild mates into buying/playing the game as well.
PLEASE!!! Leave tactical battles in multiplayer if people don't want it in their games just have an option to turn it on or off.
I totally agree, tactical battles was the main selling point of the game. Too many games were ruined by 'twitch based' real time combat.
I agree, good idea.
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