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.
Can we please have an option to turn off spawning monsters?
You talk a lot about FUN and I don't quite get where monsters raping your lands fit into that...
If you turn the world difficulty down they won't attack you, they'll just sit out there in the wilds.
I perfer the 3.5 combat to the watered down 4.0 any day.
Please ...please ....please put Tactical combat as an option in MP otherwise it would not be worth playing the MP.
This also goes for my friends and I as well. TB in AOW:SM was the best part of the game both SP and MP. Auto Resolve is already in the game for those that don't want TB in multiplay or that want it streamlined. So please release the full blown TB for those of us that want no changes from SP TB to MP TB
So... Every Tactical Battle that plays on a set type of terrain will have the same Map?
+ If a monster manages to "conquer" a city it will destroy it (they're monsters afterall)can we have them have several different options after capture depending on nature and strength? I'm thinking for weak units to only raze a single building and give back control/become unowned or reducing the population... while only razing the entire town if they're a high level spawn or have some form of wild barbarian/aggressive trait.
The old Warlords series had a cool concept: upon capturing a city, one could choose to "Capture", "Sack", or "Raze". I think having these options would be very nice. Capture just grabs the thing: no money, no loss. Sack brings in some materials, gold, maybe even arcane knowledge (i.e. resources) but reduces population and damages/destroys some improvements. Raze knocks everything down, and produces potentially more than sacking, but maybe nothing at all (i.e. 0 to n amount of resources). Telling your troops to "burn and pillage" sometimes results in them burning, and then pillaging.
Monsters, of course, could be inclined to "Raze"; bandits might have a chance of "Sacking" instead.
*sigh*
IMHO It would have been better not to put so much emphasis on TB in the 1st place. I mean, it's not HMM where every other aspect is there for the sole purpose of being useful in TB, it's a full-fledged Strategy.
Oh well... whatever... let the boulder roll... half way off the mountain isn't a good stopping point...
For the moment, it would be easy to make 10 more maps of each type, and then random them, or have a seed type depending on the terrain, and then add random elements
Issue 1 is that autoresolve is by definition boring. We need more of MoM and AoW and Xcom, and less 'Stacks of doom'.
Issue 2 is that some ppl have varied definitions of 'strategy' games. Using myself as an example, I don't consider starcraft 2 a strategy game. It is a ClickPerMinute based micromanagement game, with some spare logistic elements thrown in. Whereas I consider Turnbased combat to be the essence and core of strategical gameplay, allowing the player to make both Tactical(will I win this combat/battle) and Strategical(if I sacrafice this unit I WILL win, but can I afford that loss in the battles to come) considerations.
As far as tactical battles in multiplayer I'd leave that OUT right now. I know from experience the majority don't like to sit there while two other guys fight out their battles tactically. Multiplayer should be fast and autocalc would be best for it. When you have 14 other players in a 15 player game everybody wants it to stream along. So, /not signed for tactical battles in multiplayer right now. Perhaps an ARENA mode ladder type structure tactical battles with a point buy system might do later on though.
You don't think being able to control your own army in combat is part of a strategy game?
What's the strategy in "throw what the computer thinks is a superior force at the other guy"?
For me these kinds of games are fun because of the synergy (tee hee) of the 3 elements of gameplay. The logistical (economy, getting a good supply of resoruces), the stratergic (controling important resoruces, deploying your forces so they have maximum influence) and tactical (using the right unit in the right place at the right time).
To take out one of those three for multiplayer seems like half the game will be gone and there is little meaning to your military past stacking it up high.
Well I don't think it is pointless, playing a game for the experience of playing the game can be fun enough. With how the game is set up, I believe there could be more than enough fun just exploring the world and not having to defeat a specific opponent. When you get bored you would just stop playing.
I've never actually seen this option in any game I've played. Also I believe they already have a victory condition that does not rely on any opponent, the Master Quest victory, of course I don't really know what that is and I could be wrong.
Indeed!
Take the Europa Universalis as an exemple!
(Sorry but that post stops here! I had written a long one but Forum Egads deleted it! )
I hope that these issues become a priority soon. They're related I think - some aspects of the UI reduce immersion.
The unit movement and turn mechanics in Elemental pretty much match Galactic Civilizations and to me that just don't feel right for Elemental. It is what most interferes which me feeling engaged. I suggest:
1) When a unit has the focus, gently highlight (with a color transparency) all tiles the unit can move to in the current turn. If the player has grid line display turned off, outline the edge of the reachable area and round corners in the outline. As soon as the unit starts to move, turn off the reachable tiles highlighting, then turn it on again when the movement animation is complete if the unit can still move this turn. (Note: this was mentioned in https://forums.elementalgame.com/386279 but I don't know if that was read by the developers.)
2) Add a mechanism which changes the focus to the "next" (any order is ok) unit which has moves remaining in the current turn. I suggest putting this just left of the "end turn" button, and graying it out when no moveable units remain.
3) Add a start of turn popup whenever a town finishes building something showing what it has completed, what it will build next, and with a button to set focus to the town's build dialog. Checking towns manually is tedious.
I haven't gone looking for stuff to tweak (haven't played much, it feels too much like work in its current state) but noted some other things I encountered:
4) When the kingdom is founded (first town) automatically display the build dialog. This would help to guide the first time player.
5) As mentioned in the post at https://forums.elementalgame.com/386279, remove an unnecessary click from the town build interface.
6) The way units enter and pop out of towns seems awkward to me. I especially dislike that I have no control over where a unit appears after leaving a town, and the similar random feeling movement off the tile after founding the kingdom. A possible fix would be, after founding the kingdom or popping a unit out of a town, change the cursor to the unit's icon and highlight the possible "drop" tiles. User clicks to drop the unit. The escape key could be used for auto-placement, just as a way out for new users who don't get the suggestion made by the highlit tiles.
7) The "Research Breakthrough" dialog includes in the description for each possible selection "Likelihood of being available", "xxx". This is confusing to a new player. Does it mean something might not be available even though it is being displayed? (Of course not but I stumbled over it first time.) Does it mean that something which is available at this instant might not be available on our next breakthrough? (I don't know the answer to this.) This wording should be reworked.
8) The dialog confirming the founding of a new Kingdom should include verbiage which says that the town will grow over time and is best founded near resources (fertile land, metals, shards, etc.) which it will be able to use when it grows. Verbiage like this would eliminate the uncertainties I had when I first played the game about how a town would eventually harvest resources.
So, is monster behavior the only thing world difficulty changes? Doesn't it make monsters stronger/more numerous/anything else to actually make them tougher to kill off? If we were intent on seeking out and killing monsters anyway, it doesn't seem like changing their behavior would make them any more difficult, it only affects you if you were peacefully building and counting on the monsters to leave you alone. Or are we expected to control monster difficulty ourselves, by racing up the adventure tree if we want tougher monsters to come kill us?
Also: tactical battles in multiplayer are must-have. I don't doubt the autoresolve AI will be sufficient for destroying AI player armies, but I know that human players are going to come up with some crazy stuff that it'd take another human, in direct control of his units, to counter. To me the whole point of multiplayer will be those chess-like battles of wits on the tactical battlefield, it's the whole reason I'm interested at all in Elemental's multiplayer (never much enjoyed TBS multiplayer in the past).
I'm not someone likely to play MP much so this won't effect me but we already have that threshold feature. Why take anything out? Leave it up to the players if they want it or not. Set the threshold to 99999 if you don't want them, simple enough. Taking it out while a more MP friendly version is being worked on will not sit well with some people. Options are good.
I think the interface is a problem but don't think taking spells out is a good idea. Just make a nice intuitive interface. One major change I would like to see in this regard is to have us cast spells from the actual book, not from icons. I think this would go a long way to making things friendlier. That way whenever you are casting you see nice large icons, full descriptions and hopefully at some point have access to some sort of filtering. Would be a major improvement in my opinion.
It'd only be a problem if there's nothing else you can do while waiting for them to finish. As long as you can do something it doesn't matter. Most TBS have ways around this to overcome the end of turn wait, whether that's giving the player something to do while waiting, letting them access the informational screens to plan their next few turns or even letting them spectate in the battles. I don't mind waiting ten minutes for two players to finish a tactical combat if I can use that time to check my empire is ticking over nicely, tweak my unit designs, check up on what certain abilities or spells actually do or even just read up on the background lore.
You make some very good points here.
Best regards,Steven.
3.5 is the version that got watered down.. 4.0 distilled it.
I agree that it is essential to appeal to the casual gamer. To increase the fun and replayability of magic:
I just spewed water over my monitor and threw up a little in my mouth.
OMG!!! LMAO!!!
At least I wasn't drinking anything when I read this...
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