Why cant' we have the same UI as the Design unit screen?

So we can select weapon, armor (by body area), items from separate tabs?

The list gets far too long in the late game.  Way too many items.

Also, it was very convenient to be able to buy "full set of leather" or "full set of chain", having to do it piecemeal is frustrating; it takes like 8 clicks to buy a set of leather armor for a single champion, and then another 5 to equip them! Very poor UI.

20. The biggest problems with tactical combat are:

a. Damage is too high relative to health.  This makes ranged units too powerful, and "alpha strikes" way too strong.

b. Squads are too powerful relative to individuals.  A squad of three 5/2 guys should function like three 5/2 guys, not a single 15/6 guy.  They should lose squad members (degrading power) when they take damage (though these can heal back to full health), and if its an army made up of strength 5 guys, then they should do poorly vs strength 8 armor.  3 5/2 guys against an 8 defense unit should be three attacks vs strength 8 armor, not a single strength 15 attack vs strength 8 armor.

Fixing this will also partly fix a., and will make defense relatively more valuable - and will make combat champions relatively more valuable.

21. The lore is fine, but it needs to matter more.  Far more faction differentiation, for example, and Sovreign differentiation, so that a Fire mage feels different from a Death mage or a trader.

23.  An idea with shards: let the player select (or change) what type of shard they're using.

Again, a good way to support differentiation.  So there are various "magic shards" around.  When they player build a shrine, they dedicate that shard to a particular magic type.

So, if I'm playing a fire mage, I can choose to dedicate my shards to fire, and get lots of really good boosts from my fire spells.  Otherwise, my fire mage comes across an earth shard, and it doesn't really help much.

Let the player choose what kind of magic to pursue, not be limited by whatever shard types they happen to have near them.  Try and reward magical specialization.  This will also help reduce spell clutter.

I love your ideas, but I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. It removes a lot of the surprise and strategy from the game. If, on the other hand, you had to battle your way across the land to get to that fire shard in order to get the ultimate fire spell, then that would be epic; if you could just walk right up to the neighborhood water shard and convert it to a fire shard, that would be far too easy for the immense value that [I hope] the shards will become.

Sovereign starting equipment: I don't like having to use design points to buy something that would only cost me gold later.

Sovereigns should be able to buy for a small starting gold/points pool, maybe from part of the starting gold of your faction or a separate pool, with this gold being useable eitheir for normal weapons and armors (for the warrior type) or for some other items (scouting package for your adventurer sovereign, some starting bonus ressources for the empire builder, maybe a small starting magic item/spell for the spellcaster and so on)

Note that some talents and traits (starting units or ressources) could be replaced/incorporated in this system : do you buy with this pool a sovereign with a great equipment, a few starting units, or some starting ressources ?

Such advantages are good to have, but as they are only a temporary advantage they should not be bought with the same points you buy you sovereign abilities, abilities that should still be useful late in the game while starting items/ressources/units are only good for the early game to get a better start.

About tactical combat, I don't understand why we don't use the existing movement score of the unit. I don't like that the number of attacks and the number of move are linked.
A cavalry unit should be able to move farther in tactical combat (and maybe have a charge bonus when attacking or something like that), and not get more attacks if it doesn't move. This give incentive to stand in place waiting for the ennemy to move closer to you so you get first strike and several attacks, where separate move and attack actions would instead make players more likely to attack.

Of course some units could get some bonus when stanging ground (pikemen cancelling the charge bonus of cavalry when attacked for exemple).

Well I thought that too, but then I went back to MoM, where movement is a lot of 1 tile, and it works pretty well. I think this has a lot more to do with the power of archery and the imbalance between attack and defence. Also, in MoM, units lose men, and that also helps I think.

I have a few thoughts of my own, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to make my own thread, or where.  I see only stickied dev posts when I browse the forums.  Anyway, my list of things:

1. Is there a keyboard way to move? The four arrow keys don't cut it, as there are six directions, aren't there?  Numpad keyboard would be ideal, but it doesn't do anything.  I find moving my sovereign downright tedious.

2. Does city layout matter now?  I think I've seen one way in which it does: I had to build toward an ancient library in order to build on it.  I think.  Is there any other way in which it matters?

3. Is there a way to mouseover city buildings to see a reminder of what they do, and what they're producing?

4. My sovereign accidentally got stuck because she became surrounded by rival territory.  The only way out was to teleport out.  I guess that was OK, but it was still pretty frustrating until I realized I had that spell.  And if I were out of mana, I don't know what I'd have done.

5. I just got an out of memory crash; I guess I'll dig around to post the info requested by the devs about this.

6. I got a book that increased my sovereign's basic "defense" stat, but I don't see any such stat on her character sheet.  Am I missing something?  It's not very satisfying to get such a message and not to be able to see what kind of difference it makes.

7. As others have said, FedEx quests aren't very interesting. I hope the devs aren't relying heavily on modders to fix this. Perhaps the "book" we haven't seen will contain more interesting content?

8. In general, Beta 4 doesn't seem light-years more fun than Beta 3 to me.  My sovereign moves at a snail's pace, and I don't have all that much to do, at least in the early turns.  I know Civ starts like that too, but in Civ exploration is more interesting.  Likewise, in GalCiv there's the early colonization rush, then exploration, then planet development, etc.  Here, I occasionally build a building or create a unit, and my sovereign limps around doing dull quests.  Should I be spamming new cities?  Raising armies and chasing down spiders?  I suppose I haven't gotten far enough into Elemental to really enjoy it -- in part because of crashes.  But still, the game should hook me fast, and right now it doesn't.

Re Grotius' list.

First, if you're in a specific forum (not just on the forums.elementalgame.com frontpage) then there is a Create Post button at the top of the forum list, just above the "Last Reply Info" column header.

2. You don't have to build towards a structure to get it; things like ancient libraries can have their improvement built on them just by clicking on the tile and then the build button; you don't need the city to touch it in order to build.

However, building out to it will eventually (not in current build) mean that it gets incorporated within the city, and so can't be destroyed separately by a unit moving into it.

Otherwise, as far as I can tell placement makes very little difference, the only differences being:

i) Your units can instantly move across the entire city, so a city spread in the right directions could reduce movement costs.

ii) In case there are lots of hills or water around or other cities nearby, placement could matter if space is at a premium.

4. Waited until your mana refreshed, I guess....

6. I'm not sure if this actually increases the dexterity stat, or directly affects defense.  Dexterity does nothing except impact defense.

7. i'm guessing that there will be a ton more quests, but I suspect that many will still be glorified fedex.

8. I also find that Beta4 is not much fun, though it is much improved (many more techs, better stability, more monsters).  But, its beta.  Hopefully final version will be vastly improved.

I think attack reductions for ranged weapons (and changing how squads stack) are the right fixes for ranged weapons.

Which would then allow the units to be starting further apart.

I don't think giving a combat speed penalty is the right thing; we should want to encourage ranged units to use light armor, and so be able to get multiple shots.  If you give them a big combat speed penalty, then you're not going to get decent speed anyway, so there's no reason not to load them up with heavy armor.

I love Master of Magic for many reasons.  The spell research, the variety of races, exploring and settling new territory, etc.

I do not love Master of Magic for its combat.  It was simplistic and did its job but the stronger army would always win.  The only reason to not autoresolve every battle was because the AI would do a poor job of protecting weakened units and would suffer needless casualties.

In deference to Frogboy and Stardock the few strong points of MoM combat worth emulating are:

• Battle Length.  MoM battles were usually just a few minutes long.  I whink that most battles should mirror that, except possiblly soverign versus soverign late game battles.
• Balance between armies, ranged versus mellee, heroes and magic was good.  Although by the late game basic units were useless.
• Simplicity.  The battles were simple and approachable.  This simplcity meant the AI did ok, you couldn't defeat a powerful enemy with some cheap trick (excepting kiting trolls sometimes!).

The many poor points; no terrain, little unit role differantion, no facing or flank attacks, no cover from range, no manuvering and positioning, few special attacks, army composition was nearly irrelavant, all boil down to in Master of Magic Player Decisions in Combat were not decisive!

The current system has some potential to also recreate this negative point in its quest to capture the positive essense of MoM.

Points that I have seen suggested by others to alleviate this problem.

• Armies need to start out of range of each other.  Not turns of movement away, but outside of bow shot and the vast majority of units should not be able to move into melee range and attack their first turn.  I would extent this to spells as well.  Having spells and weapons have variable range is also and excellent way to add variety and balance.  
• Terrain needs to matter.  Whether it be high ground, the cover of the forest, a river ford,  a muddy bog, or a magma spewing mountain, players and AI need to be making decisions about how to capture decisive terrain or how to use unfavorable terrain to trap and weaken the enemy. 
• An army should be stronger than the sum of its parts.  All units should have a role to play.  Whether it is protecting another units flank, healing, debuffing/sundering resistance, providing beneficial buffs, charging and disrupting enemy advance, skirting to the rear of an enemy and making them waste units trying to track down some fast unit, or just blasting them directly with arrows or rocks or magic.  A well concerted army should crush an enemy with ranks and ranks of a single unit type.  Why?  Because this is what makes designing armies fun, getting them to work together such that they are more powerful than the units alone would appear to be.  If this is not true then the extremely exciting prospect of Unit design is a hollow exersice.
• Units should have weaknesses.  Whether it be vulnerabilty to magic or a particular damage type, slow movement, limited range. limitied ammo or mana, limited defense, poor accuracy with very wide damage spread, reckless or foolish charges, poor morale when damaged, slow attack speed or whatever.  These weakness mean all units will need others to support and protect them and that all units can be overcome with the proper tactics or strategy.
• Units should have strengths!  Obviously this is the fun stuff and Frogboy is allready talking about the efforts to improve combat with fun and interesting ways to kill your enemies.  I would take it a step further to remind that there are many ways a unit can be 'powerful'.  Try and support as many ways as posible for units to be unique but still contribute to a battle.  Other threads have great examples.

Why this list?  What do all of these suggestions have in common?    They give players decisions!  With these changes it will be choices that will win a battle!  Choices about how to design your army, how to manuver and position your troops, how to use battlefield variables like terrain, and knowledge about the enemy itself that will help win a battle.  Not only the raw power of their army.  

None of these things require drasitc changes in the basic design of the game thus far. 

Tactical battle maps are allready large enough to have units start farther away.  There are allready a host of ways to customize strategic map tiles; can't tactical map tiles get some love too?  We allready have damage types and armor types, just expand on that to include magic damage types and magic defense types.  A host of special abilities are being planned, consider weakness and tradeoff as well.  Range of different attacks is not in; this important aspect would make spell design much easier and more interesting, would make weapon design more interesting, and quite frankly adding a range stat to spells and weapons is worth the effort!

Frogboy, the only reason I can think of why increasing the amount of choices on the battlefield could be aproblem to you is becuase the A.I. may do poorly with them.  While we all want a robust AI which makes good decisions and is challenging and you may not feel you can get the A.I. to perform as well as you would like with these other factors to consider; I would argue that is a weak reason to keep them out.  It is having decisions like this that will make combat fun.  Decisons like this would a huge boon to multiplayer.  Also there are many simple ways to compensate the AI on the startegic side to balance out against the player and keep the game challenging (unit maintence, AI versus AI diplomacy, spell and knowledge research boneses etc). 

Isn't it at the heart of nearly every great fantasy story a moment wear weak overcomes strong?  Where a few brave and exceptional heros pushed back the overwhelming horde?  Adding these elements to battles allows that.  Without them the battles are decided on the strategic map and are based only on who can make their horde better and larger and sooner. 

One Last point:

Movement and number of attacks must be seperated.  The fact they were ever linked is rather surprising.  This linkage creates the obvious problem that you can never have a fast melee poor unit or a slow melee powerful unit.  It also means that Combat speed is the most decisive combat stat and overshadows all others.  It also makes it harder to balance heros and armies.  It also makes it harder to implement terrain affecting movement (since it would also gimp combat attacks), or spells that affect only movement or combat speed.  It severly limits unit design.  I see no advantage for this linkage.

Just as an update on this and some of the suggestions in the list, it's already confirmed both that tactical combat will have terrain effects, and that posessing shards will boost the effects of your spells. Two great pieces of news. Suggests we should keep posting...