As we move towards release many of the assets in the beta make their exit. We shall miss them (well, maybe not).
The finished quests start to get put into place, the finalized notable locations begin to be inserted and the unreleased spell books and special abilities start to get implemented.
The beta program has largely been about testing out systems and mechanics. Some mechanics, like the per city level building limiter, didn’t survive. Others, like influence based resource control, replaced them.
Memory Problems
The area we need the most help on right now has to do with out of memory issues. This is something we’re very concerned about because it’s not easily repeatable (but very easy for those who run into it). So we’ll be asking users who run out of memory to get us their debug.err and their saved games so we can look at it. It could be as simple as some building in the game taking up some crazy amount. It shouldn’t be hard to track down something that eats up over 100 megabytes per turn (or so you’d think anyway).
The other area we’d like to hear from you are all your ideas, suggestions and wish lists. We want to make sure Elemental is something really special on day 1 as well as set the game on the path to evolving over time.
New Quests
One of the types of quests that I’m enjoying are the ones where you have to collect various items and bring them back to someone to get them made into a special item. I’m looking at adding the ability to trade these items between players so if the AI players have found Midnight Stones (for instance) and you need one more to get the boots of eternal dodging then you can trade with them for that midnight stone (and vice versa if they need something the AI can come to you and try to trade for it).
Special Abilities
Here’s a sampling of some of the special abilities we’re putting in:
Poison Shot Tangled Web Vengeance Sanctuary Deadly Bite Immunity Blink Rain of Stone Flame Strike Maul Sprint Savage Strike Confusion Drowning Strike Crushing Blow Dominate Hurricance Backstab Tremor Searing Attack Agonizing Fear
But if you have your own special abilities you’d like to see, go ahead and post them and explain what they do. Keep in mind, the more convoluted they are, the less likely they are to go in (e.g. Moonlit Dance – if full moon, target unit has a chance of doing a special dance that causes adjacent units to mimic dance draining them of their will to live if they have an intelligence less than 8 but greater than 4).
Anyway, we’re pleased with how the game is turning out. The only thing we’re sweating right now really is the out of memory issue.
This is great. The game needs more "persistant" quests. The one I'm actually making now in spare time is from a Leatherworker to collect pelts from (wolves, currently) and turn them into leather armor for my Sovereign/Champions. Mostly proof-of-concept stuff while I figure out how stuff works. These kinds of quests are great.
Also please consider quests that are not guaranteed to appear. Quests that begin from a rare item drop from a rare monster, or quests that begin by finding a rare monster, or very rare adventuring tiles (it's not every game that you'd find a dragon lair or a portal to some demon dimension).
Furthermore, consider varying what can be awarded or required by quests. Quests that require a specific unit ("sacrifice this guy to get <x>"), quests that reward technologies (like a tile for wargs, but you have to do a quest to learn how to tame/ride them to unlock the research that allows you to build the improvement and harvest them for unit mounts), etc.
abilities
(on giant like units)
STOMP cause minor dmg on all enemies in 3 4 tile range
ROLLING STONE deal dmg on all units in a row
PUSH deal minor dmg and push unit away 2 tiles
(on hunters like )
PLACE TRAP, place a invisible trap on the playground dealing minor dmg and preventing the unit who f irst walk on it to move for 2 turns
SLOW SHOT unit hit by this shot has its CP reduced to 1 for 2 turns
MULTI SHOT ranged dmg is reduced by 50% but hits all nearby target too
(warrior kind)
DEFENSIVE STANCE the unit takes 75% less dmg for 2 turns but cant retaliate
TAUNT force the unit to only attack the caster for next turn
THROW WEAPON attacks at 3 tiles of distance but cant attack next turn
I'm thinking some 'class' specific passive abilities that effect groups or stationed cities.
The objective is to give you a bonus for keeping these specialist inside your cities. However, its a small bonus and, most of all, optional. You can continue to send them out and exploring and fighting.
Could go into each history and add another little bonus too.
Something to make each class, history, and ability more unique, meaningful, beneficial, and fun.
Can we make abilities already or not?
liked the special abilities from Panzer General 2
Devestating Fire- Attacker geta an extra attack per turn
Elite Recon- unit gets can see +1 square further
Recon movement- unit can attack, then move (and attack again if they have any attacks left.) (if you havent already changes this limitation)
Ferrocious defense- defensive bonus
Ferrocious attack- attack bonus (to hit and dmg)
Superior Manuver- unit gets + 1 movement
Combat support - all adjacent allies (or within 1-2 squares) gain bonus to attack and defense
Overwatch- allied ranged (archers, etc.) units fire back(as a defense) at the attacking ranged enemy during enemy's turn (with no loss of attack on next turn)
I think the Dragon needs Devour.
Giants could use Hurl - attempt to pick up a unit and throw them
Trample - Additional attack made while charging an enemy. Intended usage: for mounts trampling over infantry, etc
Knockback - knocks an enemy back one tile, if possible. If not possible, extra damage from colliding with whatever is behind them!
Blood Rage - unit gains HP every time they attack a unit. The ultimate in beserk fighting.
Harvest of Souls - unit gains HP from killing a unit. Ohhhhh, nasty wraiths.
Crippling Strike - attacks drain AP, preventing counter attacks
Hideous Visage - This unit is so terrifying even hardened souls dare not engage in combat with it. Morale penalty just for attacking it.
Brutal - every time this unit kills, it does so in a barbaric, brutal way designed to inspire fear in enemy soldiers. Morale penalty for each kill it makes, relative to the combat rating of whatever it just killed.
Acid Blood - units attacking this monster risk getting hit with gouts of acidic blood whenever they melee with it.
Rend - attack shatters armour, reducing defense
Yeah Special Abilities!
I really hope access to some special abilities are tied to regular unit design and unit scaling.
Special Abliities tied to unit designg and training:
Shield Wall- increase defense to arrows and some ranged magic
Set Spear-increase damage if recieved a charge attack
Flaming Arrows - does fire damage and may set a tile on fire
Taunt -Target enemy charges defending enemy, used to break enemy formation and to draw enemy into traps, set spears etc.
Set trap/Snare -spike for damage, poison for a DOT, snare to reduce movement
Charge- damgage bonus based on tiles moved
Climb - ability to move up and over walls, mountain, ruins and other tactical map features
Hide/Ambush- unit can not be seen except by adjacent enemy, free attack with damage bonus if enemy attempt to move onto or through. Can be useful on both tactical battles or strategic map.
Siegeweapons - squads should be able to equip balistas, catapults and trebuchet to attack with.
Beserk Rage- unit charges and attacks mindlessly with bonus damage but player loses control of unit.
Scouting- increase visiliity on strategic map
Assess Enemy - ability to assess stats of enemy units like strength defense and hitpoints
Knockback - unit must have charge first, Enemy unit succussfully struck moves back a tile. Used to break enemy formation and allow your fast units to get in rear arreas to attack archers, seige weapons and casters.
Reach- units with long polearms may attack without retaliation
First strike- get your couter attack in before the enemy even reaches you!
Disarm-target affected must use next attack to recover weapons instead
Sunder-Target defense is lowered.
Special abilities tied to equipment:
Armor of Fire - fire ressitance and damage shield --like immolate above. High level versions could even gain health from exposure to fire. Imagine some infantry equiped with these, chargeing into enemy ranks and then you showing the area with fireballs and firestorms!
Armor of Ice - cold resistance. Higher level version could reflect some magical attacks.
Armor of Wind- increased defense to range attacks, more powerful versions could allow flight
Armor of Earth - increase defense to movement impeding attacks and terrrain, increase resistance to lightning.
Weapons with a variety of elemental damage types and poisons.
Secondary Weapon - units with two weapons will use which everone is more effective against the target, and have a back up weapon to deal with warp wood, rust, sunder and disarm attacks.
I could spend all day thinking of this stuff!
Shame to hear about the goodie huts. To be honest, most of my fun in Civilization came from exploring for goodie huts. I rarely played a game past 1000 AD.
Not in beta but have read many posts and watched many vids on elemental:
Wish list would include:
Sovereign not being able to spam magic spells in combat as I have read in another post as this would seems to make tatical battles a little too easy (Do'nt know if this has changed) But something like casting one spell per tatical turn would seem more appropiate?
Wandering Monsters and mobs to have agenda of their own.
Main concern is a good A.I especially in tatical battles I like to feel Im entering a battles with a serious chance of defeat and not that Im entering combat just to go through the motions again. On this note battles that scale with you whether that would be your sovereigns level /your euipped items/ or just how far you have progressed and an A.I that can calculate all these factors and send appropiate obstacles for you to overcome against you. Too many games have you in so called God mode towards the end of the game with no challenges left but to plod along boringly to the end.
Set armour pieces to find and accumalate? Nightshade Plate, Summoners Garb, Thunder walker armour that sort of thing..Too wowish...maybe?
Finally Lots of big bad a*** boss mobs to battle
***Aditional*** Read somewhere that summoned monsters require gold to maintain, would it not be better to deplete a certain amount of mana each turn instead of gold for summoned minions?
Special abilities to include:
Think klaxton 449 already mentioned this one but "Charm" for me would be a must, nothing like getting some of the enemy units to fight against himself for a number of turns^^
One of my Own: Dopllerganger, clone one of your units so that a double appears and fights along side the original for a number of set turns or for the duration of that battle...damn just saw someone mentioned shapechanger above! Oh well great minds and all that
I agree there, or at least a setting that's more than on/off.
I would also like a resources setting, from little to abundant. Heck anything that spawns on a map should have these settings imo, unless it's hard coded into the map.
Trust me... that is not at all how magic is working in B4... with a 30 int sovereign I have had Melting touch(up to 2xInt damage), fail to kill a 10 hp unit... hit for bloody 5.
My thoughts:
Spells still need some work (I like the idea of one per tactical turn, maybe need some rebalancing then too of course.).
No more Goodie huts. No more Goodie... huts. Now. I spy a Major, major game-breaking problem with this. Say I am playing "Emperor Magnus Jeremiah Scott V, Earl of Cheese". I start out near No gold resource. I therefore get a piffling 0.6 gold per turn or something. I find a gold resource. I want to fund a city. But wait! I can't afford to fund a city! Where can i get the money? Goodie huts? No! From other players? Pah! They are not the fools. They shall leave me to die. So i either resign from the game or die a slow and painful goldless death of boredom and weakness.
Also, quests such as 'you must escort this chap to his estate'. I strongly feel if you are going to keep these, there should be scripted encounters. And at Least two different possibilites for 'that encounter', picked by a rng.
Possibiliy 1: The famed 'Warlock Edward Saxonite' finally catches up to your escort. He is his arch-enemy. You must fight him or surrender the escort.
I fight) Two options now.
I win. The chap i was escorting turns out to be an arch-criminal. I gain a little gold but lose diplomatic capital.
I win. The chap turns out to be uber rich. I gain heaps of gold at no cost.
I surrender him) Two options Now.
The Warlock thanks me and gives me the powerful "Staff of Rupert and the Strawberries."
The Warlock laughs, kills my escort and uses his corpse to summon "Steve, the spiffing zombie of doom". They both now attack my pitifully naive hero.
Possibility two:
You arrive at the estate. Something seems wrong. Your so-called 'escort' turns into a moustached vampire-zombie of doom. He attacks your poor wee hero. If you defeat him you find a scroll on his body. It gives you the spell "summon fledgling vampire-zombie".
I think multi-path player-choice quests are the only way to go personally, unless you have something really rather interesting to offer in a quest. In terms of Interesting quest i mean, not reward.
yeah, the spells need a minimum damage. i have hit stuff for 0, 2 times in a row.
this is a problem of the actual combat system
maybe ill make a post on this in the future but i dont like this much high RNG
basically a spell, ANY spellcan go from 0 to N
this is too much random, i hate it
there should be a small gap into spell dmg
Ouch...was that due to the units resistances, or do spells have a roll of the dice luck factor associated with them?
**Aditional** Posted this as the above poster answered my question, the spells damage seem a bit too random then, wouldnt mind if they were based on the targets resistances for instance a fire spell only doing 10% dmg against a fire orientated/resistant (not immune) type creature.
Knockback Units attacked by this unit are knocked back a tile.
Explosive. Unit damages units in surrounding tiles when it is killed.
Tactician. Friendly units in adjacent tiles get attack/defense bonus.
Elemental resistance/immunity, or to particular slashing/bludgeoning/piercing damage weapon ty (half damage/immune to damage type X)
Vulnerabilities; eg fragile takes extra damage from bludgeoning, flammable takes extra damage from fire damage, cold-blooded takes extra damage from ice damage.
Incorporeal Nomagical attacks do at most 1 damage. (Immunity is too strong).
Animator. Creates a weak skeleton unit each tactical combat turn. Or:
Reanimator. Creates a weak skeleton on the map each time a unit dies (or each time a friendly unit dies).
Blink/teleport Can move to any tile on the tactical map each turn. [Either have this take up all its moves, which might be too weak, or all but 1 move.]
Sunder; damages opponent's weapon or armor when it strikes.
Slow reload; can only fire every second turn [Useful trait for balancing powerful siege units]
Inaccurate; you choose target tile for firing a projectile, but there is a chance it hit adjacent tiles instead, or hits the target and then bounces [think tabletop Warhammer]
Bravery; bonus against units that are stronger than it.
Gargantuan; takes up 2 or 4 tiles.
Burrowing; goes under ground, at start of next turn pops up in a target tile.
Trail of ice/dust/flame Changes the terrain type to tundra/desert/lava as the unit walks around the map (think age of wonders)
Forestkin; attack/defesnse bonus in forests
Icekin; bonus in tundra
etc. for other terrain
Prospector. Can prospect on a tile; small chance of discovering a resource. [But might be too boring/ MM intensive.]
How about,
Eject - chance to throw an enemy unit out of the battle. It wouldn't kill it, just maybe move it to an adjacent map square to be dealt with later.
yea ... probably smaller gaps (not too small, but maybe Int/2 <-> 2(Int)) instead of 0 <-> 2(Int)
although 0 - Int/ N is probably acceptable if N is larger than 1
0 - Z(Int) is probably not acceptable imho if Z is larger than 1
equipment Alchemy Kit ==> ability Dragon Oil - A limited charge, limited range thrown area-effect fire attack
A more adroit way would be for them to add the different armor types Frogboy talked about (i.e. Leather would have defense and armor against crushing/lightning/ice, but 0 or - against fire/piercing.
Then you could have certain spells with wider variances such as [Int/3 to Int*2] for say 'Thunderstrike' and more constant spells like Icebolt doing [Int*.66 to Int*1.33]
Well yea ... I was just giving an example of a possible average.
If you have damage range as a variable, then some spells may become more attractive on virtue of simply being more consistent ... even if they have a lower max-damage
I like scooters's burrowing and Terrain bonus creature types!
I can imagine some badass dessert worm with both of those.
and ofcourse all the ones the same as mine!
I also like you starting to talk about weakness/vulnerbilities that some units may have. I particullary see these being associated with some equipment, for example;
Short Sword of Vamprism- unit is healed for all damage it deals through melee, unit takes double damage from holy spells.
We need exposes!
Expose to piercing
Expose to slashing
Expose to Crushing
Expose to (Insert elemental damage here)
How about stealth?
Units would be invisible depending on terrain and/or distance to enemy.
Death Strike - (Killing strike raises the enemy as a zombie or skeleton)
Arrow Fend - Unit with shield equipped has a low chance of getting hit by arrows
Also, Damage over time spells
Poison over time, other damage types over time: piercing, crushing, cold etc
Mana Collector: Expend some multiple of mana (2x, 3x?) to store one additional mana over the spellcaster's Essence. (Trait could apply to both units and items?)
Push - Knock the target back one or two tiles
Charge - Pass through the target while attacking, with a chance to knock him back
Trap(s) - Set or hide a stationary trap on the battlefield, which goes off when enemy enters that tile
Freeze - Turn liquid on map into solid ice, freezing units on that tile (may also occur due to ice magic)
Melt - Turn solid ice on map into liquid, submerging units on that tile (may also occur due to fire magic)
Wild Growth - Multiple variations: thorn bushes that sting, vines that entangle, trees that obstruct
I'd like to see quests have a % chance to appear condition on them. That is I make a an "abandoned sorcery tower" tile and have a few of them appear on the map. Those could do things like this (I haven't had a chance to make quests yet due to work and Starcraft 2, so maybe it's already possible):
- 25% You find nothing
- 25% You find a tome
- 25% You find refugees using it as a makeshift refuge, who offer to join you and give you what they found
- 5% You find a map to an ancient buried ruin. Sending troops to dig it out (takes 10 turns) uncovers a reward.
- 5% You find a map to a cave with a treasure
- 5% You find a map with a cave to a treasure, but a dragon happens to already own that treasure
- 5% You find a tome with a powerful ritual. Spending essence and sacrificing a champion lets you complete the ritual, reanimating the champion as a Lich and giving him the "Raise Corpse" combat spell.
- 2.5% You find that the tower really contained a shard, and you gain control of the shard
- 2.5% The tower collapses when you try to enter it. Next time, check the stability of a crumbling ruin before wandering in! (You suffer a death and have to resurrect at town, but gain +1 wisdom for your experience.)
You could also make ones where every tile your sovereign moves over has a 0.01% chance to trigger something, or every city conquest has a 2% chance to start a quest (resistance leader that needs handling or some such).
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