Brad,

    I've been following your posts and beta journals with excitement for months now, and have greatly enjoyed seeing and participating in the beta process for this wonderful game.  My group of friends and I actually came together playing Age of Wonders, its sequels, and eventually transfered over to Fall from Heaven and Fall Further.   We live and breathe playing these games cooperatively, and have been incredibly excited for Elemental.  TBS fantasy games with this amount of love and care in them don't come around every day.

    Hopefully without being overly dramatic, this post was incredibly disappointing, for the news that it brought about the lack of tactical battles in multiplayer.  Among my friends, we pretty much all agree that the reason that a multiplayer community endured for so long was, in part, due to the inclusion of tactical battles.  While this may seem like a hefty claim, I can think of quite a few reasons why tactical battles are a critical element in the fantasy TBS multiplayer experience.

1.  It invests players in each individual game.  Without tactical battles, major game events sometimes go by without the other players noticing it.  I can't state the number of times I've been in a Fall From Heaven game and my friend will be locked in a major battle without me noticing or paying attention.  Most of the time, its just seeing the stacks of unit as they retreat from the battle.  Additionally, as a non-participating player, you have no idea what actually happened in the battle, with no access to a log of events.  On the other hand, in a game like Age of Wonders, every player knows about that heroic spearmen that held off three orc warlords, or the dragon that singlehandedly took on an entire garrison.  Multiplayer feels like a story that everyone is participating in, rather than each player having their own simpler story in their own corner of the map. (as a side note, chat during tactical battles is very important )

2.   Tactical battles are a vital part of an empire builder/TBS game's depth.  I imagine you already well know this, since you chose to design them into Elemental in the first place.  Particularly now that you have special abilities, tactical battles are the game within a game that is a necessary component of mastering Elemental as a whole.  Disabling them in multiplayer will turn multiplayer games into a different game, a game that's somehow less than the full Elemental experience.  While I'm sure I will still play and enjoy cooperative multiplayer, without tactical battles the game will feel a little bit more shallow, with less mystery and complexity to master.  It is my personal belief that depth is the key to making a game with great longevity.  The more there is to study, there more there is to explore, discover, master, the longer people will play your game in order to master it, and the more they will fall in love as they realize the depth and complexity of the game mechanics.

3.  Watching and participating in tactical battles creates community and strategy sharing among players in a game.  One thing that is surprising about multiplayer empire builder/TBS games when you sit down and think about it is how little interaction between two teammates is actually required.  In a game of Civilization (or Fall From Heaven) you can conceivably win the game without observing a single thing that your teammates might be doing elsewhere in the game world. Now, I cannot deny that some people found watching tactical battles as a non-participating player in Age of Wonders boring.  I feel that for most who enjoy this genre of game, however, watching a tactical battle can be a compelling experience.  It allows you to share strategies between players, both inadvertantly and by design.  You physically see if that certain type of archer is effective in combat, or if he's just arrow fodder.  You see how to position and move your cavalry so that they are most effective in tactical battles.  This sort of strategy-share encourages a community to be created around a set of shared experiences - you can say to your friend as the battle is going on, "I don't think this archer type is working out." or "What do you think I should do with this footman?"  This form of interaction is, I believe, at the very heart of any game that can truly be called "cooperative" and I believe it rightly belongs in the Elemental Multiplayer experience.

4.  Battles are not truly "cooperative" without tactical battles.  An oft-used cliche of teamwork is that a team is greater than the sum of its parts.  However, when it comes to the combat side of the game, this cannot be true without tactical battles.  While the auto-resolve AI has been great so far in my testing, it cannot truly simulate the tactics that two players who are working together could utilize in a multiplayer tactical battle.   Again, special abilities are the key enabler here, Players may go down different research paths and have different units who then work together using their special stats and abilities to form a particularly powerful combination.  Figuring out these combinations is a fun part of the player experience, and I believe should rightly be part of the Elemental multiplayer experience.

More points could be made here, and I'm sure the posters that follow could fill in here, but these were the primary ones I could think of.

     For the above reasons I implore you to reactivate multiplayer tactical battles for the day 0 version.  I don't mean to force this opinion on anyone, however.  I believe the best solution is to leave them on by default, and have the tactical battle threshold slider be active in multiplayer for each individual player, or as a global variable set by the host.  Just like single player, players will then be able to choose which battles are "important" and which can be left to the auto-resolve AI.  While this opens up the potential for some griefing if one player refuses to increase their slider at the request of others, I find that in this sort of game griefing is really not a large issue.  To play a game of Elemental even without tactical battles requires a considerable amount of time, and requires agreement among all involved.  Irs easy to start a new game without an offending player, or just replace them with an AI (something I used to do in Age of Wonders on the rare occasions it happened).

    To me and my group of friends, this is a critical issue.  A game of Elemental with tactical battles is a different game than one without.  While I'm positive that my friends and I will play and enjoy both(we all preordered a long while ago), the former in my opinion is a game with far more depth, story, and sense of community than the latter.

If you got to this point, thanks for reading my wall of text

Naydien

you guys do realize that he didnt say they were gone for ever...just not initial release...

this drama queeness is so unnecessary  

mini game are not fun

i and most of ppl want to play the same single player game in multi

ofc with some tweak if needed but the same game, not some facebook minigame

I love this well thought out and constructive post.

Hello Frogboy and folks,

You might want to take a look at the way Dominions 3: The Awakening operates. You need to script orders for your commanders and units before the battle. When the battle occurs, you are provided with the results and the possibility to watch the recording of the battle. Of course, losing the possibility to react during the battle is a big negative, but this compromise allows multiple battles to take place on a MP map with minimum impact on the flow of the game. The big difficulty is for your units and commanders to behave with intelligence once on the battlefield, choosing among the many options at their disposal.

I really think when it comes to MP you need to split up who you're talking about into groups and look at each one individually, because even from this thread people want drastically different things (and this thread is small). I see three general groups:

1. People who want to play Co-op.

These folks are the easiest to please. They want to play with their friends, against the AI. Give them the single player game only with a friend or two they can ally with, and they're content. The main thing I'd like to see as a member of this group is the ability to START in an alliance with my co-op partner. Civ 4 had a team mode for that, I didn't need to research diplomacy to be friends. We started off that way on turn 1. IMO Elemental Co-op needs that (you're allied with player X even if you don't have the tech to ally with anybody else).

2. People who want to play against friends, or at least in arranged matches with people they have some familiarity with.

Similar to #1, but will also want options to streamline and speed up the game. Things like turn time limits, an option to disable tactical battles, and such.

3. People who want to play against random people.

This is the hardest group. Random games need to be fast and they need to have some resistence against cheese tactics by people who are losing (such as simply hiding units to make the game not end after they've already lost, or sitting at Civ 4's vote screen permanently without voting so nobody else can advance). This group is the problem, the game simply isn't well suited to this kind of play.

As for which groups to cater to... it looks like you want to give some attention to 3, but IMO (and based on the feedback here) it's 1 and 2 you should focus on first. Both because they need less love to make the game work for them, but also because there's simply more of them in a TBS game and the game itself works better for that kind of play. I want to play with a friend of mine, and I want to do that in the normal game. We play Civ pretty regularly and those games are almost never less then 10 hours (if they are, it usually means we lost ). There's been a bunch of other similar comments already. If I want to play a 10 minute random battle against someone, realistically Elemental will never touch Starcraft 2 for that style of game.

So with that in mind, tactical combat should come back at some point as an option. In a co-op game people are simply less likely to mind their team mate controlling a fight manually, and if neither wants to do it they can just turn it off.

As for other modes, I think you should take advantage of being on a server infrastructure and do challenge modes. Create some maps where you and a teammate get X gildar to spend on units before starting the game, and your goal is to take a castle defended by the AI. You can do leaderboards for the fastest time to victory, or the group that does it while suffering the fewest losses, or who manage to do it with the most unspent gildar.

That's similar to the idea of a wizard's duel, but in a co-op kind of way.

Also - all three groups can benefit from advanced start. For anybody who never used that in Civ 4, with it turned on you get X gold (configurable) to spend on stuff before the first turn. You can buy towns, settlers, workers, units like warriors/scouts, and research. I tend to use it on a lower setting so I start with a town, a settler, and a worker. But even with that it DRASTICALLY reduces the time it takes for the game to get interesting. (The first bunch of turns in Civ 4 usually leave you with nothing to do but mash next turn as fast as possible.)

An option like that lets people get up to speed a lot faster and really helps speed MP up, without needing to alter the core gameplay.

i dont agree

ALL THESE POINTS are the basis for multi in 2010

its not like we are asking to invent something new

we asking what every other multi has

coop

deathmatch

ffa

user defined game

its nothing new really

this is completely false

neither civ 4 was well suited but in fact there was a HUGE COMMUNITY of players who played it for years online (and keep playing right now)

also we dont want a game born for multi

we just want to play a trategy game who we played in single EVEN in multi

there is nothing really required, i loved civ single player and i wanted to try with ppl, i just did

it wasnt suited, it wasnt even balanced for multi

it was fun, i played for years

there comes the fanboy invasion

thread ruined gg

Won't miss you.

because you nutellaed the thread

gg

what is this TV?

what is television?

harpo