I've been concerned about this for months. In fact, it caused me to sit out the beta and delay my preorder until last week. And after playing for most of yesterday evening and getting deep into one sandbox game, I realized I was right to be concerned.
The game lacks an epic feel. Most of the game feels like me and a small adventuring party running around conquering other empires. (How 4-6 guys could take over an entire empire is beyond me, but it's pretty routine in Elemental.) The armies are simply too small to give the game much of a grand strategy feel. I know the culprit: tactical battles. But I don't know why the presentation has to emphasize the idea that I have a few soldiers, fewer adventurers, and a couple of hundred peasants in my "grand fantasy empire."
An infamous early screenshot showed a dragon dealing with what looks like hundreds of armored soldiers. I have seen nothing like that in Elemental (but I knew not to really). Battles are between a few units on each side. In the early game, it's my channeler casting chain lightning and killing 4 spiders (or whatever) over and over. The few troops walking around with her feel like bodyguards or traveling companions, not an army.
The game never feels like I'm ruling an empire. There aren't enough cities. It feels like a small band of people gathering together for protection; a scenario not unlike the classic "DnD party finds a refugee camp and does quests to help" adventure.
I'm not sure how to fix this. You could change the graphical presentation to make soldiers look more like units than individuals (something that sort of happens later in the game, which only emphasizes the small scale of the early game). It could be more clear than 1 pop unit in a city isn't just 1 person. Heroes could be scaled back to where they aren't slaughtering what might be considered a squad or regiment of troops.
This is my major disappointment with Elemental. I just don't feel like I'm playing a grand strategy game. I feel more like I'm coordinating a couple of small adventuring groups around a tiny country with a few villages here and there where I can recruit other party members.
It really eliminates immersion.
Sethfc hits nail on the head pretty much.
Everythings been destroyed, the world is in chaos, and the current "Empires and kingdoms" are just small groups that are slowly retaking land.
Although i totally agree on heros/champions/summons needing to be fixed.
It is not the unit count that makes it look not epic but the lack of numbers in each unit.It is like you are controlling the Frodo instead of Gondor.
Personally, I don't mind it, just because the game ends up feeling like a post-apocalyptic empire- building strategy game and, frankly, I think that's way more awesome. And self-styled dictators ruling over camps of a few dozen people and fending off raiders armed with sticks is just totally in-genre for that sort of thing. You've got to start somewhere!
Late game they aren't camps of a few dozen people, they're sprawling cities with 1,000 people in each one. But you're still conquering them with 6 or 7 guys.
Exactly.
I kind of agree with both "sides" of the discussion.
On one side, I love the feeling at the game begining. Is so great to start as a single person, found a kingdom (or empire) and grow from there.
What would be good is to have a way to incorporate armies to the medium/late game. It doesn't sound like an easy thing to do. But maybe after we all play several games, we can figure a way to do it, and it will be epic! I don't know... let's say that you get a tech that allows you to train squads of 4 people (plus a "hero", who is needed to act as their leader) instead of single units. And as your military knowledge progress, your kingdom learns how to organize military groups, until you can progress to full companies of men leaded by one or more unique units or even, legions.
This would be awesome. Imagne, a unit that was a black dragon, and needed literally an army of hundred of units to bring that dragon down (or a high level hero).
I think that makes sense. people have lost almost all knowledge. Then they maybe have even lost the knowledge about how to organize military groups. And without that knowledge, a party is just a lot of people together.
Unless you meet a sky drake that is immune to any form of magic so you can kiss your little wand goodbye if you try to frighten him with your petty ranged spells... Or the master of the nightmare riders gets the glorious idea to cast magic immunity on them.
Seriously now, every race, unit and magical school had their unique strengths and weaknesses depending on the enemy, place and time and it's exactly this variety concerning units and magic that is really missing in this game. There is stuff in here that is far better than Master of Magic could ever be, but in this case it speaks nothing but the truth in its title.
It's not so silly, not when you look at what the sovereign actually is, and what he represents. In fact, it's amazing how many primitive societies found themselves ruled by some guy who claimed to make the fields fertile.
Where have some of you been living in the past years/decades? In Age of Wonders a single ordinary wolf or bird can walk/fly into a huge walled city and take it over. In Civ games you also lead relatively small groups of units that can conquer a "city of thousands". It was the same in Master of Magic. In Heroes of Might and Magic you can take over castles with a hero with a single peasant, there are no civilian populations to take up arms against you. The same applies to most such games.
The point is you can't rigidly apply reality to a game and then frown because things don't add up.
Granted I too remember those early screens. I even remember FB's (almost) exact quote, "A single Dragon is literally wiping out hundreds of troops...". Such is the way with things apparently. Remember the early screens for BfME? It looked like LoTR: Total War. Yeah, right. Games seems to be doomed to not turning out as good as they originally seemed. I'm sure Brad had all kinds of wild dreams in the beginning but once you actually start developing the game mechanics you realize you can't get everything you wanted.
Still, if you build a large enough empire and with enough time I think you could have a few hundred troops (of decent quality) if you really wanted to.
Yep, that is exactly why i think Elemental is great. With larger armies Elemental would feel less than a tactical RPG and smaller armies fit better to a post apocalyptic world.
The biggest problem with making late game armies is lack of gildar... Late game cities should make loads of gildar off of commerce and thus allow you the means to support huge armies...
In Civ, the units clearly don't represent 1 legionaire or 1 tank or 1 artillery piece.
In Elemental, it's implied heavily that each unit is just 1 guy or whatever. That's just disappointing.
I think this is intentional. It is different world, the world where there is magic and where the war just happened, killing nearly everyone. What you think is Empire in our world on Earth, and what it is in elemental are very different things. How many people live in a single kingdom of elemental? Not a lot! In my present game I have like 5 cities, and the total population is ... 250 people. It is just different world, because in our world 250 people is just village, and there it is the whole kingdom with 5 cites!
For this 250 I have army of about 30 people, with 3 spelcasters in them, which is quite sizable army, if you think about it - more than 10% of population is in army.
Elemental world is just different, it is smaller than real world, it is governed by different laws, by magic, etc.
Epic game does not mean large army game. Epic means surpassing ordinary, heroic, not necessarily massive count of units.
It's not just implied it's been clearly stated. One person, one soldier is exactly that. One man.
If it's a graphics problem, surely there could be a graphics slider that changes the number of troops visible for each 'virtual' number in a unit, without changing heroes or large monsters, obviously. Then change the text to suggest the graphics are not exactly representative of a number of troops. Low end machines could then stick with the low number, and more powerful ones could have a more epic experience.
I actually think what would solve everyone's problems is that when you get barracks, you can build more than one per city and each one allows you to train an additional unit at the same time. Then, reduce the cost for equipment slightly. That will reduce the costs for groups of units by enough that when you get late in the game, you could have a single city simultaneously cranking out 5 groups of 20 archers or 3 groups of 20 archers and 2 groups of warriors or whatever and you could actually manage to build a large army in realistic game time. Each group should still take just as long to train. Though, even training time should probably be reduced by 25% across the board, in my opinion. So, when you start out, you would have just single units to play with. But as you progressed, you could build larger and larger groups of units and stack 10 of them into an army. With 10 groups of 20, you could go to battle with 200 people at a time. Your enemy could also bring in 200 people to the battle and your battle would be fought among 400 people. That's a pretty sizable and "epic" feeling battle, in my opinion.
Of course, the AI needs to be improved to build a bit fewer cities and build more units to defend those cities so that you can't just have a couple people come in and take the thing over. But, if these changes are made, I think it will definitely feel correct throughout the entire length of the game.
The idea of 1 pop = 1 person and that Elemental's world is this backward place with only hundreds of people is not supported by the things these pops are called upon to do.
You can't maintain the industries represented by the resource squares with city populations in the dozens or even hundreds. It just doesn't make any sense.
None of the game makes any geopolitical or economic sense if you accept this supposed backstory where everyone is dead and my city literally has 10 people at the start.
But, here we are. With an "army" with dozens of men.
This isn't grand strategy. It's just disappointing. But I'll leave off now. The game has no good explanation for why everything seems so small in scale and you can't really have a Civ-type or Gal Civ-type strategy game or economic setup with these kind of numbers and maintain anything resembling plausibility.
Well, that's a bit more of a problem. I've never got to late game, on account of memory leaks and crashes and bugs that make the game untenable to continue past early-mid (Crossing my fingers for a more stable package with the day zero patch!). If that's six or seven normal soldiers, that might be a problem. If that's six or seven adventurers who've become wizardly god-kings decked out in enchanted weapons and legendary armor, well, that's part of the genre, so it doesn't bother me that much. I guess I'll have to see how things shake out once I can play past a few hundred turns.
must admit, these small armies destroy the 'feel' of the game for me too. Ive only played for an hour or two and was hoping that the armies grow as the turns go past... wonder if this could be modded?
I agree with the previous posters about the scale its far from ruining the experience for me, but I must admit that it would feel a lot grander and epic if there were more units on the battlefield. I really don't see why it has to be any more difficult than simply having the individual units being nothing more than visually depicted as say 10 soldiers when taking part in a tactical battles.
You could change the graphical presentation to make soldiers look more like units than individuals (something that sort of happens later in the game, which only emphasizes the small scale of the early game). It could be more clear than 1 pop unit in a city isn't just 1 person
This is a really good idea by the OP and I have something to add to it. The one troop you train is just a unit. 4 units are able to join into a squad and when they are joined they occupy a tile on the tactical combat front. 5 Squads (20 units) make up 1 army. You can have it so only 1 army is the total for one whole group (or more armies or group) either way it will fix a problem i've had in this game:
It's tedious to move an army of 20 individual units when you're fighting a battle and people want major battles (me too, especially later on in the game when things are supposed to be epic), by being able to group units you will have the massive unit feel but at the same time because each group of 4 units will be a separate squad in the army, you can move them around and it won't be a hassle clickfest.
Thoughts?
So, if you had so many misgivings about the game and were apparently pretty certain you wouldn't like it then why the hell did you go ahead and buy it?
Well, personal choice I suppose. I love the game.
And, honestly, I don't really look for immersion in 4x games. That's what 1st and 3rd person games are for IMO.
Some people like to play make believe and think they're Emperors or Kings. I am one of them
You mean it's an abstraction and you have to use your imagination to see the hundreds of troops represented by 3 knights?
Hmmm...
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