The Imperfect, the Unbalanced, the Exploit
I would like to add my view on the shortcomings of elemental to the sea of critics and reviews we had the past days/hours. Many of the things I write have been mentioned before, I repeat them, partly so the devs see why we are not too happy about the game and what we expect they improve on and partly as a form of catharsis for me after playing the game since Monday without break except for around 5-6 hours sleep. I also always kept the game up to date and checked out the changes that had been made up until now. I have to say every patch made the game better, but they are still just scratching on the surface. There are so many game parts which are not up to snuff, that I doubt that Stardock will be able to fix in the next coming months.
Elementals basic concept is nice and sounds great on paper but execution of it was lacking and there wasn’t much of polish going on. Everything feels of being strapped together on last minute.
Basically: it’s first a rushed product and secondly flawed with a lot of obvious imbalances
Would have been more time for polish and some serious design flaws corrected we would have an awesome game. Currently I would rate it at 6/10 – rather an average score.
As there is so much to say I will group it categories for a better overview.
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About City management
Overall city management is enjoyable. There is really something pleasant about the way outposts grow to towns and cities.
But sadly there some shortcomings:
- There is not much to build past the initial phase, almost no building dilemmas. I like all those lvl1 buildings at the beginning, they speed things up and they provide interesting choice of what to build next (as everything is needed early on). I regularly adapt my build order according what I need most and what would be the most efficient way of improving my economy. But after the initial building phase there is not much to do. You research the occasional civilization tech, then construct the researched building in all appropriate cities and wait for the next tech advancement. The cities don’t differ much as every city will easily have all the buildings there is with just a few exceptions. Basically the promising start turns into Auto-Mode.
Suggestion: Apart of introducing more buildings with more varied abilities I would appreciate the introduction of special building slots the city acquires when it levels up (perhaps as a dedicated level up option). You can use those slots you acquire to build special and powerful buildings but I can’t build more of these special buildings as you have special slots. So perhaps a level 5 city has about 4 special slot and can build therefore 4 of these buildings. Obvious there should be more than just 4 special buildings (8 to 12 are good numbers) in game to choose from and not just copy-cat buildings like: material prod. +30%, material prod. +40%. Refrain from buildings with kingdom-wide effects a la +10% food production in all cities as such boni easily grow out of control.
Alternative: limit the buildable tile amount according to city level. Level 1 cities can build on 10 tiles, lvl 2 on 15, lvl 3 lvl 4 on 20, lvl 5 on 25 for example.
- The level-up boni for cities are a great idea. But unfortunately I rarely take anything then the gildar bonus. The guardian creature bonus is worthless. Just cut it out. Absolute waste of of level-up. Don’t think about beefing up the guardian creatures here: as long they are weak or mediocre no one will take them and the option is just clutter in the menu (though I don’t like clutter) But if those creatures become strong they will change the game in a negative way. People will just rush up the city levels to get as many as possible and rush down their neighbors. It would be game breaking. So just cut the option out (perhaps replacing the option with the option acquiring those special building slots)
Exploit!:
The player can easily raise all cities from level 1 to 2 and 3 sometimes even to level 4 regardless of the number of food recourses beyond the first. With every city level-up cities receive a considerably housing bonus. Therefore you can demolish all huts you have build without fearing that the city level drops. The freed up food can be spend on housing in other cities up to the point they won’t grow any further. After that you repeat the demolishing process up and build up another city’s level. Although I find that on larger maps food is not an issue and rather abundant.
Champions:
It had been said again and again in the forum and I back that up: weak, way too expensive to maintain and have no character. They just don’t add much beyond the first 50 turns.
The reasons are:
- Champions Hitpoints are way too low. Already at the beginning they aren’t much stronger then a peasant, after a few military techs they fall behind. Things really become bad when leveled Squads show up. They have so much HP and such high attack rating that champions don’t have much hope of survival.
Suggestion: raise the base Hitpoints of all heroes and add a small boost for each levelup
- Levelup effects aren’t balanced: I have the feeling that putting points into constitution is not of much effect as there is no amplifier gear like it is handled for Strength and Dextery. The mere effect of raising it by one on level up isn’t worth much.
- The equipment you have to buy for them is ridiculously expensive and too weak (later on). You can spend fortunes of money for just keeping one champion somewhat on par with you average peasant squad armed with sticks your cities chuck out every few turns for just a fraction of the cost.
- Equipment option for heroes shouldn’t be linked to techs in Magic and Warfare techtree. At most linked with certain techs in the Adventure/Domination Techtree.
- Champions lack abilities. Most champions either have no abilities or of minor effect. Those minor effect abilities are fine at the beginning. Later they suck
Suggestion: add abilities table the player can choose from when they level up a champion. That would balance out the effect of champions early in the game and late game.
- Leveling up champions is very time & resource consuming up to the point it would only be reasonably to level one or two
Suggestion: let Champions receive free experience every turn up to a max level determined by some tech in the adventure/domination tech tree, so they could better scale with the common soldier
Even though it is not really cost efficient there is a exploit with hero equipment. There is no limit on the accessories (rings, packs, charms…) your heroes can put on. So you could spend 2000 Gilden for 10 Medical packs and equipping them all on the hero for a whooping 50 extra Hitpoints and +10 Hitpoint Regeneration. How about spending 3000 Gilden for 10 Bands of Agility on top of that? Given you have the gold only the sky is the limit. As you see it is not cost effective but still somewhat broken. The only equipment that currently really shines with that exploit is the band of eagle-eyed for 10 gilden. For just 100 gold you get +10 vision. Spend a bit more and you have the feeling of saurons all seeing eye overlooking whole Middle Earth.
Dynasties:
Somewhat linked with champions problem. The only thing I can hope for getting more underperforming champions? Oh great… On top of that it takes ages until a child grows up. In most sandbox games I finished it in before the second child grown up when I’ve married right at the beginning of the game. Most of the time I don’t bother with the feature as it doesn’t provide much in terms of game advantage. On top of it:
- Should you spouse ever die the dynasty feature turns itself off for the rest of the game. There is no divorcement, no new marriage with another person possible. You’re out of luck. You’re stuck. But no big deal as mentioned: right now dynasties don’t add much anyway
Suggestion: Add Divorcement in! At least give us the possibility to remarry should the sovereigns spouse die!
Techtree
The techtrees aren’t in particular long. The real useful ones are the civilization and warfare ones, followed after by Adventure/Domination, Magic and on the bottom diplomacy.
Although the idea of the Likeliness of some techs to appear is neat, currently it is basically not used. In my past sandbox games it never had much of an effect. As the techtrees are way too lean anyway there is not much room for research randomization anyway.
Civilization Techtree
Here you research the main part of the buildings you will ever build. Usually it’s one building per Tech. Which later on means: there is a huge gap between each civ tech as all your cities already build that one building and there is basically nothing left to build most of the time. About level 8 in civilization techs you picked up all the essential/interesting stuff, everything post that are mostly of the same or civ-wide boni.
Warfare Techtree
Although full of important techs that make your game live easier basically 80% of the complete tech tree are copies of one of the first few techs you research only offering the improved version. Also on part it relies too heavy on civ-wide boni (all these troop size levels & experience levels…), could have been linked to a building. It would also limit the production army capacities of young settlements a little bit when these boni only apply on the city the building is constructed in.
Magic Techtree
This techtree is primary there for the acquirement of the cutting edge magically war gear. It takes only 4 levels of the tree to receive arcane weapons. Should you be so lucky to start near a Crystal recourse you can employ a squad of foot soldiers wielding magical blades with an attack of 20 and Speed bump of 0.25 in no time! As Logistics and Equipment (like it’s empire equivalent) is a first level tech there is not much that can hinder you to employ a super warrior squad with an attack of 80 and average armor rating in the EARLY game (and steamrolling everything with it). It just depends on finding the crystal field. This would be especially unbalancing in multiplayer, as right now the AI certainly won’t make much use of it (more on the AI later on)… Otherwise it boosts you spell research but as Magic in Elemental:War of Magic is not that strong/useful I mostly skip it in most cases. (more on magic later on)
Adventure/Domination Techtree
As the adventure techtree caters mainly for champions, it isn’t that good. The stronger champions unlocked by the techs are food for every below average soldier squad. The quest t unlocks have at the beginning in relation to the time investment some good rewards (resources for the early game, minor stat boosts and some ‘cheap’ items) later on they become more and more unrewarding. Their rewards don’t scale all too well. The only real important techs are the one that unlock new recourses. So I grab mostly those.
Diplomatic Techtree
Ugh. Welcome to the bottom. There is not much of in importance here. The most important is trading, then perhaps intressting is Treaties otherwise: yawn. If I could do more with those diplomatic capital points (buying influence on the map perhaps, rare equipment appears in my local shops, etc.) or get more options in game apart of direct diplomatic confrontation (and no, I’m not fond of those allies.) but right now, the whole tech tree is not very useful… I rarely go up that tree usually there is something more important to research on the other trees.
Tactical Battles
Bad. Honestly. It’s really bad. Other parts of the game had glitches or same balance problems. But the tactical battles are really… … oh boy. They need a complete overhaul. I played out some tactical battles just to see how the game behaves and how the game mechanics feel like but most of the time I just hit auto resolve as tactical battles are way too trivial to waste any time on
The combat mechanic is very simple. Basically there are: Move, Hold, Attack, use ability. That’s it. There is not much else. … oh, hang on… I forgot to mention Morale. It has basically no real influence on the battle. Most of the time it stays around 50. There is some change but most battles don’t last long enough to see a noticeable effect. And even should they take so long it would be just either a “win more” or “lose more” effect. No thinking involved. The whole concept of one morale slider for the whole army providing Attack buffs or penalties is bad anyway. If you really want it workable: change it per unit and make it way more reactive to what happens on the field. Good example for a working morale systems are the TotalWar series or Warhammer Tabletop. Take your inspiration there.
- Good tactical combat lives from position rules. I like that they are fields that provide defense boni and such, although sometime it just appears to be a bit random where to expect those boni. But the game really lacks any concept of zone of control on units. In its simplest form take a look on Battle for Wesnoth. Simple yet elegant. Actually you could copy almost the complete system of Wesnoth (which is highly inspired by BattleIsle) for a relative quick “fix”. For good tactical combat take a look on table top games. I’ve already wrote a long post once in the idea forum for an example of detailed rules. Although there I’ve been quite verbose also showing why they are good rules, the mechanic could be explainable in only few sentences.
- Currently they’re just melee units and melee units and melee units. Those two puny bows (one with attack 3 the other with 6) are the only archer equipment and rather a joke than real useful (especially regarding the enormous gold costs). The (brief) manual hinted that there a difference between blunt and cutting weapons damage wise. In the game I couldn’t find anything. Basically the difference in weapons and amore is how good they deal damage or good they prevent it. There no more differentiation apart that, so that the player finally designs his units not because of some tactical reasoning but more according what is affordable right now and unlocked by research. We have a simple arms race right now. So for what should I use tactical combat for?
- There are few combat abilities out there, but they’re rarely encountered and even more rarely add depth to the game… Especially as I’ve encountered only 3 equipment pieces which grand abilities: those 2 bows I mentioned for being able to shot from afar and the pioneer package for being able to build a outpost. That’s it. The rest just plays around with unit stats a little bit but not much else…
- Magic spells don’t fix the monotony of Elementals tactical battles, but more on that later
- The way battle movement is handled (“Combat Speed”) is horrible! Give a men a sword and he runs faster? What the f**k? The devs should have separated attack speed with tactical movement allowance.
- As a further suggestion: I’m very fond of initiative driven unit movement then the whole army moves at every turn. It makes tactical battles more dynamic and helps against the effect of the whole army gangs up on one enemy unit at the time (especially as there is no Zone of Control in game)
Magic
Finally magic. Apart of the beginning magic is relative useless. On part also because champions are so weak but also because of:
- Mana-Regeneration is waaaay to low. Having spend all your 15 Mana on 3 Battle Spells last battle? Sorry, now you have to wait 15 turns to get back to full mana. The building that raises mana regeneration requires a level 5 city which is really difficult to pull off without just building a city full of housing. A normal city with some/most buildings will quickly run out of tiles before reaching the necessary amount of housing
- The spells are underwhelming. Not many different effects. Seriously, you don’t have to invent the wheel a second time, Master Of Magic, Age of Wonder, Heroes of Might and Magic all have examples of some effects
- The magic shards are quite rare, unless you picked all spell books it’s quite difficult to get the shard you have books for.
Suggestion: keep the shards rare as they are but don’t differentiate between them. One type of shard for all different Spellbooks
- All spells should scale with int not just the damage spells. Late game spells should receive a good buff to keep up in the arms race
There are way more balance issues and areas the game lacks then that what I’ve listed so far but I’m really tired right now. So I will just state briefly what else needs improvement upon without going into detail:
- Almost no difference between the races (actually a real laughable difference as either the boni is absolute little or currently not working)
- Kingdom / Empire difference is there but not very strong, correlates with the lack of difference between the races
- The campaign is horrible boring. Basically a long tutorial. No challenge, almost no action, very static
- The Ai is abysmal bad. Wasn’t the AI once a selling a point for Stardock games?
- Lack of feedback I receive from the UI, bad documentation of features, almost no mouse-over quick hints
I could write about that stuff easily another 6 pages. Hey - would I list everything in detail I might have to write way more than 20 pages here. There is just so much that feels lacking, unfortunately.
But let’s see what awaits us in the next months…
So anyway, thanks for your patience and endurance for reading this!
Stardock Response:
Thank you for posting a very thoughtful and detailed critique of our new game. Below are some of our responses to this in an effort to encourage others to take the time, as you did, to make concrete suggestions for the betterment of the game.
1. We like your concept you propose in which players can choose to give the city a special slot to build a special improvement.
2. The guardian creature you receive is based on city level. We will likely modify this so that it is more likely to grant the player a better guardian unit (ala the Minor factions).
3. Exploits. We agree, exploits, when found needs to be eliminated. We suspect this will be an ongoing process as players learn the game and find things that we never would have suspected.
4. We don't agree with your view on tactical battles. Elemental is not designed to be Magic: Total War (though we think such a game would be welcomed). The tactical battles are designed as a relatively simple way for the player who wants to control the action. While we do plan to continue to extend tactical battles, I think your expectations on what tactical battles are supposed to be like is not in line with what we had in mind.
5. Groups of units (squads, parties, etc.) do fire as individuals. A party with a combined attack of 32 does not roll between 1 and 32. Each individual in the group rolls their own attack (1 to 8) against the defender's defense. Hence, a company of knights (12) with a combined attack of say 36 would likely do no damage at all to a unit with sufficient defense. We are, however, discussing better ways to present this since it does seem people are thinking that a group of units acts as a single powerful unit which they don't.
6. Mana regeneration is going to be hooked up to wisdom in a future update based on feedback. This should allow players to increase manag regeneration.
7. We strongly disagree that the Empire and Kingdoms are particularly similar. The individual factions within an Allegiance are very similar - by design. You may not agree with this design choice but it was intentional. Over time, we will continue to enrich each of the major factions just as was done with Galactic Civilizations II.
8. We are sorry you don't find the AI sufficiently difficult. Have you tried increasing the difficulty level? The "normal" level is very basic. In addition, Brad (the lead designer and AI developer) plans to continously update the game's AI.
Thank you again for taking the time to post this. We have forwarded this thread to the development team so that they can evaluate what things might make good additions to future updates to the game.
It is rather unfortunate that I completely agree with everything you wrote.
Anyways, great post, I hope the devs read this.
*Bump*
good post, i disagree however on the diplomacy tech trough you can get really good troops with it much more early then with any military tech. i really wish they would put in skill trees for champions, this would make them interesting and scaleable.
the city bonuses are only worthwhile for gildar i agree and that leads to you only leveling cities with gold mines:
i made a strategy thread here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/392788
anyways good post
Wall of text but I've agreed.
Good post. A lot of the equipment needs re-balancing to make things worthwhile. Champions certainly need to be expanded upon and improved in strength.
I like the idea that squads and armys have individual attack and defense values instead of combining all of them. That is one solution to army overpoweredness.
ive been pretty happy withe the AI this far, but like Froggie said, it will get better.
good points tho.
i feel also that the heroes are way underpowered and when levelling they get too low amounts of boost.
This is a truly great post. While I think it's all worthwhile, I particularly agree with your suggestions for improving tactical combat.
Agreed!
Generally good post. But you have a lot of factual inaccuracies that tend to mar your overall position. I'll just hit a couple of them briefly:
1. It's very easy to get a level 5 city with just a few houses. It just takes a long time (the city with the palace gets there fairly quickly). Upgrade your housing tech and you won't need more than a few houses. My last game I had 4 level 5 cities fairly early in the game.
2. There are a ton of special abilities I've run into. Maybe you're not noticing them because you don't do the tactical battles. Lots of enemy creatures have them, and I had 4 units that had special abilities (summoned creatures). A few of them are pretty powerful.
Things I definitely agree with:
3. Generally agree with you that magic needs a bit of an overhaul. It doesn't make sense that a fireball doesn't do damage to a creature with 4 defense. The spells seem to be unusually weak. The summoned creatures are nice, but if you build a squad of decent units, it's more valuable than 100 fireballs, it builds fairly quickly, and it's cheap.
4. They need to fix this whole squad+ thing. Right now you just rush squad and build some grunts and you can kill pretty much anything around until the bigger NPCs come along.. Rarely does the NPC enemy present a challenge in this regard.
5. Champions are a joke. Basically you just recruit them for the +1 whatever they provide, then forget about them. Lame!
Now that is a constructive post that points out the flaws without just saying "game is unbalance".
Luckily I'm staying away from MP for a while on this game (more of a SP guy with these types of games anyways), I can trust myself not to use the exploits you mentioned but I can't trust absolute strangers to not do it.
Good post, i agree with much of it.
But i still think the game is awesome, keeps me coming back. Strange that.
I agree with virtually everything said here. I was going to play a little more before commenting on the game, but you more or less summarise everything that I am not enjoying about Elemental right now.
For me, the comment on the weakness of champions highlights my biggest gripe. What makes this game different from other TBS games is the heroes. I really really want to play it like a strategy/RPG hybrid, leveling up my heroes so they become unstoppable, but this game is simply not balanced this way.
Around the mid game, even fairly common monsters start hitting for up to 40+ damage. It is very hard to get a champion with more than 30 hitpoints. And since all creatures get 2 or 3 retaliations, attacking with a hero that hasn't already been mobbed by other troops means its likely to die when the ogre hits back for more than its hit points in damage. Once the hero is dead, there is no way to revive it, and all that investment of time and money is wasted. But squads of troops can be churned out and replaced easily, and are more effective in combat. The only reason for heroes is to create casters for some basic utility spells.
I think Elemental has great potential to be a very good game, probably one of the TBS games made so far, but only if a lot of these problems are addressed. For now, I have enjoyed playing it in the beta and since launch, but not as much as I had hoped, and not enough to keep me playing at present. Unlike a lot of TBS games, where I find them addictive and moreish, I find once I get into the mid game elemental becomes a fairly souless grind with a few simple winning strategies that you simply repeat over and over, and my desire to play evaporates.
The problem with that is the game ends up being like HOMM4 where you could play the whole game like D&D without making any units at all, just an army of heroes.
Ideally we need a balance between units and heroes to make it worth using both
Personally what I would like to see in the heroe department is more administrative heroes.
Example:
General heroes - Boost soldier/unit stats in the army, helps them march better, allows better logistics, ect..
Govonor/mayor hero with stats pertaining to city growth and a way to level up without combat, maybe link the stats of INT/CHA to city management abilities and allow a way to level up heroes without the need of combat but be a choice when a town levels up (auto level a hero by X amount of levels depending on the City being built). Or better yet a whole new set of stats for city managmenet forcing me to choose if I want my heroes to be more administrative or combat centric. An example is an old wizard type who helps give me tech by studying the library, and the longer he stays in a city with lots of tech improvements, the more he gains XP to level up his Tech increase.
If anyone's ever played Europa Barborum mod for RTW, you understand what I'm talking about. In there when a general is of age (usually 16). You can send him to a city with a school/academy where he learns for about 4 years and his stats go up in management, grooming him for government duties. If you wanted a militiary leader then you send the 16 year old to one of your legions led by another general with more command stars, when the boy is 20 he'll gain commander traits and more command stars. You also had to bear in mind genetic traits and personalties, some generals didn't like their fathers so they would favor the opposite of what their fathers were, for instance if general had a father was was a govonor but didn't get along with his father he would veer more towards war traits and opposite traits of the father (IE father was a Drunk, kid is Sober for life). It made every character interesting as well as dealing with character deaths and creating lots of family trees. It's a shame TW started to veer away from the awsome family tree/traits system it had.
While I am really enjoying the game, the approach is already becoming some-what predictable.
I find myself nodding in agreement to your points and conclusions. Good post and I think the criticisms are constructive.
Hate to say it but it feels a bit like we have transitioned from Alpha into Beta at this stage. I think it is a good game now and still think this will be a great game in the coming months.
Very good write-up, I too agree with most of what you wrote.
On heroes:
Right now they are just very underpowered and expensive single units, they have no character. There are several ways to fix this:
- One is to take the brute force approach and scale their hp/attack/defence with their level.. a level 10 champion should have 300 hp, not 30. It's the approach I favor the least since it shows no immagination.
- Second is to treat champions like what they are: Leader of men and paragons. Give them leadership abilites. Bonuses for the whole army they command, such as morale, hp regen, upkeep cost reduction, more heroes with 'organized' and pathfinding, special abilites (like stun, first aid, stealth etc.). This wouldn't make champions any more powerful on the field directly, but invaluable to any army none the less.
- Third is the Master of Magic approach.. just copy it directly. I'm talking about leveled abilites of course, it worked very well and champions were competitive right to the engame.
Fix equipment.. one unit should only be able to wear 1 piece of each type of equipment.. wearing 10 amulets and 20 bands is just silly.
The other thing stopping heroes from really questing is some of the creeps are too damn powerful, sure I understand drakes and golems but an army of freaking spiders? I mean didn't Bilbo kill like dozens of them in the hobbit single handidly? It's just annoying that the creeps are sometimes more powerful then nations.
Maybe make the more powerful creeps guard important items and have bandits/wolves/spiders roam the country side. That way a lone hero or 2 heroes can take on the wandering creeps in forrest but need to get more backup when dealing with say a drake guarding his stash or a temple.
To be fair, even MOM, initally most of the heroes/champions were quite weak at the start..
But they grew more and more powerful once they got a few levels up.
Also in MOM, IIRC, the heroes automatically gained exp every turn right?
I know some people feel MOM's heroes are way too powerful at the end, but EWOM seems to take the other approach.
agree
In fact with housing and food if you dont have the apropriate housing the city should shrink and and when it does buildings and influnce should be destoryed.
lets not forget to add, no retreat during battles, no city sieges and striles of oportunity, or flying units that actually use there flying ability for an advantage
Do armys have maintance either whether there summoned or not and if you go into the negative do those armies vanish?
This game is atleast a year away from beeing finished and flushed out into a true successor to aow and mom, but that all depends on whether stardock think everything is fine or not.
I enjoy this game but I cannot agree tech tree remark you made.
Elemental, is fun because you can play the way you wish it to be.
Diplomatic Techtree in one of my games got me shrilling allies and as a mage I am surrounded by summon creatures.
So I basically rule the world with monsters and magic.
But that's just one of the game.
With every game I play, I realize it can be somewhat different.
Elemental has already achieve it's first goal.
I am sure with the patches and fixes, it will get better.
I won't review this game till 3 months later though ~ because a really good game is one which lasts through time.
Oh btw you can "retreat" by running out of the game map lol
It's a good game, it's just rough around the edges right now. With more polish it will be a great game. It's one heck of a platform to work with, you can do a lot of different things with it, it's just trying to get it all to flow as one that's the tricky part.
Some valid points there, but the bit about the champions is way of the mark. Some of my champions and children were quite powerful when they gained a few levels and had some good gear. Sure, not master of magic powerful, but I always felt it was a bit shitty that a hero or with the right equipment could wipe out an enemy empire in a few turns.
Also, the tactical combat could be better in terms of using the terain, but there are plenty of special abilities (which you don't notice if you autoresolve all the time). My peasants and swordsmen shouldn't have special abilities: they're regular units, my dragons for example on the other hand should and do have them!
Some balancing of equipment and more agressive AI (or just AI that attacks once in while) would go a long way to making the game a lot better. That and solving a few of the bugs that crash the game quite often (better since the last patch, but the game usually quits before I want to).
Just going to keep adding stuff here.
No happiness rating. Your people are always happy, you take a city over they immediatly assimilate.
So far this is a very shallow fantasy TBS, I love the look and feel of it, but when you start paying atention its not much more then a simple rts.
I agree on everything said here... especially on the tactical battles which has ruined the game for me. And i also see no evidence of the physics engine being used at all, which is quite a shame.I have stopped playing the game, and will come back to it once this has all been fixed, as I'm sure it will. A can't help but thinking that this game shouldn't have been released for another six month.
I agree with the problem, but not with the solutions. I think the best way to solve this problem is to lower how spiky damage is. In the early game it works fine because enemies only really do 0-4 damage, and 15 HP can take quite a lot of hits. But later you have say 20 HP and enemies are capable of doing 0-40 in a single hit.
Constitution does need to scale faster (and probably should scale automatically), but that wouldn't help low level champions recruited later in the game from simply being picked off instantly. IMO the real fix for champions is to change the damage system so that defense isn't a roll. *Avoidance* of an attack should be a roll, defense itself should simply work.
Just thinking out loud, but something like this:
Every point of defense lowers Attack by 1, up to 50% of attack. After that, every point of defense lowers Attack by 0.5, up to 50% again (75% total). Then every point is 0.25 again, and so on. You could make a formula that smooths the curve out some, but what you'll get is defense reducing incoming damage quite a lot (without actually eliminating it entirely) up to a point, but to reduce it more you need progressively increasing amounts of defense so you can't easily make something that just takes 0 damage from every hit.
It'd also signifintly reduce randomness in outcomes, because there's only one roll instead of two and no situation where the rolls go your way one hit (so you take 0), and the rolls both go against you next turn (so you take 50 and get one shot).
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