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.
really I have tried and cant seem to do it
I think MoM type heroes toned down slightly would be best. I say toned down slightly because MoM heroes can annihilate an army of lesser units each turn continuously no problem if they have the right equipment, which is over the top for the relatively low-fantasy feel that Elemental is apparently going for. Still, a powerful warrior hero should definitely be able to take on a decent army of grunts without fear of dying. They'll feel worthless if they can't.
I think it's only for hero units and not normal units cause I tried to run away with my pioneer but couldn't however I can run away with my soveriegn
A possible solution for champions could be to, along with beefing them up a bit, allow them to 'attach' to parties/companies of men. The soldiers shield the hero from damage and the hero provides support by way of magic and or skills.
" I can tell you this : Regardless of whether Elemental gets good or bad reviews or sells well or sells poorly, this game is the ONLY game Stardock’s development studio will be working on for 2010 and much of 2011.
One of the benefits of being a small, privately owned company is that we can focus on things for reasons besides quarterly earnings. This is a game we love and will be expanding for years to come. "
Stardock CEO "Frogboy", Elemental Journals, August 25.
I love the game but I do agree with virtually everything that the OP said. Saying that I have alot of faith and goodwill towards Stardock, that they take posts like the above seriously. I think it shows that most people on these forums care about the game and just want to aid in making it better.
Excellent post, I agree with most of it.
The 'Champions' seem more like homeless guys then real Champions. They are equipped with sticks, no armor or a horse? What the hell would I ever hire these guys for? The need a massive boost in stats, and some realistic equipment. Something to make it seem like the are worthy job candidates.
The mana recharge rate is absurd as well. Just absurd.
I'm having fun though
You obvioulsy never knew or saw MR. T
I'd also say after reading the OP's post that he's more into Multiplayer than single player. Everything he talks about lingers toward multiplayer fun and balance. I personally don't care for it. He's trying to REDESIGN the game just like the other trolls that post these things. Really you guys should know Stardock and Brad have their own design agendas and they are going to take forefront over all these other niggly things. Most of what he stated is just like in Master of Magic, Age of Wonders or Civilization. Especially city management and the tech tree. There's limits to everything and you can't have everything in these games. The only thing this game really needs is more of the same. More magic spells I agree with. More techs I agree with. Adjusting the heroes to be a bit more powerful and longer lasting I agree with but not overpowered like those in Master of Magic and AOW and even HOMM. As for the tactical combat it's no different than Master of Magic or Age of Wonders, move, cast a spell, throw darts/arrows/missles and then melee winner takes all. I might go for a surrender button to retreat like in HOMM here. All n all though the game is greater than he suggests. Even the poll shows 60% love the game and there's 40% malcontents which half of those are just following the leader of discontent on the forums.
I am also of the same opinion as the OP. Especially on teh balance Squads/Champions and the tech trees. As postet in the opener several pages of minor gameplay problems can be found by playing only one game.
Those most striking to me not mentioned by the OP are the number of technologies which should be at least twice the number presenst now and should be much more interwoven. You will need a to posess plate armor to invent enchanted plate armor for example. Also why does one technology provide three spellbooks? This could, e.g., easily be three rare technologies.
The next point is leveling of magic and built units. MoM did a great job on differentiating between those. The summoned ones started stong but did not improve while the regular troops improved by experience. While the increase of stats for regular troops is in now i think it has become somewhat over the top for regular troops and especially for summoned monsters. Those should level much slower compared to the champions! Also the diplomatic creatures loose a lot later in teh game. Why not add the option to design units for your diplomatic allys (at least for the humanoid ones) which have a small advantage compared to your regular troops. Unfortunately the list of minor balancing issuse goes on an on, resulting in large balancing and gameplay problems.
Fortunately, however, the engine provides almost all the things that are needed to improve Elemental from an ok game to a great game, and therefore Mods will be able to correct them. However, to get a balanced game we should not have to rely on Mods, so go Stardock, kill those last remaining engine-bugs and then do some polishing on the tech trees, and champion development.
The only thing this game really needs is more of the same. More magic spells I agree with. More techs I agree with.
lol no
NO NO AND NO
we dont need more spells, there are already too many useless
we still use all the same 3 4
we dont need 20 new spells we need to have the ones in game working better, more balanced, more funny
same with techs and all the rest
adding stuff will just make the game explode
Anyway, I firmly believe that good balance enhances fun also for singleplayer as it opens up options of how i can tackle certain challenges, the game play becomes more varied and dynamic. If you have several unbalanced choices favoring a particular option in a system that lives from demanding difficult decisions from the player then you quickly see how the game system falls apart as the one and only strategy dominates all choice alternatives. The player falls into some sort of auto-mode repeating the same strategy decisions from match to match as he/she found a dominant approach that overrules all other approaches.
This auto-mode quickly leads to boredom, boredom leads to the point where you abandon the game. Ergo the enjoyment you can draw out of the game is drastically reduced in comparison to a well balanced game.
Overall I agree with OP.
Let's take a look at champions in EWOM, they are bland. Moreover all heroes level up in exactly the same way - I mean you can add a bit of this a bit of that, but as result they are not much stronger then your generic soldier, but your squad of soldiers will be anyway more effective.
Now lets look at MoM why heroes where fun, because every hero is different they had own set of abilities, and they not just increased base stats but their spec abilities as well. Now that was cool. And you was happy since high level heroes were indeed powerful.
Lacking of spec abilities (and absence of their development) makes champions bland.
Overall blandess in almost everything, monsters are mostly the same except with more hp or att/def.
I don't care much for graphics but absence of variety is really sad
Great post OP! Hope Stardock is paying attention.
Thx a lot for your in-depth review.
This was the first review that helped me decide wether I should buy it or not. Thx again.
Bravo Xadie.
You've basically summed up all my current concerns after spending about 20 hours playing and keeping it patched up to date to make sure I'm avoiding as many game-breaking bugs as possible (I had frequent crashes until 1.05... I *NEVER* have games crash normally).
At this point most of what Elemental has done is make me want to revisit Master of Magic and Age of Wonders. Yes, both have their flaws but there's so much more... I guess you could say feeling or environment.
MoM has a huge variety of races, magics, heroes, items, varied tech trees (to an extent).
AoW has a similar swath of said, though the differences are less strong in all categories.
Stardock *DOES* have a gem on their hands, but to risk going back to this painfully overused word, it needs POLISHING.
Make heroes feel powerful (though not a single man/woman wrecking ball laying waste to entire empires please
Give the magic school more differentiation than 20 varieties of "does INT * X * number of shards" damage. In the same vein, give magic some OOMPH! I shouldn't be sitting there with a min-maxed mage (we'll call it "well geared" for the sake of argument even though there's precious little gear that complements a caster sovereign) and looking enviously at the damage output and survivability of a squad of end-game peasants.
Race/tech differentiation! The only difference I can really see at the moment are entirely cosmetic and so incredibly vanilla as to disappear into the woodwork.
The adventure tech tree is a really great concept, but it feels far too random and/or powerful. The whole "get to level 3 so I can pop open a bazillion treasure chests" feels almost like an exploit. Why bother with any sort of building strategy when you can just plow through it with the huge payday that happens when you can treat the map as your own gilden ATM?
Make the upgrade path in a city more understandable (perhaps show the current tech, research and gold bonuses when you level up so you're not making a blind choice) so building specialist cities is useful. A breakdown of what your city can do and how well it does would go a long way toward alleviating the "Oh boy, my city just leveled. Time to play pin the tail on the random bonus!"
Perhaps show why I can't hire a "hero"? It'd be nice to know how much gold the greedy jerkwad is holding out for.
In fact the last two points highlight one of the biggest strengths of MoM... *INFORMATION*! Fire up MoM, load up a well developed saved game, go near a city or spot for a potential one and press F1... voila! You have a wealth of simple to understand and very useful information at your fingertips. The same goes for stuff like adjusting the tax rate, mana income, etc. This isn't a game of Memory... I don't want to have to remember what city bonus I picked for some random burg 20 turns ago
Less bland "crafting" would go a long way to combat the overall weakness and easy workaround insofar as gear. Why would I even bother with crafting in warfare if I can get cheaper and better stuff through magic research? Perhaps having actual gear slots or at least restrictions would make your choices more relevant (rather than just loading up on health packs and vision rings to exploit the system).
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I really, REALLY want to love this game but it's just not there. Perhaps 6 months down the road with significant developer and modder work it'll get there.
The OP brings up a lot of great points I agree with, but I've been thinking a lot about this one in particular:
I appreciate the problem - guardian creatures are too weak as is, but make them too powerful and they make rushing too easy, in fact you'd have to rush to make up for the longterm economic loss of taking one, and not taking one would just be begging for your neighbor to rush you. I think there are ways to salvage this great idea however, two ways in fact.
-First they could become actual "guardians," i.e. much more powerful but immobile units that can only defend the city. Even better if they become more powerful as the city grows or if more powerful ones are available at higher city levels. Or they could provide some kind of defensive bonus to other units you build later, kind of like a wall (think of the guardian as inspiring your regular troops or magically defending the entire city).
-Second (instead of, or in addition to first suggestion, i.e. a different city-level-up choice) you could get a unit that's more like a champion, unique bonuses/abilities and able to level up and become very powerful in the long run, but weak at first - needs experience and equipment to reach its full potential.
Either way the idea is to get a unit that continues to be valuable later in the game, and in fact gets more powerful as the game continues (just like the +30% gildar or whatever bonus) but can't be abused for an unbeatable early rush against someone who took an economic bonus instead.
Of course, all of this depends on individual units/champions getting balanced vs. squads of peasants with cheap equipment, which are just broken and break so many other game mechanics.
Agreed.
I wish there was some setting for strength of Magic.. where you could set how strong magic is.. Kind of like MOM.. except in MOM it affected only nodes.. But strength of magic here could affect renegeration rates, power of spells etc
Awesome post, even as long as it is there would probably be at least the same length of additional issues to list.
I also appreciate you pointing out that the things missing from the game are not new concepts but are the bog standard for either fantasy combat or RPG's. None of these issues were caused by broken street dates or PC Mag quotes.
Thank you for the time you put into writing this out.
I wonder how much if any is stardock going to add the stadard fatansy features or just say this is the game we made deal with it.
I think they will fix it eventually (see my inner Stardock fanboy still possesses optimism!) since even calling this "low fantasy" would still require major upgrades.
Even Mount and Blade knows that damage from spears is different than that from the edge of a sword or the face of a hammer.
Given their track record with GalCiv and the like, I fairly sure that this game will feel much more evolved in 6 months. How much of that will be refinements versus overhauls remains to be seen.
And as tired and oft-repeated as it is, there's always modding. I'm not proposing that as a plausible solution to all the game's current issues, but 6 months from now if Stardock has included everything except that one standard fantasy feature you must have, well it can probably be modded in (and if it's a popular feature, someone else will probably mod it in for you and share it via impulse).
Excellent post!
I would also agree with the issues presnted here.
1) Yes heroes/champ/so are really weak after the early game. I am surprised that quest rewards are so meh; i woul dhav ethought rare/magical items would "drops" for the heroes making them special. As folks have pointed out peasants are more powerful.I love th eidea of special skills/advancements for heroes and perhaps tactical skills (more tactical movement, terrain use, longer ranges, better vs. certain monster types) etc.
2) Mana regeneration. I agree 100%. The mana regen is fine for STRATEGIC spells but for the TACTICAL spells it is wholly inadeqaute. I love the idea suggested by someone that the nama pool for battles (starts full at each fight) is seperate from the main (straegic mana pool).
3) diplomacy - utterly Meh and bug ridden. You dont get your gildar and sometimes actually LOSE gildar because ther eis some kind of signed value problem. The amount AIs ask for a deal is insane.
Has anyone actually gotten diplomati currency??
4) AI - wakey wakey! are you there. It needs to be a bit more agressive, but at the same token get rid of the inifinite AI cash bug.
5) MAPS I : Truly random maps. I have played 5 games so far 3x I started on the same map.. and 2x on the same location. Given that the game is so wonky atm and multiplayer is not there - lets get teh variety of random maps and forget the MP for now.
6) Quests - ar ether actually any dungeons ??? I miss those from other tactical RPGs - great for hero quest where perhaps an epic monster or two may drop some random rare spells or items.
7) Magic (tactical). It needs beffing up. As others have noted spells like fireball are so weak they should be called firecracker ( a single target low damage fireball makes no sense), but spells like blizzard are devistating in comparison. Magic needs more bling!
8) MAPS II; more varied terrain - to much empty brown stuff, with huge stretches of empty territory that make cities only worthwhile near nodes. TRRAFORMING would be nice. Say spells to grow forest, summon wildlife (deer, cattle), dig mines or level mountains
9) MAPS III: make some spell/ability render mountains passible or add flight. I'm a powerful wizard that dominate sthe land.. Oops. have to walk round the hill.
RAT
City population decreases if you don't have enough food, but the influence doesn't. This really only effects the cities ability to build an army, which really sucks if it's your army production city.
You can retreat with champions. You can have city sieges if you research down the warfare tree. Army's have maintenance, they desert if you go too far in the negative with gildar.
Never knew about the gildar maintenance because after the very early game I am routinely drowning in gildar.
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