I'm as big a critic as the next at Elemental's failings, but I think it's a fun game and I personally find tactical battles a real joy. They are simple but exciting, and I often find them challenging. I'm the kind of player who will never understand every system in a strategy game perfectly, so maybe I'm who Normal difficulty was made for. In other words, I'm not one of those hard core strategy gamers that wants the game to be super hard and much more complex.
So change the game as you will but please don't turn tactical battles into some big mess. Everyone here is clamoring for Elemental to be Master of Magic and while I have a lot of fond memories of that game, what it really was was a game that kicked my ass and had a lot of great ideas but was too hard and complex for me to understand or enjoy them all.
Keep up the good work!
I thought tactical was fun the first few times I did it, and you can win some unbalanced fights by going the tactical route.
But overall it's simplistic and the AI is not very good at it (lemmings come to mind).
Magic sucks and sucks the most in tactical.
The repop on random baddies is so insanely fast that you can literally stand in one spot just outside a city at times and do mob whack-a-mole and if you do tactical for a lot of that, you will surely go insane fast.
I've taken to building armies that can just auto the battles. Sov with jacked up health and def with melee death squads that can't screw up the fights.
fine then thats how it should of been, but even civs units are more diverse and posses strategy, such as knights on horses having a first strike advantage and spearmen having an advantage over horses.
By removing tactical combat and you might as well remove unit creation and that is a key feature of the game. I like the tactical combat in strategical games as it provides a more complete experience. It is true that at the moment it is a little simple but with a little balancing and AI tweaks it could be quite acceptable
U know... i realy liked this game untill i read your post.
100% right.
Combat as it is, is only slightly better then the repetetive Deciples 3.
Sure, stardock made this game from scratch... but just by looking at jagged alliance 2 you could scratch something much better then this.
Why not a more pose relatad system? like JA2 taking cover.
For example - if a unit has a shield it can take a "defensive stance" much like the roman turtuss formaton boosting their defence.
I can go all day thinking of othr things also imfluenced by Kings bounty - the best mechanics for fantasy tactical combat.
You know what... even home brewed galactic vic system would work!
Piercing weapons, blunt weapons slashing weapons.
Right now the tactic of alot of archers is just overpowering... im winning games with just naked female archers with bows...
Who needs armor if nothign can reach you.
Also! Summuned units should be temporary or take a permanent essence hit!
All this about the game being "hard" is well... maybe just a lone voice in the crowd.
I belive the rest of us are slighty disapointed to say the least.
I cant wait for some mods...
The bottom line I I think is that we don't necessarily need to have a more complex battle system, what we need is a more versatile battle system. More special attacks (i.e poison, stuns, etc.), a skill tree for heroes to make them worthwhile. Make the spells work properly with shard enhancements to make a caster sovereign a viable choice. Another thing I think would be good is to make the stacks (squads and parties) get several rolls to attack instead of stacking the attack and defense together (so the attack value would be 8x10 with a broadsword party instead of 80). This way they would still be good, but not owerrpowered when compared to champions.
I don't feel that any of these adjustments would make the tactical battles harder to manage for the casual player, but for those of us who like crunching numbers it would mean a considerably improved experience. And to be honest, if you feel this would make the battles to complex late game (with loads of different options) there's a button called auto-resolve.
Tomas
I second that. The battles don't need to be much more complex, the focus must be on the units and their special abilities/resistances, they have to be more complex. Combat in Master of Magic wasn't that complex, it was engaging because every single unit had at least one special ability and magic wasn't as useless as in Elemental.
Exactly, it was never hard to understand, but you could use several viable strategies (range vs. melee, magic vs. might, speed versus power etc.). Just as it should be.
Give me a break. The devs promised tactical battles that had meaning and sophistication again and again and again and again and again and half of us put money on it, so don't give me this crap about "oh, just be grateful tactical battles are in the game." Frog was boasting but a few months ago that there would be hundreds, even thousands of units on the battle map (which I myself thought was a little unrealistic and detailed.) Only a few people here want something as complex as "Starcraft 2." All I want is tactical battles that mean something. I would be 100 percent fine with battles that were as simple, but meaningful, as Master of Magic. But as of now, they aren't. The only reason I even go into a tactical battle is so that my sovereign late game doesn't get auto killed or make himself useless.
I haven't really wanted to make that comparison due to these games having different focuses...but you are absolutely right. KB's tactical combat absolutely shames Elemental's...in fact I think it is even better than Disciples III. There's so many option and so many units (with varying usable abilities) it's really a joy to mix and match and create strategies based on those decisions. Add to that the enemies you face also employ this, the bevy of interesting and varied spells you can you, and well the combat turns out so much more interesting and varied.
Obviously these are different games and KB doesn't even have much in actual Strategy (more of an adventure/rpg).
I dunno, even with that understanding I guess I expected more from the tactical battles in Elemental...
No, I'm actually close to 50! I cut my teeth on games on the C-64 and Amiga, with Populous II and Civilization being two of my favorites on the Commodore Amiga. But I was also big into simulations, then became a huge RPG nerd in the late 1990s.
Tactical battles simple? Yes. But they are still fun and I find some challenge in them.
Sue me!
I'm sorry but for me what makes a relly good and fun TBS is tactical battles. While I love GC2 and CIV the one thing I don't like about those games is the fact that there is no tactical battles. No for some of us they are not just eye candy and they are not some dame click fest like most RTS games, they are in fact one of the most important parts of the game and they should be engrossing and yes a bit on the complex side.
Now while the TC in Elemental is simplistic and needs more loving I would still take it over not having it at all. Because for me it is still fun. May not as fun as AOW:SM but some day I hope it will be and surpass it.
One of the MAIN reasons I like Elemental is becouse of tactical battles.
Umm NO!!!!! it would have ruined the game. We don't need another SC2. RTS games are boring click fest whos only tactic is the zerg. Not fun at all.
Yes KB battles are fun but they are more in Heroes of Might and Magic vein.
What is sad Master of Magic and Age of Wonders battles are better and those are fairly old games.
The tactical combat system is mildly interesting now, but another layer or two of complexity are needed for long-term replay value. Zones of control, flanking and some other standard mechanics would make the game much more attractive to many.
Regardless of whether Stardock enhances tactical battles in that manner, I hope the engine allows for it. If so, some modder will grab it and run
Is it anything like the other King's Bounty tactical combat games. (the Battle chess Style TB) then I would say while KB TB is fun it is certantly not the best nor something I would want in a serious Fantasy TBS.
Adding more complixity is almost never a bad thing if done well. There is no reason options can't be added that add complexity for players who want it while allowing other players to play games with such feature disabled. 99% of games are super basic with the idea that it will be playable by more people. Those of us who enjoy lots of customization, complex mechanics, and yes challenging and mentally stimulating games need a few games to play too.
There is no reason it has to be one way or the other. This is one of the rare cases where they can make everyone happy if they care to do so.
You are completely unfamilear with the genre, right? All similar games that are TBS, have magic, heroes and a mix of RPG and TBS have much better combat! Here are the games that I remember and played: all AoW games, all HoMM games and expantions (lots of them), Kings Bounty (2 games), there are probably other games of this kind that I did not play that have better combat. It is actually difficult to invent more boring combat. Square grid (instead of hexagonal), boring combat fields, effectively 3 kind of troupes: melee, archer, and spellcaster. No different spellcasters, no different melee combat capabilities (stun, poison, hit too cells ahead), just one spellcaster type with boring spells, no special ability of ANY troop (like teleport, stun, block), single damage type (this may be changed in future, but so far this is it). And AI is as dumb as it can be.
Let me put it like this. Any game that I am aware off and had tactical combat, has better combat. More variety, more options, actual strategy, etc.
Right now, the combat is just a placeholder for combat. They just made an engine that can have combat, it is like a tech demo.
Also, be careful just praising the game aspects just because you like SD - they may think that that aspect is good enough and stop working on it.
Some people play only to win and forget that games are supposed to be fun.
Yeah, but Elemental kicks Armored Princess to the curb when it comes to empire building.
You realize older games still exist on this planet, right? That people can pick up old games and play them, no matter what their age is...?
I have to agree. I dont see how anyone could compare the tactical battle system here, favorably, to any one of its predecessors in the genre. MoM was better and that was almost 15 years ago now! AoW better. HoMM better. Sadly, cant think of another example. Not enough games like this.
MOM's tactical battles had magic cruising all over the place. You had your wizard casting spells from his tower (the distance from him increased the cost) and all kinds of other cool factors and considerations. The tactical battle is supppper simple. We might as well have the old galciv battle simulation.
I'm of the camp that thinks that tac battles are not fun. I still do them though, because I don't trust the auto-battle to do it correctly.
However, I don't think they need to reinvent the wheel to make them more enjoyable. You have a rock paper scissors system already in place with the blunt, piercing, and cutting weapons. Just make 3 types of armor, leather, chainmail, and plate, and have each one be good against a certain damage type.
Then add a touch of flavor. For example, there's no reason to take daggers as it stands. So make it so daggers can be poisioned, dealing damage over time. Give them a bonus to hit when flanking. Suddenly daggers get a lot more interesting. Make spears good against cavalry. Give them a first strike capability when getting attacked. Etc etc. As I said, no reason to reinvent the wheel.
My point is at the time MoM was a cool and fun game but I personally didn't make as much progress through it as I wanted to. Maybe F-15 Strike Eagle III or whatever else I was playing at the time was more accessible, I dunno, but my memories of MoM are better than the actual experience ever was.
Today, at 49 years old, I personally don't need my ass kicked by a strategy game. It's not that I'm lightweight, I love beating a game like Dragon Age Origins at the lower levels then once I learn the game moving up and trying harder difficulties. But I probably won't ever invest enough time to personally become an expert in Elemental -- I just want to have fun with it and as it stands it's a flawed but fun game.
So I'm not actually comparing Elemental to MoM so much as saying I personally like this quite a bit. Yes, it could be a better game and maybe tactical battles could be significantly better, but I'd say to see them become a complex mess that forced me to lose interest in the game.
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