I find it very easy to get overwhelmed by this game, it is very complex and for me I find the game too hard to win even on the easiest level. In my 1st game some of the ai has MUCH more powerful and numerous armies then me (and why do they get brigades or whatever they call them and I don't?) and super powerful random monsters abound.
In the future I would like to see an easier level to play (maybe a tutorial level?) so us newbies can learn the darn game w/o getting overwhelmed.
And BTW plz fix the slowdowns and choppiness and have a state of the art computer and this is a TBG dang it!
thx
Well, in this day and age, your wish for manuals to be forbidden has long been true. Long gone are the days of 100+ pages of detailed units, techs, core mechanics. Personally, I have always hated a game with less than 50 pages because it must be so simple a caveman could play it. While I understand to keep costs down they cannot do that as much anymore, at least give a solid pdf.
That said, congrats on your DIY attitude! However, it seems to me, you bring up a valid criticism of the game. It you use the exploit of rushing large stacks, you don't have to look at any subtleties of the game. To me, that looks almost like a cheat. The game does have exploitable flaws. I am not talking about those, I am talking about new users trying to play a game in a non-rush/crush manner. Role playing for a lack of a better term now.
The AI obviously has numerous issues. I feel most newbies are just trying to figure out the core building, exploring, magic dynamic. Once Brad hopefully plugs the "rush" strategy, the tactic you put forth will no longer apply. Conversely, you might play MP and that will certainly not work. Then you might wish you had a manual.
I notice from the posted images that it is turn 279 and the Empire of Kraxis has a power level of over 1200. I've never seen an AI empire go over 500 and they usually overpowered me. I win by decapitation and city conquest anyway, avoiding their biggest stacks unless the sovereign is there. This was on normal, challenging and hard. Have yet to try higher settings, or lower.
Funny how this game plays out differently for different people. Wonder why that is?
Not exactly, military requires proper economics to support it, so you have to research Imperial tree too.
The first 20 turns is critical to getting a jump on the AI.
SCOUT LIKE CRAZY and SPAM pioneers the second you are able. If you can get 3 cities down quickly this should not be a problem. If you turtle you will lose all sorts of turn advantages.
I didn't read all of the replies you received but I imagine the flames! Most people want Elemental to be so hard it just about kills you. I too find the game kicking my ass at least part of the time. I will admit that even though I've been playing PC-style games for 25 years something about Elemental is just so unapproachable I find myself in situations where I'm overwhelmed.
I think most of it has to do with balance issues. And while I realize that the flamers are all so much smarter than myself, I sure hope Stardock continues to make games that are playable even by us dummies.
IGN's review of the game mentions this problem- http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1117649p1.html
The A.I. often takes its Sovereign into battle in foreign lands, making it easy to kill – which in turn eliminates the empire from the map. But should the enemy empires be smart enough to avoid this, they'll usually amass amazingly large armies and march on you, even if the victory through conquest option has been disabled. In all the matches I played I never once saw the A.I. try to win by any other way than wiping out the other nations, making it so I had to focus on my military to a point where I could never effectively pursue the other victory conditions.
Please tone down the AI's armybuilding on the easier settings. Please.
The problem with absolutely huge AI armies is something that is often related to a particular bug. The computer player goes into negative gold and can continue spending indefinately. A symptom "on the field" for this is the enemy fielding multple large squads of hugely expensive troops (such as Scions) in each army, usually very early in the game. It's not unusual to see an army with five units that each cost 20+ gold in wages each turn, clearly unaffordable in normal circumstances. Secondary field symptoms include the rapid massacre of Kingdom and Independant AI factions by Empires.
Definitive proof of this being the case is easily obtained by opening the diplomatic/trade window with the suspect faction and seeing that their Gildar capital is a rediculously large negative amount. (being several hundred thousand in debt is common)
I have encountered this only with Empire factions, and I work around it by only taking Kingdom factions as opponents, but your milage may vary.
As far as I know this bug is still i place in 1.07.
No, I've seen the weird negative Gilder balance with Kingdoms as well.
You go negative when the wages of troops push past your income. It is easy to miss that it is going negative as there is no warning. I went from +8 to -1.5 after building some companies and didn't realize what was going on until I received messages my troops were deserting because I was bankrupt!
Granted, I should have keep better tabs on the gildar total at the top. Guess I was channelling the Federal Reserve and thinking I could just print money
The AIs troops do not appear to desert on bankruptcy. This is broken.
I am hoping for less aggressive troop building, especially on lower difficulty levels.
One other annoying thing this causes is that AI players will try to extort me in those cases. Since they have debt-financed huge armies, they perceive their military power as much greater than mine, so will every couple turns hit me up for gildar. Since I can't manufacture enough of an army to even this out, its basically a guarantee that I'll have to go to war with them eventually even if there are no other reasons for conflict.
Check out Dominions_3 for a fantasy TBS... the developers provided a patch update even earlier this year which has new features and fixes. Oh when the game arrives it has a 290+ pages manual. It's a game where your sovereign(pretender) can be a mage, cyclops, dragon, werewolf, liche, etc., etc., . You will be fighting as many as 72 different nations for godhood. Different meaning not only giants, lizardmen, undead, etc., ... but also unique spells, unique soldiers, and so on. The graphics are old school... but the game depth is legendary.
My current game I intended to be a military campaign "Classic Good vs EVIL!" I had notived the Empire factions to usually be more aggressive so I tried to set up the game as just my kingdom faction vs all empire only factions... Well OPERR and I got it backwards on the setup screens and I started with me as Kingdom and ONLY other Kingdom factions...
Long Story short, the Kingdoms took a long time to begin to get agreessive toward one another and while we all remained at peace I was able to remain on the top of the growth curve due to the chokepoints of random map and some early land grabs and AOI blocks I put up to discourage curiously nosey neighboring nobles. I begun Trade and Tech treaties with each that was in my favor and before long they all started coming to me complaining about their neighbors and if we don't do something about it now then the world as we know it would end or somesuch vaguenes. I continued to advance my tech trees and quest and put down viciuos mobs and recruit and imbue casters. Then the AI began beating on other AI's this is when my dominance as an economic power began to be threatened. One AI faction took out a NPC faction and I took the AI faction out in order to show I will not tolerate that in my world where I am king! anyhow it's been an interesting ride inbetween games crashes... Memory leaks and such.
If you are having trouble use the spell CONFUSION...it may be bugged and it is certainly overpowered, use it and you'll see what I mean. This is just an example of a game were I am tolerating the other kingdoms as long as they act in a tolerable fashion. I only react to acts of aggression not start them. (my point) I do not think this is possible with empire faction in the mix...
Whenever i paly i have the same problem. i am still new to both 4x and elemental so im learning
still the enemies on extremely easy are still hard. they have massive armies, lose hunderds of gold a turn, and always have absurdly high values when i go into diplomacy with them. also yesterday i was playing and my army had taken their 9 men down to 1 health. when i try to attack them with my 12 men wich have good health,armor,attck,etc i miss and the counter of their last guy hurts me over 40. how is this fair
I was in Beta, and have played 4x games for years. One thing that I found to help me learn the game was that I would not be obsessed with completing a game. When I first started, I simply played around, set the number of AI opponents down to 2 or 3, etc. I asked lots of questions and tried lots of different things, and when I figured out a mistake that I had made, I chalked it up to experience, and started a new game. You have to learn from your mistakes.
One thing I did learn is that your game can go VERY differently based on the map you play on and the luck of the resource draw (what's close to you and what's not at the beginning of the game). Gold mines, food and tech resources help a whole lot, especially during the expansino phase. Also, are you stuck in a corner where you can hole up away from the roaming hoards of bandits that pop up later in the game, or do you forever have to be on your guard on all fronts (not a happy position to be in).
And as others have said, conquering other cities can be a huge boost as well. I often try to be a peaceful builder in other 4x games. That doesn't seem to be the best strategy here. It seems to me that the advantage goes to the more aggresssive player in Elemental.
In any case, the game will be changing shortly, so a lot of this may be moot.
If anything, the AI is so lacking that I find the game too easy. I have won by conquest on the hardest difficulty setting, and even there, a couple of the AI kingdoms never expanded beyond their initial city.
Winning by quest and spell is doable on almost every game.
Turtling should not be allowed??? When did this become Starcraft 2??? Turtling is a time-honoured strategy in 4x.
Turtling is certainly allowed, it's just a more challenging way to play given the game's current mechanics.
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