I've kept a close eye on this thread here: Epic Battles and it's become Very Obvious that a whole lot of people were expecting to be able to have the types of large Grand Scale battles that are in the picture on the side of the box. The picture many of us drooled over when we first saw it. The same picture that was my desktop picture for 6 months. This picture (which I'm pretty sure Stardock is sick of seeing by now lol).
I would like to put forth a Official Request from the Player Base of Elemental to Make The Game Look Like This, with these kinds of Epic Numbers. It doesn't have to be in Real Time. It doesn't have to be in We-Go. What it does have to do is have Epic Numbers...Without Us Modding Them In.
You've got the tools and talent to make this happen. Us modders can't do it easily because it causes issues with units appearing in groups, but you guys at Stardock have the animation tools to fix that.
When people see Elemental in the store and pick it up and think about buying it, they no doubt took notice of this picture. In fact I'm Sure there are some people out there who had no clue what Elemental was until they saw it in the store and saw this picture and decided to buy it. After getting it home and playing it and realizing these numbers couldn't easily happen, more then a few people were let down. This post is to represent All those people and all of us who have been here from the start two years ago who wanted and expected a game of Epic Scale and Proportions.
I figure if enough people all get together and request/demand that Stardock live up to this picture then maybe they'll re-balance the numbers to make this possible. Food, Gildar, Housing, and a few other resources will need to be adjusted. The animations will need to be adjusted. But with a whole team of super smart programmers and animators it really shouldn't be a big deal to get done especially since these kinds of numbers were possible at least at one point with an internal build of the game.
If you bought Elemental and you'd like to see these kinds of numbers in battle. Please sign/reply to this thread and say so. If the community really wants this, which I'm sure most of them do, please say so now as now is the right time to do it while other mechanics get revamped. I'm sure all those people who bought Elemental based on this picture would greatly support this change, as would I.
Thank You and thank Stardock for making such an awesome and epic game that we can all enjoy for many years to come.
To those who weren't here through-out the beta process, there was a time when things were planned this way, which is where the above screen shot came from. This was from the continuous turn system that was set up but got cut. We don't NEED Continuous Turns to Achieve these kinds of Epic Numbers. It CAN be done within a Turn Based Environment with some creative animation techniques to make the units look like they're fighting between turns. I'd really, Really, like to see Stardock live up to this, and so I think those of us who want this should make this Official Request so that Stardock can truly see how many of us want this. The Beta Testers never even got to see this system in action. We were told it was changed from continuous turns to better fit the "feel" they wanted, but that doesn't explain why the unit counts had to be cut down so drastically. 12 guys in a unit does Not Feel Epic in my book.
If you Don't Want to sign the request, but would rather debate it, then please reply in the other thread going about Epic Battles here: Epic Battles
If you DO want to see them live up to these numbers. Please Say So here. No one will get mad at you for voicing your opinion or asking that they live up to this picture that so many people bought Elemental based on. Again, if you Don't want to see this, please keep your replies in the other thread. Thank you.
~ Raven X and the Elemental Community
This post is a reply from page 10, but I thought it should be added to the original, because here is the proof some people might want to see who weren't here for the whole beta process, who didn't hear the devs go on and on about the Inspiration for the Game. This is what was in the hearts and minds of All Of Us when we were all getting excited about Elemental:
Here is the proof, Frogboy had Total War and Lord of The Rings Epic Scale Battles IN MIND when dreaming up what Elemental would be:
Post By FROGBOY: Elemental: scale of power , https://forums.elementalgame.com/343449
Here's a Quote from Frogboy from that post:
"If you like the Total War series, you can imagine some of what we have in mind except here you can get that Lord of the Rings battle feeling where certain units just make mince meat out of whole squads of enemy units."
There are others back in old Dev Journals too. Now, NO ONE can deny that Frogboy had Total War Type, Epic Scaled Battles, IN MIND when PLANNING Elemental: War Of Magic. For all you new people who wanted to see quotes, there it is. I can dig up more old quotes too. So, if Frogboy is Now Saying that ONLY MoM was his inspiration, well, something is fishy in Denmark...
Here's another one where Frogboy Specifically says "huge army" and "vast armies" in the same paragraph!!!
Post By FROGBOY: Design elements of Elemental discussed , https://forums.elementalgame.com/329219
Here's a List of Quotes from Frogboy from that post, some of which are mechanics that either changed, or were simply left out completely from the game we have now, like where he talks about having Walls in cities be a Big Part of tactical battles:
Quote:I understand if some stuff is being kept internal, but here are the things I'm wondering about: 1. Are there non-military victory conditions? 2. Does the game include a campaign? If so do you think the story of the campaign will attract gamers? 3. How are you addressing the steamroller issue of TBS games (ie: spending the first half of the game building a massive army and the last half rolling it over all opponents as a repeatable strategy to every game)?1. Yes. Most of the victory conditions are non-military. Some of the previews may cover this so I won't say anything until after the previews hit. 2. Yes. I think the story is compelling but I'm highly biased. 3. The mechanics in Elemental are a bit different than the typical 4X game because even in terms of warfare, there are very different paths. For instance, Player A may have a huge army ready to steamroll but Player B may have an incredibly powerful sovereign who can wipe out vast armies and Player C may have built up an incredible well of mana that can be used to decimate vast swaths of the world and all three of these things could come together at once based on which path players take and of course all 3 could lose to Player D who wins through the quest victory condition if they're not careful.Quote:Can we build walls? Us turtelers need to know. Yes. One of the key game mechanics of Elemental is how cities are built. In Elemental, when a city grows, it gains a new tile which can be placed where the player wants it to go (as long as it's adjacent to an existing tile). So cities are a multi-tile affair in the game. Now, how you choose to build up your city heavily determines how defensible or productive, or rich it is. Cities are only conquered when the keep tile is taken which could be in the utter center of the city or could be at the end of a peninsula.Quote:What are the objectives for the creation part? how many aspects will be able to be manipulated? will it be part of the game or you have to work on that on a separated editor (one of the many things I loved from MoM was the ability to forge items that were mine, created by me as part of my campaign and war effort). There will be pre-made maps and randomly generated maps in which players can insert a large number of variables in deciding what kind of world they want. Quote:I guess it will have random maps, what is the target for sizes? From tiny to ridiculously large. We are also making a 64-bit native edition to support even larger worlds. Quote:What type of feedback are you looking for the beta process? Everything. The beta process starts about 9 months before release so that beta testers can seriously mold the game. On a personal note, for me the beta process is the whole point of making the game as that's what helped get me into game development in the first place. I was one of those Usenet guys on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic hanging out talking about games and picked up Teach yourself C in 21 days to start writing (this is obviously a long time ago now). So hanging out with other gamers to tweak and add to the game is the best part. Quote:Any extra payment for the MMO part? what is the general idea of this? No. It's not really an MMO part as much as Impulse hosting the game on the cloud to make it much easier for people to interact with their "world" with their friends. Quote:Brad - will there be any way to quick-resolve combat? Playing out tactical combat is fun when the sides are at all matched, but it's just a drag on my patience when you're going to steamroll the other side or whatever. And sometimes you just want to get combat over with because you're focusing on the bigger picture or a "technology win" or something.
Totally. There's instant-resolve (i.e. two armies meet, one dies), there's auto-resolve where the game zooms in and shows a tactical battle but it's all handled by the AI (ala GalCiv II fleet battles) and then there's full tactical battles where both sides play. One thing I should mention about the tactical battles that isn't clear in the screenshots is that they're continuous turns. They're not like HOMM. The player tells where they want their units and uses the space bar to pause the action to give new directions. That way, we can get much more interesting battles.Quote:What's your combat system going to be built around? Master of Magic-style tactical combat, or Civilization-style randomized abstraction? Or will both be options?It's tactical but it can be made to play like Civ if you have instant-resolve enabled. I will likely play with auto-resolve as I'm not a huge fan of playing out tactical battles but I enjoy seeing the carnage. If anyone has ever seen Fellowship of the Ring where Sauron is whacking out tons of elves and men around, that's the look we're going for. Though, in Elemental, the creatures are much more powerful than a lone Maiar up against a bunch of punks. Dragons in Elemental are incredibly powerful and each of the channelers are equivalent (by late game) to Valar. Enough Tolkien geedkom. Quote:The few available screenshots look great. Hopefully we'll get a look at the spells soon. The spells are going to be intentionally de-balancing in late game. I.e. by late game, you'll be able to do Populous level damage to the world. A lot of the reason we had to create a new engine was because we needed one where the world could be truly wrecked.Quote:By doing that, you can then open the way to have extremely large maps in which players are viable for a long period of time with different paths to victory.
If anyone wants to play catch-up and read the rest of the Dev Journals that talk about the inspiration behind the game, behind the Original Vision, you can find them here:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/513/page/7
Notice how many times Frogboy uses LotR as a direct example of both scale and feeling for the envisioned world of Elemental. He uses it in reference to the Scale Of Battles. He uses it in reference to the Power of Sovereigns. He uses for a lot of things because it is what is commonly known to a lot of fantasy lovers.
That's the very last page in the Dev Journal History. Hopefully some of this information, quoted Straight From The Source, will clear things up for those who may be questioning what the original vision was and what the vision is now. How many things here simply aren't even a part of the game now? A lot that I can see, but, this thread isn't about any of those. This Thread is about the game living up to it's EPIC INTENTIONS. This is about Follow Through. This is about a Vast Part of the Elemental Community wanting the vision to be maintained and lived up to because we want Elemental to be Successful. We want Elemental to be the VERY BEST Fantasy Strategy War Game on the market and some of us will not rest until either that happens, or we're cold, dead, and buried.
In closing, here's a mock-up screen shot I did just now. This took about 5 minutes in PhotoshopCS4. Please don't get crazy over the details. This picture isn't meant to be super detailed, it's just meant to show how the game should feel. The feeling of truly epic armies clashing for control of a ruined world. I only did one army, not two, but I could do a mock-up of two massive armies fighting if I wanted to, but I think the point is served none the less. I didn't spend a lot of time cleaning it up or smoothing over where I patched in clear land that was covered by rocks or cactuses that I just copy and paster terrain over. It's just meant to show the feeling of what it would be like to command a Real Army that's the size of what a Powerful Sovereign of a mighty civilization truly deserves.
From now on I'll only be replying to civil posts in a civil manner. I'm not going to defend my wording of the post any longer as I've stated what I meant more than enough times. I'm sorry if anyone took offense to my wording, but if you're one of the people who did, then this thread wasn't for you anyway, as it was only meant to Count The Numbers of those of us who want the game to live up to it's original vision and potential as much as possible.
I urge those who still want to see this to Please Keep Posting and let your voices be heard. Keep the memory of what the game was supposed to be alive in your mind and hearts and keep the ideas alive in the minds and hearts of Frogboy and the Team who have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into this game right along side of us who have been here with them. We've all invested a lot of time and energy and expectations into this game, and this game is a work of art. Lets strive to make it live up to it's potential and keep your voices being heard. Thank you one and all.
Signed
The reason I bought elemental: war of magic because we would be fighting wars. Right now I rarely see a battle with more than 10 soldiers and that just isn't fun (or a war).
After the combat system is upgraded, I would love to see the numbers tweaked.
It's in CoreUnitGroupingTypes.xml
Specifically:
<TroopCount>4</TroopCount>
Although the wage multiplier and base turns to train would be needed to be adjusted to taste.
I think I will test this out tonight with varying numbers. 16, 24, 32, etc., to see the hit on performance and what Raven means by:
My initial thought that the tiles could be made bigger (by Stardock) and/or the units could be made smaller (by modelling/modding). I won't know how they are spaced out until I try it, though. But from my experience, Raven's assessment that this can be fixed by Stardock is very likely accurate, but it may not take animation modifications to do this. Simply better organization of troop formations may be enough to resolve it. I don't know, but it's definitely resolvable. The <PewterStandModel>, specifically the model within, may be the key.
My stance is that they didn't put it in the game. Period. Where is the information that what is shown in that screen shot is built into the the game but merely turned off?
Being passionate does not excuse poor arguments or behavior.
If a dissenting opinion is antogonistic, Guilty. I'm not trying to shed a bad light on anybody and as my post states I'd like to see what he suggests as well, but I don't agree with demanding it or saying things such as "don't give up on this damnit!" I read his apology, and while I'd agree it's commendable, the Genie is out of the bottle. If more people typed responses and walked away from them for an hour or so I think internet forums worldwide would be more civil overall. He would not have said such things sitting in a room with these other people. His karma speaks for itself, he's well established, nothing I'm going to say is going to besmirch that. However, having had a good track record is not indicative of future results. We all make mistakes, his apology is proof enough of that.
I think it applies superbly. Brad had a grand vision. (I can fly flapping my arms) In the end, he realized his vision was not possible for "X" reason. (I learned I can't fly just flapping my arms). As to vision and direction, I think those should be coming from Stardock; it's their product. But I understand Stardock does some things differently than other places. I'm still not sure where the evidence is that battles as shown in the picture are built into this game but merely disabled, but if that is true, would you rather they turn it on and have a worse experience based on their decision that it doesn't work for X reason?
Yet like all "request" threads, it's morphing into a demand thread. That's where I have an issue. "Don't give up on this damnit!"
I would suggest that while it's a part of the game, how it's implemented is still Stardock's decision. The bravado on these forums of people demanding things be done a certain way because doggone it, I want it, is frankly bad for the community as a whole.
Everything on the internet is an argument...what ever happened to the "discussion" in discussion forums?
Forget the discussion, how did you share the beers. Beer makes everything better.
Perhaps it doesn't show in Raven's posts but formerly there was a philosophy behind the concept of 'armies of thousands', explained by Frogboy himself.
It had to do with the different options and ways of playing your faction with which tech tree you wanted and which resources you had:
- want to focus on the Civilization tree and make a big, populous and rich empire? Then you can recruit later hundreds of peasants or light infantries with wooden spears to guard the borders and fight by sheer numbers
- want a small but militarized empire, with Warfare techs and metal mines? Then train small groups of well-trained well-equiped well-paid heavy infantries or knights and go on offensive.
That would have added diversity and also helped defuse the fear of the ominous 'stack of doom' (or the Superman stack, as someone stated). But if you reduce the numbers, you come back to the same problems: should I have only 50 soldiers, I'll make them super-soldiers.
I didn't read this entire thread, only the first few posts (don't have time - leaving!), but I thought that a good example would be like the Birthright game. It gave me the same type of vibe as what people wanted EWOM to do concerning showing a larger number of soldiers on the screen. Here's a couple screenshots..
LOL I thought of the Birthright game being a relevant example too! I just didn't know how many people actually played that game. Ah good ol' Birthright. So much like E:WOM. A multi-faceted game with so much potential but buggy to the point it was sometimes unplayable. At least unlike Birthright, E:WOM will eventually be patched properly.
KingHobbit, I sent step by step beer making instructions to you by PM, so check your mailbox and enjoy!
I've read just about every post in this thread over the past 4 pages and I think 90% are completely useless, non-objective garbage which bring nothing of use to the game or its players nor do they even cover the thread topic which was adding an “epic” scale to the game. Who gives a crup if the thread poster miss-used the “majority” as the title in the topic & lumped all of us in the pot? It’s fargin useless. Why anyone would care or find fault with this is beyond me. Who cares?? I’m just interested in the substance of the thread. That’s all.
For those of you that feel passionate about implementing and adding an "epic" scale to this game, I want to know concrete details as to how you propose doing so, not the opinionated crup that is completely worthless and makes up most of the posts. I want to know the following:
1) Exactly, how are you going to expand the map to accomodate additional units without causing game crashes?
2) Exactly, how are you going to add new larger 50-man squads (or whatever they're going to be) without causing the problems listed at * below?
3) Exactly, how are you going to rebalance the AI so that it copes with the newly scaled "epic" size and not become a "steam roll-over" instead of the "walkover" it is now?
4) Exactly, how are you going to redo the tactical battles, so that they don't degrade into 8-hr slugfest as we try to whittle 1000 hp "epic" units down one hp at a time?
5) Exactly, how are you going to proactively prevent system and memory crashes with the new "epic size"?
* Problems that I can already predict will happen with new 50-man superman squads:
{Would a 50-man squad have the attack strength and defense of a 10 man squad, but the hit points of a 50 man squad? If so, a typical mace group would be Attack: 52 Defense: 24 HP: 1000; Based on one of my auto generated unit types. If this were true, then the actual game effect of this would be to create very long tactical battles as these units would take a long time to kill, but at least they're not "superman" squads. Frankly, the only thing players would get out of this (in a turn based system) is tactical battles that take about 4x longer on manual, no problem if using auto resolve, which is probably what I'd be doing all the time if this unit were added because it would probably take 30 minutes to resolve one battle if there were 8 of these 50-man squads on each side.The problem with "epic" battles is implementing it practically in a turn-based system in such a way that:6) The game doesn’t become more unbalanced than it currently is: i.e. the AI needs to adequately "cope" with the new units.7) Avoiding the creation of 50-man "superman" squads that are basically game-breaking automatic-game winning "nukes" and which turn the game into nothing more than a tech race as to who can get this technology first and thus win the game.8) Avoiding evolving tactical battles into long drawn-out boring affairs as we try to whittle units with 1000 hps down 1 hp at a time.If you can avoid all three of the above in such a way as to "enrich" the game and add something cool and new in the process, then I'd be all for an epic battle addition. "Epic battles" translates to me as: larger battlefield area, more units per battle, and larger 50-man squads added as needed to support this epic addition.But honestly, I don't see how it can be done (in all practicality) in the current turn-based system without: unbalancing the AI even more, transitioning the game into an un-enjoyable "tech race" with teleporting super squads as the ultimate goal of every player, and lastly drawing-out tactical battles inordinately (time to resolve). }
Most of this * comes from an earlier post of mine that went unanswered, and I'd really like to know the answers.
The original topic of this thread is actually quite interesting, and I'm glad Raven brought it up. The problem is, 90% of the posts are just useless garbage posts that add nothing of substantive value. For those of you that feel passionately about adding epic battles and larger units, I simply want to know how y’all plan on doing this without destroying the game. It's not a hard question. My opinion is at this time that it can't be done without violating any of 1) to 8) above ... change my mind with direct, concrete, realistic, detailed, implementation and answers to each of the 8 points while at the same time adding something new to the game that enriches it and I'll be 100% behind an "epic" scale addition to this game .. I promise
Turn Base EPIC strategy UI
it's not impossible to make an epic turn based strategy game
but it's necessary to have the right inspiration
this is an epic image of an epic battle of Fantasy Wars ( the fantasy general successor )
it's a simple UI, it not requires a NASA computer and is really very epic
Feel free to contribute to its death by not posting in it anymore. You don't agree, we get it.
I actually have to agree with you on point 2 there.
I'm glad to see the tone in this discussion is returning to normal levels (mostly)
On the fact that making armies bigger would be more difficult to balance, and require changes in the economy; this is true, no denying that. As said by the Dev's, a lot of changes will be made to some off the core mechanics of Elemental. Maybe not radical re-designs, but certainly some significant changes. We are simply asking that if/when they change the economic system and tactical combat, they allow for huge armies. This would require some number tweaking and some engine changes (for instance allowing more than 12(?) units to be shown on a single tile in combat).
Now, we are not asking for huge armies right from the start. Quite the contrary. This would ruin the whole 'the world is recovering from a cataclysm and I'm building a kingdom from scratch' feeling just as much as the apparent urbanisation of the world does now. But we do want them possible later in the game. I for one don't want that after playing on a huge map for days, the final battle between the two remaining superpowers that will decide the fate of the world is going to be fought by a few dozen guys on each side. The small numbers we are seeing now are fine for the early parts of the game, not for late. Here's how I see the scale developing on a large map:
Early game: After establishing my first settlement, I decide to go explore the surrounding lands with my sovereign and first hero. I've trained two scouts for back up, and left a few peasants in charge of defending the town should any hostiles come by.
Later: My first settlement has grown into a nice town, and I've build a few outposts near some resources, one of those has grown into a village. I have about a dozen men, armed with bows and spears, stationed in both my capital town and the village, while my sovereign is out hunting some fabled beast with his hero buddy and a squad of archers. I've met a few other factions, and started trading with a minor faction. I encountered Umber, and though relations are not good, no hostilities have broken out yet.
Mid game: My capital has grown into a nice city, and I have a hand full oftowns and villages throughout my kingdom. I share borders with two other kingdoms, my minor trading partner, and Umber. After Umber attacks my trading partner, I have little choice but to declare war on him. After defeating his army attacking my trading partner, I move my army into Umber's land. I encounter Lord Umber and his main army, apparently on the road towards my lands. I have a 100 battle hardened infantry, nearly twice that in new recruits and archers, and two score of heavy cavalry with me, easily outnumbering him. Umber has recruited a group of ogres however, so we are quite evenly matched. After a hard battle I win, but Lord Umber escapes. His power is broken though, and I conquer a large number of his towns before his kingdom finally crumbles.
Late game: Behind Umber lies Magnar. Magnar is in the process of conquering his neighbours. When he turns his attention towards me and my fellow kingdoms we unite against him. He has several huge cities, allowing him to field multiple large armies. One of the kingdoms falls, but they put up a good fight, destroying most of his forces. I decide to make a move against his capital before he has time to rebuild and destroy me and my remaining ally. The core of my army are nearly a thousand veteran troops, supported by an equal amount of fresh recruits and support units, and over 200 cavalry. When I encounter his home legion, I discover that he had more troops remaining than I thought, making victory seem impossible. Before the battle, I am joined by a dragon; its offspring was killed by a hero in Magnars employ who turned their hide into a set of armor, and it wants revenge. Though still badly outnumbered, at least I have a fighting chance.
Sorry for the nerdgasm, but I was trying to illustrate how I saw the scale of the game changing.
Feel free to tell me this is not what Elemental is about, that what I just discribed is unrealistic to expect, whatever. It is what I hoped Elemental would be, and I think it is still possible. Maybe I'm wrong, that doesn't change the fact that I'd like to see the dev's aspiring towards this kind of, wel, epicness
Also, to Raven for fighting the good fight and not killing anyone.
So the blatant bait and switch on the retail BOX doesn't bother you in the slightest?
Or did you see the epic battle and say to yourself "Blah, this looks awful"?
You've shown yet again that you'll take the incredibly substandard current state of Elemental, praise it to the heavens, and complain bitterly if someone dares to ask for more. Say the basic promises from the alpha they called beta. Come on, stop giving Stardock a free pass on this and hold them to the level of accountability they've earned through past efforts. The soft bigotry of low standards is so tired.
I'm sorry that RavenX's all too legitimate request for something approaching the epic feel we were PROMISED offends you. The best way you can "fight" this is by not even coming here. Hell, if all the complainers hadn't, this thread would have languished at a handful of pages and dropped off the front a long time ago.
So thanks I suppose
And to make a stab at the original PURPOSE of this post, I'm 100% in support of your petition RavenX! Keep up the good work!
There were several games from KOEI years ago (Ghengis Khan and Romance of the Three Kingdoms) that had turn-based tactical combat. The armies you commanded in both of those games were in the tens of thousands and the battles didn't take much time at all to fight. If my memory isn't failing me, the tactical considerations were far deeper than Elemental and there wasn't even magic.
The AI built big armies just fine...in fact, maybe I wasn't very good, but I was frequently defeated.
How did they do it? 1 to many graphical representation of armies broken down into maneuver elements (wargames have been doing this for decades.) There are countless designs that other tactical games have used to represent this model that have worked very well and have suspended my disbelief that I wasn't actually controlling massive armies.
Incorporating heroes into such a system would probably need the tactical engine to allow your heroes to join units, though, or they'd likely be overwhelmed once larger forces started being deployed (unless they were uber-powerful...a la Sauron, Balrog, dragons, giants, battle trolls, etc.) The huge benefit of incorporating heroes into bodyguard units or larger forces could be the addition of special abilities, etc., that heroes could give to those units (cause fear, increase morale, ATK bonus, force march, etc...it wouldn't take long to come up with some really cool ideas here.) Giving heroes the ability to challenge other heroes in personal combat (a la Warhammer Miniatures) would also add a unique and interesting feature to the game.
Uber-heroes could still stride around dishing out massive damage on their own, but those would be rare and typically late game high level beings (or thematic in nature...think Elric with Stormbringer, dragon riders, Sauron, Morgoth, etc.)
The current memory issues, crashes, graphical problems, are all resolvable by fixing bugs and resource handling in the engine. Animating large numbers of not-selected troops to make the battlefield look more "alive" should really not be that hard as long as the animations are there to begin with. I'm not advocating a TotalWar non-TBS style game (as I prefer turn-based to real-time or we-go), but the Total War engine from Rome can easily handle thousands of troops simultaneously fighting on even mediocre computers today. Honestly, the technical hurdles are not the issue...unless the Elemental game engine is very, very, very poor at rendering its graphics.
The hurdle is, as has been expressed, which of the many, many systems Stardock could leverage to represent larger armies. Leave them out of the base game if there are so many concerns about how the rest of the game world would be balanced for them, but I want them for mods of other, more populous, fantasy worlds where I am confident dedicated modding teams could balance the economy and AI to handle them (especially once the AI is fully exposed via XML).
Apropos of nothing more than your emphasis on the word WAR.
This is not "Elemental: Backyard Brouhaha of Parlour Tricks", kids! =D
That's what I thought it was going to be like when I looked at the box. I saw that large army attacking that dragon and thought that was what the battles were like in the game, at least concerning appearance.
Honestly I dont give a damn about battles being epic, all i want is the game to work on everyones machine past turn 200 and for it to actually be about Elemental War of Magic instead of Elemental War of Peasants...
Right now magic is pointless in fact its about as usefull as a bow in the game except a bow doesnt have limited ammunition like magic.
I can't resist selecting out these 2 bits from the above quote:
"It seems that most of us don't want that."
"I'm pretty offended that you had the gall to speak for the "Official Player Community." It makes you sound arrogant and pretentious."
I bet the poster doesn't even realize why those 2 quotes are funny...
I want to add my /signed here. The ability to have battles as represented by that pic would add a lot to the game.
Those who think it can't be done, or would somehow 'ruin' or 'hurt' the game, underestimate the skill at SD.
I'd also like to thank Raven X for bringing this up. You put a lot of effort into this (and other things) in your attempts to make the game all that it can be, and have gotten a lot of unmerited crap for it here. Just remember -- 'an insult from an idjit is a compliment, and a compliment from an idjit is an insult'.
As long as you're running on a decent system and not a Notebook performance shouldn't an issue unless you push it to INSANE levels, like 4 or 5 thousand, That you might take a hit to performance. According to Frogboy there's no engine limitations behind the choice for smaller unit counts.
The animation parts I was talking about would be if they kept the turn based system and put in more units, it would look best with interim animations between turns. Which they could do easily. That isn't what's stopping us from just changing the XML here. What I meant by it's harder for us is the unit spacing. When you go above..umm. can't remember if it's 20 or 25 men in a unit, they don't look right within the tile. They aren't spaced evenly and the formation looks odd. That's the part I don't know if we can fix easily when we go to re-balance it for the mods that will be using epic numbers. I'm not sure if unit spacing in e formation is handled in the XML or in Python that we don't have access to yet.
The DL Team and I have been going through the XML making notes of where things are, and I've already laid out the basis for a standard that multiplies across the board for keeping the math balanced at higher levels. When I get this more fleshed out it's going to go up for discussion in the modding forums as there are so many mods that want to use a Epic Scale. My goal there is to make a "Epic Standard Model" that All the mods that want epic scale can use as a basis and then tweak from there as needed for their mod's tastes. We also plan on releasing it as a stand alone mod by its-self just for those who want epic scale in the vanilla game. Mainly though it's not knowing how to get the spacing of the groups right with just XML that's kept us from just jumping up the numbers in the XML you've shown there as a start.
If we can get the spacing right with XML alone, then awesome, but I'm thinking it's going to be something we either need API's access to make it look right on the field, or access to Stardock's animation plugins so we can remake a until animation tile and set our own lines and formations, but that's more in the modeling department which I'm not knowledgeable on in the slightest.
To sum that up minus the confusion, we can add in larger numbers and change the math to make it balanced, but without either the knowledge to space out the formations in XML or whatever other code is needed to do the spacing, it would look rather dumb. We haven't played around with it much as there's a lot of other parts of the mod we're working on while we're waiting on the rest of the tools, plugins, and API's from Stardock. So for now it's a bridge we'll cross when we come to it and have the right tools for the job.
1) Exactly, how are you going to expand the map to accommodate additional units without causing game crashes?2) Exactly, how are you going to add new larger 50-man squads (or whatever they're going to be) without causing the problems listed at * below?3) Exactly, how are you going to re-balance the AI so that it copes with the newly scaled "epic" size and not become a "steam roll-over" instead of the "walkover" it is now?4) Exactly, how are you going to redo the tactical battles, so that they don't degrade into 8-hr slugfest as we try to whittle 1000 hp "epic" units down one hp at a time?5) Exactly, how are you going to pro-actively prevent system and memory crashes with the new "epic size"? * Problems that I can already predict will happen with new 50-man superman squads:{Would a 50-man squad have the attack strength and defense of a 10 man squad, but the hit points of a 50 man squad? If so, a typical mace group would be Attack: 52 Defense: 24 HP: 1000; Based on one of my auto generated unit types. If this were true, then the actual game effect of this would be to create very long tactical battles as these units would take a long time to kill, but at least they're not "superman" squads. Frankly, the only thing players would get out of this (in a turn based system) is tactical battles that take about 4x longer on manual, no problem if using auto resolve, which is probably what I'd be doing all the time if this unit were added because it would probably take 30 minutes to resolve one battle if there were 8 of these 50-man squads on each side.The problem with "epic" battles is implementing it practically in a turn-based system in such a way that:6) The game doesn't’t become more unbalanced than it currently is: i.e. the AI needs to adequately "cope" with the new units.7) Avoiding the creation of 50-man "superman" squads that are basically game-breaking automatic-game winning "nukes" and which turn the game into nothing more than a tech race as to who can get this technology first and thus win the game.8) Avoiding evolving tactical battles into long drawn-out boring affairs as we try to whittle units with 1000 hps down 1 hp at a time.
Ok, I'll try to break this down as best I can for you my friend. Keep in mind though I'm VERY tired and wasn't planning on making any more posts tonight as I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. I might not cover every number but just boil it down to the short and simple version for now. Also, part of your understanding on this is going to be based on what you know of the development process up till now. If you don't know the details of what the devs have been talking about for the last two years some of this might seem odd as it goes against what we have in game now, but was still planned by the devs, anyway, here goes:
1. The Map, both Strategic and Tactical can be custom made in the XML very easily. Frogboy sat down with me over IM and taught the modding community how to make Extra Large Maps and I then replayed the conversation to everyone else. It's in one of the stickied lists on the mod forums if you'd like to go take a look.
2. Adding the unit sizes can be done in XML very easily, it's the spacing of the units that looks funky when you do it that way. As of current, we're not sure if getting access to the Python API's will be able to fix this, or if we'll be able to fix it with the animation plugins (animations might not be related here). Once we get the spacing issue solved the rest all falls into place quite nicely.
3. The Ai doesn't need to be changed at all luckily. The AI will fight the same and use the same mechanics as it does now. With the upcoming patch the mechanics here are already being adjusted so that if there are 10 men in a unit, each man gets his own attack swing instead of them being pooled like they are now. This will fix a lot of the minor issues with tactical combat now actually so that's a good thing. The AI will still know how to move the units and everything else it does now, it doesn't really care about unit numbers. Frogboy is the AI programmer for the game, so, the smarter he makes the AI as time passes the better the game will be for all of us. It doesn't matter if the AI is moving 20 men, or 200. A tile full of men is a tile full of men. Having more or less men only changes the calculations meaning it will change the "pace" of a battle. It's quantitative across the board.
4. Battles will still be just as balanced as they are now. A unit of 100 men, fighting another unit of 100 men, will have a battle that lasts just as long as an equal battle of 10 vs 10 would now. More men swinging means more damage done and this applies for both sides. The battles at the beginning of the game won't change so the pacing of the game's battles will stay the same as it is now until you get to Late Game when you have Large Cities that can support bigger armies. Without a large population (because Elemental makes it's units directly out of the cities population) then large armies aren't possible. The population of a level 5 city in game now is a couple thousand people I believe. Honestly I didn't pay super close attention but you can see the number when you hover your mouse over the red bar in your city window. I know a level 3 city has a population of 500 according to my city window. If a level 5 city holds 2,000 people, then in times of war when a draft is instituted I can see 1/4 of the population being drafted to defend the city, even if just the men are taken.
5. We won't be preventing memory crashed, that's on Stardock. They should be fixing the memory errors and crashes as those are the Number One bug fixes being done first to my knowledge. When the memory errors are fixed by them then memory should have no bearing on our unit counts. We won't push them so high as to bog down people's machines though, that Is being taken into account and before the DL Mod ever goes live it will be tested, re-tested, and then tested some more to make sure we don't put out a buggy release. As with any game of this nature, how many units your machine can display without causing lag is based on your Ram and Proc speed and graphics card. Our running requirements should be just the same as the normal game's running requirements unless of course the truth was stretched when were told just what the engine can and can't handle. As long as there's no engine mis-haps then at the very least the epic scale mods will only have "Slightly" higher running requirements, but it shouldn't be a drastic difference as long as it's a quality engine (which a lot of people are still doubting honestly, but, everyone needs to realize Stardock made a Brand New engine here and it's going to need time to mature).
6. As I said above, the Ai won't have a problem moving more units around. It's the same mechanics that's used now for the units. Nothing changes but the unit count at later parts of the game. It would be nice if the API's for AI programming are exposed by then so we can write custom AI's aside from just the minor tweaks we can make to them now in XML. The AI Can be tweaked with the XML to give it higher values on some things, which changes the way it "thinks" in game, and this could come in very handy making custom faction AI's for any mod. The units moving and fighting and everything else they do won't change though, it'll just take a minute or two longer to fight out the late game battles depending on how big a force you and your enemy have. As has been done in the base game though, if you don't feel like fighting any of the battles, you can hit "auto calculate" at any time you want. Making sure that was covered was brought up extensively by the carebears who don't like fighting tactical battles during beta. Frogboy made it a Specific Point that the player could end battle any time they wanted to and let the computer calculate the rest of the battle. Personally, I like to fight every battle when I'm playing the game. Even the no loose over-powering battles where you know for sure the AI will win on your behalf, because no matter how smart the AI is, I'm Always going to be smarter than it is, as is pretty much any actual human player. AI's can be great, but there hasn't been one made yet that can come close to making the random decisions a human player can and does make during the coarse of a game.
7. This one is touchy, here's why. In ANY GAME, there is ALWAYS going to be a combination of units, or an end game unit, that's always going to be the best of the best that a faction can make. This is true of ANY war strategy game. The key here is to make all the forces of any faction in the game have a balanced force that it "can" make that can counter anything their enemy can throw at them. It's just a matter of if the player is good enough to keep up with the AI in tech research and resource gathering so that when the time comes the player (or AI) can make a unit of the best fighting force it can make. Whether that's a 10 man unit, a 50 man unit, or even a hundred man unit, as long as it's the strongest that can be made (best weapon, best armor etc etc) there's Always going to be a "Super Stack" of "Something" that can wipe out anything else. This is true n the base game now and in every game of this type I've ever played. The best way to avoid it is to be prepared for it when you play. When you play a game now you know that eventually, if you let the AI live long enough, it's going to be cranking out units with War Hammers wearing Magical Plate Mail, so you need to be ready to make the same thing, or have a couple dragons, or whatever your winning strategy is when going up against powerful units. Increasing the unit counts won't have anything at all to do with the "stack of doom" problem that Every game faces today. In any game there's Always going to be a unit, or type of creature, or whatever, that's at the end of the tech tree and is the top of the line unit you can make. That's part of the strategy of the game.
8. Battles won't be any longer or shorter than they are now depending on what strategy you use during the game. 1,000 men vs 1,000 men would be equal in time to ten times as long as ten vs ten. You get some pretty long battles in game now when you have to maxed out end game armies with the best units and most powerful monsters you have in game. At the most, even if we maxed it out with MASSIVE two thousand man armies on each side, it would be Substantially Shorter than say, a game of Total War, or a game of Starcraft 2. I'd guesstimate (note thats a guess until balance is refined more) that an End Game Epic battle wouldn't or shouldn't take any longer then 5 to 10 minutes tops. Also though, as is possible now, the player can hit auto calculate Any Time they wish. You have to understand though that at least "part" of the motivation behind this is there are a lot of people who do want longer battles. When you have larger armies battles are going to take a little bit longer, but, that's all part of the epic feel. If I played a massive game that took me a week in real life to get done, I'd probably feel a little ripped off if the massive last battle of the game between me and my most hated enemy only took 3 minutes. When it's the Final Battle, it Should Feel Climactic and Epic, like the final battle in LotR, or the battle for Minas Tirith. These were great epic battles that should be meant to take a little bit longer than a standard run of the mill every day battle. You have to be careful here not to over-exaggerate the fear of how long this would extend the length of a battle as part of the desire here is to do exactly that.
When it comes to balancing the other numbers involved there are a lot of other numbers to change to make this happen, but, believe it or not that's a relatively Easy Part. The numbers and math we have in game now is ridiculously simple. I mean, a farm or other food resource normally gives a bonus of 1 to 4, or like other resources only adds 25% of something. These numbers are pre-school small and very simple to increase. I don't see why the numbers weren't made bigger here to being with, nor do many others. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that a town of 500 people (lvl 3) would have structure that only added 1 or 2 of something and 25% to the rate of something else. To me, a much better system would have been one that works in the hundreds. If a town has 500 people in it, then there needs to be enough food in the town to feed the population, so why not have the food structure make 500 food and have each person in town consume 1 food? To me that makes a lot more sense then the boiled down child's play mechanics we have now.
The people in the community who are upset about the small numbers Aren't just talking about the numbers of soldiers. Many of the people are upset over the fact that Every system in game, from unit counts, to the economics, to the damages of weapons and defense ratings of armors...all of these systems have been given small base numbers to work with and a lot of the other systems that Should have been here from the start to add depth and complexity, like more variation on damage types, resistances, skills and abilities that progress as a character levels up, city walls to lay siege too in tactical combat, none of these have been added yet and all we have are these base systems where you can count the math out with your fingers if you wanted. That's one of the things so many people were pissed about at launch. We were told it was ready and by being told that everyone assumed that the other systems that were talked about, like all the ideas for spells and damage types and magical items, everything really..we assumed it was all in game and working because it was "ready", but then all of that was missing. The Beta testers saw the small numbers in the early builds, and when we brought them up and tried to talk about them and asked what the final balance would be, we were usually told the numbers in the beta were mostly "placeholders" and Did Not represent the numbers that would be in the final game at launch...and yet when launch came we were staring at the same low numbers that were supposed to have been temporary. I'm going to cut this paragraph off here as it's starting to stray off of your original questions, but, hopefully this will give you a little insight into the mechanics we have in place now and why they are so different from what everyone expected.
So, to cut that short, re-balancing the numbers to make larger armies ad more complex systems work at Late Game stages really is child's play. Any of us with experience playing strategy games can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and work out a complex and balanced system for resources and food and economics in one afternoon. It would actually take longer to track down the variables in the XML and replace them than it would to come up with a more complex system. I hope that explains a bit what you were looking for. I know some of that may sound complicated, but once you work it out on paper and have the tools you need to make the changes it really isn't all that hard or complicated.
I'd like the epic scale battles too. I want powerful magic to use in them too...populous style!
Hmm CWG2's comment about allowing heroes to join units just triggered an idea for me. In Birthright, your lieutenants (heroes in this case) and reagent (or sovereign in this case) are represented on the battlefield with themselves plus a dozen men or so under there command. So here's what occurred to me. When you research one of the later warfare techs that allow for larger unit size (say squadrons or companies or whatever it will become after they rehaul the system) your sovereign and heroes are no longer represented by themselves on the tile they occupy. Like Birthright, there's half a dozen or whatever number of men with the hero/sovereign. In addition maybe give all heroes and the sovereign an hp boost upon researching that tech. This would help address the problem of heroes/sovereigns having too low hp in the later game and would reflect the fact the hero or sovereign now represented by a multi-person unit now.
It would make sense flavor-wise too. As your empire grows large enough one would think the king/queen would have a royal personal guard with him/her. Also your heroes would probably start becoming more like lieutenants and generals and would have their own personal staff and vanguard.
I haven't been replying, but I have been reading, and I've seen the kind words many of you have aimed my way in the last couple pages. Thank you my friends. It's is greatly appreciated that so many of you understand how things are with my position especially with all the issues I have going in my personal life. The kind words sticking up for me mean more than you could possibly know. Thank you all.
You rock, RavenX!
And your ideas about epic battles aren't half bad either =D
That could be very useful for the AI and really help keep enemy heroes and sovereigns alive on the battlefield. For me, however, I kind of like the idea that I could design and outfit my own personal legion in black flaming plate and either join them or rampage solo around the battlefield.
I could also see for theme reasons why some mods may want certain heroes to be solo. All in all, a good suggestion, though! It definitely does make sense that an elite bodyguard would be formed around generals and heroes as armies formed (as opposed to parties and warbands.)
One downside of larger armies is that wandering monsters would be pretty easily defeated. Perhaps those could become "encounters" where only the heroes and a few "champions" (some single soldiers outfitted like other units in the stack) would be present in the battle...that concept could be extended for "dungeon crawls", exploring ancient ruins, etc. Taking the whole army into that ancient barrow wouldn't really be possible...
Good gaming!
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