Saw a suggestion, but lost it, that 15 mana for teleport is OK - you can get it when you first level up. Personally I think it is bad to make extra mana so attractive, tends to reduce your development choices. My thought is it should cost 10, so you can imbue or level up and still have access.
Ah well - back to the game.
Aren't their 2 tele spells? Tele and Tele Army? Why does normal teleport even work on your army? It makes the second one redundant. It should just effect the sovereign and then late game you get tele army......
You know what, it might seem rough to have teleport at 15mana, BUT it actually improved my gameplay experience. Before, I didnt worry about defending my empire as all I had to do was port in with my Sov's army and obliterate anything that dared to come within sight range of my cities. Now, I actually have to think about garrisoning my cities, and making patrols that can pick up incoming enemy armies. This forced me to rethink my troop design and actually create cost effective, rather than all out uber, units that were good at doing what I needed them to.
It actually makes the game better.
The game needs balancing. People jump on the current FOTM over-powered feature/trait, then complain when it's balanced, meanwhile jumping on the next-most overpowered FOTM which they'll then complain about when that gets balanced, etc. etc. etc.
This happens all the time in games.
Folks want balance -- but don't dare nerf my favorite over-powered feature/trait -- just balance the other stuff!
It's a common human foible, one we all share (myself included). Taxes for example -- raise the other guy's taxes, not mine! Politicians -- we gotta get rid of incumbants, but not my incumbant!
The game does NOT need to be balanced!
It simply needs to be FUN for the individual playing it. Make EVERYONE Happy (almost)...Install an options slide bar for single player games!
Each player can then choose low/medium/high mana spell cost for the play style that they each like. Why mandate that everyone must eat the same flavored "ice cream". Let the person who paid for the game play it any darn way they like!
This should not be an issue to go to war over...
Thank you,
Consort
I would suggest several different teleport spells. Basic: self teleport (castor only). Party teleport (say, for discussions purposes: castor + up to 9 individuals (3 char + 6 soldiers / mix and match). Army teleport castor, chars, and soldiers, unlimited number...) Obviously, each one is more expensive, and harder to learn.
I like how it works in Master Of Magic. The Word Of Recall teleports a single unit to your Summoning Circle for 20 mana. Summoning Circle is at your capitol. You can research a low-level spell to move your Summoning Circle to another city for 50 mana. And the spell is in Sorcery school only, so it's not something everyone uses.
But MoM also had magical roads to instantly teleport any number of your units to any place in your empire...
Teleport is much more important on larger maps. I think the cost should be prorated based on world size with large having the least cost, say 9/7/5 for small/medium/large. On large maps you need it more, it shouldn't be priced out of existence as 15 mana/a pop does. It's already limited to "controlled" zones anyway, so what's was the big deal? This was not a game breaking spell at 5 mana. It had limits as to where it could be used, you couldn't just teleport a huge army adjacent to an enemy capital. And btw, the AI should be able to use this spell just as much to counter the human player. The AI never uses all resources at its disposal, hence it just makes spells like this (when used by the human player) seem stronger than they actually are. Consider what "should" happen: You teleport a large army to a controlled area in which you want to gank an enemy AI capital nearby. You then move into this AI territory, the AI "should" teleport a large army into its city for defense. The AI currently does not do this, hence making it seem like teleport is a game-breaking spell when it really isn't.
At 15 mana now it's priced out of existance, as it takes 15 turns to regenerate mana. 15 mana is like 5 fireball spells. Teleport is a spell that does no damage at all in and of itself, so it shouldn't be this expensive. I liked it as it was at 5/mana.
There should be an optional spell costs setting for cheap, normal, and prohibitive in game settings that can range the game from magic intensive to military intensive. These three settings should also impact mana regeneration, 1mana per turn just sux when you have guys with 48 mana. In fact, there's no point to have guys with this high mana as they can never recharge fully. I can't even remember a game where I had a "full" mana bank with guys over 32ish mana. It just doesn't happen in the game-as-is. The way mana works now forces you to imbue champions, so you can increase mana-regeneration among other things by spreading-it-out. I shoot for 24ish mana for my sovereign, any more than that is useless as you can never fully recharge.
I understand that they're going to completely revamp the entire game with the 1.1 patch, I just hope they consider the 3rd paragraph above. This implementation would appeal to most users as they'd have the ability to create the kind of game they'd like to play right off from the begining with "game settings".
This is the best way to balance the teleport spell.
I just added mana regeneration to the leveling system so that 15 mana isn't hard to come by for specially leveled wizards that I have set to be my transporters.
Problem solved.
I like the 15 mana cost teleports, it has made the game way more fun. And I think it should take that much for teleporting entire armies around. As an alternative you could scale the cost of the teleport by the number of units in the stack. That would be fun for me..
At least allow us to mod the cost ourselves.
The game already does. The XML is not compressed in any way and you can even search for "Teleport". It doesn't attempt to hide the values in any way.
Has anyone noticed that you can use teleport to get anywhere as long as you send a scout hero first? Just send a hero out until you find some really valuable land and then find the nearest quest that will open up a new goodie hut. After one turn the goodie hut appears as under your influence and then boom. You can port there with a pioneer in your party and take the resource heavy spot. Broken to the letter.
I wouldn't classify this as broken. Probably 20/30% of the mid to late game goodie hut quests end up positioning the quest location in the influence of another AI, making it inaccessible short of war or non-aggression pact which is usually over-priced. Usually, you can build a city near rare resources without the goodie hut assist anyway .. with 30 cities on turn 100 I have pioneers all over the map, there's no need to waste 15 mana teleporting my sovereign & pioneer when I can just move a nearby pioneer & guard in the location and settle there within 5 turns of finding that resource at most using caravan routes anyway. Sections of the map you can get to extremely quickly if you have your cities spread out sufficiently with caravan routs that decrease movement to 50%. Why they changed the teleport cost is beyond me? It was never broken to begin with. I think too many people cried wolf when the wolf was in fact a puppy. Just because a bunch of players think something is broken doesn't mean that something is in fact broken.
At 15 mana teleport is useless now, you teleport somewhere & have insufficient mana to fight. I've never used it since they changed the cost even on large map .. no need to. You just need to spam your cities correctly & setup trade routes strategically to get the road bonus, which the 1.08 version now makes significantly easier with the lack of monsters that can kill your pioneers. The game-as-is is just a matter of strategic expansion: expand in 360 radius with pioneers from the getgo and there's no resource you can't get. Neither the monsters nor the AIs stop you, nerfing the teleport spell at 15 mana has absolutely no effect on this other than removing one spell from our arsenel of spells that we can use.
teleport was fine and fun the way it was. It was not a must have but was a useful to have.. I do not mind the change to 15.. I would not mind the idea of a 5 point of sov +1 per unit in stack either.. It can be adapted to .. Hamstringing one feature because some view it as broken or because it does not work well in multiplay is serving only a portion of the community.. If you do not like an "thing you deem overpowered" do not us it no one is forcing you.. If a "thing" needs to be different for multiplayer because some view it as a game breaker then make it a toggle game choice... right now I have seen to many changes made because a vocal group on these forums deem them over powered.. Note to everyone not all players who like elemental come to the boards.. and not even all who do will post ... Great ideas can come from these boards// However just because 2, 5, or even 30 people on these boards decide something is broken does not make it so..
frankly I would love to see a poll on what people think of the recent food changes and one about organized/teleport .. just to see where the majority of the voters are at on these subjects..
as always this is how I see it.. and i respect others rights to disagree.
The broken part about teleport isn't the cost, it's the use. If all teleport did was allow you to travel faster around the world, then I doubt there would be any problems even if it was made to cost 2 mana. But that's not all teleport does.
Say you're at war with an AI, so he sends a strong army against your nearby city, one that has no real defense against his army. Normally, the city will fall, and you have to build up a force or wait for your army to get back, then fight to take the city back. This isn't how it works now with teleport. Not only does the city not fall, but if he was silly enough to bring along his sovereign on the attack (and he probably will), the entire war will be over in one teleport. The use of teleport in this manner just can't be countered by the AI. Changing the mana cost of the spell doesn't change this. Whether it's 5, 15 or 30 mana, if you can destroy entire empires with this spell, there's a problem. Now you might also argue that the empire destruction mechanic itself is the culprit (which is my belief), but it's just so much easier to change one single value (5->15). It's essentially a hotfix to a problematic mechanic, one that will probably see other "fixes" as the game evolves.
Oh and for the record, no, I don't think removing teleport entirely will help either.
If teleport had a max range of 6?
Any time a spell or character ability is a "must use" in a game, it is limiting choice. At 15 mana teleport is for emergencies only. I would prefer to see it researchable and have you start with a cheaper version that only lets you teleport a shorter distance and maybe doesn't teleport other units.
On a side note, it concerns me that thinks are being "tweaked" by 200%.
The AI has the ability to do this exact same thing in defense of their own cities. Sovereigns get resurrected, so their empires don't get destroyed until they lose their capital.
I never saw it as a "must" use even when it was 5mana. I think the spell got nerfed on the basis of a small minority of players petitioning that it was broken when it wasn't. I've also noticed that only the soverign can use teleport now, none of my other champions can use it even though it's listed in their spellbook, altough when I try to use with another unit it does subtract the 15mana, just doesn't teleport.
This was a very useful spell to have when influence areas cutoff areas of the map in odd ways, or when the "lower land" spell fails, now it just can't be used except by one unit. It might as well just be removed from the game, it's worthless now.
As it was, the old teleport had the following benefits:
-allowed a huge, spread out empire
-allowed having only minimal garrisoning
-allowed only having one good stack
-allowed said stack to be a super stack
-allowed super stack to run around looting&pillaging, adventuring, killing stuff to level up, take cities, etc.
-allowed one super stack to defend an entire, huge, far-flung, poorly garrisoned empire.
The cost was a mere 5 mana -- that's 5 turns of mana regen (pre-mana regen bonus) for that one caster.
If that's not imbalanced then what is? <--- That's a serious question.
I can't fathom how an ASL tester thinks it's good game design. Please to explain
Every single one of these things I've done in every game since the teleport spell got nerferd, and I've never used teleport once at 15mana. Caravan routes with city spam are great.
I don't have one "super" stack btw, I have several (because you can only put 12 units in a stack). Nerfing teleport has changed nothing about the game. The problem wasn't the spell itself, it was the lack of AI using the spell in the same way the human player used it. BTW: as of 1.08, the AI *still* doesn't use the teleport spell. In the game I'm currently playing, around turn 250, the soverign of umbar is "stuck" in a small pocket between my influence zone & that of trian (or whatever that faction is), it hasn't moved in over twenty turns. It makes no difference if teleport costs 1, 5, 15, or 15million mana the AI still doesn't use it. This is why the spell seems overpowered to the human because the AI *never* uses it in relation. $1,000 dollars seems like a fortune side-by-side with 0 dollars, but the same when side-by-side to $1,000 dollars.
If you have a squad with rifles and your enemy squad has rifles but charges forward and only shoots their pistols & gets slaughtered do you nerf the rifles??? Hell no, that's just stupid. You make the AI squad use their rifles. In this case, the AI needs to be reprogrammed to use the teleport spell exactly as the human player does ("better" would be eye-opening nice & refreshing), in fact, the cost should be cheaper for the AI to use spells on ridiculous setting (say 15/20 percent less).
None of the changes that I've seen so far in 1.08 have addressed anything about actually improving the AI itself. It still does the same dumb stuff. Changes that have been made such as teleport, organized, have only reduced the color in the game. From my POV; changes to the game are only being done as to negate strategies that some (or maybe many) players are using, instead of improving the AI to make use of this strategy (or more effectively inhibit the strategy). The AI should have placed an equal weight on choosing the organized trait as the human does, otherwise it seems the human get massive & rapid expansion when the AI does not use it. I would rather be proactively surprised by a massive AI stack that is moving 6squares a turn, rather than finding an "unbeatable strategy" that increases stack speed to that of the soverign which the AI never uses.
I'll go one step further: the AI should be programmed to use "every single" spell in their disposal under some circumstance. Sure, some spells will get more use such as fireball, but they should also use imbue, lower land, protect settlement, teleport, etc... If the AI can't be programmed to use a spell then the spell should'nt be added to the game.
Every time someone uses a spell, item, squad (type or design) that the computer AI doesn't use, then this is going to make that human spell, item, squad (type or design) seem overpowered .. are you going to nerf each of these one-by-one each time it happens, reducing the game to a blah group of club wielding neanderthals with 5 spells and and a stick per faction? or, would you make the AI "smarter" by seeing what the human does (or what units, spells, items, etc it uses) and either copying these to some extent (if stronger than current AI unit for example) or effectively countering them, or using the same strategy. That's what should happen.
Instead of taking away things from the game one-by-one (which removes color & fun from the game), the designers need to make a better & smarter AI.
Another example that fits exactly with this topic: there's another thread about city spam, would you arbitrarily remove city spam (somehow) just because many players (including myself) have been highly successful at using it? This is a standard strategy that's used in every 4x expansion game. The difference I'm seeing here is that others wouldn't nerf the city spam (or teleport). Instead, they would 1) make the AI use it more effectively and 2) make the AI more effective at countering it. It just seems to me that the method the devs use in this game is neither 1) nor 2) but 3) nerf the said tactic, unit, spell, item, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
There are several good ways the AI could counter city spam in this game: 1) not just build more pioneers & guards but make sure they effectively go where they need to from turn one on and don't get "stuck" or "blocked" as I've seen happen to them. 2) wandering monsters should be more attracted to pioneers, nerfing the wandering monsters in 1.08 was exactly the wrong thing to do 3) AI should be capable of developing long range scouts or raiders that are buildable from the start (travelling boots + base movement of 3 + some item shop item that gives +1 mp = 5mp), or better yet a horse. With a movement of 5ish on caravan routes the raider should be sent out on "long range scouting/raiding" missions that specifically target pioneers & weaker human units plus avoid monsters. Each AI faction should have at least 5 or 6 of these by turn 25/30, as well as having 5 or 6 cities by turn 30 (whatever a good city spam amount is at that point). BTW: extra-move champions would also be great for this, as they can get the goodie huts too.
On a setting of "ridiculous" no human player should be able to beat the AI without extreme luck.
Don't nerf the strategy, make the AI use it.
Don't nerf the spell, make the AI use it.
Dont nerf the trait, make the AI use it.
Don't nerf the item, make the AI use it.
Specifically on the teleprt spell: it had uses unrelate to its percieved "broken" use, such as getting around influence zones without declaring war and more importantly, getting around mountain chains when the "lower land" spell fails, which fails too much. There's definitely a bug with that spell.
Although I agree with 15 mana for the current implementation of Teleport, it should not be balanced entirely against mana cost.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/397194
There are far more possibilities than that.
Or increased range costs more mana, combined with carting extra units does something too?
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