The major economic nerfs that were slipped into 1.08 have dealt a blow to the fun of this game, and there wasn't much to be had to begin with as we wait for 1.1.
Besides the absurdity of merchants consuming food (which is just a blatant attempt to limit the number of cities in the game), resources are less common, particularly materials and food. This reduces the size of an empire. Plus, it severely limits the number of cities that can reach the higher levels, which are required to start having anything resembling fantasy, rather than just medieval, armies.
Empires were already too small, with too few cities and too few armies even on large maps. Elemental has tried to impose its vision of "one city, one party" on us with an even heavier hand. I just don't understand how a game that supposedly takes its cue from MoM, GalCiv, and the Civilization games can be so determined to reduce player states to a handful of cities and one big stack that runs around using teleport.
I would try to mod some of these changes out, but the modding system is so cumbersome (and buildings can't be modded anyway, since mod effects stack with core/base game effects rather than replace them) that isn't really worth the time.
So I'll make one final plea to the devs to stop trying to limit the size of empires and states. Restore a more reasonable economic balance to the game by making resources more plentiful. And roll back some of the silly changes designed to simply made food and cities scarcer without remotely being logical.
Read the bottom of the above post - my colorful city names are "Home_fo_go_tec" 1_Met_Fo, 2_Tec_Arc.... so I know what they need when they promote and its easier to figure out what modifying buildings to build. Colorful... or, descriptive
Balance is things like:
-if a dagger does 2 damage and costs 10gp, then a mace shouldn't do 4 damage and cost 1000gp, but rather do ~6 damage and cost ~50gp.
-if a spell that does 10 damage costs 2 mana, a spell that does 20 damage should cost ~5 mana, not 10 mana
Risk needs to be commensurate (ie balanced) with reward. Getting too much for too little is as wrong as getting too little for too much.
A trait that allows one to avoid garrisoning cities and allows a super stack to safely wander far afield mindlessly and casually looting and pillaging, then popping back for city defense, needs to have its cost commensurate with its benefit.
Balancing the game does not preclude what you're asking for, which is setting basic parameters such as map types, amount of resources, mob aggression, climate, etc.
I hate the game post 1.08. The only thing I enjoy is the weapon balance changes.
I liked "dangerous creatures" while playing on a hard/ridiculous world difficulty. I liked creature economy, it could of been nerfed but not COMPLETELY MARGINALIZED. Why have dungeon master in the game at all anymore creatures are so few and far between now. In a post apocalyptic low fantasy world the richest entities in game should be strong monsters with the ability to protect wealth and resources.
Food seems to be the only abundant(too much) resource which allows you to do nothing but build merchant buildings(terrible idea) not merchants. Crystal was always rare which is fine. Now metal is amazingly rare. Its now an accomplishment to outfit one group of soldiers. Its really impressive to watch them walk across the map leading a mob of staff wielding cloth wearing peasants and overpowered summons.
Prior to 1.08 resource techs actually did something. In a world of less per 1000 I get 1 resource on average per 3 techs. In 1.07 or earlier you got 2 food resources for the same city in some instances. A chance of popping gold was common in more than once place as well. I have never popped crystal post patch.
Goodie hut economy is still alive and well. This was the only instance in the game where you literally got something for nothing. Treasure chests still provide 400 gold on occasion. How this was the last thing fixed ill never understand. You could kill a dragon for a few hundred gold with plenty of risk. Good luck finding that dragon this time, just tech goodie huts and walk over a chest.
@Nick Danger ... good post. A bit off-topic, but a good analysis of "what is good balance?"
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@ jscott991
If Stardock is drastically changing gameplay ... then its a good sign. A good start, even in the wrong direction, is better than standing still.
If you don't like 1.08 ... see if you can reinstall (from a disk?) and then simply not patch (or patch to whatever version you wanted) ... I probably won't like 1.08, but then again I didn't like 1.05 either.
If you liked 1.05 then I feel that you are in the minority of strategy gamers.
If you were simply "content" (or worse) with 1.05, and wish Elemental had more depth, then maybe you can look forward to a brighter future with me. A brighter future were 1.1 and Expansion A make a good game out of Elemental.
Personally I hope they make a "really good" 1.1 version.
I'll agree that balance is currently a bit wonky, and your examples of drastic nerfing may have some merit ... but what this game needs is depth and interesting gameplay. and it needs it badly.
So please, stop discouraging Stardock from trying to improve a product that badly needs improving.
Similarly,
Have weapons and armour scale in the same way - so either you can be +5/+2 or +2/+5, at the same cost.
Have all AI have an equal starting chance - certain current pre-gens tend to always dominate in my games.
Balance actually enables a lot more choice - once the basics are balanced then you have a range of modifying options.
If one pregen has way to much essence to begin with, then if you "double everyone's mana" or any other variable then you can very easily magnify imbalance.
Take Galciv II, you can change the variables to suit particular races quite easily, but the races themselves are reasonably balanced.
I have to agree with OP - after trying to start few games in 1.08, I went back to 1.07, I can't bear so big slowdown of gameplay. I enjoy my large maps, but I don't want to play for 2000 turns, moving my armies single tile per turn.
I dont care much about making these 1-resource buildings useless, since I usually relied on securing proper sources rather than city spam, but now my outposts will have 0 buildings in them. Great idea, SD.
I honestly can't play 1.08. As much of a steamroll as 1.07 was, 1.08 is just a stack of artificial limitations to try to make the game "challenging".
We must not be playing the same game. Food is no problem with caravans, and on the movement note, your caravans make roads. So that being said your units shouldnt be moving 1 space at a time, unless your world is filled with forests. Gildar also isnt an issues, between the merchants and the gold mines and the trade research. Apparently there is no pleasing you people. They fixed the combat and magic and now its not good enough for you still. I really enjoy playing v1.08.
Poor SD -- criticized for an unbalanced, too-early released game.
Now criticized for balancing and fixing.
My subjective opinion about the eco system: I don't like it.
1. I liked the original concept of city building [..when farms produced food, and there was no limit / number of farms, workshops etc. / city...etc.] If I wanted to create a "farming capital" or a "military capital" I was able to do it. Now everything is limited. I cannot create specialized cities. I don't like being limited in anything.
2.a I don't like the global resource system, but we've talked about this already. I am a local eco fan. I have no probs with microing. [Even tho many stuff can be automated in a local res. system]
2.b I don't like the caravan system, but this is because of the global res. model I guess...caravans would have a much more important role if the economy would use the local model.
3. We should be able to buy/sell all kind of resources/armors/weapons/etc. IF there is a market [..or an "upgraded market"/special building] in a given city.
That being said, I am not complaining. It's impossible to create a game, which is "perfect" for everyone. + I am pretty sure that someone will [try to] make a complex eco mod eventually.
Yeah, not sure how you could be lacking food in 1.08. Start 1 city with a food tile. Send all caravans to that city. Make sure that city has all possible food upgrades. Watch as each city you build/capture increases your food surplus. Start burning the extra hundreds of food to keep your people warm in the winter. Soon you should be able to develop steam powered machines. From here your empire will really take off.
Food isn't the only thing they nerfed.
Metal is almost nonexistent in 1.08.
Specialized cities are harder to create.
It is very difficult to produce interesting units without metal; it was hard before because the game lacks anything resembling true fantasy units, but now you can't even have knights.
The increased TP costs only make the game much, much slower to play and progress. Movement speeds in this game are insanely slow. I assumed that meant we were SUPPOSED to be using magic user-led stacks. Now, we are told that was an exploit. Apparently we're supposed to plod around the map at the rate of 1-2 squares per turn.
So the game now wants me to have lots of slow moving armies to defend my empire, but I don't have any metal, so the goal of elemental is to have lots of stick-wielding peasants!?
1.08 was not well thought out and it wasn't properly tested. It's a major economic nerf because some people were screaming that the game was too easy. Maybe 1.1 has actual balance and changes where the devs considered the consequences, but I doubt it.
And, I will keep harping on this, I would mod all of this nonsense out except that: 1. you can't mod initial map resource placement, so if the world has no metal, you have no metal; 2. some files stack rather than replace when you mod them, which is insanely poor design; 3. modding these files is tedious because there is no rhyme or reason to what is placed where.
I'm finished with this game. I'm personally responsible for encouraging 3 other people to buy this on the release date and I feel awful about it. For all of the whining about 1.01, it is nothing compared to the damage done to this game by 1.08. Frankly, I'd rather have the crashes and memory leaks back. At least then I thought there was a game worth playing underneath. 1.08 is not worth having on my hard drive, much less booting up.
No. I mean overflowing. Really. I have 18 food spare and wont build anymore cities, because there is no reason too. All resources are taken, if i need more i have to go to war.
Maybe playstile is different. I only build cities where i need them. To tap resources, to block passages and so on. Also i have patience and wait for influence to spread to get my resources. I dont build dozens of satelite outposts just to tap resources. How do you play?
i liked that better, too but i guess there is no changing at this point.
Here's the issue at hand and the corresponding hole in the current system:
Players should not be able to get something for nothing.
During the beta, we used to allow players to build an unlimited number of buildings or 1 per level and this created a runaway economy.
The imperfect solution chosen in the end was to limit many buildings to only 1 per city. This creates the issue that if you have something for nothing you have an incentive to "spam" cities.
So for 1.08, we changed it so that merchants (for instance) require 1 food.
For 1.09, I am lobbying to have something put in that goes way back to an original concept that got lost and that is, using your citizens as a resource (population is still a resource, it's just not used for anything). This way, we could begin migrating back to the original concept tha tyou can build multiple buildings in a given city as long as you have the resource (available citizens) to make use of it. This encourages fewer cities and makes players choose between using their population for building their economy or putting them in arms.
YES, now this would be a change for good.
This is okay... but only if you also go over how prestige is currently handled. For one, the royalty bonus needs a balance pass (it's really powerful right now to grow population). Secondly, you need to add some extra prestige for higher level cities to have incentive for growing cities. Otherwise you'll get the same problem you have with mana regen now (because mana regen is slow, we imbue tons of heroes to multiply our regenerative power). In other word, you'll get people spamming cities just to grow people faster, and thus the whole thing will backfire.
You should also keep in mind that extra cities are also extra building queues. So you might want to have administration/troop training penalties for small outposts. Edit to clarify: You can train squads of 8 peasants in your outposts, then bring them to your main city and disband them to "transfer" population.
Just my 2 cents
Well they need to do something because the game pre 1.08 kinda stinks. Now I don't agree with the new food cost but I personally do hope they completely revamp the game in 1.1
The solution wasn't to make the game more annoying to play by nerfing the economy and eliminating the usefulness of teleporting without increasing the base movement of all units. I still don't understand why the latter isn't causing more people to be annoyed into quitting after a few turns.
And I still haven't seen one justification for the practical elimination of metal resource generation on the maps. Why get rid of a resource that lets you build interesting weapons and armor? What was the point?
This sounds excellent. Then you could just make most of the prestige increasing structures require higher level cities, and you should stop city spam. It would be nice to have a single tile 'mini-city' outpost type thing which simply looks nice on the map and allows access to resources, instead of needing you to build a full city nearby. Though with the influence increases over time, those outlying settlements are already simulated, so no need I guess.
Love this idea. One of the things I really enjoyed about GalCiv was the incentive to create specialist cities, so I could have my science capital, my economic capital, and so on. In Elemental, I just end up building one of each building in each city so the only differences between my cities are the resources and whether they have access to coastline or not. (btw, why is coastline so rare in this game?) I would love to be able to build 3 markets in one of my cities and have that city supported by another producing most of the food for the kingdom. Not only does this give individual cities personality, it also increases their strategic importance: If said food producing city is conquered my kingdom is screwed unless I take it back immediately. The more choices there are to make in a 4x game the better.
FORGET BALANCE! It's Highly Overated!
I said it elsewhere on this board. Why does the game have to be one size fits all? I have played other games that allow the single player to set the playing variables in the starting options...Please let Elemental players do the same.
Allow the players to choose the factors they want in their games with pre-game slide bars:
Lots of resources or few, cheap mana spells or expensive, lots of minor kingdoms or not, massive numbers of NPC badguys or few...
Use slidebars to allow each player to get the maximum style of game they like. This will help make the game more fun all around.
The game simply needs to be each individual player's IDEA of FUN! Don't bother trying to set one idea of BALANCE that everyone can agree with...Peace will come to the Middle-East before that "balance" is ever reached.
It might make for some arguements in multiplayer set-up, but that's a worry for another day....
GO STARDOCK!
Thank you,
Consort out.
Oh god...this is the worst idea I have ever heard on these forums.
One of the primary reasons why ANY game is fun is because of balance. By allowing players to have the sliders you suggest, you're essentially throwing balance COMPLETELY out the window. Without balance, you cannot adequately challenge the player. Without balance strategy cannot develop. Without balance there is no fun.
Why do you want to turn the game into a glorified map editor?
Finally someone else saying what i've been saying since 1.08 came out to the response of "build more caravans".
Population as a true resource would be amazing.
In response to the balance debate. Please add more randomness stop seeding things at the start. Sometimes the volcano erupts on your city. Sometimes you get every melee unit gets cover promotion. One was good and one was bad but both games were played differently. This is not the case now. Rush summons charge nearest neighbor, reproduce in case the rush didn't kill every opponent because little Jimmy will.
Hooray! This is exactly what I and others have been suggesting should be done..
You know, challenge comes from AI, not from fighting with UI and boredom. Nothing stops AI from using same exploits, and nothing stops AI from challenging the player.
Rules are same for everyone, so there is always all balance between players you need.
I dont understand what is the point in balancing stuff like teleport. It makes game more fun and more fast paced. That spell is available to everyone, unlike traits, so AI can use it too.
Its often more than 100 tiles between borders of my empire. And even with roads I have to waste a freaking hour of real life time to move my army from one border to another. There is no fun, not even slightest amount of it.
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