Hey guys and gals, sorry its taken me so long to introduce myself here, been busy working on 1.1 content for you all. I am the 'less-exciting-than-Derek-Paxton' new Associate Producer on Elemental, Toby Sarnelle.
For a little quick background on me: I have been at Stardock for a year now, however, I was just recently moved over to the games team. Those of you who have been around here for the last year may have seen my posts in the Elemental Army forum, I was the primary developer for that and worked a lot on rest of the Elemental website (among other things). I'm a huge fan of all types of games from all genres and have been playing for over twenty years now. As a sample of stuff I enjoy, some of my favorite games of all time include Final Fantasy 6, Mass Effect, Dragonforce (for Saturn), Starcraft (and 2), Diablo 2, Sins of a Solar Empire and Civ4. Oh and I'm an enormous Penny Arcade fan.
Anyways, enough about me, I'm here to tell you guys about some of the cool new stuff I've been adding for version 1.1. The primary additions for 1.1 are that we are shifting to a global mana pool for all spell casting and we are integrating your population into your production further as had been talked about long ago.
With the global mana changes will come a re-organization of all the spells in the game (along with the creation of a bunch of new ones). Elemental spell books will again be picked up through research, we didn't like the idea of having them as initial Sovereign editor choices as they are so tied to whatever shards you happen to find in the world. Its never fun trying to guess what you will run into when making your character so now your starting spell book selection will be non-shard restricted utility spells and you can research the Elemental magic you need based on your surroundings.
The way global mana will actually work is similar to any other resource; you will be able to build magical shrines in your cities that provide a steady stream of mana that will accumulate over turns until you cast spells. Also in an attempt to simplify some of the confusion over spell damage and how it is affected by your INT we are going towards more flat damage numbers for spells which your intelligence will not be increasing. This should make it easier to balance damage numbers across spells and the rest of combat (another thing I will be getting to for the patch). Obviously this combined with the mana changes basically eliminates the old purpose of the intelligence and wisdom/essence stats. Going forward they will now be used instead as requirements for a unit to cast a particular spell.
Population as a resource. We have always tried to stress that Elemental is a game of individual citizens, unlike most other 4X's. This was initially accomplished by causing you to use a population of a city when producing a unit; the population of your faction is literally drafted into military (or other) service. With 1.1 we will be embracing that idea and applying to the rest of your city production with our new Specialist system.
Highlights of the Specialist system:
As a final note, in another attempt to reinforce the importance of your population, we are changing the way gildar is produced (and consumed) in cities across the board. In 1.1 your primary income is paid through taxes on your populace. For every citizen in your Kingdom you will generate a small amount of gildar, however, to help keep your income in check as you get larger and larger most of your improvements now cost a small amount of gildar per turn to maintain. Don't worry about paying twice, however, as buildings that require maintenance no longer have an up front gildar cost.
These are just a sampling of the changes coming up in the new patch, although they are our (well my) biggest focus at the moment. I'm also planning on going through and trying to balance armor and weapon values among other things.
Anyways, back to work!
-Toby
Sounds great. Can not wait to see the new improvements. Thanks for the update.
Freebird out of the birdcage for the moment.
I like a lot of the proposed changes I have been hearing about, but the specialist things still kind of bothers me if they are a global resource. I understand the idea is kind of like a modern community labor force, where all the specialists can easily move from one city to another where they are needed. Yet, that kind of labor force requires a large quantity of highly developed social structures to function, and as any one who has to commute to work knows, it doesn't necessarily function well. Now, since this is a fantasy world and ultimately just a video game, I understand that some realities are non-issues, but I am wondering if a global pool could actually further promote city spam.
Consider for a moment the following, if a city with 1 house at size 1 produces x specialists for 1 food, then y of these cities will produce x*y specialist for y food. now if a size 2 city produces 2x specialists and costs 2 food ( guessing), then there is still an incentive to city spam, as y food will still only produce x*y specialists but you also the time penalty of developing cities to that level. Since it stands to reason that the growth of specialists in a city is actually based upon size, we can assume that a lvl 2 city produces more than 2x specialists, and therefore the food specialist ratio would be better with a lot of large cities. Yet, if we assume the specialist to be global, it stands to reason that a city improvement would cost both specialist and population, or else, we would find that a single lvl 5 city producing something like 10x specialists would be able to fuel a massive production movement in many lvl 2 cities. This would then again give incentives to city spam around a central huge city.
From my perspective, adding a specialist as a global resource would almost create a strategic incentive to specialize a few key cities while still spamming meaningless outposts. Yet, I have faith that this mechanic will be moddable and we will be able to tune this resource to a balance that suits us. Additionally, I think that yall at Stardock will also continue to tune these changes to make the best experience for the players.
I think what could be happening is that 1.1 beta could be released early November, and then refined until the final 1.1 release. I doubt Stardock would have enough time for a proper 1.1 beta before 1 November, and they do seem keen to do a very thorough beta for 1.1. So I think the beta of 1.1 released first week of November, then a good long beta (which Kael would be involved in) and then finally the final 1.1 version. After all, 1.1 looks to bring some pretty big changes and gameplay implications, and I think no-one at Stardock wants big changes to be rushed/not fully considered/not thoroughly tested.
Stardock, is this the gist of what is happening with 1.1?
Best regards,Steven.
the changes sound promising, thanks for the update. I am particularly happy to see the elemental spell books get moved to research options, I've been hoping for that change.
weapons and amour re-balancing would be excellent, really hope that makes it in too.
I'm liking the general tone and direction of the changes, and I'm eager to see them in action!
I do have a question regarding INT and WIS and the new magic system, however. It seems to me that switching these to requirements adds, as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, an additional and not necessarily helpful obstacle to casting. Essentially, it sounds like you're combining INT and WIS into a 'magic level' stat for casters. But we already have a magic level in research.
Why can't spells simply act like weapons? That is, they have a flat attack value, and INT adds to it just like STR adds to weapon damage - 10% per point over 10. That percentage could be tweaked, of course, but it seems like a scaling, simple idea. And WIS can act just like DEX does for defense.
Another alternative, perhaps is for WIS to affect the actual mana cost of a spell (rather than your mana pool). Particularly wise casters know how to gather their energies more efficiently, and cast spells more cheaply.
At any rate, just some random thoughts. Lots of good stuff in the original post, and I remain excited. Welcome aboard!
The more I have thought about specialists as a global resource, the more worried I have gotten.
If I understand this correctly:
- 'specialists' is really just a name for your population.
- Specialists can be assigned to buildings to work in them
- Specialists are a global resource and can assigned to any city, ie: commuters.
So....
1) How will this impact housing? If specialists are global, I can assign them to any city, even one where there is no housing for them to live in? So they really are 'commuting.' This seems really silly to me and very counter-intuitive.
2) Since they are global, how will this impact the loss of population? Lets say I have 100 specialists assigned to various buildings around my Empire. An enemy comes and sacks my biggest city which has 80 specialists / people. I thus lose the population / specialists within that city. So...they are gone, and thus can't 'commute' to my other cities to work...but I still have some population in my other smaller cities, so I can still cover some buildings...will the game just randomly pull some specialists out of my buildings to represent the ones that were lost when I lost the big city? This seems really confusing, and again counter-intuitive.
I love the idea of needing population to run buildings, but I hate the idea of that population not being tied to a city. It just seems silly to me that we are looking at treating population as this abstract resource that can be magically moved around our entire empire at will. A big city should be able to run more buildings because it is a big city with a big population. A small city should be limited in what it can do because it is small.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but the whole 'commuter' thing has really thrown me. I feel like this is an overly complicated (or perhaps overly simplistic depending on how you look at it) way of doing things. I think each city should have its own population, and these 'specialists' can be used to work in buildings in that city. This seems far more natural and intuitive.
EDIT: Also, I recommend that we ditch the 'Specialists' title and just call them 'Citizens' or 'Population' or whatever. Specialists implies that they are, y'know, special, when in fact this is the title for every single citizen in the game. Might keep things from getting confusing.
IIRC it was changed to BETA start in the first November week to give Kael some insight into how Stardock works.
The specialist system sounds good and the building maintenance should cut down on city spam to an extent or at least early in the game.
The new global magic system I am not so sure about.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding/patch.
These changes sounds like a very good start to reinventing Elemental I havent played for a while now as the game is pretty slow on my comp and it is not very fun to play yet. 1.1 gives me faith. A few more updates like this and we leave CIV V in the dust (I want CIV V to succeed as well ofcourse)
I'm little puzzled with the 'commuting' stuff. I think that's unrealistic that all specialists come from capital. I'm for local resources for the sake of realism. But of course there have to be some simplicity because of gameplay. Anyway, as most of us I'm also waiting for 1.1:)
Nice post Goontrooper.
I see things a little differently with regards the population changes.
Imagine a feudal society where each fief/holding/village/town/city etc has to give over 1 in every 10 workers to the feudal lord. Some will become soldiers and expand or protect the frontiers. Some will become bureaucrats and help manage the various towns. It will be up to the lord to allocate the roles to these people under his/her direct control.
They wouldn't live in one city and then commute. They would merely report to and then be assigned from the palace. 90% of the working population would still be toiling away in their towns and villages.
If a town was conquered it would just mean that the pool of available people would be less - or even in the negative. But the assigned people would still exist except the bureaucrats that were used in the building of the conquered town.
I agree that the term 'Specialists' is a little 'Europa Universalis' and should be called something different. It is not the population as such because it is just a small portion of the total number of citizens so 'population' is also wrong. Maybe 'Vassals' would be more appropriate because in medieval times it was the vassals who were drafted into the lords service.
Another question related to Specialists/Citizens:
After reading the introduction and the further explanations again, I'm not very clear how this will play in some points:
* Armies: Are armies subtracted in the future from the 'global Specialist' pool only or are they subtracted as currently from the local citizen and additionally from the specialist pool? If the first part comes true, does it mean that I can build huge armies even in outposts?
* A valid point from Goontrooper: what happens if a city gets conquered by another army? Do we see a negative number in the specialist pool?
* As mentioned, but maybe misinterpreted by myself: 1 citizen = 1 specialist? If this is the case, in my opinion it would make more sense to skip the wording specialist, skip the global pool and only add requirement of citizen as a resource for the buildings and keep that on a local level.
May if you have some time, you can provide some further explanations
Every citizen that joins your Kingdom/Empire will be added to your specialist count on the top resource bar. Buildings will now require a number of specialists to get up and running, now instead of robots you need people to operate that Blacksmith
Every citizen that joins your Kingdom/Empire will be added to your specialist count on the top resource bar.
Buildings will now require a number of specialists to get up and running, now instead of robots you need people to operate that Blacksmith
OK, that's it, I will not play the basic game anymore. Too much details. I'll stick to modding.
Getting rid of INT influence on spell damage seems like a very bad idea to me. Consider that weapon damage still scales with STR, so as your Sovereign levels up and raises his STR, the weapon will do more and more damage. This is not the case with a spell. Once you can cast that spell, your sovereign's level won't affect its damage at all. That not only leads to the majority of spells being left completely unused by the end-game because it never makes sense to cast anything other than the highest damage/effect spell, but also completely stops scaling with weapon damage once you have the highest level spell.
Any shrine bonuses or city buildings are not, in my opinion, a valid alternative to scale spell damage at all. First you need to find the correct one, then you need to build the improvement, then you need to protect the improvement, *and* you also need mana to cast each spell. None of these limitations exist with weapons, you research them and then you can just buy them.
Static spell damage is going to break the magic system even more, despite whatever other changes are made to it. I really don't understand what's so confusing about "more INT = more damage" that you need to get rid of it. All you have to do is show the total spell damage, and hovering over it will list the spell's base damage, and the INT modifier (for example Base Damage: 10-20, Modified by INT: +10%, Total: 11-22).
Yeah, I agree with this, but let's wait and see. Maybe it will work.
Fantastic idea. I really don't like the idea of all of my imbued champions instantly being as powerful as my channeller. IMHO, this game needs less simplification, not more.
Also, if you all insist on making "specialists" (which are really just your population, if I understand correctly) a global resource, please at least allow us to mod this to be a local resource. Population as a trans-city resource doesn't make gameplay sense or pass the BS-test for me. If moddable, everybody wins.
Much to the contrary. It was already been said that INT will determine which spells the caster will have access to so the high-int casters get the big guns.
The only change (and that's a good one) is that you can't just stop researching spells when you have the one damage spell you'll ever want to use. You will want bigger ones...
But if you lose your casters for some reason you are back to where you can just stop researching. Actually you can't really stop researching, you just have to keep going for nothing.
Except that magic base damage is higher than weapon base damage, and magic largely (entirely?) ignores armor. So while your weapons are scaling up, so are your opponents' armors resulting in a curve that is less steep for weapon damage than it might at fist seem. Also magic damage will scale up as you unlock higher level spells. Lower level spells will still be used because they have lower mana costs and sometimes you don't need to do a ton of damage. In 1.09 I use magic heavily and flame dart is by far my most used spell because it only costs 2 mana and I frequently find myself only needing to do 5-10 damage to finish off a unit.
Here is why population as a resource DOES help city spam:
You now have a limited of total buildings you can build in your kingdom restricted by your population which is in turn limited by your food. So with your set number of buildings you can place a few in a bunch of cities or a bunch in a few cities. Every new city you build costs food which means 50 less specialists (assuming the current ratio of house supporting 50 pop costing 1 food remains constant) which in turn means fewer total buildings for your kingdom. Additionally, with percentage based bonus buildings (e.g. +50% tech research) it is generally more efficient to put a few more libraries in a large city that already has a multiplier than build another city which will cost you food, then build a library there. Lifting the 1/settlement restriction will eliminate the incentive to build another city just so you can build another library. Also, income coming from population means that any food not being used to increase population (i.e. used to found city) will hurt your guildar production as well. The advantage of building more cities is claiming resources and land area, which is what it should be.
edit: This is, of course, assuming that whatever the base population for a city is, it will be less food-efficient than building housing in an existing city.
Global population does seem like a problem though. Lore-wise it doesn't really make sense, but I don't care too much about that. What happens when your city with a ton a surplus population working in other cities gets captured or razed? Do I get to choose which buildings go dark? Do I simply get a negative specialist number and can't expand until I get it into the positives but my current buildings keep on working? I do realize that a lot of this will be helped by the fact that city size restrict which buildings you can produce, meaning the buildings using the most population will probably also be the biggest cities, but I am still curious as to how this mechanic actually will work.
Hey Toby, wonderful news you have going there. I bought elemental even after reading the reviews because I love Stardock as a game developer and wish for them to continue producing wonderful games!I do have a question though, I was wondering when the faction creator would get some love, customizability is my favourite part of any game... With Elemental I currently feel that you guys skimmed over it, the colors dont display anywhere, have nondescript names, and you can have problems trying to construct certain units if you didn't pick a race!Hope to see more updates for this kickass game soon-Later!
yes they are going to be the same, as some people have mentioned later we don't want this to feel like some sort of intense micro system like say Dawn of Discovery, I think people are just hung up on the name 'specialist'. Think of it more as another resource to manage that will cause more decision making in what you build when. Again, think of it somewhat like supply in Starcraft or 'food' in Warcraft only it affects buildings and units.
Yes, imbued champions will be able to cast whatever spells are available based on their int/wis and pull from the same global mana pool as everyone else. So cranking out 5 imbued champions to abuse summoning a million fire giants wont work anymore. I mean you can still cast a bunch of fire giants but it will actually cost you something (enchantments/summons will have a maint cost of mana just like buildings have gildar maint). The plan now is to get as many of the abilities we can in now and attach them in ways that the engine supports for 1.1 and then in a future update take those same abilities and attach them in a better way when we have time to get at the system itself.
This basically all comes down to how well we can nail the scaling of int/wis to spells you unlock. Our intended feel is that most spells will be available with most casters, however, if you want to do something super epic (like the volcano spell or something) you will need a specialized caster (usually just your sov will have enough I would imagine).
Dragonforce, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shining Force 3 and Guardian Heroes were probably my fav Saturn games also enjoyed the Vs. series fighting games and Samurai Showdowns tho.
I will be going through everything when I'm balancing. As the combat system is still being tweaked I wouldn't expect the first pass to be the end all be all, however, there shouldn't be things like one type of weapon with the same stats as another costing more. It will be creatures along with weapons/armor.
Finally, we don't have a set in stone planned release date for 1.1. I can tell you that it will be going into an internal beta in the next week or two (but will probably be only 80% feature complete at that point).
edit: this is from me catching up on page 2... I will respond to the page 3 stuff later
Hi Toby, thanks for introducing yourself. I hope you don't mind being grilled in your introduction thread, but there is a lot of important stuff in your post.
I'm happy to see that two out of three features that need a lot of improvement are being addressed in v1.1 (Magic and city building, third being combat), but to be honest I'm not very enthused by the proposed changes.
I like that population is becoming more important, but I don't see how the specialist system will improve the game. As far as I can see it's main benefits are:1) You can instantly see how much 'free' (unoccupied) population you have left.2) By becoming a global resource, your population is more mobile (possibly speeding up the game by not having to wait on people moving into your city before you can build something).
The first part is a non-issue for me. If you want to build something, you can just look at a city to see how much free population it has left, or you can go to the city list to check all your cities at once. The second part, IMO, just dumbs the game down. All your other resources are already global, making population global as well is not only silly and completely unrealistic ('commutes' between cities used to be days, not the few hours it takes now), it also removes any restrictions on what you can build where. There is nothing stopping you from building a lot of buildings in a brand new outpost on the other side of the map, unless some (arbitrary) building limits are reintroduced. Sure, some of the more interesting buildings can only be build in higher level towns that have large populations. But (with the number of specialists being equal to the number of citizens), what is the point of separating your population from a building location if you're then going to require a certain number of people living in the city before you can build certain things? How is that better than just requiring a number of unoccupied people in a town before you can build something? If relatively few people are required for 'simple' resource producing structures, and a larger amount for the 'high level' buildings that give a % increase, you'll end up with pretty much the same end result, small towns that produces small amounts of resources and large cities that produce large amounts, without the silly intermediate step of global specialists.
As for the changes in the magic system, I'm with Annatar on the character stats influence on spell effects. Having certain requirements for casting a spell is fine, but having them always do the same amount of damage will probably result in the same spells being cast every time.
What I am more concerned about however, if I understand it correctly, is that your population will now also be able to produce mana through buildings. Not only does this not fit the lore, but it will also make it more difficult for a player with a small kingdom who focuses on magic to keep up with bigger kingdoms. No matter how much he specialises a city for magic production, he'll lose on the magic front to a player that builds two cities focused on magic, and eventually to a player that builds lots of cities with a few magic structures in it. I'm not saying everything should be completely balanced, but it will make the 'small kingdom' strategy even more difficult or impossible.
If this is implemented, magic will just become another global resource. I don't mind that mana is stored globally, it is the only resource it makes sense for lore-wise in fact. But if it's produced like any other resource it won't feel special anymore. What I'm afraid of is that the game will turn into focussing your population to produce 1 global resource to win the game, doesn't really matter if it is gildar, weapons, diplomatic clout, or magic. What I'm trying to say is that different systems interacting in different ways make a game interesting, not a single system that is used over and over again. To quote JSJ101;
Question related to the stats:
Are STR/DEX/CON going to stay the same? Are regular units going to get STR/DEX/INT/WIS/CON/CHA stats? (I can see that helping with a concrete and elegant system for magically enhanced equipment, which I'd like to see)
Yeah, the SamSho games were my favorite fighting game back in the day. Now it's the 3D fighters. On that end, I know it can never happen (for multiple reasons), but a Stardock/Sirlin mashup would be very interesting, though very combustible. (Sirlin was the designer for HDR/Puzzle Fighter remakes on the 360 and also has some interesting card games)
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