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
Looking at how the concept has changed and the stats have lost their previous function, shouldn't the stats should be revamp and change, too?
The silent party too.
And i´m very happy that so much of you ask the questions i´m interested in. It would take me hours to write meaningful sentences, because my english is so bad. So...thanks all of you .
Having different spells gives you a reason to research higher level spells too. Having spells not scale well simply obsoletes spells as the game goes along, cluttering up the spellbook with a lot of cruft.
If I wind up with Flame Dart, Flame Dart 2, Flame Dart 3, and Flame Dart 4 at varying levels, by the end of the game I'll also be facing units with more HP and more defense. Flame Dart 1 won't get the job done, if it even damages them at all. So the extra research is just to get new versions of the same thing.
Instead of that, I should be researching higher level spells because they can do more things. I could get Flame Dart, Forge Blast (halts production in a city), Banish Summon, and Flame Shield (unit enchantment that sets any melee units that attack the enchanted unit on fire).
IMO that's a lot better then having six direct damage spells, where five of them are obsolete due to not scaling.
I think the fundamental problem here is that, so far in previous versions, the only spells worth casting are direct damage spells. The few spells that weren't dd spells just didn't get the job done in comparison, mainly because the guy who attacks first needed to maximize his damage before the other team could act. You couldn't afford to miss the opportunity for a big first strike to whittle down the enemy stacks before they are brought to bear.
I seriously wonder if getting rid of all direct damage spells would result in a more diverse and interesting magic system. I'm probably in the minority in this opinion, but I think that it's easier to get creative and write a better story by finding ways other than direct damage to help your firends and harm your enemies. Obviously this game is supposed to be about magic, and so far this has been de-emphasized in an unpleasant way, but I don't think that big damage spells are the solution. It's ok if magic tips the balance of power rather than being the power.
I'm sure that it would be a useful exercize to remove all dd spells, create a magic system that works and is fun, and then add dd spells back in, sparingly and tastefully in such a way that the rest of the system is not diminished.
One more thing I'd like to say on the issue of having a bunch of obsolete spells in the spellbook is that there was one game that handled this brilliantly. In MOO2 your old weapons would get a miniaturization bonus as you teched up, so that they became cheaper and you could fit more of them into the same amount of space. They eventually became obsolete, but more slowly. A typical progression was that when you attained the latest weapon, it could potentially do more damage, but by fitting out 5 times more of the older weapon in the same space as the new weapon, you would get more reliable damage until the enemies defensive technology eventually made it completely obsolete. In general, if your enemies defenses were strong, you needed the latest weaponry; if your enemies were using low tech defense, you would gain more with more numerous, miniaturized older weaponry. It was an interesting decision.
You could probably do something similar with how INT influences spell casting, by making it more efficient or more expensive. So instead of having hard INT requirements for more advanced spells, and possibly being unable to cast them, you could simply make it a cost issue instead. So if your main hero dies, and you need a certain spell, you can have it at increased cost until your new main hero is up to speed. This could result in all of your spells potentially being useful to all of your spellcasters depending on the situation.
Don't worry about user confusion, it's just as confusing to figure out why they can't cast a spell anymore if the wrong person died.
I would like to address all our base stats and their purpose and re-balance them, however, its probably out of scope for the 1.1 patch and will have to be saved for a later update.
Just because a spell does more damage then another spell does not obsolete the previous version. Remember that higher rank spells will generally cost more mana, there will always be times you will want to dial back your spell for whatever you are facing (IE if the thing you are fighting has 8 HP left you would want to cast the 10 dmg lvl 1 spell instead of the 100 dmg lvl 7 spell). Cephalo, to your MOO2 comment this is a similar thought process to miniaturization, using less powerful stuff because its cheaper and all you need at the time.
Istari: In order to have a relevant global mana system it really has to be global, we cant still have champions with their own mana pools. It would make your spell choices less meaningful plus be very confusing to have some units casting spells from one place and others from another. I think what you are looking for is basically you want to have units that can do cool/interesting things in combat aside from just attacking or using your Sovereign's mana. This is something we are planning on addressing with our redesign of skills. Skills will be cooldown based and not require mana, thus you can still have units in your army that are like casters, they just don't use the spell book. We are trying to get as many of the skill changes as we can into the game for 1.1 but the full redesign will not be coming until the next update.
Edit: I guess this is how I imagine it in 1.1. The workshops, arcane labs and tech producers aren't limited to 1 per city anymore. So while you can build these in smaller cities, it's actually beneficial to build them in your large cities instead - because in the large cities, you have buildings giving +% bonuses to the entire city. In other words, the starter structures have a very low population requirement (in fact, none at all?). Am I way off?
One sure way to hedge off city spam by making it less effective...
Hum...
One of the BIG problems for me with the game is the painfully slow recruiting of troops.
As your sovereign has so limited movement, i count on my soldiers to do the exploring.
With this new system of population management and there use, it will severely limit the recruiting of troops.
This will make this slow game, even slower.
One more thing, some one from stardock said:
"This brings up another point: if you end up spamming cities just to get a ton of citizens and don't spend building things to protect them (keep in mind its always harder to defend 3 cities than 1) enemies will be able to snipe out your supply lines and halt your production in times of war."
Now what if i spam citys and just build soldiers and pioneer units.
Even if a city at level 1 gets only 10 citizens, thats 9 soldiers and 1 pioneer, that can build 1 more city, that will give me 9 soldiers and 1 pioneer... and so on.
So i can build one city that i build up to max level, by making 4 lvl 1 city´s surrounding it.
Those 4 lvl 1 city´s will give me 9x4=36 soldiers and 4 pioneers.
So thats 1 high lvl city, with 4 lvl 1 city´s, only the minimum number of squares away, and 4 pioneers that can build more citys
That will be easy to defend.
But i guess ill try it out and hopefully im wrong.
Looking forward to release.
I think the difference of opinion here is related to how we view mana in the game or mythos. To be honest, even with your Christmas come early detail giveaway bonanza, my thick comprehension shielded head hasn't really grasped the whole idea of the new mana system and how it all fits.
To give a clearer idea of how I see things, I'd probably be best served by using MoM (yes, again) as an example. As a wizard, you gather and store your magical power each turn, and if you don't use it, it accumulates. You have heroes who can be formidable spell casters in their own right, though without the potential to become the powerhouse that you are. These spell casting heroes have the ability to draw from the worlds' power in the same way that you do, though not to the same degree, and their mana doesn't accumulate. This is what comes to my mind when I hear the phrase "Global Mana Pool", i.e. the worlds' pool of magical energy that can be drawn from by spell casters.
If things were done this way for example, it would open up an excellent opportunity to make each of our champions and offspring different and unique in their own way. Some intelligent forumite (I can't remember who), cleverly suggested that since the game is called 'Elemental', we could tie our spell casting champions and offspring to a particular element, and they would be specialist casters of spells from that element, and at the same time would be unable to cast spells from the opposing element (possibly with some vulnerability to the opposing element). They could either inherit known spells from the sovereign, or just start with a basic set of spells at level 1, and gain new and higher level spells automatically (or by selection) as they level up. This I think would give some meaning to spell choices.
I guess I just think that if you are a caster, then it makes sense that you can draw power from the world around you. So obviously I'm too dumb to get how it would be confusing to have the sovereigns draw their own mana, and all other casters do the same, so the spell casting power is coming from the same place (i.e. the world), but being drawn upon by a different user/caster (btw, there is no sarcasm intended in this sentence, I'm being quite sincere about feeling dumb for not 'getting it').
I didn't mean to type this much.
[EDIT] I forgot to mention, that's great news about the intended new unit skills! I will really be looking forward to that. Thanks!
I have always believed in the KISS formula. Keep it simple stupid. Maybe, Elemental just needs to keep it simple. Diablo comes to mind. I want the game to work so that most of us can have fun with it. Just a thought. Bring on 1.1
Freebird in the birdcage with to much time to think.
Istari,
I think you are trying to make a system that seems simple and elegant much more complicated than it needs to be. Your kingdom generates mana, you and those heroes you imbue can draw on that mana reserve to cast spells depending on their INT/WIS.
If it's the lore that's troubling you, remember that they have said that under the new system the concept is that only the sovereign can cast spells, but can imbue other heroes to act as conduits for his/her spell casting. When you look at it this way the "global mana pool" is really just your sovereign's mana pool and nobody else gets mana.
yea this pretty much sums it up, this honestly was the initial concept for spell casting long ago for Elemental, thus why all the spell casters are considered 'channelers'.
I don't think that your system is poor or overly complicated Istari, I'm just saying its not what we are looking for with our spell casting right now (and it would be a big design and UI change for this patch anyways). That doesn't mean we wont look into it again if this ends up not being fun, just this is the direction we are heading in right now...
the primary fix being put in for city spam is still that every city after your capital takes a 1 food ration to start. Thus it will always be more food/housing effective to build up one city rather than a bunch of small ones. The defense point is just a secondary thing.
Istari,I think you are trying to make a system that seems simple and elegant much more complicated than it needs to be. Your kingdom generates mana, you and those heroes you imbue can draw on that mana reserve to cast spells depending on their INT/WIS.If it's the lore that's troubling you, remember that they have said that under the new system the concept is that only the sovereign can cast spells, but can imbue other heroes to act as conduits for his/her spell casting. When you look at it this way the "global mana pool" is really just your sovereign's mana pool and nobody else gets mana.
yea this pretty much sums it up, this honestly was the initial concept for spell casting long ago for Elemental, thus why all the spell casters are considered 'channelers'. I don't think that your system is poor or overly complicated Istari, I'm just saying its not what we are looking for with our spell casting right now (and it would be a big design and UI change for this patch anyways). That doesn't mean we wont look into it again if this ends up not being fun, just this is the direction we are heading in right now...
@perigrine23
Thanks for your take on the GMP in WoM. You found what I didn't like about it, and put it better than I could. My peeve was with the idea that the 'Kingdom' generates mana, rather than the caster. To me, it diminishes the fantasy associated with magic. Regarding my suggestion being overcomplicated, I don't know if you've played MoM, but I don't think anyone was ever confused by the way heroes worked in that.
@Kestral2040
Thanks for bearing with me 'til it finally sunk in.
I can try the new system with an open mind now, and I'll give my feedback after giving it a fair go.
First of all, I LOVE the ideas you are working with and am very excited to taste the fruit of your loins! No, wait, I think that was a mixed metaphor. Drat!
Anyhew, I agree that there is no sense in having multiple levels of what is basically the same spell. Each spell in each level should be unique, such as the examples above. If there is a similar flame damage spell of a higher level, for example, it should do area-effect damage (or a larger area) rather than just more damage. Different effects! Unique!
Recall that in MoM the low-level damage spells such as firebolt were always useful because you could add additional mana to the spells to increase their damage. It only makes sense that something of this sort should be the case here; it could be that the amount of mana you could add is based on your intelligence cap, or researched spell level, or a combination of both. However, I think players would get much more satisfaction learning new spells of entirely unique design than the same old thing just a level higher. This is what always drives me never complete RPGs such as Final Fantasy.
Combined with the levels of uniqueness that is present in the research tree and was present in spell research in MoM, this adds a much higher level of replayability to the game--wanting to see which spells are learned in each playthrough, trying out different combinations of magic schools, and creatively using different combinations of spells or exciting effect!
.
I totally agree with the last few posts... Spells should be unique, scalability of spells should be coming out of something else - as mentioned by e.g. addition of mana till reaching the cap. But I'm not quit sure if the engine is capable of that, cause till now I don't see that this is somewhere mentioned.
I agree with others, Flamedart I, II, III, IV (you get the point) are not interesting at all, in such a way we can have 1000nd of spells lacking of clear interest choices..
I think this is a very important point. This kind of 'upgrade' adds nothing to the discovery process. I would say that it is a complete waste of labor to put in numerous spells that function the same way but at different strengths. You should never believe that you are adding content when you add such spells.
For example, let me compare an aspect of MOO2 with the Civ4 mod 'Final Frontier'. FF was a very cool mod, and it was amazing that it was even possible to mod Civ4 that way, but the game presented there had a problem. In FF you had battleships, destroyers, bombers etc. and when you teched up you progressed to battleship 'beta' then 'gamma' or whatever. It was like battleship 1, 2, 3 and 4 and each step was more powerful. Same thing with the other ship types. As a system it was profoundly uninteresting, because as soon as you got battleship 2, as a player you have 'discovered' 3 and 4 as well, assuming you know how to count.
In the case of MOO2, you would run into stuff that you couldn't even imagine! You prepare yourself for a proper battle with a familiar enemy or maybe a not so familiar one, and all of a sudden your capital ships, the pride your battle fleet, start spinning uncontrollably and everyone inside are dying! "What.... is..... HAPPENING TO ME!" "Run away!' "Run awaaaay!".
That is content. If you have no idea whats coming, that is content. If you can predict it mathematically, that is NOT content and no attempt should be made to mask it as such, or else players will lose trust in the game they are playing and put it down. If I research a spell called 'Fire BALL' and then a slightly more powerful spell called 'Fire BLAST', then I immediately know that there will be some other spell in the future called 'Fire STORM' or whatever. It does nothing to increase anyone's enjoyment of the game, and has a good chance of doing the opposite.
To be fair, MOO2 had plenty of numeric upgrades in there also, armor level was basically just a numerical progression as were missles, but there was plenty of brand new crazy stuff introduced through out the game, more so than you would useally encounter in one game and that's were the replayability comes from. There was a ton of content in there, revealed in such a way to maximize the impact of each new thing.
Please make it so your children can also cast imbue champion. They are channelers as well aren't they? Or did that change as well, either that, or make combat oriented heroes way more effective. As it is, only the spellcasters remain useful in late game.
Children can't imbue champions but they, unlike imbued champions, do not have a mana upkeep which makes them extremely valuable.
I'm quite satisfied with the changes to the spell system.
Can we confirm that the sovereign cannot cast spells "globally" in Tactical combats like MOM?
1. "Flat" damage in spells
I think spell damage scaling with INT is quite a good concept, I'm not quite sure why it's removed. As pointed out earlier, there isn't really a problem with allowing limited scaling with low level spells by capping max damage (e.g. 10 + 0.4 per Int - up to 10 INT), or making higher level spells scale faster with INT.
That said MOM did not have it, so EWOM can survive without it. I'm wondering though by "Flat" do we mean there is no random variance at all?
2. INT requirements required for casting spells
I think this was an idea where forumites were stating when people talked about moving to global mana pool. I think it's not bad an idea, "warlike" sovereigns who don't have a high INT would be totally denied being able to cast high level spells or does this INT requirement work only for champions?
I also like the idea where it's perhaps not a hard limit but INT scores below requirement would mean mana cost penalty when casting by champions.
I do think that you really have to relook at your stats system, it's an aspect that I think you are not exploiting and/or balancing properly, there is so much you could do for it.
3. Additional mana pools for champions
There's really nothing wrong with the idea of the MOM system where heroes had their own seperate mana pools that instantly regenerate (some even had their own spells which made they valuable as they had access to spells you didn't).
But the lore seems to be only sovereigns could use magic, so it's okay I think if champions didn't have their own mana pools, I don't think it will make a very big difference.
Offpsring do not have to be imbued & hence you save on maintenance, but that's a very small bonus though.
4. Spell books will be all researched now
1.1 seems to be going well mostly, but one aspect seems to be getting worse. Customizing your sovereign is starting to get more and more pointless.
Some people don't like the idea that when you design your soverign you are locked out of certain possibilities. I feel that's actually a good thing!
Again MOM does it well, your spellbooks chosen at the start determine mostly what spells you can get. Being a superb game it does allow a few escape hatches including trading spells and finding spellbooks after very tough battles.
So it seems now in elemental, customization of your sovereign is mostly cosmetic? Of course in 1.0 it was mostly cosmetic, but I argue it's because of the spellbooks being exteremly similar so no-one cared not the system. And there's was a weird hybrid system where some spellbooks were only researched and not selected at the start.
Along with what Brad said about mana maintenance, we also have another idea in the pipe to make champions/children more interesting/powerful then created units. Its a post 1.1 thing so I don't want to get into it too much (unless Brad tells me to...) but we definitely are aware of that particular issue and have things planned for it.
Also again, planning on re-addressing all the core stats after 1.1
Hmmm, a mystery! Can't wait.
Ideas on stats and other stuff off the top of my head.
STR: damage, reduction to dex penalty for heavy armor.
INT: overcoming saves, level of spell castable, power of summons
WIS: saves vs most spells, tactical mana limit
DEX: to-hit, DEF bonuses, combat speed bonus.
CON: hp, healing rate, saves vs poison/disease.
CHA: recruiting heroes, saves vs mental spells, stack bonuses
I do think all units should have stats also, not just champions. Levelling up of normal unit stats should be random, and less then champions. A normal unit of sufficient level should be able to do a "man of the hour" promotion to champion after reaching max level. Certain buildings should increase the stats of units (barracks)- perhaps this instead of giving initial experience? I'd also say that spare specialist capacity should increase the overall quality of unit you get.
For determining unit stats, it should be a dice roll type generation, with training/spare capacity providing more rolls, or keeping a better roll.
For example, an average unit might be 10 rolls, keep the 5th best, but two levels of barracks training might allow keeping the 3rd best, or a +1 to all stats?
I'd say grouped units should be rolled as individuals, and if an individual member dies, it gets replaced by a raw recruit (which would get an experience bonus from the other units)
good stat suggestions, I do have some idea of my own (and some mesh up with yours). Also would like to point out as of 1.09 stacked units in combat should be rolling individually in fights (IE if there are 3 guys and it says total attack 30 each it will roll a 10 attack 3 times). Need to come up with a better way to represent this distinction in the UI to the user (I have some ideas), hopefully will get something in for that soon.
Also wanted to let people know I'm out of the country next week, so if I'm not responding here its not that I lost interest in having an active dialog with you guys just will be unable to
Rolling individual attacks? Great idea! Good job Kunta Kinte! Sorry, I just don't feel comfortable calling you by your slave name, Toby.
They have internet in other countries, Kunta, don't pretend we are unaware.
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