First of all, let me say that it's awesome seeing Elemental slowly becoming a better game. But there's something that has been bugging me now that I've taken another look at the game.
A Sovereign moves 2 squares per turn. That's basically a very short distance on the map. Your starting village will span two tiles immediately. In one turn, three months, you can travel a distance that seems like a five minute walk. It will likely take 'years' to take the shortest route to the closest inn. What gives?
Three months feels wayyy too long for a turn in a wargame to begin with. A week sounds more reasonable. It feels like the turns were made unrealistically long just to make your offspring age faster. But surely you could simply have time jumps between acts in the official campaign to bring children into play? I don't think children belong in a skirmish type game, unless you can magically age them faster. I'd like the time aspect of the game to make sense.
On a related note, the cities quickly expand to take up as much space on the map as a big mountain range. A Sovereign who moves two tiles per turn needs a year to pass by a proper grown city. What? The cities should fit the scale of the map and turns should really be shorter.
I'm sorry to say the cities also tend to look quite boring and ugly when they consist out of similar buildings on a square grid. Couldn't the locations of the different buildings be abstracted and the cities be made look more impressive graphically? Seeing the exact location of your study (that you can't even recognize by glance) is completely irrelevant and the grid building makes the cities burst out of scale quickly.
You need to spend time reading maps from the medieval era and a little more thinking about quantum theory.
Maps often depict cities as much larger than they are compared to their surroundings. In most maps, unitl the modern era, open areas with little value to the maker were shrunk to make room for more detail in areas that the cartographer recognized as important. Entire villages were obscured due to lack of cultural significance to the mapper.
Think of the space around a city as shrunk. A single tile there may represent dozens of acres of land. Now inside a city things are stretched to fully depict the beauty and intricacy of civilization. So it makes sense to lose no moves going through a city as it is much smaller that it appears on the map.
I hope this helps your immersion factor a little as it did mine when I started playing.
It's not about the immersion factor. It's not just a "map", it's also the board we play the game on. If we abstract the scale of the map, we abstract movement rates at the same time.
And there's no reason the cities should span so many tiles zoomed in, especially when they don't look very good. :/
Now we have come to an objective impass. Aesthetic is personal and isn't something one can change about the game. I like the expansive city design and am actually building a mod to make cities get taller and more robust as the game progresses. I have some problems with some buildings not scaling with others but in the end it is merely preference. This game emphasizes city over wastes. It is about rebuilding civilization. Of course the cities would function this way. There are few better ways to convey such a theme.
Normal troops don't die of old age!! Unrealistic!
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Octagons make for better maps.. my "grief" with square maps is the faster percieved motion along certain angles... nuff said, bring on the blood & guts! Oh wait... I cant raise the fallen enemies of the seige on pikes along my ramparts.. boo
The main problem for me with weekly turns (and there is another topic on this posted today) is the loss of the epic feeling.
We are bringing a civilization back from the brink of a mighty cataclysm (sp?). Doesn't seem right the we should be able to achieve global domination from nothing in the space of 3 to 4 years (or 150-200 turns). It SHOULD take many years to win the game, it should take decades to build cities up to their former glory. With weekly turns we could have a massive city and two smaller cities thriving by the end of the first year.
So yes it is a bit annoying with map movement, but it is far better than the alternative.
It was always a problem i had with the X3 series, you could become a multi-millionaire within a few days, which leaves you wondering why everyone in the game isn't wealthy beyond belief.
Elemental is still a wargame and not a civilization rebuilding sim. By the end of the game you will have wiped out your enemies or formed alliances to rebuild that civilization together. End game does not have to mean there is a glorious and advanced civilization in existence. It's about making sure things go your way in the future.
Things should take time yes, but a hut taking a year to build? I can't take that seriously. If a turn was one week, in 52 turns or one year you could have a functional city that can trade and train troops. Pretty sufficient for a wargame. Realistic and believable.
And in the official campaign it's very easy to jump time between acts to create that epic feel.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I see Elemental as an empire building game, not a war game. It took over 200 years to get from the Cataclysm to the beginning of 'War of Magic', therefore I would not be happy for the entire continent to be civilized and settled again within a couple of years. And i think you are looking at the game too literally. When i hut is built i see it more as clearing the area from the devastation, and building a whole complex of huts to house several hundred people. I don't see the 1 population as actually equally 1 population.
I am sure that it will be easy to mod it so the turns last weeks rather than seasons though.
I think the answer is in the title.....War of Magic. Not War of the City Builders. Both are fun, but I'd like way more emphasis on the magic end of it.
Yeah... be fun if I could stop all that mana going into my mana pool & use it instead to turn myself into a 100 foot tall winged demon of carnage & go on a rampage in some other players capital. ^^
It depends on your speed relative to the speed of light. Judging by my FPS, the speed of light is pretty slow in the Elemental universe...
Perhaps bi-weekly then. Early Spring - Late Spring - Early Summer - Late Summer, etc etc etc. Or maybe Early - Mid - Late. Still somewhat abstract without getting so bogged down in weeks that years take very long to get through.
You people need to get out more...
Ever played wesnoth? Treat it like that. They have a simple rule regarding tile sizes and such. "One tile may be a thousand miles across, or it may be 5 feet across." They simply refuse to specify, so its whatever you think fits the game best. I just treat one turn as one turn and ignore the seasons and counter. Immersion is good, but you gotta meet the game halfway.
So only Magic should be able to be used a weapon and defense. No mundane spears and stuff. Because it's all about War of Magic. No, enchanted mundane weapons don't count as "magic". Also, as it's about War, you should start automatically in war with everybody and never being able to get any kind of treaty or peace. And forget about cities because, really, what the fuck has city building do with war? Do you throw buildings with your catapults or what? And quests? No need for them! If it's not War of magic, out!
Make it so!
EleMENTAL:war of magic
So in fact it should be all about going insane, and not at all about war or magic
I approve of building tossing catapults. I would like to see this implemented soon please.
Different buildings could have different damage values. Buildings that seem fairly aerodynamic like the Monument or the Monestary should get range bonuses. Large 4 tile buildings that take a long time to build such as a Palace should do the most damage. There could be bonus damage added if your spouse is garrisoned in the Palace as well. Different random events can affect the damage as well. If for example she wanted you to spend the day shoe shopping you would get +5 to accuracy when you fire that spouse-equipped palace at that damn Fallen capital.
New meaning to "urban warfare".
Good thing there are no public bathrooms or waste management acheivments in the game... those would be biological WMD's.
I still think it's a bigger, more glaring issue that it takes years to travel a short distance than it would be to be able to build a small city in "only" two years.
I think you are playing the wrong sort of game if this bothers you. It is the same in every other game of this type. Hell, in the Civ games it can take several 100 years to make a two square journey.
As has been said, changing to weeks would destroy several other parts of the game such as the dynasty system, the feeling of creating an empire, the pace of technology growth and the general timeline created for the game. As for building a small city in only 2 years, with your weekly system i would expect a fairly large town/city to be built in 104 turns. Even with weekly turns would you really be happy knowing that it would take several months to walk around a large city?
I agree that the cities seem too large--it seems like the world becomes crowded with cities by turn 250 or so. I'd prefer to see the scaling done so there is more distance between the cities.
A Civilization game spans thousands of years with massive technological advancements. Despite similarities, these two games have a totally different scope.
Master of Magic does not bother me at all. Perhaps if the time doesn't make any sense, they shouldn't underline how long one turn is and instead abstract time into "turns".
The second part of my original post addressed city size that should be shrunk considerably for both practical and aesthetic reasons. If the cities aren't actually "that big" I want to see the terrain under the tiles and have it come into play. If the devs plan to keep the blocky cities built on a grid, they could have a separate city building screen for that instead of letting the cities explode everywhere to cover 75% of the map.
Yes Civilization spans 1000's of years. Elemental spans decades, rather than a 4 year period. The things you are asking for change the fundamental foundations of what makes Elemental unique. If these are aspects you don't like then, as i said, this probably isn't the game for you. There are many of Empire/War games that you will find right up your street.
If someone wants to complain, even the silliest detail in the game can be used as excuse. *shrug*
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