I have spoken several times against teleport, maybe you missed it because it was way before you started working with the team. To make a long story short, this game is becoming more and more like Age of Wonders Shadow Magic (personal, strategic, tactical spells... a common mana pool...). Personally I don't mind it a bit, because AOW is one of the best video game ever made... But I already know the feeling of this kind of gameplay, and watch it because there was a revolution going on in the AOW forum at some point, a rebellion against all forms of teleport, which eventually convinced the developers to make it optional.
Of course you can do whatever you like, but unless all forms of teleport are optional, you'll lose a large chunk of fans, those who like a more realistic wargaming approach: most of the AOW fans who have been waiting for 8 long years for a new game like that one and who are used to customizing at least that rule.
Ignore me, if you like, but as soon as you start testing the game you'll realize that those player who are using air magic will soon be unbeatable. Those spells alone will win you the game (and make a game that could be realistic, look and feel like an arcade, IMO... not to speak about the new landscape that will be made useless by moving through hyperspace.
Please consider make those spells optional.
BK.
Apart from me being a ranting maniac about the drawbacks of teleport in general (should be optional), the actual purpouse of this post is to make a point about the fact that air magic the way it has been conceived is the only possible choice unless players want a serious disadvantage.
Judging from the feedbacks I am getting, I am approaching the conclusion that:
1) I should probably see a shrink, specialized in the side effects of teleport sickness myself
2) Finally most people start to realize that, while some of them might (inesplicably) like the idea of jumping around a fantasy medieval map like it were a Star Trek galactic sector hyperspace map, almost everyone finally seem to agree that this kind of cheap tricks to quickly correct their poor strategic choice of leaving their cities undefended has indeed a weight, on the overall game. To the point of making the book of air magic a tool of such power that is not comparable to any other class of spells available.
3) Something radical has to be done about it.
Please devs, give us some feedbacks! By now you know where I stand, so it's not so much about what more I can really say, but what is the best option in your opinion?
Allow certain spells or certain school of magic to be optional (Yeah!!)? Tuned down? Limited distance? Teleportation sickness? Put a teleport spell in every school of magic (hope not) with different drawbacks (IE: fire teleport wounds units, while air teleport has a serious chance to miss the target...) - Guys things are just not BALANCED, I am not only defending my personal point here...
Which one?
Also what is the point of developing a transportation system like boats, if we have Scotty in every stack of units?
You make a good point on that. There wouldn't be any point to any kind of trasport if the cost and effectiveness of teleportation out stretches it. The people would eventually evolve into teleporting turrets, like those daylek things on Dr. Who.
'Now in this new age of magic, my people, you no longer have to leave your bed, all things can be brought to you directly with my power!'-sovreign via telepathic projection. All of their units would have 0 for all of their stats except inteligence, and mages with teleport, telepathy and telekenisis would be the entire work force, nay the entire population! You look threatening? well I'll just throw you into the sun with my telenesis! We'll untill they can ascend all earthly things anyway.
It's a slippery slope... to Nivanah.
I don't understand how this is a big deal? This is a mostly single player game. The AI does not use teleport, only the player does so just don't use it. You are ranting and raving about a ridiculous point. I am sorry but people complaining about this are just drama queens. If you think it is overpowered then just don't use it or set limitations on it for yourself and this does not require modding or anything else, just a little self control.
Agree.
As I already said in post 44:
Maybe you guys could take a look at the whole thread before coming up with a simplistic solution like that, the idea here is to talk about balance, teleport in single player VS multuplayer and whether a game so strongly unbalanced in favour of the player VS the AI can possibly have an interesting lifespan... Because the AIR school of magic DEFINITELY is much more powerful than the others.
When someone sees an exploit or something unbalanced, I don't think the solution should be "just shut up and don't use it."
Those of us who are competitive will play on the hardest difficulty and do everything we can to win. Getting the most out of heroes, troops, the Sovereign and our magic is part of that. And if one school of magic is stronger than the others than that school of magic becomes an obvious choice. Just like getting a grand amount of studies now and going up the Warfare tree and maxing Armor.
The main point is that we shouldn't have to make houserules. Ideally, the game should be balanced so there are several valid ways to go. At the very least, they should try to not make one school of magic more powerful than the others.
Yes, I know that Life magic in Master of Magic was really strong but that was a designflaw that shouldn't be repeated.
Oh come on, so what you are saying is that you can't control yourself? You have no self control at all? So, if someone doesn't eliminate an option for you, you just can't do it yourself? Seriously, reflect on that a bit.
I don't see it as an exploit, sorry.
I really like this idea. It's far better than simply increasing the cost of teleport to ludicrous levels. Thumbs up that someone at the dev team reads this and thinks it through.
Let's see. If I don't rush an AI in the beginning, don't build units which have more defense then the AI units, don't trade with the AI, don't build more then one study per city, don't city spam, don't attack the AI after it declared war against me again, don't build archers, don't build super stacks of doom, don't use spells, don't use raise or lower lands to bottle in the AI...
... well, hey. E:WoM is actually a balanced game with a good AI now! (After I've removed about half of the game features, since the AI can't cope with them.)
And now, you seriously say you don't see a problem with that? Just make some house rules, hey, balancing is hard, let's not even try. What, you can't bring yourself to not set some tiny houserules that make you ignore half of the gameplay? Hey, you, you have obviously no self control!
You know what, BlackRainZ? Shove your contemptuous advice up somewhere and leave this discussion to people that have an inch of understanding about gameplay in a supposedly strategic game. Since you obviously don't.
In Master of Magic if I go with Nature, Death, Chaos or Sorcery books then I obviously wouldn't use any Life magic.
But if I'm free to select Air magic anytime in FE then it would feel like handicapping myself not to take it. Like not choosing First Strike and Defense for heroes in Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic if I get the option or taking a Spellpower dependant magicschool with a mighthero in Heroes of Might & Magic V which is just plain dumb!
The difference between those games is that in Master of Magic the decision is made when you setup the game. In the others I can choose as I go.
I can try different strategies but I'm a powerplayer and usually try to win as quickly as possible to get the highest score possible.
Limiting the range (or scalling cost to range) would be anouther option for nerfing teleport to more manageable levels. I don't find myself using it very often anyway,usually the return spell is enough for me- and is usually used to shorten travel time for my exploring sov.
Ive always thought that rather than a teleportation spell they could include an expensive late game city improvement for magic gates a la MOO2's Jump Gates.
It accomplishes the "only in your own territory" goal without the side effect of being the ultimate "oh shit" button. If you're main force is out of position attacking in a foreign land, you're still screwed.
There are also plenty of ways to limit it to make sure that it's useful, but not insta-travel all over your realm. Make each new portal have a mana upkeep so that you don't spam them in every city. Make it so that a portal in one city has a range of XX squares and kills all or a significant part of your movement to prevent the portals from acting as an "instant" border defense system. In other words, it would take you more than one turn to get from one border to the other depending on the size of your realm but would still happen significantly faster than if you just used roads or cross country travel.
Make the portal network require some sort of "one-per-kingdom/empire" wonder building that has a giant upfront cost in resources/mana/whatever. Or make it so that you have to have one such "power node" within so many squares of a gate for the gate to remain operable (think hub and spoke). In order to even build a gate in city X there has to be a power node improvement built in a city within Y squares. Loss of that power node nullifies all gates that it powers.
Or combine some of them. Any combination still eliminates tedium of traveling across a large empire, but maintains some of the strategic consequences around army placement and potentially adds some other strategic elements in maintaining, supporting, and protecting your big expensive fast travel network.
You are perfectly right to be frustrated with movement! When I criticize teleport I understand how people may go "oh god he wants me to spend another 100 turns going back and forth!!"
But that is not the point, because what I am trying to convey is that movement itself is wrong in this game. In Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, things are balanced, units's speed is just right not to make you mad about the slowness of the game. Cavalry can get you around a medium size kingdom in just a few turns, just to cover from quick attacks, while heavy infantry becomes a necessity only when dealing with strong units. Boats and flying machines also have a critical use in that game when teleport is not used.
If AOW had a system as good and complex as that of EWOM to develop technologies (ports, flying machines), I would still spend days and resources developing them because they would be useful in AOW! With teleport, instead, they become just useless.
In AOW things are well balanced: mounted troops (and flying units) are necessary to explore (horses should be available very early in the game!!!), infantry is used to conquest and defend newly conquered cities that would otherwise rebel. Wizards are used to freeze a lake and have units cross it, make units stronger or give some support in combat. Of course ther are also stronger spells to defend one's coutry (only effective artound wizard towers), there are healers that travel with troops and fix their hit points, units that are faster or invisible in woods... there are tons of tactics that are not even contemplated in EWOM (partially because they become REALLY fun only in multiplayer)... in EWOM, instead, turns go by the dozen before anything happens.... and I completely understand that people gets frustrated when they realize they have to move a unit all the way back by foot!
But instant travelling is just a cheap solution! A lazy, simplistic solution for the developers that can only accelerate a boring game. It makes parts of the game useless (building ports, having horses, roads, a complex terrain...), it kills strategic options and doesn't add anything to the fun. It only makes the game end sooner, and do I agree that, at that point, ending the game is a pleasant thing.
They should just check how movement works in AOW and start from there!
By the way, you realize that a game where a sovreign "explores" has something wrong at the very root right? A king alone exploring? Then in order to fix that absurdity, instead than making rules that address the problem (have weak horsemen available soon who can explore better) and encourage a king to stay in his castle (give the city he is in, a special bonus), they add a teleport spell for him so he can quickly go back? When you fix something absurd adding something even more absurd, IMO, in the end you have no idea what the game is going to become! And that wrong approach is precisely what has brought to this game a lame gameplay!
Anyway, dude, call me mean, but if in your "strategic" game, your "strategy" is to have your sovreign ride alone in the same direction for 15 years, the least that you should expect after that time is just ... that he is far away!! - Now... allowing you to have a "return spell" is just a poor fix for a poor strategy!
@Kantok,
Hehe. I just had that same thought on the other side of the forum. City Portals would be a great way to differentiate a single race or shard. If properly balanced, it would mean that society could build light garrisons in every city and be sure they can all come together for defense. It makes an island strategy more feasible too. The most reasonable implementation though, is a world wonder at the end of the tech tree or from a very challenging quest. It could be great to have two continents sending armies back and forth, a small logistical advantage at the cost of late game mega-spells.
"A small logistical advance?" ... What about calling it the final nail in the AI's coffin?
Many fantasy-genre type RPG or strategy games have some form of teleportation. Good ones balance the valid points the OP makes by making these spells very expensive. This is slightly harder to to in Elemental than in, say, Dominions (whose magic system is much more differentiated -- and which has a number of quite expensive teleportation options). In Elemental, there are few constraints on magic besides caster ability and mana cost; to avoid making teleportation a "no-brainer", it could (1) be given a high mana cost, (2) require a very high casting ability, (3) be delegated to the "research" area of magic so that only powerful casters with a certain level of research can cast them, (4) be given another form of constraint, if necessary, such as a downside, e.g. having the caster be disoriented for 1 round after casting or something similar. Surely at least some of these things can be done in Vanilla and the rest in modding. Despite all of this, the main problem will exist that certain things are difficult for the AI to use because their worth and their correct implementation are difficult to evaluate; certainly teleportation (or other forms of spatio-temporal resource manipulation) is one of these. I think that should not mean that these elements should never be in a game, only that players should be aware of the weaknesses the AI will have with these and try not to exploit them.
Sorry, as many other players have stated before in a game that is supposed to be mostly single player it is just unacceptable to expect players not to exploit the rules against the AI to their best advantage! In fact it is just impossible, should we not exploit the ever-cheating AI and let it win? I just don't see anyone ever doing that throughout a whole game! A game should be challenging, things that exploit the AI should be OUT! (...And the AI should cheat as little as possible!!!!)
The game should be balanced and we'll have to start from there!
I always enjoy your threads BK even though I don't often agree with them and rarely post. Be warned this is going to be one of those walls of text.
That aside, I have played a famous tbs game where Teleport was (mostly) successful and the lead is now employed at Stardock. Fall from Heaven 2 did have a city teleport system that was balanced because the game's tech trees were so very divergent, awfully expensive, and independent from each other but also very effective. Sure I can bite the heavy cost and go beeline gates but it will burn me everywhere else and unless if it is key to my overall strategy I'll really feel the pain later.
E:WOM does not have the same type of balance because the game uses a separate research system for tech and magic. First, TP is not exclusively anchored to cities. Second, TP here is more tactical than strategic. You don't have to make the same long term sacrifices plus changing and adapting accordingly to your opponent is less necessary because teleport is so incredibly flexible. Those are the pros and cons.
You've made a very good argument but my best guess is SD's vision is to have TP primarily implemented for less but better equipped elite groups with one spell caster at each head and the sovereign himself.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
