Teleportation is broken, period. It was broken in WoM, to the extent that I'm shocked this spell even made it in.
The player uses it better than the AI, it completely overrides normal movement once you have a significant mana income, and it makes distances nearly irrelevant (ignoring abuses with outpost borders entirely)
At most, I would say a high level research that allows an expensive pair of gates between two cities to be constructed, allowing one unit at a time to pass through per turn or something along those lines.
Allowing stacks of doom unlimited mobility is a bad, bad, bad idea.
Giving the spell a significant movement bonus instead would be powerful but not hilariously broken bonus.
I agree something needs to be done. I'm often finding myself with much more mana than I can use and it's trivial to just zip around using Cloud Walk to not only avoid dangerous enemies but also defend multiple locations with a single army. I like your gate idea. If you actually had to travel to a specific point and could only come out at another specific point that might be a nice compromise.
I like the idea of the gate building and I also think in addition to large gold maint each gate should consume 1 mana/turn as upkeep so they aren't simply spammed at every city.
Instead of something complicated like having 2 gate sets it should just be possible to move between any gates. Cloudwalk/Teleport are still completely OP and should be removed no matter what mana cost you set it at.
Almost everyone would agree that it is way OP. The others probably don't use it in their playstyle.
Not calling it teleport is confusing. Even if the AI could use it, it would be a bad game mechanic. But if it costed a huge amount of mana (200-500) and was a level 5 spell, that might make it a good spell. You would still need to teach the AI how to use it. Never seen it done right or even passably well. It seems like a headache and a half.
I think Cloudwalk should be a bonus to army movement (+3 would even be reasonable at its current spell level). maybe each Airshard would add a bonus. I will just ignore the spell until it gets fixed or deleted. At release I will mod it out if this is for some reason an issue of MoM nostalgia on the devs part. (Why is there no Derek digicon? ~ )
I don't like anything that starts "Remove". However I like the ideas for replacement. Make Cloudwalk give a big move bonus, and be able to build gates. Good ideas all around, really. I'd give a gate a mana cost of 1 and no mundane maintenance; in order to be able to use them you'll have to build them in multiple cities. If they have a fairly high amount of labor required then you can't put them in newly captured cities quickly enough to matter in the short term most of the time.
As for Cloudwalk, +3, with an additional +1 per air shard sounds good to me on a small map. It should scale to map size, though. Each single tile is worth less on bigger maps. +5 +1/air would be a good addition on a large map.
Or maybe if you set it to +4 and +1 per Airshard, the number of shards would increase and scale to fit the map. There is an option to increase shards, but I haven't messed with it.
The funny thing is, I was on the other side of this argument a few months ago, until The Black Knight convinced me it was a problem.
Maybe I just like it because I like to use it, not abuse it.
For me this mechanic is really important as I love to go in the wilds and quest... but if somebody declares war on me or some big bad monster shows up I want to be able to teleport to that location to help my faction out.
And I believe that heroes should be powerful, 80 Mana imo is quite a bit (although I could do with higher costs) - maybe not totally later when you get soo much mana but I'd hate to see this spell completely removed.
I would hate to see this spell removed. Its fun to use and it is very convenient, which trumps balance for me. I think there are balance issues, but it would be possible to nerf the fun right out of the game if they attacked these problems by lopping them off.
I'm rather on the side of: Increase ways to get extra movement and / or ability to get some kind of terrain-walk/pathfinding simmilar to MoM (whould make a good Perk/Perk-Tree imo.) to all units making them faster (which also might help the AI) and make Teleport weaker in that way side of the argument. (Doesn't exclude nerfing Teleport of course. Against removing it completely. Maybe up the mana-cost ect.)
Ah yes! Good one!
The teleportation in EWOM was indeed utterly overpowered. To take MOM in example, even if you made yourself a stack of doom, you'd soon realize that it's very hard to conquer & defend a large empire with a single stack. There were some spells that could make your heroes go pretty fast, but still not enough to teleport all across the realm.
Another thing that helped cap strategic spell casting abuse, is their 'channeling' concept. Were you could only cast as much mana per turn as per your channeling ability. So it didn't matter that you had 1,000,000 mana stored up, if you hadn't invested any in channeling, you could be very limited to how many spells you could cast in a single turn, or rather, how many turns you had to wait to cast a strategic spell.
I'm having huge problems with the Beta stability so a lot of this I can barely explore, but is it still the case where as long as you have the mana reserves you can cast as many overland strategic spells as you like?
Yep, sure is. There's no channeling limitation in combat either, for whatever reason.
It'd be a totally separate post, but I personally really dislike mana as a balancing method, because it's binary: you have it or you don't, and if you do, you have infinite spellcasting. I'd rather see a cooldown based system, possibly with mana used to infuse magic item creation or certain specific very powerful ritual spells with game changing effects (a 'currency of power' vs its current implementation).
That's a radical change however, so I've been hesitant to make a post about it, given how many other aspects of the game need polishing right now.
I think adding an expensive mid-late game tech that allows for expensive, slow transit between cities (one unit/turn or less) would help for late game travel, and adding on-map portals with restrictions (guardians, in-transit guardians, fees to use, etc) to medium and large maps would also be a boon for the AI, and give another interesting strategic wrinkle to deal with.
Otherwise, on medium and large maps, fighting effectively vs enemies on the other side of the map is difficult or impractical, barring abusive tactics (hero stacks instantly razing cities, etc).
Gate Building Ftw
In Master of Magic the only 'Strategic' teleportation allowed was via the Very Rare Earth spell. At it was exactly the 'city gate' concept that is being described here.
And not only was it a last tier spell, but unless you invested 10 out of 11 points directly in Nature Magic, You had increasing chances of not even being able to get that spell.This is something that is extremely lacking with the Elemental universe. Magic seems to be so accessible, and any hero can turn into a Jack of all Trades. And a lot of 'skills' are so feeble that they can easily be overshaowed as early as "late early" or "early mid" game. Things that give you a static +1 is not even worth the point spent. In many cases that +1 represents a single building. How many of those buildings are you going to have in a game of 'medium' lenght?
When comparing to the "traits/abilities" that wizards could have in MOM the Elemental ones appear nerfed and bland. :/
Cloud Walk's still in .76, just acquired it
I've always thought a late game, expensive city improvement that acted like MOO2's star gates would be better than the various incarnations of teleport.
I searched for Cloud Walk because it's not working on my machine. When cast, it actually teleports some hero not within my party to the location. Is anyone else having trouble with this spell?
Does that Hero that's getting teleported happen to have the Cloud Walk spell?
edit - double post
I have always favored making cloud walk caster specific. It should teleport the caster and only the caster. That way you can still use it to explore and quest.
This.. is really silly. Move speed should not increase with larger maps. You should be encouraged to build more armies and defend a wider area (which should be possible with more cities/income/production). I also caution against adding anything that increases move speed beyond it's already ludicrous 8 or so limit. Move speed should be -reduced- not increased.
Giving more power to the solo stack of doom is exactly the opposite direction the game should take.
It could be turned into a town portal spell that's more expensive. This way you get around the outpost abuse and it being expensive, caps it's use.
I definitely think that we are in dire need of the channeling concept. Unlimited casting in combat and on the cloth map is way wrong!! Time/mana should be a factor when it comes to magic. This is the only way to add really powerful spells in the game.
Casting call to arms 4-5 times in a row in a city with the magic buffs after you just unlocked and designed the new uber troops?
Then casting crusade 2-3.. still on the same turn and then cloud walking them around?!!?? How can any AI cope with all this?
The most relevant.
Towns build so pitifully slowly that by the time you acquire the mana to cloudwalk your sov is level 20+ with speed 8 and can just run there in a turn or two.
Last game I only ended up casting it once.
I use Large Maps, Cloud Walk was pretty much my primary mode of transport. This is bad for quite a few reason, but also there is a reason for it.
Currently the Warfare/Army system isn't working very well, so right now most players just use one primary army. When your empire becomes large, you use Cloud Walk to navigate the one army everywhere as needed.
My hope is, once they actually add a real army system that works, they'll remove Cloud Walk and all will be good.
Well...personally, I like Cloud Walk. Though it's name is deceptive. When I think of cloud walk, I think of normal moving but ignoring obstacles, hovering above the ground. In that context, you still need to move, but you get there faster cause you can zip over mountains rather then having to run around them. Could also make it so you can't be attacked while Cloud Walking(cept by ranged or spell-casting enemies), and it only has a duration of a few turns. Or you could set it up so while Cloud Walking, you can't be attacked at all, nor can you attack anything either. That way it won't get abused.
As far as teleporting goes...I've never seen a fantasy setting of any kind that didn't have it in some form. I'm a big D&D player, and teleporting is pretty important there, but it requires (normally) a high level member of the party who is a spellcaster to cast it, or to purchase the teleportation from an experienced NPC. Instead of totally killing the teleportation concept, as I think it's a bad idea - make it limited to a certain number of panels, not anywhere in your control zones. Higher mana cost would help straighten it out too. Say around 100-200, and it lets you jump 20 panels, and onto into areas you've explored.
Course, with the current casting system you could jump from one side of the map to the other after casting a dozen times...but do you want to spend the 2000+ mana to do it or not? That way it's still pretty powerful, but not totally broken, as I dunno anyone that can easily cough up 2000 mana without batting an eyelash. But - for people that like working with one stack of strong units, it doesn't totally destroy their ability to protect their land if they accidentally forgot to put enough defenders in a city, or if a city is taken and they need it back right away.
What it comes down to is that what type of game you want to play. It is impossible to call Elemental a strategy game with Air Walk as is. You just teleport around with one big stack murdering disadvantaged AIs and farming monsters, never having to worry about coming under attack or planning ahead at all. That may be fun but it's not strategy. Strategy games are all about having to move over terrain and planing ahead to counter enemy moves.
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