Yes, I'm making this thread for myself because there are many things I simply still do not understand with this game.
So ask your stupid questions here. If you know the answer to a stupid question, post it here as well and I will edit the main post.
Please note that the answers below are from beta testers and are based on their experiences with 0.86. Mechanics can and will change during beta, and some of them we might not fully understand at this point.
Edit: The information in this post is NOT updated since the release of Beta 0.90!
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City founding, leveling and development.
Q: How do you build a second city?A: You have to build a pioneer and find a spot that supports cities again; best way of doing that is activate the show yields button. Know that cities have to be at least 6 tiles apart from each other and that locations that allow for cities are really hard to find later in the game so expand early. The pioneer has two buttons, settle will build a new city and outpost will expand the influence area of an existing city by a 2 tiles in every direction square around the outpost. There is no limit on how far away an outpost can be from the city. [Karma to: DrAtomic1]
Q: When founding a city, does the grain/material values on the surrounding tiles matter?A: No, it has no impact what so ever. Pick the spot with the best values. Don't worry much about nearby special terrain items (shards, gold etc) as you can capture those through outposts, instead concentrate on getting the absolute best values you can for food and materials. Keep in mind you will need a minimum of seven grain (get some through nearby outposts!) to achieve a L5 city. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: Is there a way to the the tile values other than hovering over the settle button on a Pioneer?
A: In the upper right hand corner is a button, press it to have the yields displayed. Note that when you load a saved game it will become unselected and you have to press it again. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: What are outposts good for? Can't I just build another city?
A: Cities can only be build on tiles with grain, outposts can be built anywhere. Also, you might not want to build a city everywhere. Every extra city splits your faction prestige, which allows cities to grow faster. If you build a lot of cities, they will grow very slow. [Karma to: Heavenfall]
Q: Could someone please explain growth, grain, and city leveling? How do you check/estimate when a city will grow again and/or when they're out of grain to continue growth?
A: Grain provides food to feed your people. How much food is a function of your technology, I'll give some more details in a minute. Each person in your city consumes one food to survive, so if you want to achieve a L2 city you need at least 50 food, and 900 food for a L5 city. To get a bigger city you need more food to increase your base multiplier, and then you leverage that with more technology. IMPORTANT!!! There is also a Water/Air spell called Gentle Rain, which increases the food generation of your city by 20%. It can be Extremely beneficial to have either your Sovereign or some other hero able to cast this, and I actively work for it in every single game.
Potential Food Multipliers:
Base (+25).
Civics (+20): Watermill +10 (Kingdom only), Docks +10. Note you need a river for these, so when trying for a huge Metropolis build next to a river.
Restoration (+10): Just for researching you get +10, this also unlocks the ability to build Orchards (+1 Food) and Apiaries (+1 Food / +1 Gildar).
[Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: How can I tell when my city's/cities' Zone of Control (ZoC) will expand based on the prestige I have? What sorts of things increase (or decrease) prestige? Is the only function of prestige to increase my ZoC so I can see things better and have access to building resources?
A: Prestige is not directly related to your ZoC size. Prestige helps grow your cities by adding growth to them which makes them grow faster. Then, as your cities increase in level, they will spread more ZoC up until city level 3 (after that, there are no more ZoC gains from city level). The ZoC is updated the turn AFTER the city gains a level. [Karma to: Heavenfall]
Q: Other than changing the tax rate and building a few buildings (Gallows comes to mind), are there any other ways to deal with Unrest in cities? Do number of cities impact Unrest? How is Unrest calculated?
A: Unrest is generated 100% from taxes. Lower taxes is less unrest. You can impact it through buildings (Gallows, Prison, Town Hall) and spells (Calm or Bless City).
As a general rule I run at zero taxes for as long as possible. Keep your expenses low by not building unnecessary buildings or else destroying them after they are no longer needed. I will commonly build a barracks, crank out a bunch of troops, and then scrap the barracks to save the upkeep costs.
It's like this - early on normal taxes will give you 40% unrest but only generate like 2 gildars. I'd rather have zero unrest and slowly lose money. Raise money by selling stuff, go out and kill things and sell the loot, use said loot to keep your Empire going. The Merchant trait and gold mines can both help a bunch too. Sell the dogs, escape scrolls, fire resistance pots, sand golems etc. They are all worth quite a bit of cash and are of relatively little utility overall. Keep some spare weapons and armour, but when you have a ton of it sell that crap too. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: Are terrain bonuses present in this version FE? There was a post where Brad alluded to their existence. If so, how can we see them?
A: No
Q: Are there specific buildings to choose for each city level e.g. prison only appears when city levels to level 3, or is there a chance to get the option prison at both city level 2 and 3?
A: Improvements are specific to the city level (based on info in CoreAbilites.xml and from experience.) [Karma to: mmilleder]
Q: Is there any benefit to having idle (ZZzz...) production in cities, other than when you build units that do something with them? For instance, does it add Gildar? Research? Growth? Prestige? etc.
A: Some of the level up city improvements provide a bonus (gildar, research) if the city is idle, otherwise there is no benefit.
[Tactic] I will commonly use these cities for Pioneer production, and use them to make sure every last scrap of my claimed area is covered by my influence via outposts. This allows me to order people to leave and have them actually be gone. It also allows me to strategically nuke the bejabbers out of any invaders. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Resources
Q: Which resources are global and which are specific to a given city
A: The only resources which are truly local and can only be consumed locally are the grain resources. All of the others - Iron, Shards, Horses, Wargs, Crystal - go into a global pool and can be used by any city.
Q: What is the importance of iron ore? How does it impact gameplay?
A: Iron ore is used to make metal weapons and armour. For example you need one iron to equip a figure with a Boar Spear. If your unit (such as my current Spiky Armadillos) has five figures then you'll need five iron to train that unit. Metal armour also uses metal, and there are city improvements and racial traits which decrease the amount of metal used.
Q: How is the Crystal resource used to make magical weapons/armor?
A: When you are designing units you can assign them magic weapons, armour and special equipment, all of which will require one or more crystal to construct. Basically its uses are identical to iron, you just can make different and better things with it. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: When you build on a mine inside an outpost, does it cost anything?
A: In the next update (after 0.86) mines will cost 10 gold. [Karma to: Frogboy]
Unit/Sovereign stats, spells and abilities
Q: What is accuracy good for? Is it just archers?
A: Accuracy is used on all attacks with an equipped weapon (Including wands). Accuracy increases by 2 points per level up. My best guess at how this is calculated is: Accuracy/Dodge (needs citation) as a percentage, with the maximum hit rating being 95%. [Karma to: CdrRogdan]
Q: What is intelligence good for? Does it have an affect on spell casters?A: Intelligence helps your spell ability and your spell resistence. [Karma to: Frogboy]
Q: Other than the spells that come out of the magic research tree how does my sovereign gain new spells? How do I determine which spells my sovereign starts with ?
A: Your spellbook is determined by the ranks you have in the various schools of magic. For example if you know Death Magic III you will have access to Antipathy, Berserk, Blindness, Curse, Drain Life and Wither. Other than in the Magic tree there is no researching of spells, you get what you get and that's what you get. As you level up and gain more ranks in the various spell lines you will gain access to more spells.
The only way to gain new spell lines (ie you want Fire and did not start with it at all) is through the Steal Spirit spell. You sacrifice a champion and your sovereign steals one spell rank from the now deceased champion, as long as the rank you steal is greater than what you already have. Example you have Air II, Death II and Water II. If you sacrifice somebody with Fire II you will gain ONE (1) count it ONE (1) rank in Fire magic. Say you later on sacrifice somebody who has Air II, Earth II, and Fire II. You could choose to gain one rank in Earth (Earth I) or one rank in Fire (Fire II, since you already have Fire I). [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: Is there a way to predict the maintenance costs of units generated? Or is there a rule of thumb to apply?
A: It is 10% of the production cost. [Karma to: Manii Names]
Q: How much does normal units actually improve from levelling. Is there an formula, or do I just have to look at stats?
A: They gain greatly in HP (I don't know the formula but CON plays a big part in it). Accuracy goes up by +2 per level, Spell Resistance and Spell Mastery at +1 per level. These values are true for heroes as well.
Q: Will adding the trait Accuracy to my archers make them do more damage
A: The Accuracy trait is essentially equal to +1.5 levels worth of to-hit bonuses. Each figure in a unit has a chance to hit the target, when you attack something they will each make their own individual check to see if they were successful. More accuracy means you're more likely to hit and do damage. If you're building a serious military town try to choose the Training facility at town L2, as it will provide a free and automatic +5 accuracy upgrade for every unit built there. There are also some major city buffs which can greatly enhance the combat effectiveness of newly trained troops as well.
Q: Can the injuries a champion received after losing battle be removed?
A: Currently, they can be removed by using a potion that is sometimes available as a quest reward.
AI
Q: Are monsters more, less or equally likely to attack your city if their lair is taken over by the ZoC?
A: Probably not. Frogboy has alluded to them being fairly intelligent when it comes to deciding to attack or not. They will never simply wander into your city and start a fight. So, monsters only attack or move against you when they think they have a chance to win. I believe that what you are seeing is that the defenders of a goodiehut are often STRONGER than the units a monster lair spawns over time. Therefore, they will act more aggressively. [Karma to: Heavenfall]
UI
Q: Are there any hotkeys?
"Control+N" will start a new game with your preset choices (Sovereign, faction, difficulty etc). Note doing this a bunch of times in a row will crash FE. I suggest that once you find a starting spot you like that you save the game as "Starting" or some such, then exit out completely and relaunch FE with your saved game.
"PrintScreen" saves screenshots in <My Documents>\My Games\FallenEnchantress\ScreenShots. It is also stored temporarily in memory, so if you're making edits in Paint to post here on the forums you can just switch to Paint and paste it in for immediate use. I do this a lot BTW, quite a few of my posts have graphics in them that I made in this manner to help illustrate one point or another.
Pressing "Tab" on the strategic map will select the next unit which still have movement points remaining.
Pressing "Enter" ends your turn.
Pressing "Space" will end the turn of a unit in the tactical map.
Pressing "Space" on the strategic map will end the turn of the currently selected unit, setting it's movement to zero and removing it from the 'Tab' queue. However if said unit is currently on a long journey pressing "Space" in this manner will cause it to not move at all this turn.
"1" through "4" are shortcuts for various views. "1" is the skewed view you start the game with. "4" is zoomed out all the way with the cloth map.
"Control+S" quick-saves the game. I have had extremely bad luck with reloading these games however. Use at your own risk.
When a city is selected, "B" brings up build side bar. "T" brings up unit training side bar. "Escape" will close these side bars. You can hit "B" or "T" to switch back and forth between them. Hitting "D" will pop up the city details window (which the escape key won't close).
When an individual hero is selected, "E" brings up equip window. "T" brings up trade window if another hero is close by.
Q: How can I identify Kingdom versus Empire units in the UI?
A: There is no good way, but by color (each faction has their own color) and once you see them, you can talk to them - actually their leader, and you likely know which side he/she is on. [Karma to: mmilleder]
Combat mechanics and Damage types
Q: Combat mechanics. How do they work? Which values are compared against one another? How are rolls are generated from stats and compared against one another to get hits, misses, clinks and the like?
A: This is to the best of my knowledge.
When rolling to hit in melee, for the attacker's accuracy and the defender's dodge are compared. The game selects one number between 0 and the stat. Whoever rolls higher wins, which means it lands if it's the attacker, or "dodge" if it's the defender. A unit with multiple units roll several times, once for each member. So a unit with 7 members may hit 3 swings in one attack, and 4 would then be dodged. This is not displayed, it simply shows the damage from those 3 hits.
For ranged attacks, accuracy is rolled against "Dodge against ranged" instead. It is also possible that Dodge against ranged is added to the Dodge stat when trying to dodge ranged attacks, I do not know this.When casting a spell that can be resisted (note: many can't), then the attacker uses Spell Mastery and the defender uses Spell Resist. The same roll is performed as when trying to hit with accuracy vs dodge.
As for how much an attack hits for, the following formulas are used:Max Damage = Attack * (Attack / (Attack + Defense)) Min Damage = Max Damage / 2A number is rolled between the minimum and the maximum damage. Therefore, the average damage is just in between minimum and maximum damage as far as I know. Again, just like accuracy and dodge, each member in a unit will roll their own damage. So a unit with 2 members that hit twice will not deal double damage, they will simply perform two attacks that deal normal damage.
There are also resistances in the game. For example, you can have 25% fire resistance. This resistance value is removed from the final damage, after all other things have been taken into consideration. It is possible to have 100% resistance, in which case the unit becomes immune to that damage.
If you are running an un-modded game, in beta 0.86, physical attacks (cutting, pierce, blunt) only have defense values from armor. Magical attacks (fire, cold, lightning, poison) only have resistances. For crits to happen, the game looks at your accuracy vs dodge roll. If your accuracy hit was 10 or more above the dodge roll (above the "threshold"), you may crit. Then, the game checks your crit chance. That is a straight up percentage number. Ie, if you have 20 crit and your accuracy roll was 10 or more above the dodge, you have 20% chance to crit that particular attack. Also, you will notice that trained units can never crit. I believe that spells cannot crit, but ranged attacks and melee attacks can. Note that this kind of threshold mechanic means that accuracy increases your opportunity to crit, and a monster with high dodge will be doubly difficult to crit on, even if you manage to hit it. There is also a few items and traits that make it so that the unit cannot be critted.
The italic parts are things I'm not sure about. [Karma to: Heavenfall]
Q: What is the difference between blunt and cutting damage?
A: Cutting, blunt and pierce damage are completely different types of attack. A weapon usually has only one type of physical damage, and may have additional magical damage such as fire or poison. What type of physical damage is relevant when attacking enemies with different types of defense. Plate armor, for example, is particularly good at defending against blunt attacks. Chainmail is better against cutting damage, and leather it not good against anything in particular. Note that an armor item may say "+20 defense" and "+5 blunt defense". This means that the item has 25 Blunt defense in total, and 20 cutting and piercing defense. [Karma to: Heavenfall]
Q: How does the existing initiative system work and how are "rounds" a part of this process? How can this info be viewed in the UI?
A: Initiatives are used to determine how often a unit gets a turn in battle. A unit with 20 initiative would get twice as many turns as a unit with 10 initiative. [Karma to: Frogboy]
Q: How is a unit's power rating calculated? And how is this value used if you use auto-resolve instead of playing out the tactical battle?
A: The combat rating of a unit is just a rough guide we use to get an approximation of a unit's non magical power. It isn't actually used. Auto-resolve simply plays a simplified version of tactical battles off screen. [Karma to: Frogboy]
Other
Q: What things can I do to improve my relations with other opponents other than crush them with my armies?
A: In 0.86 you can make economic, trade, non-aggression, and alliance treaties with them. These show up in the relations screen as improving your relation. Presumably there will be more options once diplomacy is developed further. [Karma to: Publius of NV]
Manii Names and Heavenfall- the thoroughness of your responses are very helpful!
While it's sweet you can answer these questions, I think the game mechanics need a bit better info and UI to help support their structure. In other words, I agree with the design of the mechanics, but the way it's presented needs to be clarified so it's more understandable, especially the expansion rate for ZoC and city growth. That's probably a reasonable statement for other mechanics in the game (good concept, but implementation needs work). Having veteran guys like you around really helps make things more understandable!
And Manii Names- you need to get an avatar. You post enough it'd be great to single them out for attention rather than just a generic picture.
Other than the spells that come out of the magic research tree how does my sovereign gain new spells? How do I determine which spells my sovereign starts with ?
Your spellbook is determined by the ranks you have in the various schools of magic. For example if you know Death Magic III you will have access to Antipathy, Berserk, Blindness, Curse, Drain Life and Wither. Other than in the Magic tree there is no researching of spells, you get what you get and that's what you get. As you level up and gain more ranks in the various spell lines you will gain access to more spells.
The only way to gain new spell lines (ie you want Fire and did not start with it at all) is through the Steal Spirit spell. You sacrifice a champion and your sovereign steals one spell rank from the now deceased champion, as long as the rank you steal is greater than what you already have. Example you have Air II, Death II and Water II. If you sacrifice somebody with Fire II you will gain ONE (1) count it ONE (1) rank in Fire magic. Say you later on sacrifice somebody who has Air II, Earth II, and Fire II. You could choose to gain one rank in Earth (Earth I) or one rank in Fire (Fire II, since you already have Fire I).
Bonus note: The Wraiths faction has a special racial ability with Death Magic that unlocks a few extra spells. They're strong as hell and very useful, but only accessible to the Wraiths or if you made a custom faction.
Extra Bonus Note: Some spells require ranks in two schools to access. A great one which I really love is Sunder (Earth II, Fire II). It nukes a single elemental target for (4 x caster level) damage. It's not resistable, not typed so immunities to fire etc do not apply, and is great for killing elementals. There are a total of eleven (11) spells like this, you can look them up in the Hiergamenon for specifics but this is the list:
1. Tireless March (A/F). +1 movement for the stack, awesome!
2. Syphon STR (D/E). Steals strength and gives it to the caster. Kind of crappy IMO.
3. Sunder (E/F). Nukes elementals.
4. Stinking Mud (E/W). Awesome battlefield control, I've won a lot of battles with this spell.
5. Soul Burning (D/F). Expensive but huge single target nuke.
6. Nature's Call (E/L). Summons a bear to fight for you.
7. Horiffic Wail (D/W). Mass slow, not as good as it used to be but geez it's MASS SLOW.
8. Gentle Rain (A/W). +20% food for target city. Awesome.
9. Contagion (A/D). Poisons entire battlefield. Awesome if they are not immune to poison.
10. Calm (L/W). -10% unrest in target city. Awesome. I need to quit saying awesome but they are!
11. Battle Cry (A/L). Mass haste, a wonderful spell with lots of units.
Super Extra Bonus Note: Some quest lines grant spells. Alchemy and Confusion spring to mind, there are others as well.
- Manii Names
Great thread!
I'll keep the questions coming (I'm good at that!):
Q: Is there a way to predict the maintenance costs of units generated? Or is there a rule of thumb to apply? (maybe I just missed seeing this)
I noticed my female custom soverin has more int than my male. Are there difference in sex ?
There are differences between races - were your male and female of the same race? I didn't think there were gender differences (but then I'm often wrong).
No, I -think- he was talking about territory bonuses, and that is what was shown in the pic in his posted thread.
It is 10% of the production cost.
Unrest is generated 100% from taxes. Lower taxes is less unrest. You can impact it through buildings (Gallows, Prison, Town Hall) and spells (Calm or Bless City).
It's like this - early on normal taxes will give you 40% unrest but only generate like 2 gildars. I'd rather have zero unrest and slowly lose money. Raise money by selling stuff, go out and kill things and sell the loot, use said loot to keep your Empire going. The Merchant trait and gold mines can both help a bunch too. Sell the dogs, escape scrolls, fire resistance pots, sand golems etc. They are all worth quite a bit of cash and are of relatively little utility overall. Keep some spare weapons and armour, but when you have a ton of it sell that crap too
Avatar added by request!
Ugh it didn't show ... =\ Maybe now?
If I view your profile I see a cute picture of a dog. Don't see it in the forum though.
We need to get this thread stickied
I would actually prefer this wasn't sticked unless one of the designers responded to these questions and made it an official thread.
I cannot cite the source. Hit ratings are 80-90% because those are the odds of rolling higher on a 1-22 roll than a 1-4 roll.edit: Quick experiment in-game, I used a 9 accuracy unit against a 9 dodge unit. The to-hit chance was 50%, as expected.
You are right to question it, I'm not expecting anyone to take what I say as the ultimate truth of things. As I said, this is to the best of my knowledge. That means it's the accumulated knowledge of what I know about the game.
I agree with this. Even in my own posts I said there are things I'm not sure about. Also, there is the very big chance of things changing in the beta. They tweak practically everything in every update.
This summarizes one of my main problems with the current city system.
Just pick the most valuable spot and forget about everything else. That's too much streamlining. Where's the "playing" part gone? I'm supposed to have to evaluate and plan before selecting a spot. Here I could just push an autoselect button.
While it's awesome to see Brad post and reply so much and have occasional posts from Kael, it'd be cool to see some posts from the dev and any other people involved in design. One of the dangers there was the WoM problems, where they'd ask for feedback and the scope/function of the feature would go crazy. On the other hand, it'd be rocking-awesome to see a detailed post on various strategies you could use in the game, in-depth info on the game's mechanics, features of their game engine, etc. Please, Stardock?
Most of the stuff in this thread will make it into a manual, eventually. I know all of the stuff I have posted is correct as of 0.86, but it could change for 0.90. I hope some of it does, honestly.
I have built quite a few cities in sub-optimal locations for the purposes of territory control and defense. Blocking a mountain pass can have a huge impact on your defensive strategies.
- Now with more doggy goodness! And yes he's my little beagle.
City levelling
Are there specific buildings for each city level e.g. prison only appears at city level 3, or is there a chance to get the option prison at both city level 2 and 3?
Is it possible to get this thread sticked e.g. put at the top of the forum as I believe many would find this thread useful.
If you built a city on a 4/3 spot with forest on some of the surrounding tiles, and if you remove the forest either by building or just remove them, will the material for this city be different.
Also if you snake your city towards forest or other terrain features (mountain, river, mines etc.) can you increase the original yield for a city?
Disclaimer: These answers come from my own in-game observations with v0.86, and may change in future revisions.
[Edit] Added info on how to find the city buildings in XML.
[Edit] Note on forests
Yes there are specific buildings. Prison is L4 BTW
You can find a list of these available buildings by looking in your FE folder. The file you want is "CoreAbilities.xml" and the path to mine is C:\Games\FallenEnchantress\data\English\CoreAbilities.xml. Yours may vary depending on where you installed it. Once you have that file open (IE works fine) then search for "CityLevel" and that will take you to the start of the L2 buildings. Scroll down to see the L3 etc ones.
No, available grain and materials for a city are fixed once you found it.
One exception - if a city is razed then the original city square becomes unbuildable, and the removal of forests in the surrounding area definitely (see it myself in-game) impact the value of the squares if/when you try to rebuild.
Bonus note: I VERY rarely remove forested lands around my cities. I find them to be of great defensive value, slowing the pace of attackers as they approach. If you really need to cut them down because they are impeding your own progress then by all means do so, but I advise not to if it is unnecessary.
Original city yield is set in stone and doesn't change, with very few exceptions. Offhand I can think of building a Blacksmith for +1 materials and a Bakery for +1 food / -1 materials.
This is a great thread and needs the sticky treatment.
Although, shouldn't Stardock be documenting how the game works and how to play it. That would be definitive.
I expect they will, when the game is finalized. Based on Brad's comments about Beta 3 and Beta 4 I don't expect that to be for another 6 months or so. In the meantime we'll make do with threads like this.
I just played a game where one of my cities ran out of space early game. I saw that it had rivers and wood around it, and for the first time I chopped away some forrest. This did not help and I could not build anymore in that city. Kinda game stopping. Shouldnt this chopping have freed space?
Main thread updated. HUGE thank you to those who are providing info to me and the rest of the clueless crowd.
One thing: please try to post short and to the point answers. The main post is already hard to update with all the text.
Again, thank you!
Ready for another slew of questions?-
Disclaimer: the contents of this message may cause disease, and/or self-immolation. Read at your own risk. Information is current as of v0.86.
Some of the level up city improvements provide a bonus (gildar, research) if the city is idle, otherwise there is no benefit.
[Tactic] I will commonly use these cities for Pioneer production, and use them to make sure every last scrap of my claimed area is covered by my influence via outposts. This allows me to order people to leave and have them actually be gone. It also allows me to strategically nuke the bejabbers out of any invaders.
When you are designing units you can assign them magic weapons, armour and special equipment, all of which will require one or more crystal to construct. Basically its uses are identical to iron, you just can make different and better things with it.
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