So much fun stuff to talk about. Let me start by owning up to a mistake that I made.
In my faction differentiation thread I talked about adding new traits and abilities for pre-designed units. When you asked if those were specific to various factions I said that they were open to anyone, because I wanted players designing their own units to have as many tools as possible. Many people cautioned me against that, and you were right.
I have been living in faction differentiation land and been doing a lot of work detailing exactly what each faction can and can't do. Though I like a player's ability to customize his units, it has to be secondary to the differences between the factions if faction differentiation is to mean anything. This became more important as we added more abilities to each faction.
I always get excited when we start to talk about abilities that may be too powerful to balance. Can Yithril start all the trained units off at 2nd level? (yes, but they won't get access to ranged units). Can Kulan have an ability that allows him to take control of enemy beasts in combat? (yes, but it has a range of 1 and a 2 turn casting time, you better be able to survive 2 turns of cave bear attacks if you want to capture one).
We won't have all the new faction abilities in by the start of Beta 3. But there will be enough that you all can start playing with them and providing feedback. One of the ones we were focusing on last week was Magnar. They can't build any growth improvements, no Inn, no Pub, no Brewery, etc. But when they defeat men or fallen in combat (be they bandits or enemy armies) they add them as population to the nearest Magnar city. And they keep the ability to take population from the cities they raze. People aren't flooding out of the wilderness to join Mangar cities, they need a bit more proding.
Magnar doesn't get any new weapon or armor. But they have a new unit type they can design from. If you go into the Unit Design screen you have Male and Female at the bottom. Some factions have other options they can design on, for Magnar that’s slave units.
Slaves don’t have any training cost and you don't have to pay them wages. You still need to pay for the training time to make whatever weapons and armor you give them, and their stats aren't very impressive. At some point you will want to use real Quendar units if you are already spending the time to craft valuable armor and weapons. But for good cheap archers, warg riders and militia, slaves work great (and you can't beat 0 wages)
We used to have the conscripts trait that was attempting to provide a similar benefit, but it didn't work as well. Now there is a nice visual distinction between the larger Quendar units and the smaller slaves they are marshaling into battle.
Magnar also gets access to unique spells. Death Lash makes a unit dramatically more powerful, but then kills it at the end of battle. Cull the Weak kills one of your own trained units but heals the caster and gives back some mana. For Magnar their cheap slaves are fodder, have fun with them.
Another piece of feedback that I took to heart was that a lot of the damage types and resistances were underutilized. In general the differences between weapons and their impact on other armies or monsters didn't mean as much as I wanted. I was being too subtle. So I went through every monster and gave them dramatic strengths and weaknesses. Trolls are all vulnerable to fire, Ice Elementals have no defense against blunt weapons. Naja and Stalkers are immune to counter attacks. Ogres all have bad spell resistance. Nearly every monster has areas where it is weak, and areas where it is strong.
The same thing has been done with armies. Armor has been rebalanced and instead of being 50% more effective against certain damage types it is 100% more effective. Abilities have been added to all weapons. Swords all have counterattack. All axes have backswing. Spears still have armor piercing, but they also make the unit immune to counter attack. Hammer type weapons don't have an ability but tend to be big, slow and do lots of damage to make up for it.
What weapon you use matters. And many of the factions have special versions that drive this even further. Krax has one handed versions of the spears that they can use with shields. Umber has scimitars that have backswing and counterattack. Pariden has a staff that shoots lighting. Yithril has a great axe that has armor piercing (it's devastating).
Another example, races now give a bloodline trait. Ironeer's get +6 to Spell Resistance and an additional Hit Point per level, but their tactical spells cost 50% more than normal. This applies to trained units and any Ironeer champions you recruit (regardless of what race you are playing as). It also applies to any custom sovereign you create that has Ironeer as their race. All Pariden units get a minor boost depending on the amount of shards and the type of shards you control. All Wraiths get -1 hit point per level, but they heal 3 hit points whenever they kill an opponent.
We have a lot of faction differentiation work to do, but it is coming together nicely. Now that the base game mechanics are there and working, we can have fun polishing and creating all the special stuff that makes it special. Thanks again to all of you for providing feedback and I'm looking forward to more when Beta 3 releases.
That all sounds great. Do we really have to wait ´til April 12 ?
Sound squite interesting...
Who said it was april 12th?
Frogboy did. In a post called "FE BETA 3: April 12"
https://forums.elementalgame.com/420782
Well it sounds like you've been working hard on things...my opinion however won't change much unless the nasty crashing the threading technology you're using stops killing the game on me. If it doesn't all the changes won't matter much cause I'll only ever see 1 or 2 races on the map cause any more causes crashes after about 50 turns. Still painfully awaiting custom races and dynasties...which were my favorite aspect of WoM. Think I'll go back and play that some more.
Lots of good stuff there. Does Razing a city still completely wipe it from the map no matter the town's size? For slave traders I would think they would "Pillage" a city, forcing it to drop a complete size and obtaining a portion of the citizens pillaged as slaves. So level 3 would become a level 2 city with no future city growth reward when/if it becomes larger. Random city improvements destroyed. Razing a large city in one turn is a bit hard to swallow.
Some good choices made here. I agree it is better to go overboard with damage and resistances and uberness of abilities, and then *slowly* reel it in with balance patches--rather than to go underboard and try to enhance it later. Persona 3 has probably the hardest system of counters I think I've ever seen in a game, but the turn-based combat still stayed engaging throughout a lengthy game, and while not very difficult once you understood the system, it was fun overall.
Go big, or go home indeed! These look like great changes, or at the very least a great place to start evaluating. Can't wait for the 12th!
Sounds like Kraxis is going to be my most played faction; I LOVE 1h spear + shield combos.
This sounds fantastic. I can't wait to see the next beta.
Suggestion for hammers: You currently have AOE spells in the game but no weapons that do AOE damage (as far as I know). Why not keep hammers slow, with lots of damage, but make the damage type AOE and spread it among all the surrounding enemy units? Then it would make an excellent weapon for your front-line warrior types that typically get surrounded.
With the drastic differences with weapons, we'll really need the ability to swap to an alternate weapon in tactical combat.
Sounds very exciting. I like where your going with this.
The main reason the armor system never got used wasn't because weaknesses were too understated it was because for half the game you only had one type of armor, and when you did get new armor it was a no brainer to always use it. If you make armor weaknesses larger without giving us more armor options then we we will simply see one type of weapon dominate early game.
This ability actually encourages quantity over quality, which I don't think was what you were aiming for.
Hopefully all these cool new abilities and items are mostly based off faction instead of race. I like having a lot of freedom when designing new factions.
Sounds great!
Screw balance, make the game fun and diverse. MoM had virtually zero balance, yet people worship the silicon it was coded on. Imbalance also provides a nice way for players to make the game more challenging without having to let the AI cheat. Pick the underdog race and stack your opponents with the overpowered ones.
Exactly. Unbalanced stuff is the FUN stuff. You balance it with cost, not against other things which are intended to be balanced. Spell which sears the eyeballs out of all your opponents, making them permanently blind, and doing 20 fire damage? Sure! 50 Mana per cast. Enjoy!
This stuff all looks amazing. Positively amazing. Is there any plans for including unit trainable abilities which are linked to specific weapon types? Axes only abilities, for instance?
When it comes to faction differentiation, there is one 4X/grand-strategy game I have played in my entire life that stands out above all others. And that game is Fall From Heaven 2.
I am SO glad that you are working on faction differentiation now Kael, because honestly...I couldn't think of a better person to do this. Every faction is FFH2 just felt so unique, I played it so many times because I wanted to experience the game from different perspectives.
So when I read this post I got REALLY excited. Your description of how the Magnar get pop reminded me of the Infernals in FFH2. I know you're going to do an awesome job with faction differentiation, and I really can't wait to see it .
I agree with the voice that suggests there should be a special effect for hammers too. Slow with massive damage is not exciting enough. I concur that a small stun chance, or perhaps a sunder or knockdown effect, could benefit the weapon.
This sounds awesome. A nit-pick: but can you make sure the kingdom's main color as represented in the UI matches the kingdom's zone of control color on the map?
These are awesome changes! Really looking forward to playing as the slave-driving, cannon-fodder-based, Magnar now!
I would like to second that hammers should get a special feature as well and not the subtle bonus you mentioned in the journal entry.
One concern over spears: if spears turn out to both pierce armor AND eliminate the bonuses affixed to other types of weapons, then what weapon counters spears? Will spears be extremely heavy (reduce movement) or have lower damage output?
How is this stuff implemented with regards to custom faction creation? Obviously the "bloodline" stuff is inherent to the races, not factions. But what of the rest? I want to be able to make a faction of trogs with a totally different bonus and penalty. Are you deviating from the current "everything is one point" scheme?
Will beta 3 readjust damage calculations for stacks? It affects everything ranging from kiting to glass cannons, see below.
FE's system measures X amount of damage successfully dealt always equals Y number of units per stack are dead, no exceptions. That includes magical damage too. The problem is distribution of the damage dealt. If I dealt 10 damage against ten units, should two of them always fall dead 100% of the time or should there be a possibly of only one dropping dead with five others wounded etc?
I'm going to start by saying that I'm impressed with all the work you guys have put into the game thus far, and hope to see the game become a great game in the end. It's win-win for everyone, IMO.
However, on topic, if I may add my 2 cents: there's no need to completely neglect customized factions when you try to add faction differentiation. A lot of what you are saying can be done with the current customization system, all that needs to be done is to tie those "differences" into traits that you select for your factions instead of making it certain faction specific. Big, impactful traits that you simply can't pick more than one of (or maybe you could, but only at the cost of completely gimping your faction on other fronts), and perhaps you could neglect all together for some more mundane ones. It would mean you have to rebalance the traits a bit to make custom factions fair, but that shouldn't be something you need to pull your hair out over (sometimes a bit of unfairness is fun too). This will allow people to create split factions that plays mostly like the original, but with minor differences for personal taste... or perhaps bigger twists... like a Magnar that don't use slaves at all... *gasps*. If you make it Magnar only, you'll be stuck playing them the same way all the time. I don't see why doing this would be detrimental to faction differentiation, as long as you make the custom factions pick and choose what they can and cannot do (As in, don't let them do everything).
That's awesome, I'm so glad you made the choice that differentiation trumps customization, and everything you said sounds great. Sounds like Magnar is getting a lot of love (I'm sure other factions are too).
Anyway, I can't say how excited I am about faction differentiation. I'm not even sure if I should post the above ideas as it might dilute the message of yay differentiation and damage types!
Sounds great. Look forward to seeing another patch to the game finally.
Nice work. Keep going.
I strongly agree with what Kalin has said regarding faction differentiation and custom factions. Simply put all of the special race conditions and bonuses of a certain race in a "can only choose one of these traits only" in the faction editor, and tie all the special conditions to the race trait, not the race itself. Obviously the built-in races/sovereigns would use the default values, but I think it would be fantastic and very sensible if you could use one of the race archetypes as you have described for Magnar and use them for a custom sovereign/faction, or even apply them to another of the pre-existing races. Just make sure that these special conditions are "one choice only" (and while we're talking about this, make mutual exclusivity an selectable modder option for all race, sovereign, champion and unit traits) and we're good to go without having custom factions out in the cold and lacking flavour!
"They can't build any growth improvements, no Inn, no Pub, no Brewery, etc. But when they defeat men or fallen in combat (be they bandits or enemy armies) they add them as population to the nearest Magnar city."
Don't those improvements affect how much food your city produces and hence how much population you can support? Do the slaves just fend for themselves in that regard? Do the enslaved populace produce taxes or do they produce wealth for their masters via slave labor? Will we have to lure enemies to our big cities to get the population boost needed? Or will large cities develop near high combat zones because of this feat? I am curious to see what kind of game play develops due to this kind of faction differentiation, though more interested to see if there are neat unanticipated play styles that develop due to changes.
I like what I see, go big or go home is the essence of epic fantasy in my opinion. As a recent convert to the vast realms of D&D, I find a lot of value in being able to role play in my games. I am the guy who will create a character and stick to decisions that strategically make no sense, but work great in the story in my head. I would really like to be able to take the characters we've known for so long and really go wild. Like some on here, I tend to be a screw balance, I'll do what I want kind of dude (which kills a lot of my D&D characters -- I'm the opposite of a minmax in a party of minmaxed out freaks of nature).I don't know what plans there are for any multi-player yet, but that is one place I think this game could thrive. It has the necessary role play elements and mod tools for games to be hosted with all player-factions and less of a push to "win" and just enjoy the story. This is harder to do with the AI, especially because you can't really have a true organic diplomatic chat with them... yet.
Anyway, I am rambling, but I would like to see more variation in classes too, for soldiers, champions, and sovereigns alike. Bards would be cool, while there are abilities that give army bonuses to combat, it's not that specialized. Druids are awesome (and broke) in D&D, being able to turn into a cave bear with the power of say an earth shard and a water (or two earth and a life, something like that).
That is all my rambling for now. Part of me would like to wait to just see the finished product and not get involved in this beta stuff, but it's addicting!
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