While the first impressions are still fresh, please go here:
https://www.elementalgame.com/journals
and vote on what you think of Beta 4.
Thanks!
Had another run.
I'm having a lot of fun, despite the various issues here and there. It seems there is a solid core, at last.
The game is difficult, though. Of course I hardly know how it works yet - still, getting a newly found village hammered by 100+ attack monsters seems harsh. I wouldn't know how to counter that even with the "Hero Squad" as defendants. Every other faction is more than doubling my power score after a handful of turns... not sure what they're doing better.
Anyway, as I said, I'm having fun so far.
I would still vote Good. I only got to play a two hours or so, but I really enjoyed the game. I like the essence change for cities. The flow of the game was good. The art and graphics were good, and I liked the UI once I got fmailiar with the changes. I am looking forward to getting some more play time in.
My major concern is still the Champions. I still do not feel any any attachment or immersion to the sovereign and the champions. I still think this is because Sovereigns and Champions are basically the same. Champions are still to powerful compared to the Sovereign. They have the exact same spells, and their damages are comparable. Either the Sovereign is very underwhelming or the Champions are too powerful. Magic needs to be derived from the Sovereign. The essence idea for cities is great, I would like to see the same sort of system for Champions. A champion with 3 essence can have three enchantments placed on him. These enchantments could be buffs, or enchantments that grant the ability to cast tactical spells, or limit their damages and access to mana. You never really have to train troops because you start walking around with pretty powerful champions very early in the game. The only real purpose for troops is a meat shield. They are both physically and magically powerful. I like the injury system but one of the possible "injuries" needs to death.
The little glitches not to worried about. It is a beta, and most of these will get polished out. Had a boar spear last night and was still getting countered, and I saw a couple of the others. The turn ending without everyone moving is a little annoying
Under game options tick off "Auto-turn". First thing I always do when I get a TBS game - after I move my units, I want to have the option to change city queues if necessary.
Anyway, I'm enjoying the game so far. The pacing seems a bit slow, however, and money is rarer than hen's teeth. Or maybe it's just me.
You can turn auto-turn off in the settings menu.
Edge scroll and the delay can also be tweaked to your preference in the settings menu. I prefer to hold left click and drag the map to where I want to go. You can also zoom in and out to move the map to where the cursor is pointing. Might want to play around with the settings a little. There are lots of good options there.
Right now, it's too early for me to vote, but I'm seeing one pacing problem
I think it's too easy to get a bunch of cities, the one game I got to play, I had like 5-6 cities before I really had any interaction with anyone.
I'd also like to see Civ 4 style popups when you're finished building in a city, so you can decide what to build next. The way Civ does it hasn't been beat yet, and I wish Stardock would copy it.
I have played for a couple of hours. I'm still very much in the early stages of my first game in beta 4 on normal difficulty, on a large map, with 4 opponents. I am getting my butt nicely handed to me. Loving it so far.
Wanted to vote "Excellent", but have only voted "Good" because of this reason:
- Since last playing the FE beta, which is a few months, my email address has changed. The game would not allow me to log in, because of this. Had to edit my icon to include my username and password as command line parameters. This shouldn't be necessary. The game should really pop up with a log-in screen.
Other than that. As I said, I am loving it so far. The game feels much more finished now. But it's not quite there yet.
How could someone vote terrible? Anyway I voted excellent really love the changes so far and you guys are definitly moving in the right direction.
i voted good but its better alot then beta 3
it would be awesome if i could turn of the attack animation at the strategic map, it takes alot of time when someone swings a weapon
and i think i found a bug that you can rename champions that are not your own :0
Same, after a long wait there are a ton of great improvements, the hard work put in by the development team really shines through!
One area I believe the game still needs a lot of work in is the UI and feedback to the player in general.
For outposts it is a mystery on how many turns something takes to build until you start construction and then go back to the city its attached to. Is there a way to change which city an outpost is attached to yet? Also I read in the notes there is now a minimum range but that does not seem to be so as I've had outposts in other outposts radius! Outpost Spam still exists, and there still doesn't seem to be any defense you can put up against enemies stomping your resources and seizing your outposts without manually assigning units as garrison. On that note, Tarth seems to rely solely on pioneer spamming the early game.
For city building it is still awkward to move things around in the queue and often times its just easier to manually clear out the queue and re-add everything in the order you'd like. When you go to build a building you should be able to double-click on it to add it to the queue.
Its nice that Research screen lets you know that a tech is complete, however I still find myself not knowing if a city is not producing or just starting on a new item or if a character has completed his movement waypoint. I think there used to be a highlighted square at the very least but it perhaps because I am playing as Kraxis it is messed up if the highlight is yellow/gold?
You should be able to change your email: I did at one time, at the very least Stardock Support can do this.
An AI flaw: the AI is trying hard to get the first hit in, but messes this up in several ways:
I love the essence resource, utter game-changer in a good way.
Love everything, except...Animations in combat are dreadfully slow, and it appears that you cant mouse to the edge of the screen to move it any more? Anyone else experiencing this?I love playing out every combat, but it's so slow that I've started to auto resolve a lot. I'm sure I could turn animations off, but with my graphics card I shouldn't need to.
Hello,
youre on the right way with this game, its the first that can kiss the feet of Master of magic(MoM). I still play Mom with Dosbox and its crazy that the old thing from the last millenium can make more fun than new games with 3dgraphics. And i played Fall from heaven and master of mana but thats only mods for civ. warlock was only eyecandy shit. youre game has better graphics and better sound and if you insert a good campaign that MoM never had it can kick Mom from the throne. Please let it be a the game were waited for the gamemessias of fantasystrategy
some bugs i saw:
- the leader sometimes stuck, i saw some other players already told it
- after loading autosave the leader was missing, he/she wasnt there but with the older second autosave he was there
It really does..
Ah great, thanks..!
Read full thread to learn how to fix edge scroll.
Battle animations can go at 1x, 2x,5x. Switch to 5x for fastest animations.
Voted Good. I think I voted Fair last time. The new city mechanics really did change the pace and feel of the game, for the better.
The game is in its way to be a great game, however if you want an Excellent from me the game still needs more work than just balancing and polishing.
1 - The world is supposed to be devastated, but by turn 40 it is always difficult to find wild places because the AI settle so aggressively. In CiV 5 by comparison you would get a large continuous territory only in the industrial age. A new town should come after a great investment by the players.
2- The new outposts mechanics is cool, but they are too fragile. Some of them should provide a garrison if attacked.
3- The tactical combat is still bland, though it is still improving. Zone of Control, Backstabs( based on facing, surrounding penalties/bonus should improve it more.
4- The SFX are atrocious. I mean, the music is great, but the strike sounds, the shouts, they are terrible and really need improving.
5- Diplomacy could still see some work.
It may look a bit critic, but I like the game. It is on the right track, but IMO for it to become a great game, instead of just a good one, there is still quite a bit of work to be done.
Dear Derek or Frogboy, please have a look on these comments about Beta 4 and try to implement them if they sound reasonable to you as well
I play Difficulty Expert, Size Medium, Monsters Dense. I'm very impressed by amount of work done for Beta 4. Lots of lots of pleasure to play. Special thanks for a deep atmosphere and feeling of epic events going on inside the game world. However:
- Too much micromanagement. Not a nice feeling to always think about and micromanage tens of resources, their upgrades, outposts, three times as much buildings and their upgrades as well.
- Essence is not balanced. Affects based on essence quantity scatter too much. Second, I wish to be able to add more than 1-2 enchantments (+1 conclave) on my largest cities, especially with new nice added spells. I was always using inspiration, ench. hammers, empower and gentle rain in Beta 3 in all my big cities. Its frustrating to have saved mana and not being able to spend it on cities economy.
- After lvls 8-9 new levels progress too slowly. To go from 9 to 10 I need around 1000 xp, its equivalent of killing two dragons. Sovereign stops advancing at lvl 10 by the moment when all medium map is cleared. Archmage spell ranking is almost unreachable unless you strongly focus on one spell school without taking any other talents. I think best would be the lvl progression somewhere in a middle between Beta 3 and 4.
- Cities still are too weak. My concentated army at Expert Difficulty can wipe out 4-5 enemies cities in 10-15 turns with no effort and game is over. Cities economy is much less important than what your champion or sovereign can do on a world map. I wish cities to be more important: stronger city defenders (!), more spells available to defend a city (like wall of fire), more possibilities to increase food and growth.
Bugs
- when amount of essence changes in the city, related spells don't update the strength of their effect.
- AI doest use its full movement when it can already reach opponent. It moves only 1 square/turn.
- spells panel sometimes disappears during first turn on tactical map (since Beta 3)
- eye of the eagle spell doesn't work. I wasn't able to see more with this spell (since Beta 3)
- shrink spell reduce attack of Juggernaut to zero. (since Beta 3)
Balance
- Destiny insight spell too expensive, 25xp per 250 mana. Noone uses it. It should be something like 25 xp per 25-50 mana.
- Avariance now gives 1 guildar per essence per 200 mana. Too expensive. Investment should pay off for 15-20 turns. It should cost 25-30 mana like enhanced hammers or.
- Berserk spell does more cons. than pros. It should be something like +4 attack -1 hp per turn instead of +2 atack -1 hp per turn
- Gentle rain now gives 25% food increase per essence. Its iverpowered. It should be 10-15% per esence.
- Death lash spell is +3 attack + 3 init nad unit is killed per 20 mana. It should be something like +5 +5 per 7 mana to be worth of killing a trained unit.
- Curse city 500 mana per 10% unrest is too expensive. In Beta 4 its easy to decrease unrest. It should cost something like 70-100 mana. I would personally never use this spell. There are much more valuable investments for such amount of mana.
- lvl 5 conclave improvements are useless compared to owerpovered +1% treasury interest (town) and -30% unrest all cities (fortress)
- please change a feat "quick" from +1 initiative to +2. since levels progress slower now +1 initiative is a total waste of a feat.
- feat +15% xp now does not pay off. Player needs to advance of at least 7 levels to get this investment back. Since levels progress slower this feet is not usefull compared to others.
to bro from above ^
Anything good?
It had to take you a while to get all that out. I haven't even played it yet. Do you have anything positive to say about it?
If he is taking the time to write all that, it must have been alot of playtime. Great list!
I just finished a long game. I had lots of fun but I couldn't actually win due to a repeating crash. Definitely an Excellent in my books although there are tons of bugs, AI issues, and balance issues left. With the Economic system in place the game has finally come together.
I very much enjoyed playing it last night. Its funny how small changes like the different fonts improve things so much.
I haven't played enough to vote yet, but its definitely left me wanting to play more.
I find it funny when people complain so much about little things in these forums. Some guy complained about picking up three hate stones? I mean c'mon, random is random.
Some bug clean up and UI polish left, but I really like it, and I'm sure these things will be addressed.
If I did have a wishlist, I wouldn't mind if the champions mostly looked different than something I could create for my own sov. And also the people I meet in the quests, like the merchant that offers me a map to treasure, he looks too much like the Altair sov. Just little things.
I have not yet seen a crash in beta 4.
The issues that I see so far are:
1. Early game pace seems too slow now
2. Some tactical combat screens go into very, very slow mode. I saw that in beta 3 as well.
I voted good, BUT the poll NEEDS a very good, the only significant issue that I had in my ONE test game was that the spellbook does NOT remember which page it was on, so every time I want to repeatedly cast a spell I have to page through the ENTIRE spellbook to get to the spell that I want to use, and it is a spell that I tend to use atleast 5 times per turn in the late game.
harpo
This. Listen to this guy.
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