This is a situation that particularly highlights the need for SOME options for alignment. Knowing that a Dragon can target 9 Units if they are lined up, no sane commander with control of the situation would put all units next to each other.
Even if we had an option before battle to choose Close or Spread, it would still be an infinite improvement on the current situation. Commanders don't go lining up for a Dragon's Breath, well I wouldn't.
Clearly, LH needs SOME option/s for preparing formation of troops before battle.
Also, check out amount of experience the units got, WITH XP boosts. For a unit that can damage pretty much all of your units and kill 3 instantly on its first turn, do you think 17 XP is sufficient? (+10% Altar, +10% Brilliant, All three Potential Traits, 2 +XP Artifacts)
Looks like it only gave 8 exp, and your exp bonuses doubled it. Gotta love the new LH exp system.
Well, in that case it's even worse... Definitely needs a change.
The combat to XP rate has been changed to 0.05. In FE was 0.075. You can see it el ElementalDefs.xml
I think it's working just fine. It's made the game "more challenging". I'm certainly glad for non-balance items and things in the game that keep it that way. Too many changes can ruin a game just take a look at AOW:SM if you don't believe it.
Sort of agree, was quite a pain to do the eye of dragon quest. Had 2 champs, 4 jugs, 2 heavy armor cav. Cast natures whatever on them for the 20% reduction (no earth shards) and lost 1 champ, 3 jugs and a horse in the first round of fear and flame. Had csila for initial mass curse and a badass sov. Still took 5 reloads to be able to just beat it, let alone with any sort of army left.
Which is kind of fine - its 3 dragons.
The xp afterwards was terrible. I've gotten way more xp taking out spiders and critters.
*snort* *hack* *cough* I just almost choked on my mini-quiche. AoW:SM is my favorite 4x game, way at the top of my list, it's what I compare every other game in the genre to, much like many people here do with MoM. There was absolutely nothing "ruined" in that game or by that expansion.
That really has nothing to do with what's wrong with the exp in LH. Dragons have a much, much, higher combat rating than a few weak darklings, but the darklings usually give much more exp. I believe it's the game adjusting the exp down when a weaker army kills something much stronger, so they don't gain several levels at once, but they overtuned this way too much resulting in, for example, dragons that nobody wants to deal with because the risk vs reward is upside down. Changing the combat rating exp percent to 0.075 in the OPs example would have only made the base exp ~12 instead of 8, that's not any better.
Yeah, I have noticed in my games that battles against stronger mobs tend to give very disappointing amounts of experience. If the game is really reducing experience gain based on the strength of the army, all I can say is that that is a totally stupid idea.
Right now, the feedback loop on experience is completely broken. There's just too many things that muddy the water. First, there's no way to know, going into a battle or quest how much experience you stand to gain if you win. For a battle, any estimate the player might make is pretty much guaranteed to be wildly different the actual experience earned. It's even worse for quests, because you get zero feedback about experience (unless your hero manages to level).
Mechanics like splitting experience between heroes, calculating the experience earned dynamically based on the strength of your army, or not displaying experience gained due to quests only serve to muddy the experience loop to the point of irrelevance.
From my perspective stardock can go two diametrically opposite directions.
A: Continue to obfuscate everything that has to do with experience. In which case, get rid of the after-battle report. The information there is pretty much useless. If you don't want the player to strategize and min-max experience, then don't show it to us. Heroes will continue to level semi-randomly, meaningless battles will continue to generate outsize gains while epic battles with mass casualties result in tiny benefits. The RPG element of the game will suffer, of course, but c'est la vie.
B: Make experience explicit. Make monsters give a fixed amount of experience and show us the experience gain on the pre-battle report and on the quest's opening page. Any calculation that goes into experience should be explicit and consistent throughout the game. Don't use secret sliding scales based on army strength; in fact, don't do anything tricky behind the scenes. If the monster gives heroes 10xp, and your hero is in the army that killed it, your hero gets 10xp.
If it's too much trouble to go back and fix everything so that experience makes sense, then I would go with option A. Otherwise, fixing experience so that it makes logical sense would be a great improvement to an already great game.
I think the game makes you lose potential exp when you have units die. It's pretty extreme too and not sure why it was added. I'd think a survivor bonus would make more sense than a survivor penalty.
Yes, this is a very important thing to fix! Currently you earn much more experience defeating comparatively weak mobs and get penalized when tough monsters kill some of your units. Of course they kill some of your units, they're tough! Why get penalized for that? Especially when standing together (no formations currently) + Dragon + Frying on first turn kills a whole lot of your units BEFORE you've HAD A TURN.
You have to get the risk/reward balance right for most things, or it completely undermines the game. Currently having no tough creature bonus, no formations and a possible penalty for losing units (against a Dragon! of all things) is really unfun.
Devs, what are your thoughts? Can you provide a higher default XP rate (or option to do so without editing game files), better rewards for tough monsters (especially Dragons with the fire breath and monsters with high attack and overpower or maul), and some form of Formation support? I think we need all three.
"I think it's working just fine. It's made the game "more challenging". I'm certainly glad for non-balance items and things in the game that keep it that way. Too many changes can ruin a game just take a look at AOW:SM if you don't believe it."
I play AOW:SM extensivley and I'm not seeing what you mean by this statement. This is still the best game in the General to date (But AOW3 may change that.) And with all the updates as well as the community path and unit mods this game has become very challanging as well as fun. But even the Vanilla game was fun.
"snort" "hack" "cough" Fraid you are "very wrong" about that as it's the worst of the whole bunch of fantasy 4x games. It has the WORST AI I've ever played against and I cannot stress worst enough. Playing with all AI on EXPERT I could easily wipe all of them off the map with little to no effort. It might and I say might have been a fair MP game but the community ruined that game with that last patch for "balance" for the MP game. I've played fantasy strategy and 4x and wargames since Warlords I so I know my fantasy games pretty well. I wouldn't recommend that POS to a blind person.
You are really alone on that opinion. The poster above you agrees with me, and AoW has been brought up on these forums by many other people in the past as a shining example of where Elemental could aim for. Gamerankings.com also has Shadow Magic at 83.59%, slightly above the base game, while metacritic has it a 82% with a user score of 9.0. It's an amazing game, and you are the first person I have ever seen attack it. You are welcome to your opinion, I'm not going to try to change your mind, just know that everyone here is going to look at you funny when you say bizarre and alien things like that. Also make sure you are thinking of the right game.
Thanks for the clarification, I see the issue now. Yes, it looks like an excessive correction.
I completely agree with your analysis. I understand that perhaps it may be very difficult to tune up the whole XP system, but Stardock devs have a tool at their disposal in this forum. If they shared all the mechanics that result in the final XP awarded (by implementing your option B ) there could be a discussion here about if modifier X it's too high or too low, or if modifier Y makes sense or does not make sense etc.
Lol Gamerankings and Metacritic? you actually BELIEVE those scores? lmao The reviewers have been sooooooo WRONG on sooooooooo many games it's hilarious. Well I see where you "mentality" is now well below "intelligent" when you start spouting and BELIEVING scores from those websites.
Also "everyone" here does NOT agree with you because I have seen others who don't like AOW:SM so don't try to use false information to bolster your own "opinions" lol
Sorry to disappoint you but you are wrong as I don't care for AOW:SM because of the lame AI and if a game doesn't have a decent AI it's not worth playing and certainly not worth those scores. Reviewers do not always get it right take a look at what they gave Rome Total War and then play it for yourself. So don't go making ass-u-(not)me-tions that everybody here agrees with you or about AOW:SM.
Opinions are opinions, and everyone has them. Even gamerankings and metacritic are a kind of averaged opinion. But instead of having a big fight about who is right, why not just accept that you have different opinions? Because unless an opinion contains factual errors (and there are not many "true facts" in this world) then they are all right, but are the result of different value judgments. Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic has a great atmosphere but not very good AI, though some mods I think have improved it. Why do different people like different games? Because we are all individuals.
Although, in a thread about improving formations, XP and tough XP bonuses in LH, talk of AOW:SM is a little off-topic.
On the note of the whole formations thing,
I want to second that one as being quite a bit of a problem. Particularly when you're new to the game... as I am... it's very, very easy to just abruptly have a unit obliterated on the very first turn of combat simply because the game decides to plop it down 2 spaces in front of your guy, and then it gets the first turn and eats him. Noticed this with the cave bears, for example. The fight starts, I wonder "wait, why is that moron already standing RIGHT in front of the bear?", and then the bear gets it's turn instantly, and just wrecks the guy. There's no strategy or tactics here when this happens, because what in the world could I even do about that? I've no way of knowing that positioning will be that bloody stupid BEFORE the fight, and even if I did, I'm not given a chance to do anything. Not to mention that, logically, it doesnt make a lick of sense; why would anyone just casually waddle all the way up to being right in front of something like that BEFORE pulling weapons out and starting to, you know, DO things? Ideally, I would want to maybe smack it with a spell or use some helpful item before the distance is completely closed, but the fight STARTS with it already closed.
Pretty darn annoying, really. I end up saving alot before fights like that just in case it decides to be a snot in that way.
Now as I said, I'm still pretty new to this, but I figured I'd chime in nonetheless, for feedback and all.
There are many who do think that AOW:SM was a damn good game escpecially after the patch updates and mods. It is still one of the best Fantasy 4x TBS games out there. Now I do agree that the AI was not the best in the vanilla game but it was on par if not better than most games made back then and it can compete with some of the games AI's today. And it did not know how to use boats back then but now with all the mods and 1000's of units made my AOW:SM game is deadly escpecially in the oceans.
Now we all have our own opinions on what games we think are better than others most of us disagree with your opinion. Besides it does not really matter since AOW3 is in production and it looks like it will be the next great 4x TBS fantasy game to take AOW:SM place as the best.
What is the best? While there is some consensus, there will never be total consensus.
Well I'm on the side that AoW:Sm wasn't that great. Speaking from the version that went retail and not all the mods that are required to possibly make it into a better game. The fact is out of the chute AoW:Sm was craptola and I was teed I wasted money on it. Then that community got involved and ruined even more of it that I was trying to enjoy. Took away flying from Wraiths! How ridiculous. The community was more concerned about making the game balanced for multiplayer than they were fixing all the issues of the solo single player game.
It is true opinions are just that but I don't like to see anyone say everybody agrees with me that just isn't so.
Well of course MOM is the best.
The best in my minds eye
Well I liked most of the community patch did but my Wraiths still fly. Editing and adding units is not hard. So there were a few units that I changed from what they had. And my friends and I also added over 1000 more units to the game over the years. And we have hundreds of Hero's amd Magic Items. So it is far batter than the Vanilla. And we also updated all maps to use the changes we had in it.
One of the staying powers of AOW:SM is the Editor both map and unit editor. That is why I still play it to this day. Have never found another Fantasy TBS to come close to it. I do like Warlock but it is more like a Fantasy CIV V than a RPG TBS like FE and AOW:SM.
And for me AOW then AOW:SM was the successor to MOM and I liked the AOW games better but then again they were very similar.
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