I cannot understand the reason for this design decision. It seems to add needless complexity and discomfort for the player without being fun or making any sense.
First, the making sense part. Champions are people who become developmentally handicapped in the presence of other champions. They are smart as a whip sitting back and letting 6 squads dismantle the opposition, taking notes and learning the ways of uber-pwnage. But with two champions, what happens, is there only one pen and paper for the entire squad? Do they have to take turns writing and split up each other's notes afterwards?
I know this rule was instituted when it was discovered that champions were so powerful that you could beat the game with them without ever building units. This strategy offended those in power long ago, and since then champions were neutered with exp split, general exp decline, and spiced up with that just three to six crummy levels til I get the cool ability feeling. At the same time, units got an extreme buff, and now you can beat the game easily without ever using a champion (or having a champion be useful), but there is no outcry. What gives there?
Now there is the effect on the player. Players have to build an army for each champion, or resign themselves to just having fancy backstories to their unrest reduction in some city. The player must manage these multiple armies, which will never have enough map to level them all, all the while wondering, is this how Peter Venkman felt when Egon told him to never cross the streams? I mean you CAN use them together to win that hard battle (maybe against a giant marshmallow man), with all that juicy exp... which gets split up to the point its just one more stride on the long mile to level 10 or 12, or whatever level a champion actually will feel heroic at. Fellow champions are each other's kryptonite, which makes it a difficult strategic decision whether to use them together, but it's like a choice between crummy or crummier to the player.
This forces a player who knows the split exists to play with far more micromanagement and complexity in the hope, in my experience in vain anyway, that your heroes will eventually be, you know, heroic. I mean make it to the level ups that are fun (the ones that aren't +1-3 to a stat that doesn't make much difference). Players who don't know it exists will just wonder "why are the trees so long"?
I know this is a negative post, but hey, I strongly feel this is a bad decision through and through. The game will be better and more friendly and logical to every newbie, at the least. But I think it may even make people who are strategy diehards have fun teaming up heroes without having to worry about fighting 2-5 times as many battles to get where almost no champion but the sovereign gets in a normal game now. It makes sense and it is a fun, simple strategy to band champions together, and it is bad design to discourage logical, simple, fun gameplay. It is not unthinkable there was another way to encourage more complex gameplay without killing the fun rpg parts of the game or forcing players to juggle making and using many armies.
Btw, I think the game is great and should get deep and wide acclaim, but I think decisions like this endanger it to a possible dilution with "meh" because it doesn't pander to the most visceral and powerful source of fun in games with rpg aspects, the ego identification with heroes and the player's character. I have posted about this before, but basically every game that has ruled this genre has been at best a decent strategy game suped up with a fat layer of ego satisfaction. I think this is a great strategy game that has been drowning out its own ego attraction in the name of balance.
that's really just a matter of how you play and what you do with your heroes. i think i actually posted in this thread an example from my last game where 2 level 7/8 heroes killed a level 16 clambercoil dragon with some crappy support units (shortbow archers or frostmages or something). so no, i don't agree that they only start to feel useful at level 10 or 12 or whatever. they are viable much earlier.
as a sidenote: the wildland bosses have a base level of 15 (afaik). so within the world of elemental, a level 16 hero is on par with a titan/god. depending on your choice of hero, a level 16 hero can actually be far more dangerous than any of the wildland bosses (or any other creature in the game world, really). i remember a game as magnar. this game i decided to not use my other champions much and focus more on him. at the end he was level 17 i think. he killed wildland bosses with 1-2 spells. doesn't sound like "mid level" to me, tbh.
Okay well here's a thought. The fame requirement to gain heroes should scale according to the pace you have set for production in the options. Meaning that you shouldn't be swimming in heroes when you haven't yet got enough troops for them to all lead an army.
Well ; you did not play FE long enough, did you ?
XP splitting came late ; one of the last update before the LH beta.
I was very surprised when it happened.
Yves
you're wrong. XP split was introduced in the beta of FE. the release version already had that mechanic.
OK. I did rampage with stacks of just three trained units (two were usually enough). What's the difference to you ? It's rampage alright. Instead of the stack of doom 6 heroes, I'll be having the army of doom with 6 armies, which is utterly over the board to crush whatever opposition. So it's stack of doom vs army of doom. Isn't it ?
To me there is a big difference ; it means that all the RPG stuff hiding behind heroic fantasy settings is gone. So playing LH with such a setting is no. I'll go play Total War. Or retrieve my old MoM which indeed captures the feeling.
What is it to you ? What makes army of doom so much better than stack of doom ?
PS: don't forget that I destroyed the super-baddie (victory quest) with an army of three trained units. They were barely scratched at the end. Imagine what a stack of 6 would do...
Good question.
Plus, stack of doom, when well done and well balanced (meaning something that you achieve through good strategy and playing well) is one of the most enjoyable things of strategy games, is like a well deserved reward for your superior strategy.
There may have been such a mecanism in pre patch 1.3.
At this time it was OK and heroes would get enough XP to get to level 20. You did not divide the XP between all heroes in the same way as of now.
Patch 1.3 did change the formula and things went to hell.
This is made clear in that post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/441056/page/1/#3329399
If you agree to go back to the formula pre-patch 1.3, I am fine. heroes were heroes then.
It is indeed not that easy to win all battles with mostly heroes; and true stack of doom makes it a point to use only heroes. There is a lot of tactics involved to win the battles while managing your mana pool while protecting your weakest heroes. And you feel the levels well earned.
When at war, there is also a lot of strategy involved to defeat your opponents using but one stack. You sometimes have to leave a front to run to the other side; you have to take gambles on how a random stack will move. There is adrenaline there...
In my last game, it was boring as hell ; 6 stacks of 3 units controlled everything... However, I did not raze any lair, so I still had the occasional pop up in the middle of my kingdom to keep me awake...
that's easy. there are no armies of doom until the point where the game is pretty much over, so i don't care about high tier units outperforming heroes or whatever. the interesting part of the game is the early/mid game. later, combat gets boring. pretty much the same way as it does in every other 4X or RPG. you invest time into developing something, and then you're too powerful and it becomes dull. it's not so boring with heroes, since they are the guys you actually feel attached to, so if i decide to finish the game, it will still be a hero centric game.
the changes of the beta so far improved the situation, but i think it's the very nature of this kind of game that they get boring/too easy towards the end. a pure RPG with an interesting story has an advantage at this stage - combat may be dull, but you'll still finish the game to see the end of it. a sandbox game doesn't have that advantage, so i often just quit when it's obvious that i will win.
I think there is way more to this than that. The general strategy of using heroes together has been penalized to the point it is not viable. This was a fun, intuitive strategy that I think most people in this thread want to at least be possible.
You have argued that it is possible, and in fact is not discouraged, but I don't think this is the case. Say you have 3 heroes in the same army. They will get <= 1/3 of the experience per battle had they been alone, factoring in the split and the power rating increase of the army. In addition, any troops apparently get the same deductions to their experience. They can only fight one battle per turn, and they must move to new battles and compete at a slower rate for the lairs with the AI. The rate of xp gain is slowed way down over splitting the heroes up (3 armies can do 3 times as much). The strategy already has the inherent flaw of putting all your eggs in one basket, in this case the XP split also breaks 2/3 of the eggs. There doesn't seem to be a need to pile on, especially as harshly as they have done.
Does it cause stack of doom by getting rid of it? Possibly, but the people who are arguing for it probably find that outcome superior to having no fun with their heroes. That is a matter of taste. I am fairly insensitive to balance issues myself as far as my fun factor is concerned, though I understand people who are very sensitive to them.
But that's ludicrous!
There is no stack of doom at that time either! You have at most three heroes, and not level 15 or whatever you may think! Otherwise, I you must admit that my armies of 2 spearmen that remained undefeated througout the game were indeed already army of doom.
And trained unit always perform better than heroes at this stage. That was true even in FE pre-patch 1.3. So much true that when I was pressed I would condescend to building troops to fight tough monsters pressing my settlements. Ah ; a FE level 16 hero ? that's an entirely different matter!
Sorry, but if you think a stack of three early heroes is already stack of doom, then you've never ever played that strategy and are speaking about something you have no knowledge of.
To be true, the good point is where one hero can single handedly defeat one top notch troop of his time. But is severely challenged by it. This makes heroes/trained units on par and gives a true choice on how to build an army. We are very far from this now! In truth, some heroes woulld be able to defeat two or three troops, with other heroes behind helping with spells such as slow etc. That's fine. The idea is that the stack of doom must be able to defeat, but be challenged by an equal number of top notch troops using the latest technology available.
your point being? i never mentioned a stack of doom. all i ever said was that the XP split is fine and there's no gameplay reason to remove it. i never promoted a stack of doom. i just told you that the balance is already there - you can have one higher hero or several lower heroes. the difference is not big enough to invalidate any of the possible combinations.
trained units don't perform better than heroes at that stage. if that's the case for you, i guess you must be doing something wrong with your heroes. the only heroes that more or less compete with trained units are warriors and assassins. they are superior to spearmen etc. in the early game and continue to be at least on par with them until troops get T2 weapons and/or large group sizes (5/6). at that point, it's a matter of itemization. a warrior with a 40 attack champion weapon can still compete with the damage of a trained unit for the rest of the game, an assassin is a bit more luck based. when they crit, they outperform trained troops.
the other 3 hero paths have different roles, so they aren't in direct "competition" anyway. you might argue that defenders are in a similar role as trained tanks, but that's only half the truth. they are superior at least up to the point where you get chain armor for trained units, and continue to be the best option for tanking all the nasty big monsters with the overpower ability (dragons etc.)
mages and commanders don't get useless wither, since they either support the trained units or(in the case of a damage specced mage) deal so much more damage than trained units that it would be foolish to replace them with another group of pikemen or whatever
and as i stated several times before, they don't need to be level 15 to perform. most champion builds do just fine at level 8 or something.
it's not like i don't like armies. in fact, one of the reasons why i'm against removing the XP split is to keep the balance of heroes and armies. at the moment, a combination of both is desirable. make heroes too strong and armies are obsolete. apparently you liked Fallen Enchantress. i liked it, too. but i found the heroes blatantly overpowered. you could clear the whole map without even building your first city. that's not a good hybrid 4X/RPG game.
I didn't have time to read through all the posts, so I am not sure if my idea is already mentioned. I think splitting XP should only be a temporary solution to the stack of doom problem. A good solution is to design skills/spells for champion and army/summon/monster to buff/help each other. The result of the buff should be champion + army > champion + champion and champion + army > army + army.
There is no such thing as stack of doom. Take any unit and design it with all the best armor / weapons / traits / equipment, max size. Then put that unit to face my Assassin for example. A level 15 Assassin vs a level 15 Stack of doom. Do you even have any doubts who would win? All your stack can do is move and use 1 (or 2 depending on race) skills. While my Sin will have a full array of skills, items, spells and will be pimped gear wise as well. Can you reach 60 dodge without buffs on your stack of doom? Can you use a weapon with 60 atk, 30% increased dmg with each consecutive swing on same target? Can you get more than 24 initiative (with all city buffs)? Sure if you do 100 duels, at one point your stack will luck out and score a hit on my hero, possible killing it (or not depending how I build him / her, a simple shrink and your stack of doom is what, punching bag?).
All troops are limited, they have only 3 purposes: damage, movement restriction and meatshields for the real heroes.
Sure you can have armies with only troops and clear the map, but you won't do it as easy and you will have to stop for regen / replace troops etc. That's diversity, doesn't mean it's the way the game plays (as in you don't need heroes).
After all you're leading a large empire, and the number of heroes you can have is limited by fame / quests, while you can hoard armies like no tomorrow if your production / economy permit it. You are in fact encouraged to have leaderless armies for defense / offense purpose since your 4-6 heroes can't be in all places at same time and are limited to 1 fight per turn (which often is not enough).
There's an argument for both viewpoints, everyone having their own unique idea of fun, particularly we gamers. FE was definitely weighted towards the stack of heroes, LH seems to swing that weight to the basic troop. Particularly for those who really enjoyed FE's stack of doom, LH is a very different game.
Somewhere in between is the answer, but after a lot of testing I'm inclined to think that it's not necessarily the xp split itself that's the culprit, it's the total amount of xp available in a typical game. You can build a faction and tailor your playstyle/world settings to maximise how you gain that xp, and get several heroes to the upper levels, but not everyone wants to work that hard. I'm a min/maxer kinda gamer, so I don't mind the extra work. And I'm loving that troops matter, way too much fun designing them for the AI factions and seeing them usrd effectively.
That said, I still think the simplest way of "fixing" this, if it needs fixing, would be a slider for total xp, or an on/off switch for the xp split. Anything that gives the player more control over his play experience is a good thing, in my book.
So ummm it's hard to cast Xp spells instead of rising volcanoes and whatever else? If you play a large of huge map and expand continuously and make enough conclaves, and build all the mana / turn increasing stuff, you will never have a problem getting that hero (or heroes) to whatever level you want, it's just a matter of time. Nobody said you have to get to level 30 by turn 100 or game is broken. Heck all my games (where I disable all VC except conquest for obvious reasons, since they are more easily to achieve and earlier in game than Conquest) are just warming up around turn 300-400 (this is with normal speed for techs / production etc). Sure if I had other VC's enabled I could push the victory to a much shorter turn, but what's the point in playing large / huge maps for 100 turns? Go play small / medium if you want to finish a 4x game in 2 hours
There are so many hero buffs spells (like the one giving random stats to your hero) which for example can make you forego initiative or upgrading weapon as you can get hp / atk / ini (I think resists too) from this spell and is rather cheap.
That would be a solution that would please everybody.
EXACTLY. Give more and more varied ways to earn xp -especially outside combat - and there is no reason to whine about an xp split. You earn xp, by expending the time/troops/risk to fight monsters OR you expend your civ's resources to train your heroes.
Only reason people dislike xp split is because monster hunting is the only way to level heroes quickly.
1) Why can't Destiny's insight cost only 100 mana, Instead of 200? 125?
2) Why can't xp giving books be available in the shop for a fat price (maybe make it a tech unlock)? Why can't the adventurer's guild give a flat 1 xp per turn? it comes so late in the tree now, isn't that fair?
3) Why can't monster lairs continue to spawn throughout the game, outside settled territory?
4) Why can't there be a diplomacy feature where you send your champions to train in other civs, you pay money/ resources and they disappear and come back 15 turns later with xp?
So long as leveling your heroes takes away from building trained troops or is a weigh on your economy in some way, isn't that EXACTLY in the spirit of the 4x game design?
yeah those suggestions would work. i think the XP slider is the best solution. i think it's pretty obvious after 8 pages of discussion that there are people who want higher level heroes and others who are content with the game as it is. for all i care, just add the XP slider so everyone gets what they want. the in-game stuff like XP books could work just as well (i think i suggested the same thing a few weeks ago). more ways to trade power between heroes and your civilization (in this case- gildar for XP) always seemed like a reasonable addition to me.
Well ; we have major difference in play style, which may lead to extreme differences for the gaming experience.
In my last game (I still have the save, so I can check ; but others were not very different), I finished by turn 360 and took my time using slow armies (didn't bother with horses till very late because I kept upgrading initial troops) ; with 24 cities, tech tree at the end. Huge map, max monsters, otherwise all normal. Razed one nearby faction by turn 30 ; razed another one around turn 200 I think. Other factions irrelevant now.At turn 300, I already had 18 cities, owned 2/3 of the map, so the game was mostly finished. I wanted the victory by quest, but did not yet know the location. I was also being slowed down by a suicidal faction who had declared war. This delayed the full map exploration.
So by turn 300, the game was not not warming up ; it was definitely already cooling down!
This also lets me answer the suggestion about casting spells for XP ; my mana pool is 5000, growing at 129/turn, which makes 25 casting of Destiny's insight. Oh! a grand total of 625 XP! Not really appealing. You can pull one hero from level one to 9 ; with all the mana accumulated by a large empire over the course of the game...
Clearly, my games go much faster than yours and I wonder how much this affects our perception of the game overall.
From my little experience as a casual player playing medium maps at challenging difficulty, I can say that this is a real problem. I have tried different setups and my conclusion is that in a normal game in a medium map, with a main army of 2 heroes each with tutelage and full +exp traits (not mage) they usually end up at lvl 13. Since 3 of those levels have gone to the +xp traits you have 10 traits from those big ass lines to put on ur hero, resulting in not maxing even one tree sometimes, especially if you want to take some magic ranks.
Now i agree that one of the main issue in the game right now is the general lack of xp, barring killing monsters. So here are a few of my thoughts that have beein said by people already:
1. Target is for heroes to be more powerfull than the trained units at each point in the game. Not much but at least to show that he is a HERO.
2. City building XP. Endless Space has done a very good job at this. I would recommend that the commander path would be more heavily invested in civ and heroes should take xp with each building built.
3. Hero armies are not easily overpowering. Even if the xp split was not an issue, there is always the matter of equiping the heroes and even with good equipment they don't have the defenses of high level stacks. So I agree that the xp split should be either reduced or be removed completely (the slider is also a very good idea, but personally i think that the game should not become overly complicated in creation)
4. Put more experience in the game, especially vs the actual enemies (many nice suggestions in the posts here)
5. Condense the trait paths and remove the +XP traits, you cant live w/o them and its 3 first levels of the heroes wasted with them (the one mage trait is good IMO cause a mage has to pick more traits than other heroes). No more I,II,III at least not one after the other and if possible not mandatory.
I have faith in Stardock that in the end this will become an awesome game, every change i have seen from WoM to FE and from FE to LH was very welcome and positive. It may take them a couple of expansions to get there though.
And yes ; specific sliders, both for global XP earned (this is a figure you can find in the data files), and how the XP is split between heroes would close the discussion. I thought about it long ago. Not sure I suggested it, but it seems so obvious that the developpers have certainly thought about it (especially with all the discussions about XP that have been raging for a long time), and probably decided not to implement it.
I wonder why.
@moi-meme: you forgot to mention difficulty, but taking from your post you played on normal world / AI diff yes?
Well if you bump the diff higher am pretty sure there is no way you can kill an AI by turn 30 (unless there are some nasty wandering mobs who kill his units or attack his city).
And no, using a scout or other cheap units to drag dangerous monsters from their lairs / path into territory of an AI to wipe him is not a fair tactic in my book. Simple fix make wandering monsters not chase for more than 3 squares and if initial target escapes, or after killing it, return to previous location (be it wandering mode or lair). Imagine if AI was programmed to do same to you, with you having NO WAY to defend against it.
If you already, however, play on ridiculous or insane and can wipe an AI w/o outside help by turn 30, I would be very interested seeing it, either a simple save at turn 25-30, or a short youtube vid with couple turns
While you're asking these, you might as well ask one more:
Why is it that I (apparently) destroy any quest locations I come across, be they arenas which have operated for a century or two, or inns in the middle of my lands? Can't at least some of these be more or less permanent map features that spawn a quest every so often, assuming you've performed the last one to spawn? Sure, with the Arena of the Slakhanan or whatever it is you'd need to have some degree of opponent randomization after the first run, so that you aren't always fighting the same people every time the Arena resets, and you'd probably want the final piece of that quest to be a one-time-only deal, but there's little reason for the entire Arena to be gone forever after I visit. Same goes for Inns - surely there are still people who go by that Inn after I visit, and surely at least one of them is willing to take a chance that I might be willing to help another person after I helped the first guy there.
So? Trained troops are also capable of doing that. Plus, prior to level 10 or so most champions feel more or less identical to regular troops, and it's only once champions get to about level 10 or so that you can really start differentiating same-class champions. Moreover, losing a unit of trained troops isn't really a significant loss in a battle - you can replace them easily and since they get less out of leveling up than champions do - whereas if you lose a champion in battle, he or she gains no experience regardless of whether or not you won, gains an injury which may or may not be ignorable, and still counts for dividing experience. Congratulations! By bringing along an extra champion who didn't quite manage to survive the battle, you've halved the experience that everyone else got, and didn't even manage to get that new champion any experience! Yippee! And given that the AI generally focuses on killing the weakest units first, and most champions seem to come with a close-quarters weapon, and a new champion is likely to be the weakest unit on the field ...
Moreover, level 10 really is fairly low-level. The trait trees are designed so that each class has at least 25 traits available to it, plus 9 general traits and 4 spellbook levels per magic type. A mid-level champion should be somewhere in the 15-20 range (maybe a little higher, even) rather than the 7-12 range with that number of available traits. High-level champions (champions who have more or less all of the traits available to them) being rare is fine - I'm not asking for the ability to have every single champion have every single trait - but having more or less all the champions in a game only scratching the surface of their chosen class, and only a handful of champions even coming close to filling out their chosen specialization within their class, doesn't make the champions feel 'legendary' to me. If the trait trees were broad rather than deep, I could at least experiment a bit more with various champions and have each of them feel a bit different, with their own specializations even if they all have the same class, rather than the current system where all champion classes have essentially two lines of development available, with generally short branches that begin deep into the tree.
The problem with this is that you can constantly visit the inn over and over and over and over and over and over again right after you finished the quest. There is however a way to accomplish a series of spawned quests from a single quest. But part of quest spawning is a special feature of Altar and changing the mechanic also lessens Altar, but I can mod in the infinite quest spawn if people would like to see it, but I wouldn't expect it to be a feature since there are only about 80 quests and 35 random events or so...
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