Welcome to the
Community Wishlist
(originally intended for Fixes, Critical Gameplay issues and original ideas concerning gameplay)
- Please post any interesting points you want to add -
An example for the layout of this post is as follows:
Number. Theme of points below:
- Description of the point. Possibly opinion of original poster. (original poster, confirming/strengthening poster) - Number of times this point has been confirmed/strengthened [comment by me - possibly a cry for YOUR help to confirm the issue]
- Mute point, either fixed or otherwise pointless. Still here to be remembered. Only found under category 17. Old points (original poster) [comment by me]
Feel free to search through this post for the themes included in this \tableofcontents:
0. Bugs | 1. (Possible) Exploits | 2. Military / Combat System | 3. Unit Abilities (granted from weapons or races) | 4. Faction Abilities | 5. Heroes Abilities/ Skill Paths / general | 6. Heroes' Spells | 7. (Heroes') Items | 8. Outposts | 9. Economy/Cities | 10. Quests / Random Events / Experience | 11. AI | 12. Map Issues | 13. Victory Conditions | 14. UI | 15. Crashes/Graphical Errors | 16. General Game Development | 17. Old points (uncategorized)
0. Bugs:
- I see the hero you get at 800 fame is still level 1. I thought that had been fixed, but I guess not. Seems like it shouldn't reset to 1. (Publius of NV) [unconfirmed. GandalfTheRedskin reported otherwise]
1. (Possible) Exploits:
- Pioneer exploit: queue up a bunch of pioneers to cheat the growth system (Brainjuggler, Mistwraithe)
- Pioners and any other units who cost resources should consume resource on completion and skip turns if resource not available, not consuming at moment of queue, this will fix all possible issues with grown, interest and everything else. (sharpxe)
- City militia units will only fight once: attack with one sacrificial unit, then attack with a second stack and all the city defenders won't be there (Brainjuggler)
2. Military / Combat System:
- City Militia would like ALOT of love. They require armour. (See parrotmath's armor mod to get you started). YOUR city militia also disappear after the first combat in a turn BUT AI city militia is full health every combat within a turn. Major imbalance and unfairness. Both AI and player should be under SAME rules. City militia should have health and death tracked throughout the turn so that multiple attacks can be defended by the same city militia AND those city milita retain damage dealt and deaths throughout the turn. (GFireflyE, Brainjuggler, abob101)
- Maybe give the militia the "defensive" trait and a shield (at least a wooden shield, or maybe the best shield currently available). That would make them more useful without making them too powerful. (Azunai_)
- Magical mercenaries should be changed to include mana upkeep. More types of mercenaries would be fun (even if it's DRM) (GFireflyE)
- Tactical camera, automatic focus on units should be disablable. (sharpxe)
- Swarm Mechanic TOO powerful. Please REMOVE the +1 atk from the bonus. Flanking units should NOT be granting additional attack. Addition accuracy is very keen and balanced. The +1 atk makes attrition too powerful a strategy. (GFireflyE)
- The cooldown of player and monster abilities should be reduced to 3 turns to make the combat more interesting. (Wizard1200)
- Caster heroes, even those with "melee" weapons equipped like the starting caster staff should be treated as ranged units for troop placement at the start of a battle. Caster heroes are still starting in the front lines with the melee troops if they have a staff/dagger. (Kantok)
- It's too easy to do absurd stuff in combat. Summon Skeletal Horde+Cull the Weak and Gallowman's consume spirit can generate far too much mana, Life Draining abilities and free heals makes the fastest way to recover health, to find a random weak AI city or wandering monster as a full heal. I propose that abilities that produce mana in combat should be capped at the amount of mana you started the battle with. Same for health production abilities. (Arcayer, sxyz123)
- Combats using Auto-Completion are handy, excepting that the AI often manages to deal out disproportionate damage to the Player's units making this method lackluster. (BernieTime)
- Conquering an enemy faction. When forcing the Enemy AI to surrender it's counter productive to raze the former leader's cities. If nothing else, the surrendering AI cities should become independent, not just disappear like Atlantis =P If that faction is/was my Ally, there should be a method of making the former Sovereign into a Vassal at some point. Maybe if my Ally's population or cities are below a certain threshold. (BernieTime)
- Magical staves always do the same damage even vs. magic immune targets. (Chaosti) [Please tell me how they work against Frost/Fire resistance]
- rename the "pass" button in tactical combat to "defend", and maybe add a tooltip that shows how much defense you gain from defending instead of attacking. (Azunai_)
3. Unit Abilities (granted from weapons or races):
- Bows and staves have no special abilities. Bows could have the "rain of arrows" or any other interesting ability and staves could have the "focus" ability that works like the spell with an additional action immediately afterwards. (Wizard1200, GFireflyE)
- I would offer that 'rain of arrows' be limited in range (assuming that you mean for the ability to do splash damage to a 2x2 tile area) so that bowmen cannot abuse it from afar. (GFireflyE)
- Staves would be cooler with some kind of ability like 'surge' or 'Spell Focus' that increases the potency of your next spell by 25%. (ie, casting Blind with surge would generate a 31% blindness instead of the regular 25%) (GFireflyE) [or maybe increase the buff duration?]
- Quendar race ability: flame tongue - really overpowered to the point of being ridiculous. Maybe a rebalance? It does 2x the damage of the unit's level in melee range in fire damage, and costs no mana to use. Early-game: Level 2 3-man Quendar: 2*3*2 = 12 damage spell; Midgame: Level 6 4-man Quendar: 6*4*2 = 48 damage spell; Endgame: Level 9 4-man Quendar: 9*4*2 = 72 damage spell; Level 9 5-man Quendar: 9*5*2 = 90 damage spell... Suggestion: severe damage reduction on this ability! (Chaosti)
4. Faction Abilities:
- Lucky is too strong and could instead better work like backswing. (Wizard1200)
- The Faction points that uncover research would be cooler if they would add some other unique bonus (e.g. Civilized would unlock "Civics" and provide a +5% gildar bonus) (me)
- Racial perks are balanced in favor of the Fallen Empires. Especially Tarth gives the Kingdoms a disadvantage compared to Urxens. (ArisianOne)
5. Heroes Abilities/ Skill Paths / general:
- Warrior trait tree: Probably switch the special abilities that currently hide behind Weapon specific (e.g. +Axe Damage/+Spear Damage) traits to the front of those lines. That would in my humble opinion make the warrior so much more onjoyable to level instead of being stuck with boring +dmg that does not even benefit your current weapon. (me)
- the path trees are too long and the abilities have too many prerequisites. For example instead of evoker I - IV there should be only aeromancy, geomancy, ... that increases the damage of air, earth, ... spells by 50 % or instead of vital strike I - III there should be only vital strike that increases the critical hit chance by 15 and the critical damage by 50 %. (Wizard1200, Lord Micheal) [this has been partly changed during recent versions - Evoker IV was removed]
- Totally agree here. After playing a few games in beta, I think when a champion levels up, they should be able to choose one trait
in each tree. I find myself choosing only spells in the beginning. By the time I start choosing combat skills the game is nearly over. (Lord Micheal, Bernietime)
- Hero Trait advancement is painfully slow. Recommend giving "free" extra traits every "x" levels and a Free Trait pick upon choosing the Hero's path. Free trait picks could be restricted to the Generic side only used to help balance out some current path deficiencies. Like having an Armor advancement path restricted by Level. (Bernietime) [e.g. something along the lines of a 2 traits points every 5 levels]
- Why not give a customisable hero/hench once the game has gone through all the pre-programmed heroes? So you could choose the skills, Path and items (within certain constraints) for an x level hero/hench. As a reward for getting to a high level of fame (you attract the heroes you want ). (StevenAus) [fyi the last hero currently unlocks at 4800 Fame]
- As soon as a medium or high level commander is in an army the unit stats are unbalanced. The commander could instead of passives use active abilites e.g. to improve the accuracy by 25 for 1 turn, the spell resistance by 25 for 1 turn, ... (Wizard1200)
- If commanders are too strong, then their abilities should be weakened, but making them be like other heroes just so that they line up better is wrong. The entire point of a commander is to fill the role of a vanilla hero who doesn't have to go about doing stuff to function. We already have an active buffer, he's the defender. (Arcayer)
- The Commander Champions should be able to gain XP 's while assisting cities too. (Lord Micheal)
- How about for Commander exp there is exp bonus for building world achievements where they are stationed? Maybe even other 1 per faction buildings but not as much awarded? (kendainty)
- Beastmasters can tame extremely powerful beasts, en-masse early in, which then have no upkeep. Tame beast's cost should scale to the level of the enemy monster, making it easier to tame wandering wolves in the beginning, and harder to start out with an armada of cave bears. (Arcayer)
6. Heroes' Spells:
- The scaling of some spells destroys the balance. For example flame dart is useless at low levels and overpowered at high levels. (Wizard1200)
- The power of some spells is too low (shadowbolt, cloak of thorns, ...) and should be increased like the healing spells in 0.87 (Wizard1200) [Shadowbolt was nerfed due to the Spell not being resistable]
- The AI does not use strategic spells (pillar of flame, freeze, ...) against the player and strategic spells inflict too much damage IF a high level mage casts them. (Wizard1200) [The AI does use some spells now. Although that number and variety could still be improved upon imho]
7. (Heroes') Items:
- Staves should use spell mastery for the attack and spell resistance for the defense. (Wizard1200, GFireflyE)
- All 'magical' staves should be ranged weapons that deal magical damage equal to their specific shard type (blunt weapons staves that have no magical properties can remain melee, though I doubt any hero would use them). This would place mages on the backline WHERE THEY BELONG. Mage path should have the ability to increase the damage of their staff weapon embeded within. Something like "Attunement - increase staff attack by 25% if you share magic type as the staff) (GFireflyE) [This also concerns the Summoners Staff with the +10 atk vs. elementals, it is pretty useless atm]
- Complex does not equal interesting. Vanilla pieces are as important as their more complicated counterparts. (Arcayer) [agreed, but it shouldn't mean that there should be no Staves/Bows with special abilities]
- The damage of crossbows is too low. (Wizard1200) [and they are still not to different from bows. boring.]
- Few Late game Mage/Archer items and much less Mage items compared to melee. (Stupidity10)
8. Outposts:
- Outposts may be better off if a different unit would be used for construction. At the moment, it costs WAY too much for pioneers to be used to construct outposts. The SCOUT unit should have the option to be consumed and build an outpost. Imo, upgrading outposts should involve scouts being consumed on the site to select an upgrade INSTEAD of the current option of building upgrades directly from your city. Outposts should also have the CHOICE of which city they are to be associated with and thereby where the bonuses they are collecting are going to. Resources should be tied to the closest outpost/city. (Not just the closest city). (GFireflyE, Brainjuggler)
9. Economy/Cities:
- The tax system could better have different internals: Free Spirited at 10% tax with 16% unrest, Low at 20% tax with 19% unrest, Normal at 30% tax with 24% unrest. High at 50% tax wtih 40% unrest, Brutal at 70% tax with 64% unrest, and finally Oppressive at 90% tax with 96% unrest. Some other economy and unrest rebalancing may have to be done as well, but this opens up taxing your population with MUCH more meaningful levels of tax. (GFireflyE) [some work has been done here. I would like more opinions on this matter. How does the new tax system fare?]
- unique buildings: adding a unique building to the queue prevents anyone else from building it (even if its not built yet) (Brainjuggler)
- All factions should be able to attempt building the Unique Wonders. The Faction that finishes first should get full benefits, but that shouldn't negate other nations from completing a "knockoff" of the wonder. You'd still get a building and not wasting all that queue time, it just wouldn't be anywhere near as impressive as the "Original Wonder". (BernieTime)
- City Razing is imbalanced. Should imo NOT be instant razing. A raze could better take duration equal to city level. (GFireflyE, sharpxe, abob101)
- City Razing is one of the biggest flubs that FE/LH has in place. The best method IMO that has been suggested is that a city which has been successfully attacked suffers a major population loss. If population goes below Zero, THEN the city is reduced to rubble. Oh, and quit salting the square where the city used to be. That's just stupid. Ireland is full of Castles being build on top of other Castles. (BernieTime)
- While it's currently not the actual case in the game, you shouldn't be receiving a global unrest penalty for having a recently conquered city to your empire. That unrest should be localized to the conquered city in question. As the local unrest of the conquered city decreases over time, the global unrest should increase. (GFireflyE)
- Cities should level up at different intervals: Level2 @ 100 pop. Level3 @ 200 pop. Level4 @ 400pop. Level5 @ 600pop. Right now, you're capital levels WAY too fast, often before your second city location is even discovered and the player has to make an UNINFORMED decision as to what your capital now has to specialize into. (GFireflyE)
- Road pathbuilding wants to have attention. Many threads about this one. (GFireflyE)
10. Quests / Random Events / Experience:
- More quests should give options to choose between different artifacts. (Stupidity10)
- Combats with AI should generate similarly weighted experiance as combats with monsters. Currently there is almost ZERO point to attacking AI to generate experiance. In addition, random events should be gone through to ensure that proper amounts of fame and experiance are handed out upon there completion. (I've seen too many that were overlooked). (GFireflyE) [apparently trash units give trash exp and late game units give more exp.]
11. AI:
- While the AI has improved dramatically to date, there is still a huge lack when it comes to their strategic military decisions. When to declare war. When to demand tribute. When to attack weaker stacks. When to attack stronger ones. Why don't they do stuff like summon units when in combat? Or cast strategic spells just prior to an attack? Or clear there own territory of quest huts and lair huts? Or buy 50 copies of the same leather bracers (saw that again in a 0.80 let's play)? Or always do the same strategy to victory (resoln is ALWAYS building towers)? Imo, there should be a different level of interaction between AI 'out there' and AI touching your faction's borders. (GFireflyE)
- Diplomacy is still an aspect of the game that is lacking. There are not enough options to interact with the AI. Different types of treaties. Different types of pacts and alliances. AI should have different levels of tolerance in dealing with you depending on who you are, who they are, special considerations, and faction power. Lot's of work to be done here imo. (GFireflyE, abob101)
- The AI uses powerful tactical spells (blizzard, fireball, ...) only rarely. (Wizard1200)
- AI is terrible at building infrastructure. Villages, Conclaves and Towns all build troops even when fortresses are available. Ive seen newly founded villages produce troops then build buildings that increase food or gildar by %. (Stupidity10)
- I would really love for AI to value resources EVEN if they have some of those. It makes no sense to attempt a trade with an AI player who got 20 metal, and I'm offering him 50 and the perceived value is 0. Really? Same with crystals, horses and wargs. As it is now you can't do anything with your surplus of a resource except money - Gildar, and research knowledge. It makes no sense at all. If I'm stranded in a location and only resource available to me are horses or metal, I should be able to trade it for crystals or wargs. Yes if the AI has some too, maybe even more than he needs, he will give me a low price for it, but really 100 crystals value 0 to you when you have only 15? (Anelyn)
- My biggest AI pet peeves are about the fact that it still does things players just wouldn't do, ever. 1) It sends out lone heroes into enemy territory. It just shouldn't do that. Only in peaceful times when you're levelling your hero he might be on his own. Otherwise always accompanied by troops. 2) It makes too many 'unit only stacks' and hardly no stacks of doom. Players only make a few stacks and try to make them as strong as possible. The AI should really invest more time in that and not scatter its units so much. (LordTheRon)
12. Map Issues:
- Unrest should be made to scale with the Map size. Currently on Huge Maps Unrest is really unmanageable. The way the game works now I've never been able to scale the economy above LOW due to lack of ways to counter Unrest as an Empire grows. (BernieTime)
13. Victory Conditions:
- Also at victory conditions, change Diplomatic Victory to: Create and hold an Alliance with all players left in game for 30 seasons (or something like this). Is really too easy to get this victory as it is now, pretty much if you have a slight start / faction power compared to rest of AI's, is the quickest way to win the game without even breaking past mid game tech / research wise. (Anelyn)
14. UI:
- Please add a scaling to the skillbars in tactical combat to support the usage of the whole widescreen monitor some technologically advanced people here use. Kidding. At this moment in time everyones skillsbar is as long as 1/10th of the whole screen even on a 640*480 resolution... That really is a waste. Just take a look at Dragon Age:Origins - their skillbar was customizable in length. The first 10 skills had shortcuts (the numbers 1-0) and after that the other skills were just clickable. Imho a good way to handle that. (me, cammagno74)
- Clarify the way traits stack. at the moment, it's not obvious whether traits stack or replace each other (they all stack, btw.). that's a fairly common question in the forum (a new version of that thread pops up about once per week). I suggest changing the descriptions/tooltips of the traits to better describe the mechanic, for example: "Lethal III - increases Attack by +5, cumulative with Lethal I and Lethal II for a combined effect of +12". Alternately, change the descriptions/tooltips to indicate the combined value and change the description accordingly, i.E. "Lethal III - increases attack by +12, replaces Lethal I and II". I think the second version is easier to understand, though the first one is probably easier to implement (just have to change the tooltip/description texts, without changing program logic which icons to display on the character sheet) (Azunai_)
- the swapping of queue items is too unintuitive: add 2 buttons that appear when you select an item in the queue : 1st button = move the item 1 position up in the queue, 2nd button = move 1 position down in the queue. OR Make the "queue list" be completly scrollable with the mouse, so that, when you have selected one item with the mouse, if you move the mouse on the left part of the page, the game understand that you want to move this item on the previous page, and scroll to this page automaticaly. (stardock334)
- Upgrade paths for items are still messed up. I think the simpliest solution would be: offer 2 upgrade 'paths'. one for the 'warfare' path and one for the 'magic' path items. That way, for example, if I want warhammers on my units rather than lightning hammers, I can. Same thing with regards to armor and such. (Chaosti) [this has changed during the last few version. Please provide a bit more feedback for it.]
- When upgrading units: if doing an armour upgrade, the game should not try to replace soldier's boots (+1 initiative) with armor-type boots (e.g. leather)! Similarly, it really shouldn't try to upgrade leather armor into the monk's armor (sure it gives 1 extra defense and 5 dodge, but generally that's not a worthwhile upgrade for the crystal and gold cost!) (Chaosti)
15. Crashes/Graphical Errors:
- Restarting a game too often will cause the graphic engine to break and deliver graphics too bright to be pleasing. (me)
- After playing for too long the game will start flickering and eventually black will cover most of the screen. The game itself still works if you know where to click. But you can no longer see any menues, etc. (me)
- The game will sometimes not close its process after a long playsession causing possibly 1GB of Memory and a great deal of Processor power to be blocked (probably due to a memory leak). (me)
16. General Game Development:
- Be inspired by Mods produced from the Community. I really couldn't stand playing without the Bridge Mod (for instance). (BernieTime)
- Also, I totally agree that playstyle is very important; that's why I'm suggesting buffing the less interesting factions, rather than nerfing the powerful ones (I don't want to see balance come at the expense of diversity). Really, the whole point is that I'd love to see even more playstyles be viable without feeling like I'm unduly handicapping myself. (ArisianOne)
17. Old points (uncategorized):
- And finally archery bug. If my Assassin uses bows, and I researched end of the line longbows (including magical ones) who supposedly ignore 50% of target defense, that coupled with my 75% target defense ignore from Assassin path, should give me 100% Defense ignore on enemies. Yet the damage displayed on tooltip and actual damage dealt in combat reflects that neither are applied at all. With a Sovereign with 24 attack, with a bow that deals fire damage and amulets that add fire and ice damage (2 each), with 75% + 50% Defense ignore, with Break used, should do more than 1-5 damage on a Statue Lord (or what he's called, the ones leading the golem bands in scrapyard). (Anelyn) [Probably fixed during the fixing of curse. That fix also made "Ereogs Token" a very good item. Try it!]
- Break skill does not work. It graphically applies the debuff on targeted enemy, it is shown when inspecting said enemy in tactical screen, but it's effect is not applied, target retains full defense (against all attackers, including the Assassin who used Break). (Anelyn) [Supposedly fixed as of 0.9 - someone confirm this please]
- Heroes that have no more traits to spend skill points on get stuck in the levelup screen once they level up again. (me) [fixed as of 0.87]
- Knights of Asok, Mercenary and Border Camps are still useless due to the high upkeep cost of their units and the inability to upgrade them. This will ruin one to many games a new player will start (this was pointed out by Lord Xia in the 0.87 and 0.9 Changelog post) [balanced during 0.91]
- Stacks can't move after fighting: let an enemy clear a nest of baddies, then claim the treasure yourself. With some clever use of sacrificial units and choke points, you can keep enemy stacks at bay indefinitely. (Brainjuggler) [Changed during 0.91 or 0.92]
- unique buildings must be reworked in favor of MP balance - first player who build recieve fullpower structure, all other players still able to build it, but recieve only minor bonus. (sharpxe) [Stardock said that the game will not be balanced towards MP if there will ever be one.]
- BTW: The hard cap of 9 on resources per square of land (ie grain + materials + essence <= 9) is my personal bugbear, I detest this change. Not sure if others agree but merely knowing that I have no chance of finding a really awesome settle spot removes a significant part of my fun from exploring and expanding. I haven't tried the latest couple of versions tho so it is possible they have already removed the hard cap. (Mistwraithe) [the cap is moddable through the xml]
- Also another execution glitch with Rain of Arrows from Assassin path, sometimes (often) instead of firing instantly the caster remains stuck for 10-15 seconds with no casting animation then the damage happens instantly. (Anelyn) [this has been fixed as of 0.91]
Contributors (in order of appearance): Brainjuggler, sharpxe, GFireflyE, Wizard1200, abob101, Lord Micheal, Anelyn, Kantok, Stupidity10, Arcayer, kendainty, Mistwraithe, Azunai_, stardock334, Chaosti, BernieTime, LordTheRon, Publius of NV, StevenAus, ArisianOne, ... and many more to come.
Please do add to the discussion by linking sources in this forum (if possible and applicable).
I will continue to add everything to this list that any of you points out. And if things double or triple I will add +1,+2,+3,etc. behind those points.
And I will also continue to update the points on this list. Possibly removing anything that has changed or has been fixed.
Also if you could suggest better categories or a change of categories in my list. Please, feel free to do so.
Regarding mages and their magic attack. Is weak. VERY WEAK. Even hoarding warg mounted companies of high level mages made in a fortress with 4 essences with the fire dmg city buff (which adds 24 damage to the group) they are weak, their dmg is 50 with the basic ice / fire staves and an amulet with +1 fire or ice damage - made those playing Porcipinee. Compare this to a company of mounted 2h Axe cavalry made in same town with 120 Atk.
Yes vs a monster with high defense mages will do about same damage as the 2h Axe due to later dmg being reduced by enemy defense. Now add a skill / spell that reduces or REMOVES enemy armor. Who does more damage now?
We can't really compare unit A vs unit B as if they were on their own out there to explore and fight mobs. We have to take into calculation all possible heroes skills and spells (strategic and tactical alike) that are present in game to support your units in combat.
If you would change mages damage to be physical + 1 fire or ice, they will become WORST ranged units in game. Even the basic Archers would deal more damage than them (just put a ring with +1 fire or ice on them). They are still worst than archers / xbows for previous mentioned reasons, but they do fine for early / mid game ranged power when you lack / don't have yet access to defense removal / debuffs.
access to leadership trees. There needs to be a way for every sovereign to have a little more control over some of the skills their subjects may learn. I refer specifically to the military and civilian leadership trees. Unless you have henchmen, a luck hero selection is required to have access to the leadership trees. I recommend that every faction have access to a trained 'unit' (like the mini-magic users - that have only three levels of magic potential). This mini- (or dedicated) units would have either (or both) the admin trees: (a) enhancing a settlement (lower disorder, add guilder,research, [mana?], or ( enhancing an army; increase initiative, experience rate, healing, etc.
How about you make each hero automatically advance in the general tab of skills giving you a free selection on each level-up, and you get to pick a skill from your selected path of specialization.
Maybe 3-3 or 6-6 split then. Either way, it shouldn't be doing all magical damage.
And are you comparaing basic staves with max axes?
Furthermore, isn't death magic (curse / mass curse) the only ability that offers armor removal spells?
So effectively, you're comparing a general unit that will hurt everything for good damage, which can be recruited starting turn 30 or so, to a unit that requires end-game technology and requires a specific skill to hit for high damage (and death magic is pretty rare in general).
Which is a bit silly...
The point remains though. It's a bit disturbing when vs plate mail warriors (90 defense or so?), basic staves are still hitting them for 16-24 damage each. Since the enemy has like 60-90 hp, sure it requires 5-6 shots to kill 1 unit. Well they got a long way to march, and since I got 6 mages (and my hero to summon to hold them off), I can easily buy that time for my mages to do their work.
The point being, the AI's turn 200+ technology units are dying en masse to my turn 30 basic units. I also could clear the master quest easily with this army, and killed Delin, the Pyre of Man with an army of: 5 horse ice mages, 1 hero level 6 (mage with all points into summoning).
Upgrading Units:
- The cost for adding an additional equipped unit (in metal and crystal) need to be added into the cost. It should not cost a flat 30gold rate!. Most effective way of training units mid-game is to train a 3-man unit, then pay 30 or 60 gold to increase its numbers.
Simpliest Cull the Weak fix:
- Can only be cast on the default races (humans, mancers, etc).
No more casting it on undead / elementals / beasts / twisted / whatever-else-you-can-summon or capture and get rid of for extra mana.
AI Mechanic / Exploit
- It prioritizes melee units over archers. The easiest way to deal with it is to have your ranged army, keep firing away, and as the enemy gets closer, summon a unit (e.g ice elemental) behind it. Suddenly, the enemy will break off and charge away from your ice elemental that is behind them, giving you all the time you need to finish them off with your ranged units.
EDIT:
Nighthavvk, I upgraded my description of the Quendar racial trait ability. I really do think it needs a complete rebalance (take a look at the details - it's on reply 41.).
Instead of reducing the power of magic staves it would be better to give players a chance to protect themselves against the damage. The protection from fire and protection from cold spells should be moved from the mage path tree to the fire 3 spellbook and water 3 spellbook and there should be a protection from lightning spell in the air 3 spellbook.
which then leads to the whole 'AI is not intelligent enough to cast spells properly in combat' issue Wizard1200
Especially when they got to take into account what spells you have access to, and counter accordingly (whether in the mage branch or spell affinity).
Well, the easiest fix, I suppose, would be to have armour actually give elemental resists as well as armour...
That might make armoured units a bit too good overall though.
All weapons have higher base damage than staves. They only get closer when you research end of spell tree and gain access to last tier of staves / axes etc.
You get access to higher damage weapons (except staves) much earlier in game through warfare research which offers plenty of upgrades to normal weaponry, while high end staves are only found in the later part of magic research tree which won't be accessible until end game.
You have traits and special armor pieces that buff elemental resists (cloaks with 50% fire or ice resist, trait that increases unit resist by 20%) plus you can cast magic buffs to increase units resists to specific elements. If the AI doesn't make good use of those, that's a different matter, but for a player the options exist. The reason why they are not available in the early game (they are in the middle of magic research tree if am not mistaken) is because starting staves already have very low damage compared to rest of weapons as pointed earlier, and you won't be fighting (or shouldn't) powerful magic creatures that early in the game when you are not equipped properly
The fact that you can do epic quests with a variety of army setups makes the game have variety. I can solo all map and epic quests with a hero with mana blast and mana shield, which renders all units "useless" since the said hero will be immune to any strategic and tactical spells, monsters power / abilities etc, as long as I have enough mana to keep mana shield up. Should both those spells, mana shield and mana blast get some balancing passes? Definitely.
Could you do same epic quest with a different hero than a summoner having only mage units? Let's say with a warrior or assassin or commander etc. I doubt it. On one hand you can't have AI completely ignore summons - as that would make them redundant, and even impossible to play Resoln past early game, but focusing entirely on summons shouldn't be a go to strategy. Maybe make special bosses / elites do double damage to summons or something.
Regarding the whole enemy plate units have a long way to march to reach your mages. Well against AI they will always ignore the ranged classes UNLESS they have their own ranged units which will attack them, and all their melee units will just try to swarm closest unit to them - or beeline for your only wounded unit. A human player will have no problem reaching your Mage units on turn 2 and 1 shotting them. So again is an AI problem of not prioritizing targets accordingly.
No offense Anelyn, but I can't really tell whether you're arguing for the sake of arguing, or disagreeing with me that staves are OP, or what.
Can you get higher damage with researching weaponry? Sure. But even those mid-game techs tend to take a very long time to research. I don't know about you, but playing ridiculous difficulty, by the time you get the mid-range weaponry, the enemy has plate mail. Against that flat 80-90 armor, your mid-game weaponry is useless. But those mages are still killing them as I said. It might be different if there was more access to armor-removal/reduction spells, but there aren't.
Are summoners the go-to type for a hero? Yea without a doubt. It's by far the most OP, especially since units in general have stupidly high upkeep while your income in the game is very limited. The weirdest point I found was how those militia with nothing else, would cost 0.3 (0.1 per guy) upkeep. However, throw in some basic leather armour, give it 3 perks, and suddenly the upkeep per unit is generally 1.5 (0.5 per guy).
Let's not get into chain mail equipped units and such. But with the little gold income you have, running more than 1 army around the map is rare.
And of course, the whole armour system is rather odd I find. Leather armor tends to let you max out at 11 armor or so.
Chain armor tends to make out at 30 or so (side note: it's also rather odd that a chain mail warrior requires like 40 metal. Hard to get that much metal for more than 2-3 units).
And plate armor maxes out at 90? Effectively, each 'phase' of armour renders the previous type of physical attack weaponry completely obsolete. For the matter, by the time you have chain mail units, melee type heroes are almost useless.
Well, ultimately, there are more issues with this game than just this. For me, playing on ridiculous difficulty level, the only way to win is to effectively make use of these OP combos, and completely abandon the less useful techs and such. Effectively, it means ignoring all the warfare techs beyond chain mail (assuming you even get chain mail), and completely ignoring all the weapons there, going for magical ones instead.
On the other hand, it does let me figure out more and more of them, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Overall, I do have fun with the game, but there are lots of flaws. And I'm not even going to touch on how completely unsuitable the game is for MP because of all the broken combos. Not that MP exists in the game right now (a wise move on stardock's part, removing it). Could you imagine, MP games where everyone's playing a custom Empire Mancers faction (+1 move), with scout affinity + lucky + cull the weak ability. Your hero would be a beastmaster. The goal of which is to tame lots of beasts on the map, cull lots of cheap cost units/skeletons for mana, and then blitzkrieg the enemy at turn 100 or so, before any chainmail units show up, and you will have like 1000+ mana to throw spells around due to the culling - this is 1 of the ways to beat insane difficulty rather easily too...
On the amusing side... death magic level 5 has access to a spell that instant-kills any enemy unless resisted... and almost no units have high magic resist in this game, for some reason, not even end-game epic monsters. And even if they do, it's not like a spell mastery level of like 130 is hard to get on a high level hero (more or less guaranteeing 100% chance of success for the spell)
I don't recall seing MadDjinn using spellcaster and mage units only (or go to units) in his ridiculous LPs.
As I said that's most like more of a problem with AI not building proper units when you're focusing only on mages as your main force. If their units had fire and ice resist (or one or the other) what would you do?
The game is meant to be played on normal difficulty and this is the main focus of balancing it, ridiculous is just that, a very hard challenge (which you find easy now because AI is very bad not only at building / designing units, but also at rest of aspects of the game).
Is like comparing Civ5 normal play with deity level where if you don't follow a strict path and get perfect timing to grab some things, you can kiss goodbye your chance at keeping up or progressing.
All magical equipment is better than it's pure military counterparts, no doubt, and intended design decision. It has to be since is... well magical
It's also more costly to produce and upgrade.
Am not sure if they should add bonuses to weapons like axes & swords deal extra dmg to leather, daggers and pikes to chainmail and hammers / clubs to plate.
The game focus seems to be mainly on you vs world, rather than you vs rest of players. The other players (AIs) just inhabit the some regions of the world. Ignored for too long they may become a threat (faster on high levels of difficulty obviously) but still (due to AI implementation / limitation) they will never posses a threat as big as epic mobs.
Am not arguing for sake of arguing, I just give my opinion from my own play experience (along with watching MadDjinn LP's who's one of the most known strategy player that streams and beats any strategy game at highest difficulty levels, even playing with handicaps, and also points out to developers flaws in the AI behavior or improvements etc). You may or may not agree with my opinion and my solutions / ideas, but don't take them as a personal attack just because I quote some posts to which I feel like responding instead of making a post mentioning random stuff based on other posts.
Want to know what are the most broken things in game IMHO? Mana shield and Mana blast. A level 1 hero with those spells and a big mana pool makes the game boring and broken as he can single handed solo ANYTHING (including magic immune monsters since he can still deal damage with whatever weapon you put on him despite the dodges and what not).
Not really taking it personal or anything, just wasn't sure what you were arguing. Because I couldn't see a focus, when you were saying that warfare can potentially do more damage than staves.
Which is true, but doesn't affect the fact that staves can:
- be trained really early-game and for very low cost (6 crystal for a squad?)
- needs almost no research to get, unlike even mid-game weapons in warfare which a much higher amount of research.
- end up doing similar damage, ultimately, due to the fact most units have armour (unless you have death magic and will cast curse repeatedly in battle).
Incidentally, I have beaten Endless Space, Civ 5, FE, X-COM, and most TBS titles out there in general on the highest difficulty level that they offer.
In my opinion Mana Blast + Mana Shield are Spells that reward hording Mana and if you come to the point were no enemy can deal more damage than you have mana then the game was over anyways before it. You need to pump out Conclaves and Shards to get to a mana pool of 10k's.
So it is not even that overpowered if you ask me. It's just the games way of giving you the option to go for your invincible magic conquest win when you want it.
Just curious, where do you even get those 2 spells? lol
They seem like they're very overpowered with the current state of: cull the weak + summon skeletal horde (every battle you win can gather you up to 155 additional mana after all).
Otherwise, gathering that kind of mana would hundreds of turns.
These Spells are unlocked in a Strong quest that drops randomly on your maps as a goodie hut or by Quest maps. You are going to explore some king of crypt/grave where an ancient wizard has left these spells.
All heroes and henchmen will immediately learn both spells.
Also there is the "Sovereign Blade" which allow the wielder the casting of "Mana Blast".
Ummm you can do fine with way less mana since your hero will also have equipment on him which will give him resists / dodge / armor etc and the damage your mana shield takes is after mitigation.
@Chaosti I did same, except FE which I did not play at all, LH is my first dive into this game (I did play galciv 1&2 from stardock tho). Credit going to MadDjinn for showing me that this game is worth buying and playing (same with Endless Space) in his streams. But I try to not base my opinions on how the game is balanced or not from the highest difficulty levels of play - since obviously this is not the case for any game (including X-Com EU). In the end as I said previously, is my personal opinion, I don't find mages broken in my games and I never have them as a major force either (sometimes they are not present at all, and not because I would lack crystals, I just prefer to spend it on upgrading other units with magic equipment).
Regarding Cull the weak that's a race specific spell for Magnar if am not mistaken (am not going to consider custom tailored heroes / nations because obviously they are not balanced like standard factions / heroes). So not everyone has access to it. If it's really that great - haven't played with Magnar yet, didn't like the lizzard aspect, then you can add a 5 turn cooldown on it (if it doesn't have one already).
Mana Blast and Mana Shield - from mid game onwards, you will swim in mana (you have buffs already in place on units, your towns are buffed, you have or should have traits / items / buffs that reduce tactical spell cost) because you should have several shards and already with some upgrades on them and in your conclaves, and getting to 100+ mana / turn isn't out of reach. Not to mention the particular case of Queen Porcipinee who can get a 4 essence town as a conclave and get it to level 5 relatively fast. Maybe is map / settings related, but playing on a large premade map (bay of cara something name) I had no problems with 7 towns (2 forts 2 conclaves 3 towns) as Queen Procipinee and about 12 outposts (magic ones why not) to get at 3k mana in mid game then 2 shot the elite in the swamp (1070 hp if am not mistaken with 2 haunters, several beasts and the big frog like dude). So a battle that was supposed to be epic, was a walk in the park. Sure immune to magic monsters do exist - mainly golems / statues, but they are not the main type of enemies you encounter.
mana blast let my henchmen run all over the map, killing dragons with 1-2 shots of mana blast, with just 2500 mana banked.
Its too powerful imo. My hero was nuking for 500 with her mage tree enhancers. Perhaps if the mana cost scaled with the damage done, or something it would be more in line imo.
Well, beating a dead horse at this point, so all I can say is try it Anelyn.
100-150 turn victory method:
Step 1: if making any troops in early-game, stick to the basic militia unit (@ 20production/ 0.3 upkeep per unit, it's affordable and massable, unlike troops equipped with armor or anything like that, which instantly goes up to 0.9 to 1.5upkeep/unit and require like quadruple the time to build).
Hero + 4 militia will more or less crush anything you need early-game. and you can have 2 of these armies running around if necessary.
Step 2: Focus on settling for crystals and horses (scouts will help spot these and such). Research towards getting the following:
warfare: leather armor and horses.
magic: staves tech
economics: main focus. The most useful tech is the unit size +1 tech so each unit has 4 rather than 3.
Step 3: Make leather armored mages on horses (leather armor is protection against enemy archers). If you really want to break things further, trade for horses from other players. I think it costs 10g per horse.
Step 4: 4 or 5 mages and your hero (mage / summoning spells focus, ideally with a dagger for +3 initiative) will absolutely wreck everything on the map. And this is by turn 80 or 90 or so. Just go around the map crushing everything in sight! The one exception is probably dragons with extremely high initiative and I believe spells that can dispel summons.
If I have the patience to do this around 7 more times (which i don't) I'll have all the steam achievements except for the recruit ___ ones.
These are two really good points and I think they're related. It's hard to know if the AI is just not recognizing that it's at war or if it's just making a geographic error. Like its gathering troops in the wrong place and so sending them across enemy territory.
If Brad can gt the AI to always build the most effective armies it can and gather them up within cities rather than at distant points that would go a long way to making the AI credible. Not that I think that's easy.
Leaders and Kingdom / Empires traits are not displayed properly on the select sovereign / faction screen when you want to start a new game.
For example for Krax - Empire of Krax there are not penalties shown to faction / leader. Yet when you start a game you discover they have +10% unrest.
I would like to +1 everything that is a gameplay-impacting bug.
Guys guys guys, I'm sure all this stuff will be fixed in the next expansion!
umm, i think your game is broken, then. when i start a game as krax, they don't have any extra unrest. they used to have -5 from their emperor Karavox (he had the "cruel" weakness in FE/earlier LH builds, but he was changed to start with fire2/water1 and no weakness now instead of fire 2/water2 and cruel).
just started a new game and no, i can't reproduce your problem. first city has 25% unrest at low, 13% at no taxes. just like every other faction (except for tarth, obviously- they start at 35% [low] / 23% [no tax])
EDIT: i just found a real faction imbalance problem, though: the default Umber faction has 4 faction trait points without a weakness - master scouts is 2, stealthy is 1, assassins tools is 1 and masterwork chain is free - tarth has the same setup [except assassins tools replaced by archers] but actually has to "buy" the 4th point with the -1 point from the "rebels" trait.
UI suggestion:Can we PLEASE have the option of minimizing or dragging the Settlement Level Up screen? When I'm on my 20th settlement, I sometimes forget the strategic significance of a settlement that levels up out of the blue and need to pan around the map to orient myself to what I had planned for that location.The level up menu blocks out enough of the strategic map that all I can rely on is my own memory (which is lacking) and that settlements base resources to make a decision.
I'd like it if the AI is more cognizant of monster lairs that it's going to disturb when it creates outposts/settlements. Especially when the monster stacks are threat levels that the AI (or any player for that matter), is incapable of handling at the moment.
Bugs:
- Completing two quests on the same turn gives zero xp for the second quest.
- Only 3 items are available in combat, even if you have more usable items in your inventory. Wouldn't be a problem if you could select which items to use.
- Please fix the ages-old issue of the city borders not updating instantly
- Some Techs lack descriptions (icons)
Pet Peeves:
- Remove the 3 Potential traits, increase the overall xp gain instead.
Ok, I could list many others, but this one fix would be such a huge improvement to the game. I'll just list this one, for now.
Changing the resolution to below desktop resolution will make the game run in window. Without the separate "fullscreen" option, the game should probably default to enabling fullscreen when the user chooses lower resolutions.
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