Over time, and by time I really mean some immense time, of playing LH, I have discovered a giant list of bugs, annoying items, things that should work but don't, things that shouldn't work, but do, and things that just make absolutely no sense to me. As a disclaimer, I do not play the game the way it was designed. I play the game with the intention to win. What I mean by this, is that there are some things that I do that nobody else would probably do because the system is flawed. I do not mean I reload when something goes bad (besides a crash,) but that I know some things people may consider exploits. Some other things people will consider bad design. Inherently, there's actually a lot of design choices made in the game that have obscenely useful outcomes for the player despite them being intended to be negative against the player.
That last item is what I'm presenting here - the "WTF" list:
1) You gain more experience for defeating weak monsters (like the common bandit+wolf combo) than you do some immensely difficult fights against the AI (like your sovereign solo against 6 company units of the AI.) Obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
2) The easiest way to gain power for your sovereign is through gear. The easiest way to gain gear is by researching (or buying from another faction) mounted warfare and buying a horse. Then going solo into an "event" area, waiting for monsters to move off their little treasure piles, and then taking free gear accordingly. I think I've seen level 7 required gear, but nothing too far above that. I can get level 7 in about 10 minutes.
2a) You can simulate this with decalon/arcane monolith on any portion of the map.
2b) If you have the escape skill, you can sit in front of a monster and use escape after they attack. Then move away and they will move the next turn. Pick up your winnings when you swing back around.
3) Insane monster level + any enemy AI level is easier to play than any other combination. Why? Because, similar to item 1, you gain much more experience. And if you sit there for, say, 100 turns or more, and just build a small army from one city, you get even more powerful faster. Monsters overrun the world? Not so much. More like experience bonanza.
4) AI ... Oh, Pariden *looks* like they love peace, but once your army that destroys half the world is deemed too weak by them, they hate you. They then go to war, and refuse to accept peace offerings from you unless you provide absurds amount of incentives (gold, crystal, etc.) That holds true from turn 1 of the war, as it is to turn 4 in the war when you've wiped all but their last settlement out. Turn 10+, yeah, they'll begin to offer peace finally. Doesn't matter what you did.
5) Speaking of war.... wars are started by power level. This is purely ridiculous. Why? Because the power level doesn't make sense either. Let's put this into perspective: My sovereign just kills a level 15 dragon. Solo. I haven't built an army, because I don't need an army (more on this in a second). Meanwhile, Magnar declares war because his power rating is 300 and mine is 80. I proceed to destroy him with my non-existent army. Point of this is the AI should be smarter on when to start and stop a war. Power rating just isn't calculated correctly for it.
5a) Now that's an assumption, but I see no other reason why an AI would start a war. They don't care about getting slaughtered, only that this single number says they should be winning. It's almost never true.
6) And again, on the army front, why is this based that way anyhow? I don't get this.... Let's say you have a single town. At around the point where any faction meets you, and they have a power rating of say 5x what you have (25 to 115+ or so) they all proceed to go to war. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's not worry about the most powerful, but instead start a war against the weakest. That single solitary town in the corner of the map with really no resources is seriously hampering our ability to conquer the world!
7) The opposite... why doesn't the AI gang up on the most powerful? If I'm sitting at power level 1,000, and everyone else is around 800, they're too busy offering tribute and fighting amongst themselves to do anything else about it.
8) Dragons... the fire breathing kind.. pretty epic fights! Right up until you have protection from fire and a decent sovereign/champion that can solo the whole fight.
9) Ranged weapons are great for units, terrible for champions. In fact, balancing between champions and units, as seems to be the case with some items, is a bad idea.
10) Skeletons ... like number 1 above, they don't provide much experience but are pretty hard to defeat. When a battle takes 2 minutes, and you get less experience than a battle that takes 10 seconds, something is wrong.
11) Life is more powerful than death magic if you're taking care of armies. Death is only more powerful when you don't have an army.
12) Death and Life magic summons are near identical. Unless you have a specific race/sovereign build, death magic is far weaker than life when it comes to summons. I saw some people say the lightbringer is weak. It's not. Really not. Makes a great tank against dragons when going at it with a solo mage, but a more distinct issue is raise skeleton horde in the early game against butchermen, wolves, shrills, crag spawns, some spider spawns, and ... oh wait. Let's narrow this down - it's bad against anything not bandits or low level spiders.
13) Summoning crag spawns, by the time you get them, isn't worth the mana. They're too weak in comparison at that point. I'm not sure about other people, but at level 7 or so, I'm fighting things way higher than the crag spawn is useful for. Stinking mud is great, but it would need to cover more area before I would actually use it.
14) Some other summons don't make sense, but has been discussed before. I'm actually a little sad there's not bigger differences between empire and kingdom summons. It also saddens me because I know life is more powerful over all than death, which inherently means kingdom is more powerful than empire when it comes to magic. The key to this statement lies in the early levels.
14a) You also get compassion for kingdom which increases the power of healing. You get no trait for empire, but get horrific wail. That would be good, but it doesn't do enough damage in the early game, whereas compassion is infinitely more helpful for the first few levels. It's a trade off for power in the early game vs the late game, but remember that this game has a snowball effect. You only need the advantage in the early game, because by the time you hit the late game (when horrific wail gets good) you're already winning.
14b) Taking death worship is almost compulsory with death magic, just because of infection/graveseal. It works with others, but you almost need it without healing if you're planning on going at it with a small/no army.
15) Damage spells confuse me ... mostly because lightning bolt is really good when you're low on shards, and other spells that take far more effort. It's good that there's one that scales with level. It's bad because it just shows how dependent on shards you are for other spells. It's further sad when you have the shards, but can't afford the time in battle cast (lightning bolt takes no time.) You also can get this earlier in the game without having to worry about whether you want blizzard or fire damage.
16) City unrest based on empire size doesn't make sense. People have said it before, but I might as well reiterate. Granted, there's a way around it by way of fortresses.
17) ... I forgot how many of these I had written down so let's just end it there.
Alot of things don't make sense in this game.
The ranged combat for heroes is a joke.
The talent trees are full of filler.
You can't fully upgrade your non champion units after they've been made.
This game seems to be a polished templet for modders more than anything. I'm not a modder but the work I've installed from a few modders makes this game so much better. Leaps and bounds better.
- Agreed on the XP aspect. Makes no sense that fighting enemy players generates no XP, but fighting mobs on the map generates tons of it.
- The 'monsters walking off of lairs' in wildlands and player ZoCs is a major issue. It makes no sense. If anything, they should be spawning wandering mobs' of good sizes (say 5-6 unit armies, and right now, they spawn single unit armies, while also walking off the lair). It's the one main issue I'm shocked Stardock still hasn't addressed yet.
- AI currently has quite a few issues. I'm expecting Stardock to just keep improving it though.
- Completely disagree on death magic being weaker than life. The main factors that come to mind are:
- Swarm bonus. The increase to accuracy and damage when a unit is surrounded by multiple enemies
- if you summon the skeletons behind the enemy, they get targeted initially. This prevents your units from taking damage (thus, healing not as important), and lets you manuever your army to engage at will.
- Don't forget that death magic offers curse, which reduces enemy armour to 0.
This is true, and a bit of a fault, that you can use the skeletons as a way to keep a group of enemies busy. However, it loses its effectiveness against some ranged, and higher powered units. It doesn't work too well in the beginning on some larger groups, also, as they can generally wipe out the skeletons before you can even move them, and sometimes move your own troops.
Basically - you can always heal, you can't always take advantage of bad AI targeting precedence.
As for curse, you can get quite a few scrolls for it that you would really only need for major fights. In addition, you don't generally need curse. At best, in the beginning, wither is more usable. By the mid game, if you're building cities, you have magical weapons that don't seem to take armor into account. Also available are just pure damage spells from other means - scrolls, magic schools, mages, a pendant, and so on.
This is a really well written critique of many of the areas of the game that need some attention. I understand that the game has been released but these are areas that could make the game even better.
Just a few points...
- I think the healing vs magic argument comes into play depending on what difficulty level you're playing at. Same thing with curse. On insane/insane, all the AI troops you encounter will have massive amounts of defense and hp. A slugging match with healing would be a massive drain on your mana which leaves you unable to cast many spells in the future.
- Units heal hp equal to their level per turn.
- Are you arguing some larger groups can be handled with a wisp / lightbringer + army, but not with 10 skeletons + army? I can't really imagine that, considering I just killed 500hp dragons and a 780hp delin, the pyre of man with the skeletons + hero + 4 units.
I'm actually drawing reference from insane/insane, though I have gone back through all the challenge levels and can say it's about the same until challenging and below where skeleton summons are quite powerful, but so are militia.
As for the question... I am not arguing that larger groups that can be handled by a wisp/lightbringer + army but not with skeletons+army. I'm arguing that a well built healer level 10+ and JUST a lightbringer can take on large groups that a skeleton+army can't at the same level 10+. Now, that doesn't mean some fights with skeletons could potentially be easier, but it does mean that you are actually more limited by having to pick your fights, or your supplement units. There are some exceptions (say a dark wizard that you can't kill in time and it resists a counter spell), but those same exceptions exist for both circumstances. We must be vigilant to compare similar fights. Your dragon fight is a good example. If it's an ash dragon, it's not only feasible, but quite possible to go at it with the champion healer+lightbringer as long as he has protection from fire. It is not as feasible with champion+skeletons alone, because the dragon will most definitely tear through the skeletons with ease before it dies.
Finally, as for mana, I have never had a mana problem outside the very beginning of the game if I had at least a single city. There was a single game where mana was an issue because I never built a city at all, but then I wasn't using spells either (expert/expert, didn't seem to work above that.)
Ok, you roused my curiosity Aedorn. Since I hate making an argument about something I haven't ever utilized myself, I'll test it out now
So insane/insane, custom kingdom faction with a hero starting with life magic 2. And then you want to get him a horse, and lightbringer asap.
Will try it out and get back to you on comparing skeleton horde vs lightbringer I guess
This is doubled when units are stationed in cities, which can also build structures which further boost the healing rate (e.g. Infirmaries in Fortresses). You can also provide Troll Charms (+5 health restored per season) and First Aid Kits (+2 health regeneration per season) to trained units and champions if you research the proper technologies, or occasionally you'll find such to give to champions.
If you have a particularly badly injured unit, or feel that it is important that a unit be fully healed rapidly, and you have a champion with Life II, you can cast regeneration on them to restore them to full health every season. If you have the mana income for it, you could theoretically have this enchantment constantly active on every unit you control, but I would not suggest doing so.
Agreed.
If I recall correctly, Lightbearers do pure physical damage, so be careful against high-defense targets. They do have the helpful ability to blind everyone around them, and that effect also triggers when you summon one in a tactical battle.
I've used kingdom factions with lightbringers before. I just never used it in combination with a healing mage hero, on insane/insane difficulty, to make any sort of argument/comparison to the death magic necro horde.
Should be an interesting test, outside of that max-min insane-insane game.
Thank you for writing this. It's nice to have all of the game ruining idiocities (not a word) of the diplomatic AI reaffirmed. If you want some suggestions on how to fix this, I created a thread named Diplomatic AI.
The only thing I disagree with is the life vs. death magic. I find death magic to be very powerful when used with the proper combinations.
If I may add one:
Many of my stock Resoln unit designs have the "chain mail proficiency" or "plate mail proficiency" traits, e.g. axemen, swordsmen etc. Given that this faction can neiher research nor use this type of armour, it is a waste of resources. Are these generic designs for all factions? I thought they were specific per faction. And if so, I see no reason to keep it. Maybe just get rid of those traits altogether for them.
Ok Aedorn, I tried it out the kingdom wisp/lightbringer summon combo in an insane/insane game, and this is what I think:
Vs regular mobs, lightbringers are amazing. That 16 armour is enough against almost everything (like cave bears with 19+ maul, they only do 1-2 damage to it per hit), especially with wisp healing standing behind it.
Vs Ashwake dragons with 34 melee attack, not really viable unless you're completely spamming healing spells with your hero behind him. Which would require a ton of mana, unless I'm missing something with this combo.
Fire resist would stop the drake's fire spell he casts occasionally, but his melee attack is pure physical. And at around 500 hit points, that's a really long battle, which would require a ton of heal casts. Unless you're doing something different from me with your lightbringer / hero combo.
EDIT:I just had an idea of using shrink (life spell level 3) on the dragon to cut his attack in half, and then fighting that way. Going to try that out when I get some time
I generally don't have a mana issue if playing aggressively, so by the time I hit a dragon I (in most cases) have found things to reduce heal mana cost to 9, and wellspring to 24 or so. The reason why mana isn't that big of an issue by then is because for most fights I don't even need to use a summon. Using other tricks it's not uncommon to get a ridiculously overpowered shield and sword.
In fact, the game I played last night netted me a Dancing Blade, Reinforced Tower Shield, Cloak of Shadows, and a Legendary Greatsword before I was even level 2. Here's a quick rundown of that game (insane/insane):
Between 2 and 8 I used a Shadow Dagger (I forgot to change equipment at 7.)I actually got some sacrificial daggers at level 1, and used one until 2. The shadow dagger is ever so slightly better when not getting critical hits. Level 1 was the only time I ran out of mana. Butchermen at 1 is a terrible idea, but it ended up working.
I'm level 15 now, have taken out two AI opponents because they decided it was a good idea to go to war (power ratings 300+ vs my 25), and have built only 2 units (Pioneers.) After wiping those opponents out my power rating is an astonishing 66 and Gilden, Kraxis, and Umber have also decided to declare war. If their armies gave experience I swear I'd be level 30 by now.
I built 1 other city, with the other Pioneer dying due to fantastic path finding (my mistake for letting it go the way it did without babysitting.)
It's season 165, and I'm sitting at 4,305 mana. I am getting 131 mana per turn already.
My sovereign did die a single time because I passed her turn without paying attention and she died to a crushing blow. I believe my response was "son of a b****!"
The city I built was on the Imperium (level 8), to complete that area, and I have also killed Vetrar (level 13). I actually have yet to see a dragon, sadly.
I have life rank 3, and just recently got water rank 2 at 14 just to use freeze. I took water rank 3 at 15 to use Mantle of Oceans. 13 to 15 was entirely on enemy AI armies. They had a lot, and it actually took around 40 seasons to finish them off. Neither wanted to surrender despite being completely obliterated. They also never wanted peace - obviously war is better for them.
Looking at this game there's plenty of "that shouldn't be happening" going on here. In the end that's my main point, but yeah, I'm sticking with the life is more powerful than death magic until late game when it does balance out a bit. Not that I couldn't do a lot of that same thing with death magic, but it's just far more time consuming than is worth.
Also, if I'm tired of clicking all the time (lack of keyboard shortcuts is actually my number one annoyance) then other things do come in handy. Shrink, as you thought of, helps quite significantly. It's actually really powerful, as is growth. With the lightbringer we don't care if it gets hit, but how hard it gets hit. The dodge isn't that important in the end, but the damage output is if you're trying to conserve mana. You also have gift of iron, if you get earth magic at all, and slow+haste can help, but usually if you have the mana reserves it doesn't matter in the end.
I would still ask for a setting that influence the monsters aggressiveness directly. The monsters should really come for you if you want that kind of game.
Like a zombie horde game where the monsters will take your city if they are near and doesnt skip it to make players happy (as is now).
Ah ok, I see the difference then.
In my game, I was aggresively moving forward and had a huge road network setup. I only reached turn 31, and had 80% of the map scouted (as well as all 3 enemies), and have actually taken one of the insane AI's capitals. But with only 31 turns played, mana was really tight. The only reason I had mana, of course, was because I was consuming shards left and right. 4 consumed shards, around 640 mana to utilize, which I threw into 3 wisps, 3 lightbringers, and the occasional (very low) tactical battle spell, and I was sitting on 200 mana.
But yea, at this point, to maximize my enjoyment from the game, I currently do play with a few 'house' roles, such as no capturing lairs until they've turned green (i.e. the monster that was originally on it has been killed), and no utilizing the diplomacy system to get everything I need in crystals and horses for gildar.
You're right that lightbringers + life magic (growth / shrink / heal) is insanely overpowered. But I feel death magic + skeletons is just as effective (although it utilizes more mana).
I really do hope stardock will spend some time fixing issues, but then the game has been out for 2 years now since the original elemental, and it has been improving steadily.
I get that. I can get similar results without taking items in the early game by waiting for leather armor, wooden shields, and lightning hammers. Then throwing out militia that get upgraded.
A bit off-topic, but I would actually like a spell that causes monsters in the immediate area to attack a city. Call of the Arena, any city (friendly or not.) That way, in those sometimes difficult early positions when you can win a fight with the city's militia you can get them to attack without waiting. The upside is some easier fights, downside would be if they attacked on the same turn it would drain your fighting ability fairly quick.
They would need to fix the city militia issues before that, though.
Aedorn, most of your comments are about how you play the game. The number of responses which highlight other ways to play the game, some disagreeing with your views, suggest that the game is deeper than you have perhaps suggested. And I do find it kind of funny how everyone says how broken a game is which they appear to have spent 100 hours+ playing (especially if you include Fallen Enchantress).
The things which you've mentioned which I think are genuinely issues:
2) Your exploit is a bit cheesy but yes, I can see this is a problem. Possible fixes: a) have a game option where the main monster group never moves off the lair. or Have a minimum number of monsters (presumably including some sort of boss) always stay on the lair, regardless of game options.
All the stuff about power is more or less identical to how Civilization plays. The power calculation could probably be improved, but I suspect the biggest reason it's a bit broken at the moment is because the AI doesn't level up its heroes properly. A level 12 AI hero is nowhere near as dangerous as a level 12 player hero. A lot of the best skills are at the end of the tree, and the AI doesn't go for them as it should. Having some standard skill paths for the AI to follow would help enormously.
The other problem with the power calculation is that the AI doesn't know how to take down the player's stack of doom properly. Which is admittedly a hard AI problem to solve, but that's the main reason the AI thinks it will crush you; the player only really needs one good stack to win the war, because the AI's heroes are not as dangerous, and because it doesn't understand how to win a war of attrition. So I continue to think one of the main areas which would make the game more enjoyable is improving the AI.
I'm not sure why you say that.
1) Experience is just numbers. It doesn't matter how I play the game, the numbers don't make sense. If anyone plays the game differently where they get wildly different numbers, then please enlighten me as to how.
2) This is the easiest way to gain gear. You can't even begin to argue against it because the mechanics in the game are exactly like this. Just because you don't do it, doesn't mean that the statement is incorrect. It is a problem whether you ignore it or not.
3) Again, this is a numbers game. You cannot argue that it's opinion when it's pure math.
4) You agreed on AI, so let's skip 4, 5, 6, and 7 as they all pertain to AI decision making.
8) Again, this is numbers. The moment you can reduce their fire attack to nothing, the rest of the fight is trivial. This, again, has nothing to do with opinion, but math. In fact, it's fairly easy to show that drakes with drake packs are far harder in the end than a single fully grown dragon.
9) More numbers. In fact, I barely went over it because plenty of people already agree that ranged is weak right now. The one circumstance where it is not as weak is on units. The only interesting thing that can be glossed over here is that when Elemental was first release, the ranged weapons were actually far superior in the beginning game because of movement. They changed it later. It's just still not quite right.
10) This is about experience on skeletons. You get quite a bit for a dark wizard, but you get very little for actual skeletons. When the tomb is open up in the possible random event at the near beginning of the game, those skeletons take quite awhile to take down. They aren't hard, but it's a lot of time investment. The same holds true of enemy AI units in which you get very little reward for far more effort.
11) I can actually back this claim up with math, as well as 12, 13, and 14. However, that is for a post coming later, and right now we could say that it is opinion without the mathematical backing.
15) You do not need shards for damage to be added to lightning bolt. There's actually quite a few spells where shards do not add to the power, but this is the easiest to get damage wise. Depending on what shards you do get, it does eclipse other damage spells quite often. Again, this is just numbers, with the added weighting of probability.
16) Unrest on city count has been discussed before. I am positive there are far better threads than this one to talk about the intricacies as to why it does not make sense.
That's 25%. 4 out of 16 things that we can call an opinion until I post the actual mathematics behind my reasoning, in which it's then the same as a lot of the rest - a numbers game. The problem with posting numbers on initial posts is that very few people care enough to figure it out, and it's just not a good read. Finally, I actually do mention that I do not play the game like most, but that doesn't mean these things should not be looked at or outright fixed.
If the game designers come back and say that things are working as intended, then there's nothing more to say. I can fix quite a few of these for myself, and I can only hope that one day they release source code so I don't have to reverse engineer this thing to fix AI flaws. That said, I do not believe the game to be a broken mess, or lacking fun. I can easily dwarf the 100+ hour players in play time, and it has been far better than Elemental was. Even if nothing changes, I had my fun.
I always thought Pariden was meant to be imperialistic. You know, the thing in their description about all other kingdoms being rebels and traitors.
Just used for effect: when Queen Procipinee is off building an army of pioneers, then she must love peace by that point!
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
