We had a great discussion about what features of LH players liked the most.
Now, let’s turn it on its head. What parts of Legendary Heroes do you like the least?
This doesn’t have to be a feature list either, it could be elements of the game (or parts of the game) that you just find boring or frustrating or poorly thought out.
Let us know!
I would have to say general immersion, the game did not draw me in like I hoped it would. Here are some possible factors.
-I thought the leaders were a bit bland and lacked strong personalities. At least compared to games like Civ IV and V and GalCiv II where the leaders are more flamboyant and more interactive.
-Not a big fan of the cartoonish art style.
-Music was not bad but felt pretty generic and lacked "strong moments".
Been a few months since I played LH though. I think I will give it a new go with the new 1.6 patch this week.
The lack of curative/dispel magics for tactical. This may seem pointless, but I think it would add the ability to further make poisons/diseases more potent but leave a way to remove them through abilities/magic.
- The Music
- The Immersion - I feel much more drawn to distinctively different factions with strong lore behind them and a world that feels a little more "alive" and brimming with environmental uniqueness.
- THE BUGS AND THE ENGINE. I hate that there are bugs and weird AI behavior that existed in early FE builds that still exists today.
- The lack of hard choices with the civilization aspect of the game. Reduce the amount of room I have or force me to make other difficult and unique choices. See Warlock 2 for *some* inspiration. Maybe even Endless Legend, it looks like.
I do not like how the game is tiny in scale, it hurts the immersion. Its great to start building your empire from ashes with few people, but in the late game, it always looks bit funny to see "epic battles of empires" with 20 soldiers involved. I am not asking for total war style 10k battles, but having bigger units in our disposal would be great. Or at least make them LOOK more epic, like the 9 soldiers squad from the original EWOM.
Aside from that, music could use a refresh and research is a bit bland.
Also the whole unrest/taxes model is a bit oversimplified to my taste. It would be great when the rebelious cities did more than just have 0 production. E.g. spawning bandits in the city domain would be great (AoW3 model).
I think I will agree with this. I did not feel that "Critical decision" aspect when I played LH. Researching techs, building cities felt like more of the same. It did not feel like my decisions on that regard mattered all that much in the grand scheme of things. Like what stuff I researched first was not so critical. I could build just about anything In my cities etc.
The game focus was more on "building your uber party ". Leveling your heroes and clearing the land around you was fun but I missed that hard economic management and strategic choices I find In my favourite 4X.
I am currently playing Age of Wonder III and I think they managed this better than LH, despite the game being simpler than LH.
You have money, research, mana and army as your main ressources and you are constantly struggling to balance them properly.
-Build too much military and you chocke your income and halt your growth.
-Neglect research and you quickly fall behind.
-Dont build enough military and you cannot clear the land for more bonuses and expension room.
-Dont have enough mana generation, you cant use those awesome techs you just researched.
You are always wondering what would be the best "build". In LH i never really needed a build.
I had a problem deleting custom factions. Whenever I logged into Steam the deleted factions/heroes would reappear.
Is this still the case?
the tech tree is dull - it is always the same and inevitably you make the same or at least similar choices in every game.
IMO, there is something about the Mid-Late game challenge that is very lacking about LH and increasing the difficulty simply isn't the solution as doing so also increases the early game difficulty, which I think scales quite well. So, it's more involved as you transition through a game from early to mid-late. I think several factors contribute:
Here is a list of things that I find really annoying about the game are:
Here are some things that I think could use some sprucing up:
I enjoyed FE:LH and most of what I would have liked to see fixed is the first one...the others are answers if pressed.
Lack of 64-bit (i.e. memory limitations)
Inconsistent Abstraction -
Army power vs. Hero power - I would very much prefer if the hero unit also had a body guard unit or at least had a 2 other lieutenants included with the hero unit.
The limited use of the terrain -
Lack of the Dynamic Environments -
Lack of life of the map -
Poor experience distribution amongst monsters - The lead monster is the only one that gained levels.
Would have like to see experience points / levels done in a different fashion.
Lack of decisions in:
(Also, music felt overly simplistic, but I can live with it.)
The fact that a sovereign is a badass in concept - but a weakling in practice.
This is probably the single most frustrating loss from the original concept - I start an empire! ooh, rusted chain mail! Luckily this can be cheated around with modding game files, unfortunately due to it not being a core concept it is a cheat and not a game feature. There should be multiple starting scenarios:
Tie it into game difficulty - but assign them to all sovereigns across the board rather than needing to do via files. Would want to consider a research boost, capital city boost as well - i.e. X # of research points per setting and Y amount of base production for capital city to simulate an expedited start.
Either jack up the world to make it comparable in difficulty - or don't. These sovereigns can be demigods. It will trivialize quite a bit, but at the same time you can only be in so many places at once.
To hearken back to the old days - possibly give huge city and empire bonuses if the sov is in residence to compel the user to use them as an administrator.
Interesting concepts for the above:
Weaken the SOV over time (the old essence concept), start big, but get progressively weaker over time - i.e. Max HP reduces by X per turn regardless of level
introduce huge impact events/mobs based upon starting strength - i.e. a flight of dragons lands in your domain, only the Sov can stop them - takes permanent damage - either lose hp, defense or attack - ideally make it decision based.
introduce a Sov 'reckoning' where all Sov meet up every 50 turns to do battle - losers get injuries, which can add up to weaken over time.
Most of this seems do-able via mods, so could be DLC
Beyond that:
I HATE how monsters and AI get along
I HATE arbitrary diplomacy
I HATE AI research trading points (always 20-50 times higher than the player).
I dislike how the AI can't handle a stack or unit of doom. Understood that this is part of the human advantage in planning though.
I don't really like unit design that much. Could easily be streamlined by providing a default troop list and then augmenting with faction specific units or concepts. i.e. all 'wraith' are dodgy. All Gilden are armored, etc. Tie in 2 or 3 concepts per faction that can then be extrapolated to new faction design - similar to Sov design.
Starting locations - make it use the elementaldefs - seems to be ignoring. If I want all starting locations to be 5/5/5 then they should be.
1. How AI units are rarely (never?) attacked by monsters.
2. How your militia only show up for the first battle.
3. No multi-player. I'd love to see simultaneous-move co-op available in some future version.
I got hundreds of hours of enjoyable game play. However, if I could play this game with my friend (and without waiting for my turn), it would be absolutely amazing.
4. Moving units could be improved:
a. Weird, unexpected pathing.
b. Units don't stop when a previously unexpected unit or monster is discovered.
c. Units with partial movement will lose movement when end turn is executed. There should be a move all units button so I can then access units more easily that still have movement left after that.
5. The "You have enemies in your territory" notification does not tell me how many, forcing me to cycle through the list every turn or risk missing anything new.
6. Summon wildling spell does not usually work when cast by AI.
Uhh I think it has been like a month since I last played FE:LH cuz I heard about 1.6's monster lair's zoc so I've been waiting patiently.
Okay things I dislike that I still remember is....
Ridiculous Difficulty ok i'm sorry.
Anyways,
- Gilden AI always get themselves killed by spamming guarded strike on me in tactical battles. I felt like I was exploiting the Gilden AI but can't be helped... i didnt want to die.
- Wildlands isn't very threatening.... I once spawned next to Fire elemental lands, and curgen's tomb, plus asag. To my north, south, and east.
No even once the wildlands did try to assimilate my lands into their empire. Well Curgen's tomb is understandable but not the fire /asag.
-And if one of the elemental gods attack your cities, and you opt to battle them tactically then they will kill themselves as their rank/file troops go fight you cuz there's not enough space on map. And AIs love to travel into Squares that you're not allowed to travel into. Especially archers.
Oh oh yeah. War of Anthys Scenario! Vergas just sat back and picked his nose as I killed off his allies one by one. Was a disappointment. I was annoyed off enough to cast ineluctable vision just to find out where the heck Vergas is and what's he doing..... just drinking beer and laughing at his allies.
I haven't seen a single unit from Vergas show up at all. Here's all of them. Camping in his homebase.
Now problem, when occasionally when they invade me in force they tend to put all their armies into a single tile and laugh at me. At first I panic but then I look at falling star and Tornado spells.... Then I tend to calm down quickly as my reinforcements can deal with forcibly spread out stragglers well enough. Because when they invade, they put every single army in a single stack which makes them really easy to kill via spells. I recommend limit armies to one army or five armies per tile?
Because when I invade the AI. My invasion look something like this for example.
My armies don't all sit on one tile to be falling star'd on or Tornado'd to hell and back.
Ok they're not protected against falling star cuz I'm confident that the dying AI don't have enough shards to make it matter. But they are protected against tornado spells by the virtue of putting only one army per tile so that only one army gets smashed across the map. But the AI don't give a shit and put 22 armies in one tile for me to decimate with one spell.
I LIKE THIS PICTURE THE MOST OUT EVERY PICTURE YOU GUYS MADE FOR FE:LH
But.. Battles never feel like the one shown in that painted picture.
X% of the times Kingdoms always smash the empires into the ground very easily.
And then, battles is always a gankfest with one faction with the upperhand as the enemy struggle to respond after being surprised even when the enemy is the one that dow'd on the faction who easily got the upperhand. Oh well at least it's an epic wallpaper.
But occasionally i see a glimmer of it in the AI. Mostly from Vergas.
Is this dude hitting on me?
*coughs.* Anyways I did manage to see his face but it took some work considering that he summons a titan to scratch my face off with....
I wanna equip my troops with beefy 2handers. Free riders is hax and cheat
Err I don't know how to work this forum so that it'll show the first post in the thread.
But autoresolve vs dragons is crazy. https://forums.elementalgame.com/451511/page/1/#3441555
Also when titans returned to the world. I expected second cataclysm to happen but nope.
Titans get killed by a patrolling warg riders with pikes that i garrisoned various outposts with.
And I couldn't counter-invade titan's homes through the black portal! I was disappointed.
Come on man! U GOT ME HYPED THEN DISAPPOINTED ALL WITHIN THE SPAN OF FIVE MINUTES!
I thought I was gonna totally lose cities and soldiers to titans' armies.
But the end result is that I now think Pariden was a level 1 noob who picked a fight with a level 100 dude and got pwnt with predictable results.
Siege battles really suck in FE:LH
I built walls! Yay! oh wait enemies can get in my walls anyways. Oh that's not all, my militias disappear after one battle!
Fuck that shit about my militias disappearing after one battle while AI's militias never do that. Fuck that. More worse, even if I manage to do incredible job of defending and not lose a single level 1 militia in siege battle they all vanish anyways for 2nd battle! woo-hoo! jerks.
Even more worse, the level 1 village's defenses in tactical battle is exactly the same as level 5 fortress.
Lack of exciting naval combat is a disappointment but after all it wasn't exactly advertised in FE:LH so I won't hold this against you guys at all. After all AOW3 is bad at it too. As it is, Civ series is only turn based game with semi-working naval combat.
Rectangular map is ehhh. Its bit funny to see that all of the known world is a .. rectangle
AIs have no understanding what unrest is and they proceed to drown in it as the result. There needs to be a script if they reach a certain % of unrest, they need to stop all queued projects and set belltowers etc as their next queue to build. If there is something currently being built, let it finish.
Ais is dreadfully useless when it comes to with outposts. It is the normal for me to raze down many many outposts in 2s or 3s when put just one outpost in the same location and gain access to all resources when AI spend 2-3 outposts to do the same. ANd that is only because AIs don't know how to upgrade the outposts. rawr.
If you guys can make AI deal with unrest for once and all then AIs will be way tougher and stronger at last because they will have resources to spend on plate armored troops like me.
Damn, i remember much of FE:LH even when I just took like a one month break..
What do I like the least? This is going to be a long list for a game I like, but that's the way it usually is with games I consider B+ quality. Lesser games I quit over bigger reasons, better games have fewer reasons.
Many of these are game balance related
1) the way Life/Death shards work. It's buggy and hamstrings the game in some areas.
2) overemphasis on best equipment/armor
3) Wish factions got their own traits they could add as a 4th trait to their unit that were custom
4) not a fan of the way mounts work and that they always are a better option
5) lack of variety in hero trees (please port this into FE from your next game)
6) limited tactical AI combined with a terrible and wildly inaccurate fast combat AI. AOW3 smokes LH here. I do like that LH battles are faster though, I don't want AOW3-sized battles in LH.
7) some areas where the AI can't play by same rules as human- such as outposts
8) the way unrest works and how razing is almost always the best option
9) I feel there's a lack of variety in magic and summons
10) Wish there were lategame leather/cloth/plate armor, instead of masterwork chain/light plate, which should be tiers of armor instead.
11) Buggier than a 3 yr iterated title should be at this point
12) Don't like hero xp split, it was needed in FE, but not LH.
13) The Dead DLC has new monsters I like, but I don't like the faction and the AI can't play it.
* I never liked the graphical style of the game.
* Building from scratch in a barren world becomes repetitive. Let me start with a fully grown empire with all or many of the tecs researched!
* Tech tree. You select the same things in each game. It should have more branches.
* The factions are boring. Undead was good though!
* City building is uninteresting.
* I prefer hexagons...
I like LH a lot but it could be even better with a few changes/additions etc:
1. Unit size is now too small. In the beginning with EWOM the units leveled up to significant group sizes. Now the growth from party to squad, etc adds about 1 figure to the unit for each new technology!. The units should at least look bigger to make the battles immersive.
2. The lack of the spouse and children to build a dynasty. That was a great EWOM mechanic.
3. Lack of minor factions. This really reduces the complexity of the game.
4. The game should not end so soon. Playing on after the game tells me it is over is a bit of a let down. In order to explore the entire game world on a really large map more time is needed. Game length should be an option the player selects every time they start a new game.
5. Truly random loot items are needed: Something like the "+2 ice sword of life stealing". The prefix and suffix are randomly determined from a truly large list of possibilities when the loot is found. This is a bit more like how Diablo type games handle loot. It adds to the fun a lot.
6. The loot found needs to be proportional in general level to the difficulty of the battle. No more rusty iron gloves after defeating a dragon!
7. More creatures to summon and the high level ability to summon more than one.
What I really don't like is the complete lack of depth in tactical battles. No LOS, terrain penalties/bonuses, flanking, morale, "give bonus to adjacent friendly unit" and so on. Stardock have been trying hard to keep the time you spend on battles down to a few minutes at most, and it's hurting because of that.
But it doesn't go well with how combat is handled on the strategic level anyway. Fun fights or difficult fights - I'm there! But most fights just get auto-resolved by me anyway. And really, fighting a whole game just to end it all in a 5-minute "siege" feels pathetic. I'm not spending 50% of a game playing battles, it's more like 5%. It's not a good number to be around, 25% would be better and having important fights fly by is unforgivable either way.
Again, I understand you wanted to keep the tactical battle duration down and keep focus on strategy. I don't think it turned out well, I don't think those were good decisions. I think you missed out on about 1000 interesting unit traits to link strategic progress with the tactical side of things. I think fights can still be quick, even if they are complex. But tactics needs to be more important*.
* This is also an opportunity to make AI more nuanced and difficult. And it would be far more visible than strategic AI gameplay, which (imho) happens 99% behind fog of war anyway.
About the only thing that really ever annoyed me was the limited choices in heroes. Sometimes I may want a specific type, like a governor, but neither of the two choices that pop up are suited to the task. So I end up stuck with another meathead to go around mashing things.
I'd say the late game mop-up, when the world stops being dangerous. Not that FE:LH is a worse offender than other games, but if you could tackle that you'd be kings.
after ~100 hours of play I still don't understand how to set up the game so that it stays fun for more than a few hours.
there are just too many variables:
when games take dozens of hours to finish and half the variables are changing from game-to-game (because of patches or different settings or my game knowledge increasing), figuring out how to set these by trial-and-error becomes impractical
i'm the last person to complain about having too many choices... But when the AI doesn't know how to play the game, the player basically has to become a game designer if the goal is to play an actual strategy game instead of something beyond an empire/hero sandbox
so I played the empire/hero sandbox and basically got to the point where I disliked:
I don't like the map, both the world map and the combat maps.. I hate the look of it, it's so square and so bland. I think one of the main problems is that you designed a cool concept of being able to change and mold the land, but it was never really utilized and the cost was some really ugly squares that just don't look like anything. I hate the squares that act like octagons. It's a terrible thing for tactical combat. With a tactical wargame, you should be able to form linear combat, but no matter what formation you create, anyone can be ganged up on. I also that there doesn't seem to be good tactical combat zone of control, or maybe its too much movement in a small space. There just isn't any real tactics in combat. The tactical combat is just really bad.
I don't know if this is real or imagined, but it seems like certain monsters are grouped together on each random map. And if you get one group, you never see monsters from another group.
For example, I often get maps with a lot of skeletons or no skeletons. Lot's of fire elementals or no fire elementals, etc.
If this is true, I'd like to see a greater variety of all monster types on random maps.
The fact that the AI doesn't have to do quests. It's really annoying, because even if quests are easy they require a lot of back and forth with the hero stack, but not for the AI. In fact, this is what made me stop playing altogether a year ago. Almost everything that I don't like in the game, I can mod; not that.
I also don't like that the Building Requirement tag for units (for modders) is not working even though we were told, more than a year ago, that it would be fixed "within a week". A lot of cool stuff could be done with that tag.
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