If you could list 3, and only 3 things you absolutely want in Reforged, what would they be?
Personally, I would prefer to expand metal equipment, charms, and enchantment.
As I wrote, need to look at how the turn is resolved (https://forums.elementalgame.com/537900/)
And perhaps this would be out of the scope, maybe the water area could be expanded rather than merely acting as a blank/inaccessible space.
Smarter AI, able to react flexibly to player tactics.
More intuitive fleet and planet management interface, less menu digging.
More large-scale random events added to make every play feel new.
I would like less tedium. I just played a 6 hour game of elemental and found myself hitting next turn too often. Early game is too slow trying to build up cities, late game is a slot of pouring out units and slowly fighting your enemy back. More QOL functions like auto-equiping hero's with best market gear, assigning heroes to groups so they aren't useless late game (they just get 1 shotted by anything), better AI when using quick battle (if I overpower the enemy by a lot and I auto resolve, I lose a unit, but if I let it play and watch on auto, no damage... what gives?), and a tighter ui (even on newer hardware, it felt weirdly sluggish when it was my turn, lots of extra clicks).
The whole hero unit thing is awesome, it's just gets to be too much of a chore as the game drags on. I want a few more passive type heroes like the city admin. Also, make all heroes more tanky or remove death penalties, or at least tame them down (no penalty if the army wins and a small penalty if the army loses). It's already enough of a loss losing a hero army, let alone having a hero with a permanent de-buff who ALSO has to heal up.
1. More hero skill trees.
2. More QOL features like auto equip or auto level up armies (sooooo many clicks to upgrade a dozen troops by troop size, weapon AND armor... the damn window closes after EACH upgrade!!!!).
3. More city improvements (maybe parallel improvements with unit production so speed it up)
Kudos for returning to the Elemental project(!) – Am one of those who’s played all 3, although most FELH.
See the project may be at the stage where scope expands and moving into the phase where strands will need to start fitting together for a robust conclusion. Aimed some notions below at that; some I admit are more scope-widening and its quite possibly more than 3; but hey(!) – Reminded me of the early days of Elemental forums when all the ideas were flying around – it was fun in itself at the time.
1-Because families and dynasties are back – new ways to use all those characters(?) – as more than just combat units. Expand ways a hero unit can be present in a town to boost stats; or to boost research. Might espionage / turning of one another's dynasty members / infiltration be a possible feature? – Feels like a natural opportunity to expand possibilities of the Diplomacy system – perhaps when I speak to Kraxis I “deploy” a family member with higher diplomacy skills – or he appears with a spy I sent over to his town standing at his shoulder and offers me better trades (until they’re discovered) – or I send a spy over and find out an opponent’s research, or view their unit movements – Up to potentially assassination attempts leading to hits on enemy units, and/or similar “injuries” to enemy hero units to those that can happen in tactical combat already.
2-Victory Conditions; Multiple victory conditions were great;- although after a few play-throughs it could start to feel a bit straightforward to focus on certain of them, particularly the “Master Quest” and Spell of Mastery equivalent. Might the “standard” victory become based on a Victory Points system, with the individual previous “victory conditions” becoming “achievements” that score highly in an overall scheme? - Although still available as individual victory conditions as an objective for eg. Campaign scenarios that are more focused. This sort of system is used successfully in many games now; and would work well in a multi-player situation.
It would also serve to increase the “epic sweep” story arc of a standard game? - And provide a reason-in-itself to achieve powerful artefacts and/or a large dynasty, if those scored points in ranked order, for instance.
3-Tactical combat improvement is already in, I see - Could maps/grid-squares play a greater role? - For instance by providing specific “buffs” on special spaces or allowing units to “obtain” a one-time bonus by moving onto a grid-square (this was I think hinted at in the original FELH editor but not I think actively used). – Might encourage all kinds of tactical possibilities.
Also in tactical battle stuff - (> 3.5 ! - sorry) – Expand the naval element, up to and including flying ships(?) – I think Elemental roadmap once had ship tactical battles in it. - Although ships were in some FELH campaign scenarios (think the AI couldn’t use them at that point, they were scripted only – it might do so better now?). One way Ships might be less just a unit-transport/tactical unit but more strategic would be implementation as mini-cities/outposts (incl buildings/upgrades) that can move with a chunk of your domain around them, as well as containing / growing units. – Same notion would allow for a cooler realisation of a “flying fortress” too, for instance.
Also on strategic movement; think the “cloud walk” spell (or similar) could be re-themed and balanced; there was a part at end of FELH campaign where you go to another plane (think it was described as metal and humming with magic energy) and take on demons in a tactical battle. – The far-movement strategic spells could use “gateways” but also require you to fight your way past demons to teleport across the map (greater distance = more/stronger to get through).
Just a few Cosmetic thoughts too:
- Could we have a variety of horse bardings, alongside all the human outfits? That’d be nerd-tastic. 😎
-I enjoyed the Hiergamenon and the lore, the backstory. In PDF format was fine; you could always re-issue with a few Easter eggs such as filling in more lore fragments that were noted as missing in the original?
-Appreciate that scenery’s getting a tidy-up (I and others wrote mods for FELH scenery shaders). – It’s worthwhile as the scenery occupies a lot of screen real-estate in the game. – Hoping rivers and mountains are also to get some attention, from screenshots so far.
I'm going to cheat a little and give 3 x 3 things. 3 big things, 3 small things/tweaks, and 3 things to avoid. Just, I don't have all three yet. I'll update with further reflections.
3 big things:
1. I'd like the transition between the strategic layer and the tactical layer to be more dynamic. Sounds vague, I know. The prime example here was Humankind where any army in the wider vicinity could participate in the battle and you could even move armies into the combat zone to participate, if they were in range. That's probably not going to be feasible with E:R, given how the two game play layers are more separated. But a lesser version that draws in anything within 2-3 strategic map tiles would be useful. You know, so that you don't get caught offguard just because you were busy reshuffling armies or similar cheapo tactics.
And connected to that, a sensible way to retreat before and during battle. From a "real-life" perspective it makes no sense to fight to the last man when ordinarily you'd retreat and save at least some of your forces. Ofc from a game perspective, it's frustrating for the dominant side to always have the weaker side slip away. So, retreat but with a cost.
2. "Endless"-type faction quests that lead into victory types. Honestly, I think that worked so well to imbue lore into the game while at the same time giving your games focus and offering a path to victory.
I would probably also say victory conditions in general and ways to avoid the end-game slog. Or at least make the power levels increase so exponentially that a strong faction can wrap up quickly.
3. Not sure about a big third one and I may change my mind. Maybe a simple one for now: less is more. Fewer research items and buildings but making those that are available more impactful.
The core world-feeder world / cities-settlements dynamic for GalCiv IV and Civ VII sounds like useful concepts to avoid late-game slog. FE had upgradeable outposts, so maybe that can be expanded further or given a bigger role in the expansion aspect of the game?
"3" / a few small things;
1. An AoW 4 and AoW:Planetfall type combat retry. You can let the AI auto-resolve but still take the manual battle afterwards if you don't like the result. There are a LOT of battles in these games. And in particular towards the end, you (or at least I) just don't want to fight every last single one. But I equally don't want to lose useful units just because the auto-AI is too dumb to get it right.
2. At least in FE, please require me to actively select another building I want to construct after I placed one. It happened to many times that I placed a whole bunch stuff just because I was randomly clicking around the city.
"3" / a few things to avoid, for me at least:
1. Don't get too bogged down on unit customisation. It sounds nice and maybe it's a feature many players enjoy. But for me it's often a lot of fairly boring activity for fairly limited gain and even some active downsides. If also all enemies are customised, then that implies I need to study every unit of every army I want to fight in detail to determine how risky that fight is. That is part of a strategy game, but I don't find it much fun.
2. Overly long victory-condition count-down timers. It's frustrating if you (think you) have already won and are just sitting around and waiting for a turn timer to go down, potentially while withstanding a final onslought of enemies. It would be much better to communicate to players clearly and earlier if someone has taken an important milestone and trigger any AI behaviour then. That way, the player homing in on that victory still has one or more objectives of that victory to pursue and ergo something to do other than waiting.
1- AI plays fairly, using all the same mechanics as the player. Auto battle enacts real battles, which are played quickly, automatically and without graphics, and is not a lossy approximation that ignores major mechanics. In order to maintain challenge, I would give every faction a power level score. Some factions are just better than others. Allow faction boons to be given at game start to further specify faction power level, for instance, +10% income, which increases faction power level score. This system completely replaces difficulty and computer cheats.
2- Change the 3d model graphics loader to work with something reasonable and normal so modders can more easily introduce custom models. FBX, for instance.
3- Individualized quests/random events for all factions. A unique branching story for every faction. Looking at Alpha Centauri, most of the plot was offloaded onto the technology tree, with some help from secret projects. In this way, every faction leader had lots of stuff to say, and did all sorts of cool/interesting things. I think in Elemental, this should be part of the quest system, but because all the factions share the same generic quest/event list, there isn't actually much dialogue that pertains to the actual parties/characters. Even say, ten faction unique random events per faction would go a long way towards adding more characterization and plot to the various factions.
3 things:
1) Enemy Archers/Mages/Catapults are like tanks - they should go down more like butter when attacked by melee and units on horse. Something is off in tactical that makes it feel frustrating with regards to their defense. Also - some cover (take less damage) against archery (woods) or cavalry (crossing a gulley), etc.
2) Make Terrain count for something. Maybe better defense in hills, or archers suffer penalty in woods, rivers show up in tactical and slow units crossing - choke points for defending, impassible mountains. I imagine a quest where once you complete it, you gain an advantage (you save a living forest by wiping out some nearby axe happy Darklings so now if you are attacked when in the forest - your enemy takes 2 tactical damage per turn, etc)
3) Spells need a balance pass. When you summon a Air Elemental and it knocks down 8 units around it - it's insane. Needs to be nerfed IMHO. Maybe you gain that ability later when the A.E. gains a couple of levels... Conversely, fireballs, etc. seem so lame in damage.
Basic stuff you want in a modern game:
1) No slowdown in the last half of the game.
2) Modern games have spoiled me with their great music, sound effects, voices. I'm looking for modern sound engineering.
3) I don't remember if the original games had lots of hotkeys but I do want modern hotkeys.
a lot of game options at the start when creating maps.
some players like me like a challenge and get bored after a few 100 turns once you researched a tech that the AI will not reach for 50 turns or have a spell that the AI will never use etc. at that point the game is won and we start hitting end turn. to prevent that maybe add a game option for dynamic game difficulty that will scale the monsters/wilderness/random monster spawns with the power level of the player. i get that this is not for everyone and thus a game option to be toggled on/off at the map creation phase
more things to do with the sea , not just naval battle but trade routes , exploration to other far flung continents , setting up colonies or trading posts etc. , there are resources in the sea too , maybe add some food and industry around those
how about magic death zones , in world map as well as tactical maps ?
modding via steam workshop would be nice to have. wheel of time , lotr , midcemia etc would all be awesome to be brought a live with a game that has 4X + spells
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