So I've finally had time to seriously play Elemental thanks to the weekend, and I thought I should post my thoughts since it seems encouraged.
First off, let me say that I'm one of those 64bit Win7, ATI setup, and I've noticed a lot of improvements with 1.07 (although 1.05 was playable for me). I'm also glad to see certain exploits have been fixed in this version (double build improvement, and unlimited rings/amulets, etc). The pace at which these problems along with the technical ones have been addressed is very impressive, so I want to thank the team for their hard work. There are still some odd OoM errors and a few CtDs (around 150+ turns in, map size doesn't matter) that I think has something to do with the dynasty system and the children growing up because I have noticed some oddities there as well. In general though, the game is playable, especially since I have a pretty good rig and the load times are barely noticeable. I'm sure these problems are being addressed, so let's move on to game changes.
I'll get straight to the point: the number one thing that should be addressed is the faction destruction when a sovereign dies. Simply put, it just HAVE TO GO.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and start a new game on a small map (just to make things faster), choose a Kingdom faction (only because I'm more familiar with the Kingdom techtree) on ANY DIFFICULTY (easy to ridiculous, doesn't matter) and build your first city near a tech library. Research Production for the Great Mills if you don't have up a Material resource near your city, then up the resource discovery path in the Adventure tree until the Ventri mines. Then focus all research into warfare for catapult and build a couple. Most importantly, DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE. Don't marry, don't explore, don't expand, don't do any spell research (don't build anything that produces arcane research, and don't bother picking any spell books either). You don't even need to build up your city beyond level 2 (to build the Great Mills and have enough influence for your resources), yep, that one hut city with 75 guys is all you'll need. All the resources that you need for your catapults will be available from the discovery techs except for materials. Now hit end turn a ton of times. Depending on your game setup (number of AI, their difficulty, world size, etc), this might take a bit, however it always ends up the same, the AI will expand and gets powerful enough, then declares war on you because you are weak. Finally, the fun begins... right?
Just sit there and continue to hit end turn until the AI marches his sovereign and his army of doom up to your city to wipe you out. Right before he gets to your city (since they only have 2 movement, they will either be right outside your city, or one tile away), pull out 1 catapult next to his army and attack. In battle, shoot his sovereign in the face with a boulder (twice, if needed). If he survives the first round, end turn and shoot again. Repeat until he's dead (then autoresolve). If he somehow managed to survive (got REALLY lucky with his armor rolls), pull out another catapult and repeat. Congrats, you just completely destroyed one of the stronger player in the game. Hit end turn a bunch of times until the next one steps up to the plate to be smacked in the face with a boulder. The only real question at this point is whether you have the patience to wait until you win.
Just to be clear, this isn't a problem with catapults, they can be destroyed fairly easily with a massive melee stack. In fact, if you don't want to use catapults, you can do this with archers very easily (especially if you pick the archery stat for your faction) or spells (but will take more work to imbue/level champions), anything that can do range damage will do, even the earth golem. The problem is that your sovereign is the weakest link in your empire, and thus prone to assassination techniques like these. Even if the AI was told keep its sovereign inside it's territory, all you would need to do is take the nearest city, then hit the sovereign with an assassination squad on the same turn. It's just way too easy to kill someone by going after their sovereign. This is the main reason why even the ridiculous AI with all its bonuses are a joke atm.
To fix this, you have to either:
1) Remove all range attack from the game (melee, skills, magic). This will let the sovereign run away like the coward that he should be, and will also fix the problem with autoresolve's inability to emulate movement and the advantages of range combat. Although having said that, I hope that you don't choose this option, as it would make tactical combat completely meaningless.
2) Use the dynasty system to your advantage. Namely, if the sovereign dies, the control of the empire should be switched to the next channeler in your family tree. So if you imbued your spouse, they would take over. If not, the first child that is a channeler (some children is born with 0 essense, and thus doesn't qualify). If you pursue this path, you could do creative things like have the empire split up if there are several qualified heirs, and if one of those is married to another family, that split portion would join the other faction, etc. There are a lot of things you can do with this. You'll probably have to tweak the dynasty system a bit to make heirs available earlier in the game to prevent early game assassination (but you should probably do that anyways to make them more of a factor), but this is probably the most realistic approach to the problem.
3) If the above is just too complicated (or perhaps it'll take too long to implement and you want a quicker fix), you can always just have the sovereign respawn but give them some harsh penalties (reduced max essence and health, lose all equips, etc). Only when the sovereign ends up with 0 max health or essence do the empire actually gets destroyed (no health or no channeler to lead them). This will at least give more leeway to the system, and the AI can be told to be more and more protective of its sovereign as he gets weaker and weaker though multiple deaths.
Now I'm sure there are other options available as well, but you really have to do something about this. If left alone, no matter how great the game runs or how much time you spend on AI tweaking, all it takes is a single range assassin to destroy an empire. With this system in place, I've won countless wars that I have absolutely no business of winning. IMO, this is the main problem with the game at the moment. Are there other problems? Sure, the magic system is a bit stale, equipment balance, faction uniqueness, etc... but none of those have as big an impact as this, so I'm going to hold off on talking about any of those because it seems like talking about certain topic raises its priority on the the master list.
I also think it's an undesirable combination, to have powerful ranged attacks that can easily 'assassinate' a single (non-squad) unit, and making one unit so valuable that you lose the entire game if he gets hit by a couple catapult boulders in enemy territory.
There are 3 solutions that I see:
-Never ever let your sovereign enter enemy territory, and teach the AI to do so as well. I really hope we're not reduced to this; it's horribly boring and cripples a major element of the game (getting to lead armies and kill things with your sovereign!). Come on, did Gandalf and Aragorn hang out in Minas Tirith while the army went off to attack the gates of Mordor?
-Prevent those ranged assassinations, nerf ranged attacks. I agree with the OP that this is also a terrible idea; if you nerf ranged, what's the point of tactical combat? Now all you've got left is a bunch of guys charging forward to melee each other, there's no reason to need tactical combat at all.
-This leaves us one good option: you don't lose the game if the sovereign gets 'assassinated' in enemy territory. It's possible to come up with some kind of inheritance system, where you continue playing as your heir over some or maybe all of your kingdom, but I don't expect that'd help much - it's still harsh enough a penalty that we're back to boring solution 1, never attack with your sovereign.
I'd rather see a harsh but not game-ending penalty for death in enemy territory; maybe lose access to your sovereign for 10-20 turns while he recovers, along with.. say 3x the normal essence loss? Now dying in enemy territory is costly enough that your sovereign is still a prime target in combat, and you'll think twice about letting him get in range of those catapults, but not so costly that you never dare let your sovereign leave your capital - if he does die unexpectedly you can eventually recover from the loss.
HAHA all very true! Also did you notice the MIGHTY... familiar? Yeah, You can just imbue three heroes, each of them can produce one familiar, now you can have the sovreign and a group of heroes running around and attacking anything with the absolute certainty to inflict 80 (!!!) hit points of damage on turn one on every battle before the enemy can even blink (OK they have to reload mana occasionally)
An offensive magic approach is way too powerful in this game because units don't just move according to initiative which would somehow allow the defenders to at least try to do something instead than getting utterly destroyed without a chance.
Note: all these issues have been discussed over and over in the Age of Wonders forum, since that game deploys similar mechanics. Result: the defender moves first, (attackers have to be more careful, and suffer more losses having to advance under fire, which is realistic) archers have different chances to hit depending on the distance (so that on turn one they cannot pulverize the enemy... actually I am not sure if here distance is a factor)
Regarding Familiars their skill is just ridiculos!! They are the strongest unit in the game in my opinion. They should either do a lot less damage or they should be unit only the sovreign is allowed to have... and just ONE!
I forgot to mention Age of Wonders 1 had to insert an optional "leader off" game system... because they also realized that destroying a faction because the sovreign was dead was just silly. In other words well after the game came out they decided that it was possible to play it also without the "sovreign"
In AOW II things went differently, leaders (wizards) would respawn in their own city if there was a wizard tower built. That may seem like a similar system to this one, only that in that game their faction would not disappear in thin air when they got destroyed, instead their city and their units would still be there and would get aggressive like crazy (aggressivity is an option to check in the settings)... But aggressivity seems like an unknown concept to this game, enemies just sit there waiting to get blown away.
In any case having the sovreign be the weak spot of a faction would leave the door open to all sort of exploit. I am even looking forward to the day where the AI would finally be competitive and the game be polished: a little rush in with a few familiars and there you go: a whole nation would just DISAPPEAR!!! Not even one of them left to beat the hell out of you out of spite! They would all just be gone! ABSURD!! (OMG I was saying the same things in the AOW forum 7 years ago!!... And you know what? They ended up listening to me! They could't do otherwise the exploit were just to obvious to ignore. But I believe before we get there this game has to get rid of actual bugs, then they will necessarily realize that certain things just spoil the fun.
Yep, that's certainly a fix that Elemental could borrow from. If the lore absolutely demands this kind of behavior from the game for some reason (the only possible reason I can think of), then at least add a game option to disable faction destruction upon sovereign death for the sandbox game. You just won't be able to use magic again unless you have an imbued champion or child, or w/e.
Just think of it like the disable tech trading option from GC2, no matter how well intentioned you want this to be, or how much you tweak it, the players will just end up gaming the system.
Number 2 definitely, RTW style.
The heir system is pretty important there, as you need leaders with good quality skills, high morale, leadership and diplomacy. As your empire goes on longer and you have more marriages and kids, you can go on to make more and more generations. When your faction leader is killed, the faction heir takes over. When you lose all your leaders and heirs, your faction is destroyed, families can be comprised of over 20 members, so it's not an easy thing to do.
Would be nice to have a more important Dynasty system, Sovereigns should die from old age and your family should progress down the generations. Having your sovereign assassinated should give you drops in morale and maybe a reduced income for ~10 turns while your population are mourning and worried, before your heir takes over and re-instils security. It should never ever be an insta gameover, that's really stupid.
This. The dynasty system is there, use it.
While these are all good points and suggestions, mine is perhaps more fun. Give Sovs a large health capacity so that they can survive longer in a given battle. Frog is already teaching the AI to not attack with the Sov unless they are very very overpowered. I think adding some very expensive but useful articfacts to the magical tree is the best fantasy rpg way to deal with this for human and AI alike. This links your survivability to the questing/magic trees and creates its own interesting lore for the story. An amulet of [enter ancient name here] could give you excellent dodge. The ring of [enter mythical name here] could up your health significantly. The cloak of [enter (dark noun and pluralize it) here] could make it impossible for you to be attacked from range by mundane men.
There are a hundred ways to deal with this and the way the mod system is set up, we will be able to upload and distribute our own solutions to any that think it is a good idea. And THAT is why I bought this game.
I don't think you understand, I had 3 catapult (plus default no equip sovereign and Janusk) the entire game, just about any standing army is going to find itself "very very overpowered" in comparison. Even if the AI was smart enough to hide it's sovereign, the only thing that would change is I would have to walk around hunting him instead of sitting there waiting with the end turn button. Admittedly, I'd have to actually build up some defense against its real army, but that's not all that hard (I just wasn't trying to demonstrate a point). If you have the "no range attack by mundane men" cloak, I'd just use champions decked with equips, who will run away after he assassinate the sovereign, or when their melee troops get too close. After all, if he can get the "air shield" cloak and awesome equips, why can't I? My champions would be immune from his archers too, and they would be 10x as deadly than a catapult if equipped with all that awesome equips. The only difference is, if I screw up somehow and my hero dies, I send out another assassin. If he dies, he loses the entire war.
Edit: not to mention Dragons, did I mention you could just research up the diplomacy tree to get Dragons to 1-hit sovereigns?
Why on earth would you have dynasties in the game and no succession...
It solves this problem easily and with style, and adds a really cool element that isn't found in most strategy games.
One way that Master of magic and Elemental differ in a huge way is the ability of the Sovereign to take the field and get killed. In MOM the Sovereign would just switch to another city if you took the city it was in. therefore you had to kill every city of a rival faction in order to win the game by warfare. so I mostly won by the master spell - spell of making.
I wouldn't mind the succession system - it seems easy - but it would mean, under the present system(auto switch to nearest friendly town for a channeler), that you would have to hunt down all the kids as well, which would mean that you would have to conquer every city a faction had to get them. At that point like MOM - the master quest and the master spell would be the most obvioulse way to win the game. I personally don't have a problem with that.
You could also make the Sovereign stronger. Giving it a health bonus each level on top of the constitution HP. This would make it harder to kill the Sovereign in this way. I might add that the system above will only work until the Sovereign rush bug is fixed in the AI and no human player would make that mistake. that said i think making the Sovereign harder to kill is a good thing anyway.
The other thing to do would be to have the Sovereign able to cast spells at over map distances and therefore into any combat in the game, much more like MOM and in some ways better. but a major game change I doubt we'll ever see unless someone goes to the trouble of creating a MOM mod for elemental.
Agree totally. This mechanic sucks. Aside from the AI problems, where's the fun in spending the whole game building up a strong sovereign only to be told once war time starts "oh go park that guy in your capital and don't use him/her offensively"?
This fails the single most important test in gaming: the fun test.
I think that there are plenty of ways to fix this that are much simpler. Just add in some enchantment spells and equipment that do one or more of the following:When a unit dies, it resurrects automatically with 10-20% health;Teleport a unit from combat to the nearest friendly cityA unit has a much lesser chance of being hit by ranged attacks, perhaps complete immunityLower the range of an enemy unit, or prevent it from using ranged attacks.
There are plenty of spells in MoM that did this, spells and equipment have alot of potential to make your sovereign harder to assassinate.You could always add other mechanics on top of this, but I think there should be ways to protect your sovereign besides keeping him in a city or having an heir.
Just so you know, you do lose 1 Essence per Sov-death. I think increasing it to 5 while in enemy territory would go a good way to help this problem, as long as your Soverign cannot be imbued by your children (infinite life Sov :/ )
I also think that losing all your cities should become an additional lose-condition. That way you don't play "find the Sov"
quick change to stop the exploit: amke it where the sovereign doesn't die unless he loses the battle, he recovers with 1 hp.
I'd rather see a succession dynamic though. This would encourage diplomacy early, or at least hero recruiting. Janusk should be unmarryable though, snip his balls off if you have to.
I know this is rare on the internets, but you have completely reversed my opinion by giving me a logical and well thought out rebuttal. You are right. There needs to be a penalty for losing a Sov. It should not be a game over screen. We are too many and too crafty for any game mechanic to combat this. I suggest we continue this post in a rational and systematic manner to convince Sir Frog to look a dynastic system that would change the face of gaming. Imagine the possibilities of a son taking the reigns of his dead father's empire, swearing vengeance on those that betrayed him. Imagine a Sith Empire derived of Masters and Aprentices that kill each other regularly in hopes of becoming the ultimate power in the realm. Imagine a nation bequeathed to an ally when the royal family is totally wiped out and the only heir is the princess of a foreign land. I think we may have something here.
What other benefits can you think of?
One extra step could be to add a spell that helps defend the caster against ranged attacks. It won't solve everything, but it will help.
There is a spell to stop magical attacks so making a spell for arrows isn't that far off.
This.
I totally agree with those who suggest the solution lies in the dynasty system.
It is by far the most interesting solution. That plus champs/sovereigns should be a little harder to kill.
Perhaps they could gain a pretorian guard or some such - a phalanx of bodyguard who absorb long distance attacks.
Could you please explain the bit about capturing a nearby town and then assassinating the sovereign ? Is influence linked to controlled towns ? You can instantly switch influence of regions ?
Dominions 3 uses a similar system. If you lose your pretender god outside his dominion then he's dead, and the only option is to order a large number of priests to call him back. This lasts quite a while and in meantime his dominion decreases, the pretender is unavailable and priests are occupied. Pretender comes back without his items and permanently loses 1 level in every magic skill. He can be empowered again, but it's costly and time-consuming.
There are some physical forms with immortal] perk, and these immediately respawn at capitol with no penalties if killed in their own dominion (area covered by their faith). If caught outside, see above. This is similar to Elemental. In Dominions 3 there's no instant way to lower dominion, and capitol is one of sources of dominion, it radiates it. At best it would take a few turns, with the right Demon Lord or skeptics, with priests preaching in nearby provinces.
It can take a while to mop all enemies up sometimes, but Dominions 3 offers customizable victory conditions. You can win by controlling X out of Y capitals, by owning 60% (example) of all provinces, by victory points etc. And in multiplayer people often surrender when they see no chance to win. You don't have to clear everything unless you really want to.
I think the main problem here is that Sovereign in offense means win or lose war for defenders.
All other mechanics aside (balancing range, hp, whatever), this issue stays, however you rebalance the system.
And things is, one battle should not decide the war.
The only proper solution: sovereign should not die, simple as that. Maybe add additional penalty. Like him being unavailable as a unit for 5 turns or something.
Yeah, it's a bit different from dominion in Dom3. In elemental, influence comes from cities, or rather, it comes from the population of cities. It doesn't have the province effects (Order, Production, etc), and mainly controls off city resources and prevents other factions from entering (unless they have a nonaggression pact or declares war). When you capture the city, you gain all of that city's population, and thus its influence as well.
As a result, if the enemy sovereign is in his own territory, all you have to do to is to take the nearest city, turning the influence under him (once his) to yours, and then smack him with an assassin. Then poof, his empire disappears in a puff of smoke, cities, armies, everything. This isn't really as hard as you might think, because the AI will tend to focus all its defenses at the front lines (in one or two big stack), leaving only 1 or 2 defenders in other cities. So you can just use specialized high movement units (or just use the organized trait) to bypass his massive army stack and take all his other cities easily (usually with zero losses). At this point the AI will be trying to chase you around with his huge army and never quite catching up due to movement. Sooner or later, his sovereign is going to end up in that situation where he's stuck in your influence (which was once his), and at that point, you can proceed to wipe his empire. You will never have to actually fight his massive "army", they are all just for show. Implementing a gradual influence shift like Civ4 might help a bit, but not entirely. Sooner or later, he's going to have to retake the city, and will end up vulnerable.
As to the suggestions for spells to stop range attacks, that would be okay, against this specific tactic, and IF he had a chance to cast it. There's nothing that's stopping you from going into battle (with say a champion), shooting him in the face, then run away once he cast that air shield spell, then repeat until he's dead. Even if it was an enchantment, you could still assassinate him with some spell casters like I mentioned in my opening post. It would just take some work to level up imbued heroes for this purpose (or say, a single vigilant demon - but I heard that's getting fixed). Put it this way, even if you were to magically remove all range & magic attacks (or make them ineffective with some spells), you will still have assassin units designed to survive long enough to run up and smack the sovereign. There's just absolutely no reason to actually fight the entire enemy army when all you have to do is kill the sovereign. As long as the sovereign remains the weakest link in your empire, he's going to have to hide like a coward and run away at every possible danger. If the only thing the sovereign should be doing in battle is run away, why bother have him in battle in the first place?
"If the only thing the sovereign should be doing in battle is run away, why bother have him in battle in the first place?"
To gain xp if you won so you can make more overpowered imbued champions to spam fire elementals.
I agree that the dynasty system should be the ultimate solution; why go out of their way to say "1st in line for the throne of X" if that situation can never actually arise? Your faction is vulnerable to regicide until you have grown heirs, and after that you have to wipe out the whole family. I would bet that is where the game is heading, as they listed the works of George Martin as one of the influences.
MoM had the spell Guardian Wind, which made the target unit practically invulnerable to arrows and sling bullets, but less so against catapults or hurled boulders. Introduce that, plus a higher level version which protects against boulders, and it helps reduce the ranged assassination problems. But as said in earlier posts, rushing the sovereign is always going to be the go-to tactic until the dynasty system can provide true heirs.
I would actually prefer it if a faction reverted to a Neutral status upon ultimate death of its family line, so I can continue to gain XP/gold from conquering the remaining cities/troops. I was quite surprised the first time I saw an entire nation go poof.
Beyond the dynasty issue the next thing we need is more spells to choose from, as they should provide the ultimate tactical planning and advantages in a game like this. To borrow again from MoM, the spell Recall Hero was used to great affect; if I attacked an AI hero with my killer stack, they would just Recall away and let the fodder get munched.
But all in all I'm in love with this game and look forward to watching it grow!
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