Any news?
This does worry me. Teleport is really the most powerful ever ability in any game. It's actually pretty hard to make it influence the game in a controlled manner. It actually prevents many other mechanics that are also potentially fun. Building a fleet of ships to move an army across an ocean is expensive and time consuming, but also very believable and fun. How do you make teleporting more expensive than that such that you can include ships as a useful option?
How fast the units travel might be too slow for the game we have seen so far, but this is another thing that requires extreme care. You can easily make the 'World' seem like 'Hawaii'. As long as you have some fun decisions to make on every turn, I think it's better to have units go slow as they possibly can without their slow movement holding up everything else in the game.
In Age of Wonders Shadow Magic you have teleport based in towers (optional). In order to get it you need to build a city then a tower, then two upgrades of the tower, then the tower gate. It takes a while. Still if you manage to approach an enemy area it is worth bringing a pioneer, because it starts that whole process so that you can eventually overwhelm the enemy by instantly teleport hundreds of soldiers right in the middle of his country.It takes a long time to build but still it has been agreed in that forum by many players that it is spoils the strategy. So you see that also in AOW teleport is theoretically defensive (from tower to tower) but it ends up being used offensively. And hoinestly if you don't do it it's the other guy who is going to, so that becomes the only strategy, instead than using the fleet and the roads you have been working hard to build.I just can't see how in Elemental we could get a form of teleport which takes even more time to build or cast than that, and still they agreed that it was a game breaker. Crippling the caster for me is the only option that would make sense, but I repeat that it should be OPTIONAL.
If you needed a level 5 city with upgraded towers in order to make a rift, then bringing a pioneer/settler to the place you want to teleport to would be a very slow strategy, and it would be much quicker to walk there.
Aside from that, zones of influence in Elemental can tend to be quite large, so there might still be a ways to march even once you've sent your stack to the city nearest your target. So luck would play a role in how strategic your city placement is. And if the capital city of an enemy sovereign is on the other side of a large map, then teleporting between your cities would not give you that big of an advantage.
There is however an important feature that needs to be implemented, in order to make it more difficult for any army to simply march into a city, whether they teleported there or not. WALLS! Currently defensive improvements amount to increasing the defense rating of units in the garrison. Walls would make it strategically difficult to approach a city and destroy any units. You would actually need to plan a siege strategy.
I do agree with one thing though. There should be a standard Teleport spell that works the way you'd expect it to, and the game should have the option to 'Allow Teleport' or not.
Why not just make it so that cities need a food/maintenance consuming building to project a small 'teleport sphere' around them, and you could only teleport within that sphere.
I still recall with fondness one game I played where I had to guard three mountain passes to the peninsula I was based on, from two different, powerful Fallen empires. 'Tish and pish, easy', you might say, but I only had one mine and highly limited gold. I had to make due with soldiers with inferior, material-based equipment against enemies of gradually increasing capabilities and numbers, plus ogres from one side and Scions from another.
My solution was a single powerful army rather than split my weak forces into three weaker forces that could be overwhelmed, I hired an adventurer, turned her into a spellcaster with Imbue Essence, and trained up up to the point she could cast Teleport twice a turn if necessary. Furthermore, rather than allow the enemy to get within striking distance of my cities before teleporting (and risking being caught unprepared if three armies attacked at once) I created a 'Ranger' soldier, archers given an array of magical equipment so they could move 6 squares a turn, had a massive line of sight, a squad of them could bring down an Ogre safely, and if left out in the field would slowly heal their injuries. Groups of three lots of three of these troops were positioned in the mountain pass and kept an eye on incoming threats. If they were small, easily handled attacks the Rangers would deal with them. If not they would fall back and meet up with the teleporting army to provide reinforcements.
Really, the 'enough essence for two teleports' bit was overkill. With the Rangers in place I only needed to teleport once a turn, which really should be a limit on the spell.
TL;DR version: Teleport should require a minimum of X mana and drains all the mana of ANY spellcaster teleporting to 0. Plus they can only teleport into 'safe zones' determined by a small radius around cities with a 'Teleport stabiliser' building. The basic building costs food and a little maintenance, but better versions can be researched that provide a larger radius at the cost of higher maintenance, and requiring a larger city. Minimum city 3 for the basic one.
ok to summarize then:
Walking Good.
Teleporting Bad.
And. There should be a wandering monster called a Black Knight (it's just a flesh wound) that goes around hunting magic using heroes and stealing their spell books.
(incidentally heroes of might and magic used a pretty decent system to control how strong magic got - trade off between a stronger army vs. a stronger spellcaster)
(edit - horses help a lot with movement, but horses and gear get very expensive and should not be used as a substitute/ solution to the problem)
We have combat map, and we have the world map.
things we can so in the tactical map:
1. short range teleport to get a better position in combat.
2. the ability to teleport beside someone, attack, then teleport somewhere else so there is no counterattack.
3. the ability to jump in beside someone and give a surprise attack for extra damage.
4. an escape mechanism to get out of combat.
5. teleport an enemy somewhere else in the map, moving them out of position (we can do this randomly with air elemental and we have titan's breath to move someone back one square)
6. teleport an enemy unit out of combat to a few squares away on the world map in a random direction.
7. damaging teleport - you attempt to essentially cut someone in pieces and spreading them around - causes damage.
Things we can do in the world map.
1. short range teleport on the world map. probably 4 to 6 squares worth of movement.
2. medium range teleport on the world map. probably 7 to 10 squares on the world map.
3. long range teleport. probably 11 to 15 squares on the world map.
4. gateways between two point.
5. teleport an enemy unit somewhere to cause them damage and move them out of position (we have the hurricane spell - forget the exact name - their is some randomness to the spell, i have yet to use it myself at the moment)
6. opening up a portal into another dimension would be kinda cool - we could use it as a special summons for a powerful creature perhaps.
7. extreme long range teleport - target any elemental shard and move to it. perhaps we could be able to unlock tech that enables us to build a substitute in cities.
We defineately need to beef up heroes so they can make more of a difference in battles and there needs to be some form of specialization for magic using heroes versus warrior heroes. There is also a basis for a thief type hero (more loot after battles) that can be expanded upon. A healer/ druid type of hero would be nice, since i don't see how a divine type of hero would work in this world - although evil divine heroes could get power from titans but i can't think of a good hero type equivalent.
Mind you, kingdom gets life magic and empire gets death magic so maybe it is a racial distinction that can be used to explain it.
Implementing the feats system would help a lot with this, as would the ability to mod feats.
Heroes don't seem to get enough at level right now, and magic is twitchy - lets see what happens with 1.1
You can get a few armies there before the teleport is ready, but from that point on there goes the instant exploit: lots of units just appear next to, or inside, the enemy territory.
THAT'S MY MAN!
For the rest I just don't mind all the tweaks and complications you want to add, as long it is optional... because I'll never even try the version with teleport in it!!
My take on that is that heroes should be more useful in battle but from a strategic point of view, not really by being "beefed up". The idea of them healing units is great, they could also add morale or have skills to improve unit movement, or their simple presence could add experience. Also I would make sure that in battles which are not actually fought tactically, they would tend to stay away from troubles and therefore be the last unit getting killed, dying only if the batte is lost. IMO the leader's chance to survive autofight should be quite high, almost sure.
I think teleporting is too fundamental to have as an 'option'. At that point you are talking about doubling the work that needs to be done designing two different games. I say one at a time! lol.
How can the option of removing a feature be "doubling" the work???? I am not saying that there is no work involved... but... double? Read all the complications these guys came up with in order to address what they, obviously, have finally recognized as being a possible game breaker! ...While instead I just suggest to make it optional!!
LOL. I think he is too
Sorry but that is just overdoing it now. If you are going to wait for at least 2 cities to become level 5 and complete their upgrades, and walk as many units as you can to the rally point in the meantime, just to be somewhere near a city you wanted to attack 300 turns ago, then I don't see how you could possibly call this an exploit, unless you can accurately predict all the actions of all the AI players. For all you know, that city you wanted to attack could have been razed by another player or faction in 100 turns. What if in the meantime, the war is taken to your doorstep at a city of yours that is no where near getting a rift? What if that city is no longer a primary target for you, and a stronger opponent is assailing you? Where is the exploiting advantage of city teleports then?
By the time you have two level 5 upgraded cities, you would have explored a fair chunk of the map on foot, and taken in your LotR epic walking and feasting adventure. It is only after this that you will move into the 'high magic' era of the game, where events have developed onwards from your rudimentary beginnings.
Exploit is not the good term you areright, the good term is probably game breaking, because if I place teleports on to far sides of my empire and you do not I will have a huge advantage, which means that you'll have to do it too and so do all the other players. The game will all be about that, I am not saying that there is no strategy involved whatsoever, just that all games will end up being the same.
When you factor in how long it actually takes to establish a city on the far side of a map, defend that city, and then wait for that city to grow and prepare a rift in order for you to begin your offensive strategy, you will find that you will be beaten 9 times out of 10 for sitting on your hands waiting for teleport to come in.
No, I don't think everyone will be opting for this strategy if teleport gates were implemented in this way. I think this implementation of teleport would be silly, and everyone would complain that it is far too gimped, and that most games would be over before you ever got a chance to use it. And even when you did get to use it, your two level 5 cities might not have been in a position strategic enough to even provide a real advantage for offensive teleporting.
So, the better term for this teleport would be 'useless'. Hardly game breaking.
I could understand before how you think teleport is a really bad idea, as there are some very valid reasons to support this, and I am in agreement with most of them. However, when you fail or refuse to properly take into account the limitations and changes that differentiate that horrible teleporting experience you had, from the ideas being put forward here, it makes me wonder if you are being objective enough about the issue to warrant further discussion.
What I really love about this debate is simply that no one even cares to point out that the AI does not teleport at all, nor would they even come close to exploiting it even if they did. While I can say that in MP this could be a "problem," it would be equally usable by all parties so there is no balance problem. Ultimately, the entire teleport debate still comes down to people complaining about how they feel forced to use something they might consider an exploit, which is pretty much just hilarious. Really, this whole point comes down to simply adding an option to remove teleport from MP, which is probably not that difficult, since it is all personal choice in SP.
If you really try, you can have 2 level 5 cities which are fairly far from each other by around turn 200.
Books don't often include teleportation because it entirely eliminates that most fundamental of story mechanisms: the journey. It's a trope that turns up in story after story, from Pilgrim's Progress to the Canterbury Tales to, yes, the Lord of the Rings. The challenges the characters face in the traveling itself are what creates a compelling evolution of both the character of the characters and the story itself.
Being able to just go from journey.start() to journey.end() through teleportation utterly eliminates or trivializes all those challenges. After all, if they _could_ have teleported, why did the characters suffer and fight so hard en route? Because they wanted the "xp"? Because they're bloody stupid?
Games also have this issue. That's why TES slowly moved away from incorporating stuff like Disintegrate Wall or Levitation (also engine restrictions in TES4) or Mark and Recall -- because whenever things got hard or annoying, you could just disapperate. Arcanum's teleportation mechanics were fairly well balanced and implemented (techies used the train or boats for a price, mages had to invest in a skill tree), but the game itself was little played.
In a strategy game, teleportation, when well handled, can be pretty fun. Unfortunately, the computer tends to handle it poorly or neglect it entirely, especially when tactical teleports are used (like in Empire at War, warping your reinforcements in behind the enemy to smoosh their engines), so it's often simply a straight player advantage. Strategic teleports are pretty common in games -- Civ4 used airports, and FfH used the Obsidian Gates -- for moving troops rapidly from city to city, but that's again something the AI rarely uses.
So, if it is in, it should be something the computer considers in its moveto(). And it should come at a fairly hefty cost -- you should only use it when you really need an edge, rather than in lieu of standard movement. If both of those constraints are filled, then teleportation has its place in the game. Otherwise, teleportation delenda est!
edit: No spoilers? Snap! This post is already pretty long, so you can skip this part. It's all anecdotal discussion of WoTMud anyway.
WoTMud was a faboo PK Mud where you could create a channeler who, if you leveled up and joined the Aes Sedai, could travel or create portals. Incredibly useful, because riding between towns was mad arduous and also quite dangerous, what with all the trollocs and murderers and Seanchan wandering about! However, there were a few issues with traveling in particular, but also portals.
See, in order to do any kind of teleportation, you needed to have the location code for the place you were traveling to. In the case of portals, this required you to be physically present in a location where you want to create a portal, and get the code from it -- which would decay after an in game month, and was specific to you personally. So, you'd still have to go between towns every few RL weeks to get the loc code for it, and thereby expose yourself to the dangers of the road or traveling. Only mid/high level Aes Sedai could pull it off (or Dreadlords, but good luck becoming one of those, it took RL years and lots of intense RPing), but it meant you could move an entire group to any location in the world.
Traveling was way more dangerous. See, anyone could give you a loc code for someplace, and you could also pick it up by locating items or creatures. But every time you traveled, you had a small chance of ending up somewhere completely different -- say, the incredibly dangerous Spine of the World, where trolloc PKers loved to hang out, or the center of the Seanchan's island. Which, if you were a lower level channeler, invariably meant pissing your pants, spamming loc and screaming for help in whispers to higher level friends.
Why was this so terrifying? Well, because death meant all your items could be looted from your corpse, and also that you'd lose a ton of hard-grinded XP and even some quest points -- necessary for ranking up in the clan, hence even more difficult to get.
So teleportation was very well handled in that game because it was costly, difficult, rare (only one class of one race in two clans, both of them disliked, one intensely so, could learn it) and potentially fatal.
You are of course right about the AI problem. I think though that a reasonable mechanic must first be decided on before you can start going into how the AI could possibly make use of it. Depending on the mechanic, it may not be very viable, and so you go back to the drawing board.
If that is the case, 200 turns is still quite a bit, and a lot of marching can otherwise be done in that time. At the same time, that would provide a total of 2 places to teleport between. Not a game breaking advantage I think. Also, doing your utmost to achieve that strategy early would leave you quite lacking and weak in other important areas, and so would not make this the strategy that players would have to exploit to have a good chance of victory.
Actually this has been debated massivly before in at least two other threads. It was pointed that the AI never uses teleport even when it should, such as when stacks get blocked or stuck:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/397164/page/3
My feeling is that teleport is over-rated, it's powerful, sure, but not game-breaking ... others disagree for whatever reasons. I didn't reply to this thread only becasue I've already said everything I wanted to about teleport before.
Also:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/398631
Actually I believe it is a few more than that, though I was referring to the overall community debate, not simply this particular thread. Since 1.1 will probably remove or at least vastly restrict teleport, I think the entire debate is ultimately moot until the new release. I think if a player or set of players have a problem with some game mechanic, they should simply attempt to handle the problem themselves instead of pushing to have the entire mechanic removed. After the game's release, many people were convinced about how OP the Organized trait was, and it was ultimately removed. In the wake, we now have the level 1 escort quest which takes like 30 turns just because the nobleman moves at 1, or a war effort which takes ages if you have even one unit which moves at 2. Since I have yet to hear any word about updates to move points or tile move multipliers, I would say that people should keep quiet about teleport, because once its gone, you can forget about any kind of fast movement.
This is a good example of a spell that should have a "pregame setting" associated with it, since there's such a wide debate among players.
.. Actually, I would have a pregame setting for magic in general, say highly magic (all spells are about 30% cheapter), normally magic (as it is now), magic-less (all spells cost about 75% more than they cost now), also crystal & shard frequency should be tied to these setting. This way, players can choose the type of game they want to play at start. It's *always* a good idea to have a lot of pregame settings that allow players to customize the game as much as they like before playing.
My argument, that I've made before, which is exaclty the same as to both teleport & organized, both of which got nixed for the same reason, and I still maintain today, is that they only *seemed* overpowered because the AI never used them. The extremely weak game AI never used teleport or organized. If the AI had actually created a kill stack and started romping through player cities at 6 squares a turn, taking 2 cities down a turn, threatening to take the player capital the next turn, then the player would be forced to use teleport & organized to defend himself, casting these abilities in a whole new light. If AIs actually used diplomacy in this game, made alliances & then launched a coordinated strike against the human player on two fronts .. wow, I would be so unbelievably amazed I wouldn't even have the words. Apparently, it's impossible to program the AI to have these basic skills. The traits/spells that players call "overpowered" only "seem" overpowered against an AI that never uses them.
I made the comment in another thread that if you have a squad with rifles, and the AI squad has rifles but instead tries to charge and use its pistols, grenades, or bayonet in close combat, the charging AI squad will get slaughtered, making the human' player rifles seem "overpowered." This is *exaclty* the same analogy in this game. So, do you nix the rifles since they seem overpowered? hell no, what should happen is that the AI be made to use them, i.e. make the AI use teleport & organized (intelligently I would underscore), simple as that. Ultimately, if it's not possible to program the AI to use these spells/traits (for whatever reasons), then they shouldn't have been added to the game to begin with because they just break the game by creating a "walkover, turkeyshoot" AI ... Sometimes simpler is better.
It's been my experience that AI groups get "stuck" between moutains and/or political boundries. The AI is also incapable of using "lower land" making it possible to just completely block off entire sections of the map by casting "advanced land raise" or whatever it's called. Would players call these spells broken? It should be a very simple matter for the AI to analyze the map around its kingdom & determine if it's "hedged in" by mountains, after all, all the AIs are given all 4 spell books at start. Why give them all 4 if they don't use them? Lower land is only 2 mana? It should also be simple for the AI to determine when it gets "stuck" in between political boundries and cast "teleport." I've personally seen at least one game where the AI sovereign sat for over 40 turns in the same square in this situation and did nothing until the political boundries grew & just "auto-displaced" the sovereign group somewhere else.
It's not that these spells or traits are overpowered, it's that the AI is borderline broken/weak. I'm not saying that they're not powerful either, they're both very powerful, but not "over" powered.
I think that teleporting is such a far reaching question that if you want to include it, you have to design the game around it. If you design the game around it though, then you are most likely going to really need it. If you then remove it, you are left with a gaping hole in your design that must be filled in with massive adjustments to everything else.
Currently the game has trade caravans, each city can have one. If two cities are linked by a portal, one would think that they would also be linked in trade. Of course we could simply choose to ignore that...
Teleportation is just really goofy. If you don't wanna cross the map, use a smaller map I say.
A couple of suggestions for alternate (Black-Knight approved, hopefully, heh heh) methods of transportation..
1) Champion-for-hire, random, Harry Porter. He can apparate, floo-powder, or port-key your party.
2) Fed-Ex City Improvement, you can Parcel your party.
don't forget about flat stanley - although i'm not sure if we have enough book cases in the game.
<JK>
While I agree that the issue is a difficult one to solve, I don't think it is all that drastic. I don't know if you have read this thread in the Ideas forum, but Gazz_ has listed quite a few combinations of methods that could be used to make it viable. My personal pick is the teleport anchor points method. It seems to address most of the grievances with teleport.
actually, i have to admit my list of things you can do with teleportation was not meant as a solution to the perceived problem, but a complete a list as i could think of - of special things you can do with the idea.
.. by the way, I may not be satisfied by V 1.1 until it provides good catering, does my laundry, puts a chocolate at my pillow at night and fetches my slippers in the morning ...
LMAO
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