I would think a popup that tell you that there ARE idle when you try to end turn and asks "Are you sure you want to proceed to the next turn?" would be better (with the ability to mark cities as idle so they do not cause the message). Then you only get one pop up from idle cities.

Thanks for the post and the screen(s)!  Will be interesting to see how it plays out, could have some bloody battles with the hp boost.  Nice to hear of more use for charisma.

Nice. I love what we see about the city popup (as long as it only shows once per city! not once per city every turn). Nothing more annoying than trying to produce a unit in every town, having to check the city manager every turn. This will be doubly welcome with the added focus to large cities.

Is morale gone for good? Or gone until you can do something fun with it.

I hope we can link statistics to values in modding. For example, linking charisma to give better values from a champion - not just prestige - would be desirable. An Administrator that speeds construction of buildings in a town might be better at his work with a high charisma.

Interesting, I thought it was too high rather then too low. If accuracy inflates very quickly just by levels but dexterity requires significant investments for a 5% dodge chance... why bother? It'd make more sense to pile those points into CON and be able to take the hit that you're 95% likely to get.

With your example of 23 accuracy, I'd want at least 10 dodge to consider it useful. That's 20 DEX. Against a level 4 unit. Against a level 8 unit I'd be facing 31 accuracy and would feel more comfortable with 15 dodge, or 30 DEX. That's huge. Switching accuracy to level * 3 will pretty much ensure that I never spend points on DEX because it's doing so little (I don't consider going from 3% dodge chance to 4% dodge chance to be worth investing in when units die in a few hits).

The current level * 2 for accuracy seems a touch high to me, but it's probably still workable. When we get a beta build I'll test it and let you know. But level * 3 is just going to overshoot the mark unless you want dodges so rare that there's little point in having them at all.

I'm also curious about what armor does now, and how damage/absorption works.

Ah. So it's still possible for a high defense unit to roll a 0 (or a 1) and wind up with no defense that attack? That's concerning.

On the upside, scaling HP and lower attack numbers from not having Strength act as such a strong multiplier could make it less of an issue then it was before (combined they lower the chance of a one-shot kill). Thanks for the info.

Wow, dodge, spell resistance, accuracy, now we're getting somewhere.

That same unit could roll 20 on its def. roll and still get "no defense" if the attacker rolled 21 accuracy, it's a moot point. Just like in DnD accuracy/dodge determine whether a unit is hit or not and then the damage reduction kicks in to provide the final amount of damage inflicted.

Why wasn't essence kept as a cap on how much mana can be spent by a unit during a single battle? Kinda like the casting points in Age of Wonders.

I feel these scaling would make Dexterity pretty much of a dump stat for me, and an annoying feature when fighting against dextrous enemies. Using the mechanism you mentioned, the odds of hitting (when Accuracy > Dodge) is:

1 - Dodge / 2 * Accuracy

For example, for Accuracy = 15 and Dodge 5, you have 5/6 chance of hitting. Doubling Dodge to 10, and you have 4/6 chances. The survivability only increase by 25% for a huge increase (+10) of Dexterity.

I actually coded a roguelike that had this exact hitting mechanism, and it worked OK. However, a TBS is not a roguelike, as you are not supposed to do as many attacks for each enemy. So I fear that it would not work very well in Elemental.

My suggestion would be to increase the effect of Dodge, such as to get hitting rates for average stats to around 50%. Then increase the number of strikes to decrease variance. This increase can be done under the hood, hidden from the player (ie: you roll attack 3 times, you get damage proportional to the number of successes. No success: miss, 1 success: scratch, 2 successes: solid hit, 3 successes: critical.) Or you can make all the attacks visible on screen, a little like AoW2, which had 3 strikes per turn, with success rates around 50%.

Your first draft doesn't deserve a nix. The essence nix deserves a nix.

derek, what are the TYPES of armour vs weapon types effects eg dagger vs leather, arrow vs plate, sword against leather/plate and hammer vs leather/plate?

meaning how will the weapon class fare againt the armour class?

harpo

"....and Intelligence is the "magic" stat...."

Could Intelligence be renamed to Magic, I personally think that would be more immersive/intuitive name now.

 

"....There are now 5 base stats and..... 5 tech tree branches...."

I think it would be nice if every Sovereign stat gave you a small bonus(n/10 %) to research to it's correlated branch(Strength <--> Warfare, Constitution <--> Civilization, Dexterity <--> Adventuring, Intelligence <--> Magic, Charisma <--> Diplomacy). For example 10 Strength would give you 1% bonus to you warfare tech research.

Whoa whoa whoa, hold the phone...  Essence is gone?!  *Turns to his imaginary assistant.*  GET ME THE VP!

No, seriously though, I'm...  Well, just a little shocked.  Only because this change wasn't exactly made very clear...  Whether that was the choice or not on your end, I don't know, don't really care, honestly...  It's just a little surprising.

In hindsight, it does make sense though...  Perfect, logical, rational sense, and I really don't know why I didn't see it coming...  Hence the surprise.

As for other changes...

HUZZAH!

'Nuff said.

How does it make sense? Other games with global mana that I am familiar with have a limit for how much a hero can use per turn, which is what essense could still do.