Black-Knight

Join Date 09/2009

+15

Why This Game Is Too Slow and How to Fix It

This game is slow, way too slow, unless we create cities everywhere.
That is because only with many cities we seem to be able to put together in a reasonable time a large number of units. Enough to cover such a large map.

I understand how out of frustration several players seem to tend toward teleport as a solution to cover the map, but that IMO would only create different problem, other than being completely unrealistic and completely break the wargame experience.

Because I personally do not like that many cities (and many people seem to agree), I have been thinking about several possible solution, trying to figure out how the many wargames I have played worked.

First of all I have to say that if in order to create cities and to create units a player can only use money as a resource, he will always tend to create many cities before creating many troops, out of fear to be outnumbered by the enemy. Therefore if we want to limit cities but not units, cities and units should not depend on the same resource to be created. let one to be gold and the other... something else (food? Population?). Probably the best solution would be that pioneers need MATERIALS, lots of them to be created (or a different resource? Prestige?). Materials also offer the advantage to improve cities that are already there.Thus the players would have to make a choice: more cities or better cities?

Once that issue is addressed the problem would still be how to produce many troops out of few cities. I have to say that the new TOTAL WAR game: Napoleon Total war, addresses that issue very efficiently!

One city in that game can produce several units every turn. Some of them just take one turn to be created, others take longer, but the final result is that an army can be ready and moving in a more reasonable amount of time than in EWOM. THAT IN MY OPINION IS THE MAIN WAY TO MAKE THIS GAME MORE FUN. GET TROOPS FASTER: GIVE THE PLAYERS MORE THINGS TO DO!

Obviously such system would mean less city micromanagement, but also mean more battles and therefore battles should be fixed to be faster than they are (bug fixed, animations sped up)

Also other ways to move units around should be encouraged. Units and ships should be (a little) faster, and there should be a lot more shores where troops could disembark (that is very important since right now ships are useless because of that and because ports can be built too late in the game IMO)

In fact I also believe ports should be able to be created starting from level 1 cities, maybe improving and build better ships in larger cities.

I believe that as soon as a resource different than gold is introduced to build either cities or armies, and armies are created faster, the game will be a lot more fun than it is now, and it won't need teleports or other Star Trek devices to get things going.

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I have a idea of improving the game speed at the start through magical means. Usually the play spend 10 to 20 turns at the start moving sovereign and hero around then hitting the end turn button while waiting their army to build up or research spells that they could engage in neutral creep hunting in earnest.

If the sovereign have a random set of spell on the start with imbue champion as default, the player can start battles on turn one. The gold earn in the 10, 20 turn of creeping can help speeding up the initial stage of the game.

Most important IT GIVES PLAYERS SOMETHING TO DO instead of queuing up buildings on turn one then run heroes around then hitting the end turn button for the next 10 or 20 turns.

Of course, this can be accomplish with having a few honor guards on the start.

Maybe this can be accomplish by having a random spell for every spell book the player choose instead of only having enable the spell book.

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Ports and ships aren't near useful enough. Ships are far too slow to be worth building for transport, and that appears to be the only ship I can build-- a combat ship to destroy transports in auto-resolved combat would at least provide a minimum of naval combat. There are also far too few beaches, and I can't make beaches with Lower Land which doesn't really make sense.

I think a big problem with military growth in the game right now is that a just-built city can build units almost as fast as a level 5 city. There are very few buildings, at least on the Kingdom side, that increase unit production speed, and not that many on the Empire side either.

Every other Civilization-style game has cities with high production produce units faster, it's certainly unique that Elemental doesn't do this .. but it's not good.

If higher level cities produced units significantly faster (as in cutting the previous time to 2/3rds each level-up or so), the game could actually be quite balanced. As it is now, you're probably better off making a lot of mini-cities, letting them grow to just enough population to field a squad and churn out 3 squads in 15 rounds instead of waiting 45 rounds for a big city to make three squads.

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Quoting Stromko,

reply 2

I think a big problem with military growth in the game right now is that a just-built city can build units almost as fast as a level 5 city.

They were trying to represent that it takes a certain amount of time to make swords and then teach someone to swing it, which is fair enough. But what they haven't taken into account is that any school (military or otherwise) has more than one level of student at a time. If it takes 4 years to train a swordsman, you'll always have some in their 1st year of training and some in their 4th year.

Maybe what they need is for each city to have a concurrent training capacity that increases as a city gets bigger. So a level 1 outpost might only be able to handle training 4 people at once (a party), while a city might be able to train 50 people at once (4 full squads of 12). The 4 squads may all commence training at the same time, or they might start (and finish) a dozen turns apart as you get the resources to pay for it. Your training capacity would naturally and sensibly be helped by adding things like barracks and war colleges.

I'd also link the quality of troop you can train to city improvements - how can you train veteran troops without barracks?

And training 4 guys shouldn't take anywhere near 4x the time it takes to train 1 - they're all doing the drills at the same time (plus the instructor can tell them to go practice amongst themselves, getting in his own R&R while still progressing the training ) Sure personal tuition is a good thing, but having classmates isn't as terrible as the current system makes out (though it does make sense if your faction has the egalitarian trait - I couldn't concentrate on training when half the recruits were athletic chicks in skimpy armour).

Put it all together and you'd have big cities able to crank out well trained units quite regularly, but they still wouldn't be able to instantly pop out a meaningful defence if you were unprotected when the big bad wolf showed up. The little outposts would be severly limited in what they can train - though that wouldn't kill the early game because who has the tech and cash for big squads anyway?

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Perhaps we could have military growth added to the options for city level up? This would create a butter or guns choice that would help. Since we can choose to specialize our cities in money, tech, or magical tech, why not military production?

In the real world we have cities geared more towards military, just like we have college towns and industrial towns.

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Reducing training and build times seems like a step in the right direction. Having population as a resource might be an opportunity to move things in a more speedy direction. In the real world, during war, basic training doesn't take that long. For peasants, or "observers," with wooden clubs, the time in training should be negligible.

Maybe also be able to select and issue orders to units-in-training, to be completed when the training is over, since if it takes 10 turns to make a peasant squad half the time 10 turns later I forget what I was going to do with it.

Later on it seems that half my game time is spent managing caravans. With experience and practice it has gotten less painful, but I wouldn't call it fun. An auto-caravan option would be nice that sends caravans to the nearest city connected by influence without an existing trade route. Also, when we get a notification that a caravan was destroyed, to have a button in that window to "replace caravan" would save a little time.

Boats feel a little on the slow side to me. Also, it takes one click to many to disembark units from the ship.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2420

Yea, one of the big things I'm noticing in our internal v1.1 build is how much the population as a resource allows the player to control the pacing in the direction they want it to.

The reason for this is because in v1.1 you can build multiple barracks, multiple workshops, multiple studies, etc. But all these things require people.

In Elemental v1.0, the player really doesn't have a lot of say over the progress of the game, it just boils down to capturing resources.

For 90% of Elemental's beta lifetime, we had the previously mentioned system EXCEPT we couldn't get population as a resource implemented properly and as a result, players could just conjure unlimited amounts of resources -- there was no real strategic cap.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 6

Yea, one of the big things I'm noticing in our internal v1.1 build is how much the population as a resource allows the player to control the pacing in the direction they want it to.

The reason for this is because in v1.1 you can build multiple barracks, multiple workshops, multiple studies, etc. But all these things require people.

In Elemental v1.0, the player really doesn't have a lot of say over the progress of the game, it just boils down to capturing resources.

For 90% of Elemental's beta lifetime, we had the previously mentioned system EXCEPT we couldn't get population as a resource implemented properly and as a result, players could just conjure unlimited amounts of resources -- there was no real strategic cap.

I am not sure how you guys are implementing population as a resource, but I have noticed that usually in games of this kind there is a way to set taxes. By decreasing the taxes people are attracted to the city and by rising the taxes too much you can make fast bucks but lose population (in some games taxes are set once for the whole empire, while others allow you to micromanage each city individually). As the game is now taxes wouldn't be a bad thing, since a little extra money would only help the gameplay...

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