No Teleporters Please !!! Elemental BTOOIC !!!

but age of wonders 2 does have teleportors....    you can build them in any city with a wizard tower...

I've also seen no trouble from teleporters in Heroes of Might and Magic, another inspiration to this game.

I've actually seen very few High-fantasy books that contain armies (i.e. would have spells that powerful, and have armies.   Lord of the Rings had very subtle magic.   Forgotten realms books don't generally contain vast armies, though if they did it would be possible for the stronger wizards to cause them to teleport across the world.  I haven't read any planscape books, but I'd wager that armies pop out of nowhere in them all the time.)    That being said, I HAVE read books where huge armies pop out of nowhere.    I turn your attention to the Warcraft: war of the ancients trilogy, and likely many later warcraft books.   A bulk of the burning legion  totally pops out of nowhere in the middle of the Elven capital.   (I might be embarassed to say I've read that series)

Lastly, teleportors would be  super late game, next to city destroying volcanoes...   somebody should be about to win by that point.   So... yeah, they would totally end the strategy of the game, because the game would be over.

edit:   actually, come to think of it, I've read more sci-fi novels that have armies pop out of nowhere.   Sure there is a scientific explination like they are alien bugs and they burrowed there, or they are in a cloaked space ship, but in terms of game mechanics they may as well be the same thing.

Silly. If the Sovereign can, the armies can. As simple as that. I wouldn't believe that my Sovereign can raise volcanoes, destroy mountains and everything else, and yet be unable to teleport an army and only himself. Either you ban teleport completely or you leave it as it should be. Forgotten Realms without portals? NO WAY!! Planescape without portals? NO WAY!! (ok, this last one for obvious reasons... ) IN fact, any fantasy rpg out there without portals and/or teleport? NO WAY!!

And as in a RPG, as a GM has the duty to have those kind of spells/magical objetcs in mind when designing adventures and the possible uses and/or counters to them (and yes, players will still jinx it somehow from time to time but still...), here the same.

So should I start a boicot thread against those who don't want Sovereign Death = Game Over? Or should I start a thread pointing all the reasons why it's a good idea and try to convince them with rational arguments and as many details as possible instead of an crusader attitude? (without malice and with the best of intentions but still agressive)

Quoting black-knight "even read a fantasy book where armies pop out of nowhere?" yes i have its called The Redemption of Althalus by David and Leigh Eddings and i highly reccomend it and his Belgariad and Malloreon series

Also, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series usses teleports a lot.....

Black-Knight   you've over-reacted to teleporters... clearly the AOW thread is only requesting city teleporters to be "An Option" where as your topic leans heavily towards requesting "No Teleporters".  

On another important note the game Elemental will have MANY months of beta testing by MANY actual gamers... unlike Triumph Studios.  You're crying the sky is falling and you haven't even looked at the sky otherwise you'd know the extensive beta testing will properly balance any major gameplay problems.

I hate teleporters.  I just can't see an AI using it effectively.

Just my 2 cents. 

Hope that helps  

If the game wasn't coming from Stardock (known for AI) I would probably agree, but the teleports are merely shortcuts to other locations.  Such path_finding programming is not as difficult as say having an AI build supercombatants(SC's) and equipping them with the proper items to effectively kill armies single-handledly OR having the AI plan assassination attempts on enemy sovereigns.

For some reasons I get the feeling that an AI would get a bigger benefit from teleporters than human players. Human players are better at evaluating where the enemy is going to come from, a skill that is not needed when you can see any army coming from more than 1 turn away and can teleport defenders as needed.

(Of course the "teleport defenders as needed" scenario is pretty boring to fight against, so any teleportation should be pretty costly to avoid abuse.)

So maybe the arguement should be how do we fix the problems of teleportation, not how to ignore it...

There shouldn't be just teleportation, but if your sovereign is power full enough, shouldn't he be able to have a spell that he can summon unit's, through a portal or something, at a cost of mana, or something along those lines, 

Well I have no problems with fixed teleportation like portals/gates between 2 or more points, since its the same for everyone. I could see how something like a teleportation spell might be overpowered if you can choose the desination and gate in an entire army ontop of a city for example, but then again you can put a Volcano on a city which is probably going to be just as bad for it anyways. Basically if the game gives you a counter for a spell like teleport then I'd have no problem with it being in game.

I also would not have a problem with teleportation if a few things were observed.

First, it MUST be fixed location to fixed location. Building portals in cities OK!

Also I would want it to be late-game stuff. Basically useful for easing logistical concerns in your troop deployment and movement. Also useful for trade!

I could go either way, but would lean towards those gates only being capable of moving a limited number of troops per turn (ala airlift from civ 4. 1 unit per turn)

Wow, seriously?Come on man...

I have to say I strongly disagree. Strongly. Teleporters are a necessary part of a magical world in my opinion. Portals to Hell for Demons to come from. Doorways for powerful Wizards to traverse the realms. I think Teleporters should be in the game.

BUT....

They should not be easy to make and if they are to be placed naturally in the world they should be very, very, rare and Heavily guarded by powerful monsters. They should be used with caution and not littered all over every map. That was the problem with AoW2. The teleporters in that game were laid haphazardly with no consideration for where they were placed on most maps. Teleporters are not something that just sit around naturally most of the time. If a teleporter is in the world it's usually sealed away in some far off ruin somewhere.

If they make it a high level building that the player can construct that would be good too. It all comes down to balancing in the end. They could be limited to only being able to build a certain number of teleporters. They could be incredibly expensive end game buildings. They could take almost all of a very rare resource to construct. There are unlimited ways it could work and be balanced.

I also think Teleporters are necessary to Elemental because they have said that if you're playing the game with a 64 bit OS then the maps can be so huge they can take you a Year to complete. On a map that HUGE without teleporters it could get very tedious to move armies and to try to maintain a war with a large empire where you're fighting on two continents. Perhaps your economy is in the hole currently and you can't afford to keep two armies going. Without Teleporters you can't get a single army back and forth fast enough to defend lands on both continents. Playing on a map that HUGE, teleporters or some other super fast means of transportation is a must. Not only teleporters. You can having Flying Citadels and Flying Ships for super fast mass transit. If they go fast enough they might as well be teleporters in a different skin. That's a little off topic for this post though so I'll stay on the topic at hand, Teleporters.

Teleporters fit in a world of magic. Also Strategically they can offer a Lot to gameplay in my opinion. If Teleporters or "Gates" are present on some maps then the answer is simple. Simply control both ends. If they are places on the map then first thing I'll do when I find them is build a city at both ends and defend them with everything I have. This way units won't "pop out of nowhere" on someone else's lands. They'll be moved magically from one continent to another in my lands. These two cities militarily will become targets for everyone on the Map who wants to control the gates. From a strategy game perspective I don't possibly see how Teleporters would hurt the game. Especially a game that's made mainly to be enjoyed as a Single Player game. Yes Multiplayer will be fun and I do look forward to killing all of you in it, but, it's a single player game.

If you go back farther in 4x history and need more reasons, even Moo had Stargates and they had them in Moo 2 also. I don't think they called them Stargates in the game, but they were there. You could build one at each planet and move massive fleets anywhere in your empire that you needed them. They were very expensive to build and you didn't get them until you were almost at the very end of the tech tree. This is in a game where ship travel speeds are very important. From a simple means of in game transportation Teleportation is the logical end of the tech tree in any Sci/Fi Fantasy game as it should be with Elemental. We all know Elemental is different and better then any game of it's kind that's come before and we also all know they are doing some things differently in this game which is what sets it apart from all the rest. If they decide to leave out Teleporters in this game I would be disappointed. From a Strategic point they bring a lot to the table in any game. They become part of a plan and are planned against as well. If you don't know where the other end of a Teleporter is and you're worried about it being controlled by a powerful rival then you'll be forced to keep a decent garrison at the cities located near it or build a city right next to it to defend from invaders.

It's worth noting that teleportation was specifically excluded in GalCiv because of the issues involved in making the AI utilize it as well as a human could. I wouldn't jump to expect it for certain here just because many other fantasy games have them.

Galciv had wormholes - I call shenannigans!

What about them being optional? They sure change a lot in a map and if they are peppered around by the random map generator they can definitely change the geography of world.

(God I am getting soft here...! Because what I really mean is that games get dumb to the point of being almost unplayable with teleporters...)

a random map generator and teleporters: a dangerous mix when you descover on turn 100 than the other half of the map, the one you are just uncovering is a complete unplayable mess!

While I agree the original poster is speaking about doom too soon, pathfinding becomes a pain when teleporters are incorporated: there's no way you can build an heuristic that takes them into account, so you have to use much worse algorithms (like Djikstra) and in big maps that's a killer. It's not too hard, but it takes a lot of CPU time to do it properly (too much).

ohhh yes....

Pathfinding isn't a problem.    I mean its not that hard to create an algorithm that traces through portals.  (Big O of N+XN where X is the number of portals in walking range, thus expected to be a rather low number)   Its other issues that relate to it in terms of AI trying to judge distance.   When it is no longer "can this unit reach this location in 10 steps?" is when its a problem.  (that would be just starting on the unit, and doing a recursive loop to check all spaces that are within 10 movement that hasn't already been checked by one of the previous recursive branches)

I mean in theory you could go through each city, and cross reference it with each enemy unit to see how far away each enemy unit is (thus pathfinding through portals to see if the unit is 20 steps away, for example) but then you're talking crap like Algorithms with Big O = N (squared)... which is very CPU cramping (and likely the way I'd do it if I were coding game AI...   but thats why I'm not allowed to code AI or collision detection for anything I do anymore).  

And lets not forget "checking to see if this particular opponent can even detect the enemy in that space"  which could include checking to  see if allies or friendly opponents might like the AI player enough to tell them "hey, there's a dude sneaking up on you who's likely not visible to you yet but he's commin' through the portal... you better watch out" and can see the unit for the AI in question.

 It gets even rougher when it has to run checks like "does this enemy have access to the planar gate spell, which allows it to jump across maps in certain ways" because then it has to run a check for each of those... Big O = N (cubed),   so the enemy turns now take 3-5 min to process enemy movement.   Its a freaking chess program, except with 16 opponents rather than just 1.

BUT!    then again, this game has a multiplayer component, Gal Civ didn't.    The AI doesn't need to compete with human players for understanding portals, other players do.   The single player campaign can just be limited on the number of portals, or have portals only used/placed in certain ways that the AI does understand it.     Skirmish should just be "whatever is fun" and the player totally customizes that anyway... just make one of the defaults "no portals", and have tons of portals for the "non-cannon" multiplayer settings.   Frogboy promised an AI that could handle mods, and pathfinding through portals is certainly needed, even if this game doesn't include it in its cannon, just because that would be used in countless situations that might not even be directly "portals" but just similar in terms of sub-mechanics.   AI for portals isn't needed to fulfill that promise, since it isn't something so dependent on the basic functions and compatibility of the engine...

Actually the real problem with teleportation isn't that the AI can't use it, but rather the other way around: maps become an intricated and confused set of locations where the actual distance between places is something that can't really be examined by a player when he tries to make his strategy.

And I am not going to like a strategy game where I can't make strategies!!!

"Players can handle it, so it's ok if the AI can't" is not a valid excuse, since Elemental is a single-player game first and multiplayer second.

Not really. As you'd typically build a teleporter in every city, it just boils down to how near enemies are to any given city of yours, and whether you have your own stack of doom in or near any other city of yours.

Tracing around portals is like tracing from one tile to the next for the pathfinding algorithm: they just add new connections between two vertices in a graph. But I think your O(N+XN) is wrong, given that Dijkstra performance ranges from O(V*V) to O(E * log V).

The rest I agree, portals make a lot of other calculations more complicated for the AI.

That assumes that Elemental will fail in its ambition to encourge diverse settlements and avoid the tired old 4X tesselation of nearly-identical cities. What if each and every Gateway you wanted to build in a settlement required the completion of a quest for a rare pre-catclysm item or a hard-to-find 'natural' resource like phase-spider silk or petrified dragon's wing?

Also the Rift War Saga by Raymond E Fiest.  The entire premise is that magicians opened up a rift between two worlds that allowed one army to invade from another planet.  The main charater even starts a wizard's college called "Stardock".

Sword of the Stars.  An entire race in that game bases their FTL drive on simple teleportation.