Very true, my friend, very true. As I say above in another post, I already know I'll have a LOT of re-balancing to do for my Dragonlance Mod. Most likely this will involve me having to re-balance the Entire Game to get the numbers I want and I'll have to be creative in how I do it. What it will come down too will be following the story in the books while giving the player the freedom to change the way things turn out. It will be a very unique and fun experience I think. Though, Yes, I do expect it to take me a few months to do on my own.

You're also correct in that they haven't shown us how to Mod trainings yet. So far the only actual Mod Work I've done is changing some of the base graphics for armors and faces. I haven't tried anything else yet as I don't want to do a bunch of work now and then have to change it al later once another Beta comes out or when the actual release comes and that changes everything again. It's best for me to wait until I have all the tools and info I'll need, then start seriously working on the mod.

Somehow though I doubt I'm the only one who wants massively huge epic armies in my game. Anyone doing a LotR Mod will most likely want the same thing which will require them to do a shit ton of re-balancing as well.

Edit Note: In case anyone was wondering how I changed any of the graphics, some of them are saved in PNG format which can be edited with Photoshop and other art programs.

Indeed, also quite right. Which leads me to ask "Why not just change the Display Numbers to be Larger so the battles feel more epic?".

In the Back-End, in the Engine, just have 5 guys Be Shown as 50. When one man actually dies, ten men will fall down. All that's changing is what you're looking at and how that "feels". The numbers behind it in the engine won't change at all. It's just all a matter of Opinion, which we have established already

Note: No, when I make the Mod I won't just be changing what's displayed. I was just giving a simplified example.

Well I could see where watching 5,000 guys doing the current death animation, all at once, would be hell on the morale of the other 5,000 guys... LOL!

P.S. At .2 Gildar per head for maintenance, a 10K man army would cost 2K Gildar per turn. Good luck with that.

3B lurks...

twitch twitch

When I think about how Huge the 64Bit Maps will be, and then think about having 20-30 cities under my control at the half way point through the game, I think bringing in 5,000 Gildar per turn would be quite reasonable. The numbers and how much money or food something needs is all arbitrary and handled on the back end. You can tell the player every soldier needs 1 food per turn, but then in the coding have them only use .5 Food per turn. The player doesn't need to see the back end. The player needs to see what the player thinks is "cool".

Edit: You're definitely right about having 5K men do the same animation at the same time. That would look cheesy as hell and you can rest assured that Will Not Happen in my Dragonlance Mod

No No No Raven X. You don't be telling me one thing in game and have the Engine be doing something funky with the Math. That is very bad Karma dude.

I am not against 10K armies, but given the current Graphic interface, pretty much a lock now I would assume, I just can't see getting two 10K armies into a place on any Map such that they would all make the Tactical Map at once?.......

Well Ok. If the RMG somehow recreated the Plains of Abraham, perhaps... LOL!

Pure awesomeness. Thanks for the clarification Froggie!

Really? Try telling that to almost everyone who made a video game between the years 1980 up to Now

I can't even begin to count how many games there are that tell the player one thing while doing something else entirely behind the scenes where they think the player isn't looking. I see what you mean though

It's to tease us. Or make us blind: )

Actually it's simply because Brad is EVIL. Seriously. He makes Sauron look like Barbie riding a My Little Pony....you people just don't have any idea.

J/K Frogster

You probably won't want to take Friday off if they release it that day because you may run into problems with the download or they mey download lat etc. The day you want to take off would be Monday when you know you will get the whole day to play.

A: Elemental has multiplayer. To ensure that it is robust, we basically threw money at the problem (i.e. set up servers around the world to just host the game) rather than monkey around with trying to get players to connect with one another.  However, Elemental IS a single player game that happens to have multiplayer.  Out of the box, Elemental’s multiplayer will be essentially skirmish on fixed maps that have been pre-balanced (i.e. not randomly generated). 

I would rathere persoanly just have mutilplayer be exactly the same as single player, so me and my freinds can play it as it was meant to be played, with full features be them over top or not if there good enouggh for single player there good enoughf or mutilplayer, get 3 people playing there own kingdoms with extra 10 or more computers involled allr unning our own kingdom be awesome, just like playing civlization, we love civilization becuase we can custmiz it to allow 20+ othere AI civlizations plus we are able to play over interent with the 5 of us.

Rather disappointing with unit numbers... was hoping to see a very new and novel idea to allow for scaling, such as leadership and reinforcements. Oh well... another modding thing.

Ah, so ten of his people are an equal match for 100 of your people.  I see.  

Also slightly disappointed by the small scale Elemental ended up going with, sounds like no epic LotR-style battles of thousands of guys hitting each other in Elemental, but this is excellent news - as long as it's moddable all is forgiven. As many people have already pointed out, 10,000 man armies won't work anyway with the current economy/population/upkeep systems, but that is certainly no problem to change in a mod. The important point is that it's not hard coded or an engine limitiation, then the possibility for huge armies still exists (assuming one rebalances other game mechanics to make them viable).

So what if it turns out to be laggy as hell on a high end machine then what will you do?  My hope is that you will adjust to what the game and average PC's can handle. I would really like to play a DL mod.

I am not really all that worried about the population thing, for in a world of magic a few well trained well spelled soldiers could fight like an army.  Simply makes more sense to me.

I just hope Brad addresses my question of non-hero, spellcasters.  Otherwise it will be Elemental: War of 1-2 casters per side.

I'm with you on this one... I'd like to see the multiplayer same as the single player, whether in competition or co-op. However, they had a caveat in their answer... "Out of the box..." So perhaps the multiplayer we'd like to see will happen in an expansion?

well ... I'd still personally like to see (not in release but maybe a mod) large battles where Each individual soldier is a separate object.

Basically, while the unit is bought together, trains together, and moves together ... each soldier is a separate object with its own attack, defense, and HP.

So even a giant force of 1000 peasants, separated into 10 units of 100, cannot attack ALL AT ONCE with all 100 peasants ... instead the peasants attack one at a time once they come within combat range of an enemy.

So if ur fighting vs Pikemen you will be attacked by 2-3 rows of pikes, and if ur fighting vs daggers you will be attacked by 1 row of daggers, and likely only 1 or two daggers if ur a single person.

equally, if you attacked the rear or flank of a phalanx formation you would be attacked by less enemies than if you attacked them in the front ... due to the lack of flexibility of the formation.

Meanwhile, a mob is weaker but has no proper flank, and attacking from the rear won't confer any advantages other than lowering the enemy's morale.

// While a Phalanx is a stronger formation and increases morale, yet it cannot do as much damage to enemies attacking from the flank or the rear ... do turn the whole formation would take a "movement point" or in other words 1 combat speed/ combat round.

I'm fine with low numbers of soldiers (unless uber giant sized 64 bits maps?). Fits the "Rebuilding the world from near extinction" thingy. And visuals = numbers. If I take 1 peasant from my city, I want to see one, not a thousand.

Is this due to memory, time or game balance/mechanics?  With the current system I was finding it hard to imagine armies that big but it was something I was looking forward to and was thinking it would be available for modding if nothing else.  Would a modder be able to add this or will that not be feasible until you guys make fundamental changes?

Good luck with that one.

Some guys sure seem to like epic battles. I don't.

In both RTS & TBS, epic battles feels unbalanced. A slippery slope of power. Though it's milder in RTS since you can escape at any time and there's no "I shoot first and you just sit there and take it".

Strongest memory is Heroes of Might & Magic III. The bigger your stack, the more units dies from the other and thus less retaliation. Got disappointed in the Heroes system in Armageddons Blade where 284 Minotaur Kings with Luck (double damage), killed my entire 80 Minotaur King stack. Now he got 284 Minotaur Kings and I got none....slippery slope....

StarCraft II. 8 Stalkers firing against 6. Slippery slope.

The higher the numbers, the worse the problem becomes.

These epic battles are also closely related to turtlers so I'm wary of them.

Are we going to continue to have fixed costs for maintanence?  I assumed this was just a placeholder.  Shouldn't my elite cavalry equipped with plate mail, magic shield and flaming sword take more to maintain then a common peasant?

Oops, guess I should have read all the posts before posting as this was already answered.