Tyrion2001

Join Date 08/2009

Pacing note

One of the things I feel is way out of proportion in elemental is the pacing. I hope some people will agree with me and post here so they look into changing it a bit. I feel like research happens to quickly to make anything other than top tier abilities/weapons/armor worthless. Every time I play a game I have claymores and full plate and have done the entire civics tree before any major encounters occur. I feel there is no incentive to build the peasant army since they still cost 1 person and take the same number of turns to train. That said I have a few ideas I think would help.

Longer movement-There are times where I can get a new tech before my army can even get outside my area of influence of a small city. I really feel longer movement for armies and the like would really enhance the game. It would also make scouts far more valuable. It would most likely make multiplayer run smoother as well because it will be less likely that one player has a battle while the rest move their one space and are done on any given turn. It would also force you to build an army earlier in the game. When it takes 40 turns to move your army into an enemy city and 40 turns to train that army it is hard to justify it unless they are in it for the long haul.

Proportional Train Times for Units-Should it really take 5 turns to train a peasant to wield a club? Should it only take me 5 turns to train some guy to wield a claymore on horseback in full plate? The pioneer pack is great, adding time for that but it should not be the only thing.

Slow research wayyyyyy down: There are a good number of techs in the game and it takes a little while to get going but once you start producing a decent number of research points (like 2-3 solid cities) it only takes 3-4 turns to get a new tech. This makes everything become outdated almost before it is build. I have a new weapon I can build before I can even train a unit with the old one.

The one other thing I think will really need a good look is balancing the victory conditions, and I think the only way to do that is going to be enabling multiplayer and seeing which ones go the fastest. Right now I can accidentally win the master quest before I could even think of conquest. I know it is still very much a work in progress and I am impressed with the way things are changing so far. (Really love the new way resources work)

Please add your thoughts.

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EvilTwinTepe
Symondus

I agree with all of these points.

I also wrote some long feedback on research here. Maybe you can also share some opinions there.

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Agreed on all major points above.

The pacing seems way off still.

Though it's not just technology or research - I feel like I never, ever, have to leave my area of influence - for anything. 9 out of 10 times I just sort've wandered around my starting around for a few hundred turns, cleaning up freshly appeared goodie huts. Like I said in a different post - quests need to end randomly on maps. If that Estate I need to bring the noble to is in the middle of enemy territory - I may reconsider the quest. But at least it'd likely have me interact with other factions (I mean, besides eventually dominating them militarily).

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I agree with these points also, the game I am playing I hit military domination before I even got to daggers and short swords.

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I absolutely agree with all of the above. I don't even often bother training armies, I just research the best weapons and armor, throw them on four or so hero units, and wipe the map clean.

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I agree with the OP. This game progresses way, way too fast. I don't have time to do anything and I'm getting new techs left and right. I never get a sense of achievement out of anything. It's not only pacing, it's everything. Too much research, too many goodie huts, too many quest locations, too many resource tiles.

The map feels absoletly cluttered with all sorts of junk. Same thing for research and pacing, everything comes too easy and in too big quantities. It feels like the game has an attention disorder. It's not fun this way.

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Agreed, pacing is way off. The number of technologies per tree as well.

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Having played some more games i think one of the major problems is: The maps, even the tiny one are too large. At small you often need 20 turns to walk a pioneer to the next city spot.

Either speed up map movement and very important in this case also the number range of vison, or alternatively slow down research and building by a lot. Keep unit building the same or speed it up. This should also remedy the super strong heroes a bit.

An additional problem is at the moment that makes testing the pacing difficult that the ai is not very dangerous.

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Adding my voice in agreement (except the maps being too big )

We can now build a structure that increases upgrade build times. I don't want to use it because it's already too fast lol. Same with research and magic. Everything is so fast i don't feel the need to build anything to improve any of these processes.

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I think there are currently two problems within the game regarding pacing:

* Hosten's Library: After found out what it does and how it influence the research, I think the first few turns everyone will try to get to education as soon as possible and build Hosten's library. This provides a +8 to research. Compared to the beginning research pool this is by far to much.

* Starting to research: the beginning levels for breakthroughts are to high if you don't get to Hosten's Library or get a Lost Library nearby. Without those both it takes endless turns to get a new breakthrough.

In the end, it will most probably turn out that a player who don't go for Hosten's library and have only a few or even no Lost Library nearby will loose the research race and therefore will quit or restart relatively soon. In my opinion this has to be tweaked otherwise there is no choice style to play.

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I just thought of another thing that bugs me about the ease of progress with cities. I may be insane but i don't like the auto upgrading buildings.

I'd much prefer to have to decide to spend resources on upgrading existing structures to a new tech. Give me an option to upgrade all relevant structures upon a breakthrough (why don't bigger houses cost more food btw?). Without thinking about it too much, i see this causing more strain on my resources while also slowing down progress.

We do it with combat units so why not city structures?

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If bigger houses cost more food they'd be of no extra benefit compared to huts unless they were made notably bigger. With the small amount of food available though I think this would be a bad idea.

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I don't think that upgrading adds value to the gameplay/fun. I like how it is done currently. You have to invest research time / points into the upgrade. This is already the decision. If you would have to upgrade the individuel improvements afterwards it adds micromanagement but not excitement in my opinion.

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I think slowing research down some would help. The Hosten Library was mentioned, I didn't take it because I didn't feel like I needed it. I'm ahead of at least a few of the other nations in research and have cleaned out the Diplomacy tree (don't know if more levels still help it though).

I think next game, I'm going to play with the Pacing option when you create a world and see what that does.

I don't think I'll ever create an army of any decent troops with the amount of non-gildar resources it takes just to recruit a party, much less a team or multiple teams/armies.

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While i love micromonagement, i accept that it's not to everyone's liking hehe. Point taken on research being a preemptive decision and resource investment

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One could simply add a capital building that gives like one Goldmine on gold, one lumber mine in materials and one lost library in reseach and can be placed without cost and tiem requrement in the capital city. This way one of tehse important resources in the first city only doubles the output instead of multipliing it by or so.

because we then also know the minimum output of materials, golf and research ( and probably arcane knowledge) the game can be balanced accordingly.

So all cost increased for buildings and research.

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I agree that pacing is off - but in regards to the army / combat:

One possible reason you're able to relax and just research the entire civ tree is because the AI right now poses no threat what-so-ever. If you had an army of 100 pissed peasants upon your doorstep being led by an enemy sovereign, you might feel differently about needing to build up an army earlier into the game.

I'm not 100% sure how goodie huts are being handled at the moment... if some are created / visible specifically to each player or if they are shared amongst all the players - but if there were some greater incentives to go goodie-hut-hunting, then that too would be a reason to build up some forces earlier into the game (to prevent all of the other players from collecting up the special gear).

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Quoting TheProgress,

reply 16

I agree that pacing is off - but in regards to the army / combat:

One possible reason you're able to relax and just research the entire civ tree is because the AI right now poses no threat what-so-ever. If you had an army of 100 pissed peasants upon your doorstep being led by an enemy sovereign, you might feel differently about needing to build up an army earlier into the game.

The problem is though at 5 turns a peasant and 50 turns to move across the map I can have that all done before the army could even get there. If you add in the time it takes to discover each other, time before the AI declares war, and the game just would not be fun if the AI declared war on you as soon as you met. So now I give my sovereign a claymore and heavy plate and mash peasants. I realize the AI is a work in progress but the other thing is with people being a resource can they even make a 100 peasant army, and with the upkeep set the way it is there is no real chance of being able to recruit that many guys.

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I think the pacing is way too fast.

For example, I can research cutting weapons and then 4 turns later have superior cutting weapons... so, the original cutting weapons are outdated before I could have even made a unit equipped with them.

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I disagree with slowing things down, or it will lead to "war" being the only tree ever researched.

Instead make key technologies dependent on other tech trees and make training time part of civ/production tree.

For example:

You can produce plate knights if you just research plate/clymore, but it will cost you waaaay too much time/money unless you have corresponding tech in production/civ and building to support/speed up training.

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Huh? Slowing things down would lead to warfare being the only tree researched how? Currently you can research to the end of the warfare tree in trivial amounts of time and then go stomp all over everybody. Slowing things down means more time during which each tech is relevant, which in turn means more opportunity and indeed incentive to research other things.

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