Help me like Elemental please!!

from Elemental Forums

Hey everyone,

I think I really like ELEMENTAL, or at least I really WANT to like ELEMENTAL.  The problem is that the game is not making it easy for me to like.  I feel like this game is a foreign language that I can ALMOST understand, like some words seem to make sense to me, but then suddenly I'm lost again.

If anyone truly thinks that the campaign can be used as a tutorial, they are dead wrong.  Sure, it gives you some vague ideas of where to go or what to do, but does it tell you how to build a farm (without which you can't grow your city)?  Does it explain how to mine the gold or harvest resources?  Does it go over the idea of armies, units, and champions and how they work, or hold your hand the first time you enter the combat mode and things make zero sense?

It doesn't do any of these things.

In fact, there's nowhere in the game to look to get basic advice or answer simple questions.  Like these:

1. In a Random Map, why do some characters who are roaming around let you talk to them (the word bubble "...") and others not (there's a read circle and line through the word bubble).

2. If I choose to do immediate resolution to battles, how does it choose who takes the damage?  And if I click on other characters in the army before the battle begins, what determines all those stats?  Literally, I feel like a dummy at a genius convention here.

3. Why won't my @#$% city grow??  I either can't get it to produce gilders, or I can't get it to produce food.  The buildings or technology required for these things seem lost to me.  It keeps telling me I have a growth restriction due to lack of housing, but if I construct more huts, doesn't that just compound my lack of gold or food?

4. Are there supposed to be just dozens of times where I'm just hitting the "End Turn" button, waiting like mad for a research to finish, or a unit to be trained?  'Cause that's how it goes sometimes in the land of "What am I supposed to be doing right now?"

I've played Civ games, and I've also played GalCiv quite a bit over the years.  I feel like I SHOULD be able to access ELEMENTAL and embrace it, but the game is making it so hard.

I really just want to be able to follow a tutorial to get the basic concepts down, or at least have one nice, straightforward complete video walkthrough of a Random Map to watch to see how an average (non-pro) would get through a game.

O ELEMENTAL, why do you elude me??

elemental
5,760 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The lack of a tutorial is definitely making it harder for people to get into. Try taking a look at the Help Me thread. It may help.

For some specific answers:

1. If they won't talk to you, it means you can't recruit them for some reason. IIRC if you mouse over the crossed out talk button, it will give you a tooltip to tell you why.

2. Auto-resolve battles have the AI fight for you. It chooses it based on what the AI decides to do in combat.

3. Take a look in the bottom left corner when the city is selected, you should see a horizontal bar with a house icon on it somewhere. That's the growth bar, and mousing over it should give a tooltip that tells you why it's not growing, if it's not growing. (Most likely you need to build houses, which require food.) For producing a lot of gildars I think you need a resource that does it. I forget which one right now since I'm at work and can't look. :)

4. If you've got nothing else to do, that can happen. But you should have things on the world map you can go explore, particularly if you're doing adventure tech research.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

#3:  make sure you found your city near (next to) fertile ground.  Once your influence surrounds it, you can click on that piece of ground and build a farm (lower left of the interface).  The same is true for mines or shards or what-have you.

ObjectDock - Access shortcuts and frequently used applications from an animated dock.
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

3) Also if you want food you need to click on fertile ground (or some equivalent) within your borders and it will give you the option to build a farm. Yeah, I had to figure that one out by looking on the forum, it is not that elemental and playing the beta taught me to do things a different way. For gold you want gold mines, merchant npcs, tax houses or markets or any building that sounds money related. With houses, money and gold you can get real far.

4) I've seen a bit of saturation of "goodies" whenever I upgrade adventuring. Ideally you should keep one eye on your city but also have one party out there plundering ruins, completing quests and beating up bandits.

 

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Thank you guys for your quick responses!

Here's another question:

If someone joins your party who gives you a special bonus (+1 gilder, +1 prestige, etc), do they need to be in the town to bestow the bonus, or can they be a part of an exploration or combat army?

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting CLeder, reply 4

If someone joins your party who gives you a special bonus (+1 gilder, +1 prestige, etc), do they need to be in the town to bestow the bonus, or can they be a part of an exploration or combat army?
 
End of CLeder's quote

Depends on the someone. Their card usually makes it reasonably plain but, generally speaking, if the bonus sounds global ("+1 Gilder") than it will work anywhere; if the bonus sounds specific ("+25% settlement food production") than he will be need to be in a settlement for it to apply.

- Ash

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Don't feel too bad, I played the beta and it took me a bit to figure out to click on the resource within your influence to build on it. Lets hope the day 0 patch addresses a great many of these concerns about the vague nature of the start of the game when you'd expect a tutorial. As for your city, you need huts. It would seem like more mouths to feed and peasants to clothe would be a detriment to your fledgling community, but it will actually give you more population which opens the door to the next city level. When your cities level they can build additional types of buildings, and get other bonuses as well.

 

It looks like this was already answered, that's what I get for opening a bunch of tabs and replying to an empty thread without first refreshing the page.