Elemental - a look at the The Imperfect, the Unbalanced, the Exploit

Xadie

Join Date 06/2007

+18

Elemental - a look at the The Imperfect, the Unbalanced, the Exploit

The Imperfect, the Unbalanced, the Exploit

I would like to add my view on the shortcomings of elemental to the sea of critics and reviews we had the past days/hours. Many of the things I write have been mentioned before, I repeat them, partly so the devs see why we are not too happy about the game and what we expect they improve on and partly as a form of catharsis for me after playing the game since Monday without break except for around 5-6 hours sleep. I also always kept the game up to date and checked out the changes that had been made up until now. I have to say every patch made the game better, but they are still just scratching on the surface. There are so many game parts which are not up to snuff, that I doubt that Stardock will be able to fix in the next coming months.

Elementals basic concept is nice and sounds great on paper but execution of it was lacking and there wasn’t much of polish going on. Everything feels of being strapped together on last minute.

Basically: it’s first a rushed product and secondly flawed with a lot of obvious imbalances

Would have been more time for polish and some serious design flaws corrected we would have an awesome game. Currently I would rate it at 6/10 – rather an average score.

As there is so much to say I will group it categories for a better overview.

About City management

Overall city management is enjoyable. There is really something pleasant about the way outposts grow to towns and cities.

But sadly there some shortcomings:

- There is not much to build past the initial phase, almost no building dilemmas. I like all those lvl1 buildings at the beginning, they speed things up and they provide interesting choice of what to build next (as everything is needed early on). I regularly adapt my build order according what I need most and what would be the most efficient way of improving my economy. But after the initial building phase there is not much to do. You research the occasional civilization tech, then construct the researched building in all appropriate cities and wait for the next tech advancement. The cities don’t differ much as every city will easily have all the buildings there is with just a few exceptions. Basically the promising start turns into Auto-Mode.

Suggestion: Apart of introducing more buildings with more varied abilities I would appreciate the introduction of special building slots the city acquires when it levels up (perhaps as a dedicated level up option). You can use those slots you acquire to build special and powerful buildings but I can’t build more of these special buildings as you have special slots. So perhaps a level 5 city has about 4 special slot and can build therefore 4 of these buildings. Obvious there should be more than just 4 special buildings (8 to 12 are good numbers) in game to choose from and not just copy-cat buildings like: material prod. +30%, material prod. +40%. Refrain from buildings with kingdom-wide effects a la +10% food production in all cities as such boni easily grow out of control.

Alternative: limit the buildable tile amount according to city level. Level 1 cities can build on 10 tiles, lvl 2 on 15, lvl 3 lvl 4 on 20, lvl 5 on 25 for example.

- The level-up boni for cities are a great idea. But unfortunately I rarely take anything then the gildar bonus. The guardian creature bonus is worthless. Just cut it out. Absolute waste of of level-up. Don’t think about beefing up the guardian creatures here: as long they are weak or mediocre no one will take them and the option is just clutter in the menu (though I don’t like clutter) But if those creatures become strong they will change the game in a negative way. People will just rush up the city levels to get as many as possible and rush down their neighbors. It would be game breaking. So just cut the option out (perhaps replacing the option with the option acquiring those special building slots)

Exploit!:

The player can easily raise all cities from level 1 to 2 and 3 sometimes even to level 4 regardless of the number of food recourses beyond the first. With every city level-up cities receive a considerably housing bonus. Therefore you can demolish all huts you have build without fearing that the city level drops. The freed up food can be spend on housing in other cities up to the point they won’t grow any further. After that you repeat the demolishing process up and build up another city’s level. Although I find that on larger maps food is not an issue and rather abundant.

Champions:

It had been said again and again in the forum and I back that up: weak, way too expensive to maintain and have no character. They just don’t add much beyond the first 50 turns.

The reasons are:

- Champions Hitpoints are way too low. Already at the beginning they aren’t much stronger then a peasant, after a few military techs they fall behind. Things really become bad when leveled Squads show up. They have so much HP and such high attack rating that champions don’t have much hope of survival.

Suggestion: raise the base Hitpoints of all heroes and add a small boost for each levelup

- Levelup effects aren’t balanced: I have the feeling that putting points into constitution is not of much effect as there is no amplifier gear like it is handled for Strength and Dextery. The mere effect of raising it by one on level up isn’t worth much.

- The equipment you have to buy for them is ridiculously expensive and too weak (later on). You can spend fortunes of money for just keeping one champion somewhat on par with you average peasant squad armed with sticks your cities chuck out every few turns for just a fraction of the cost.

- Equipment option for heroes shouldn’t be linked to techs in Magic and Warfare techtree. At most linked with certain techs in the Adventure/Domination Techtree.

- Champions lack abilities. Most champions either have no abilities or of minor effect. Those minor effect abilities are fine at the beginning. Later they suck

Suggestion: add abilities table the player can choose from when they level up a champion. That would balance out the effect of champions early in the game and late game.

- Leveling up champions is very time & resource consuming up to the point it would only be reasonably to level one or two

Suggestion: let Champions receive free experience every turn up to a max level determined by some tech in the adventure/domination tech tree, so they could better scale with the common soldier

Exploit!:

Even though it is not really cost efficient there is a exploit with hero equipment. There is no limit on the accessories (rings, packs, charms…) your heroes can put on. So you could spend 2000 Gilden for 10 Medical packs and equipping them all on the hero for a whooping 50 extra Hitpoints and +10 Hitpoint Regeneration. How about spending 3000 Gilden for 10 Bands of Agility on top of that? Given you have the gold only the sky is the limit. As you see it is not cost effective but still somewhat broken. The only equipment that currently really shines with that exploit is the band of eagle-eyed for 10 gilden. For just 100 gold you get +10 vision. Spend a bit more and you have the feeling of saurons all seeing eye overlooking whole Middle Earth.

Dynasties:

Somewhat linked with champions problem. The only thing I can hope for getting more underperforming champions? Oh great… On top of that it takes ages until a child grows up. In most sandbox games I finished it in before the second child grown up when I’ve married right at the beginning of the game. Most of the time I don’t bother with the feature as it doesn’t provide much in terms of game advantage. On top of it:

- Should you spouse ever die the dynasty feature turns itself off for the rest of the game. There is no divorcement, no new marriage with another person possible. You’re out of luck. You’re stuck. But no big deal as mentioned: right now dynasties don’t add much anyway

Suggestion: Add Divorcement in! At least give us the possibility to remarry should the sovereigns spouse die!

Techtree

The techtrees aren’t in particular long. The real useful ones are the civilization and warfare ones, followed after by Adventure/Domination, Magic and on the bottom diplomacy.

Although the idea of the Likeliness of some techs to appear is neat, currently it is basically not used. In my past sandbox games it never had much of an effect. As the techtrees are way too lean anyway there is not much room for research randomization anyway.

Civilization Techtree

Here you research the main part of the buildings you will ever build. Usually it’s one building per Tech. Which later on means: there is a huge gap between each civ tech as all your cities already build that one building and there is basically nothing left to build most of the time. About level 8 in civilization techs you picked up all the essential/interesting stuff, everything post that are mostly of the same or civ-wide boni.

Warfare Techtree

Although full of important techs that make your game live easier basically 80% of the complete tech tree are copies of one of the first few techs you research only offering the improved version. Also on part it relies too heavy on civ-wide boni (all these troop size levels & experience levels…), could have been linked to a building. It would also limit the production army capacities of young settlements a little bit when these boni only apply on the city the building is constructed in.

Magic Techtree

This techtree is primary there for the acquirement of the cutting edge magically war gear. It takes only 4 levels of the tree to receive arcane weapons. Should you be so lucky to start near a Crystal recourse you can employ a squad of foot soldiers wielding magical blades with an attack of 20 and Speed bump of 0.25 in no time! As Logistics and Equipment (like it’s empire equivalent) is a first level tech there is not much that can hinder you to employ a super warrior squad with an attack of 80 and average armor rating in the EARLY game (and steamrolling everything with it). It just depends on finding the crystal field. This would be especially unbalancing in multiplayer, as right now the AI certainly won’t make much use of it (more on the AI later on)… Otherwise it boosts you spell research but as Magic in Elemental:War of Magic is not that strong/useful I mostly skip it in most cases. (more on magic later on)

Adventure/Domination Techtree

As the adventure techtree caters mainly for champions, it isn’t that good. The stronger champions unlocked by the techs are food for every below average soldier squad. The quest t unlocks have at the beginning in relation to the time investment some good rewards (resources for the early game, minor stat boosts and some ‘cheap’ items) later on they become more and more unrewarding. Their rewards don’t scale all too well. The only real important techs are the one that unlock new recourses. So I grab mostly those.

Diplomatic Techtree

Ugh. Welcome to the bottom. There is not much of in importance here. The most important is trading, then perhaps intressting is Treaties otherwise: yawn. If I could do more with those diplomatic capital points (buying influence on the map perhaps, rare equipment appears in my local shops, etc.) or get more options in game apart of direct diplomatic confrontation (and no, I’m not fond of those allies.) but right now, the whole tech tree is not very useful… I rarely go up that tree usually there is something more important to research on the other trees.

Tactical Battles

Bad. Honestly. It’s really bad. Other parts of the game had glitches or same balance problems. But the tactical battles are really… … oh boy. They need a complete overhaul. I played out some tactical battles just to see how the game behaves and how the game mechanics feel like but most of the time I just hit auto resolve as tactical battles are way too trivial to waste any time on

The combat mechanic is very simple. Basically there are: Move, Hold, Attack, use ability. That’s it. There is not much else. … oh, hang on… I forgot to mention Morale. It has basically no real influence on the battle. Most of the time it stays around 50. There is some change but most battles don’t last long enough to see a noticeable effect. And even should they take so long it would be just either a “win more” or “lose more” effect. No thinking involved. The whole concept of one morale slider for the whole army providing Attack buffs or penalties is bad anyway. If you really want it workable: change it per unit and make it way more reactive to what happens on the field. Good example for a working morale systems are the TotalWar series or Warhammer Tabletop. Take your inspiration there.

- Good tactical combat lives from position rules. I like that they are fields that provide defense boni and such, although sometime it just appears to be a bit random where to expect those boni. But the game really lacks any concept of zone of control on units. In its simplest form take a look on Battle for Wesnoth. Simple yet elegant. Actually you could copy almost the complete system of Wesnoth (which is highly inspired by BattleIsle) for a relative quick “fix”. For good tactical combat take a look on table top games. I’ve already wrote a long post once in the idea forum for an example of detailed rules. Although there I’ve been quite verbose also showing why they are good rules, the mechanic could be explainable in only few sentences.

- Currently they’re just melee units and melee units and melee units. Those two puny bows (one with attack 3 the other with 6) are the only archer equipment and rather a joke than real useful (especially regarding the enormous gold costs). The (brief) manual hinted that there a difference between blunt and cutting weapons damage wise. In the game I couldn’t find anything. Basically the difference in weapons and amore is how good they deal damage or good they prevent it. There no more differentiation apart that, so that the player finally designs his units not because of some tactical reasoning but more according what is affordable right now and unlocked by research. We have a simple arms race right now. So for what should I use tactical combat for?

- There are few combat abilities out there, but they’re rarely encountered and even more rarely add depth to the game… Especially as I’ve encountered only 3 equipment pieces which grand abilities: those 2 bows I mentioned for being able to shot from afar and the pioneer package for being able to build a outpost. That’s it. The rest just plays around with unit stats a little bit but not much else…

- Magic spells don’t fix the monotony of Elementals tactical battles, but more on that later

- The way battle movement is handled (“Combat Speed”) is horrible! Give a men a sword and he runs faster? What the f**k? The devs should have separated attack speed with tactical movement allowance.

- As a further suggestion: I’m very fond of initiative driven unit movement then the whole army moves at every turn. It makes tactical battles more dynamic and helps against the effect of the whole army gangs up on one enemy unit at the time (especially as there is no Zone of Control in game)

Magic

Finally magic. Apart of the beginning magic is relative useless. On part also because champions are so weak but also because of:

- Mana-Regeneration is waaaay to low. Having spend all your 15 Mana on 3 Battle Spells last battle? Sorry, now you have to wait 15 turns to get back to full mana. The building that raises mana regeneration requires a level 5 city which is really difficult to pull off without just building a city full of housing. A normal city with some/most buildings will quickly run out of tiles before reaching the necessary amount of housing

- The spells are underwhelming. Not many different effects. Seriously, you don’t have to invent the wheel a second time, Master Of Magic, Age of Wonder, Heroes of Might and Magic all have examples of some effects

- The magic shards are quite rare, unless you picked all spell books it’s quite difficult to get the shard you have books for.

Suggestion: keep the shards rare as they are but don’t differentiate between them. One type of shard for all different Spellbooks

- All spells should scale with int not just the damage spells. Late game spells should receive a good buff to keep up in the arms race

There are way more balance issues and areas the game lacks then that what I’ve listed so far but I’m really tired right now. So I will just state briefly what else needs improvement upon without going into detail:

- Almost no difference between the races (actually a real laughable difference as either the boni is absolute little or currently not working)

- Kingdom / Empire difference is there but not very strong, correlates with the lack of difference between the races

- The campaign is horrible boring. Basically a long tutorial. No challenge, almost no action, very static

- The Ai is abysmal bad. Wasn’t the AI once a selling a point for Stardock games?

- Lack of feedback I receive from the UI, bad documentation of features, almost no mouse-over quick hints

I could write about that stuff easily another 6 pages. Hey - would I list everything in detail I might have to write way more than 20 pages here. There is just so much that feels lacking, unfortunately.

But let’s see what awaits us in the next months…

So anyway, thanks for your patience and endurance for reading this!

Stardock Response:

Thank you for posting a very thoughtful and detailed critique of our new game. Below are some of our responses to this in an effort to encourage others to take the time, as you did, to make concrete suggestions for the betterment of the game.

1. We like your concept you propose in which players can choose to give the city a special slot to build a special improvement.

2. The guardian creature you receive is based on city level. We will likely modify this so that it is more likely to grant the player a better guardian unit (ala the Minor factions).

3. Exploits. We agree, exploits, when found needs to be eliminated. We suspect this will be an ongoing process as players learn the game and find things that we never would have suspected.

4. We don't agree with your view on tactical battles. Elemental is not designed to be Magic: Total War (though we think such a game would be welcomed). The tactical battles are designed as a relatively simple way for the player who wants to control the action. While we do plan to continue to extend tactical battles, I think your expectations on what tactical battles are supposed to be like is not in line with what we had in mind.

5. Groups of units (squads, parties, etc.) do fire as individuals. A party with a combined attack of 32 does not roll between 1 and 32. Each individual in the group rolls their own attack (1 to 8) against the defender's defense. Hence, a company of knights (12) with a combined attack of say 36 would likely do no damage at all to a unit with sufficient defense. We are, however, discussing better ways to present this since it does seem people are thinking that a group of units acts as a single powerful unit which they don't.

6. Mana regeneration is going to be hooked up to wisdom in a future update based on feedback. This should allow players to increase manag regeneration.

7. We strongly disagree that the Empire and Kingdoms are particularly similar. The individual factions within an Allegiance are very similar - by design. You may not agree with this design choice but it was intentional. Over time, we will continue to enrich each of the major factions just as was done with Galactic Civilizations II.

8. We are sorry you don't find the AI sufficiently difficult. Have you tried increasing the difficulty level? The "normal" level is very basic. In addition, Brad (the lead designer and AI developer) plans to continously update the game's AI.

Thank you again for taking the time to post this. We have forwarded this thread to the development team so that they can evaluate what things might make good additions to future updates to the game.

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Quoting SqueekyRat,

reply 48

Excellent post!

I would also agree with the issues presnted here.

1) Yes heroes/champ/so are really weak after the early game. I am surprised that quest rewards are so meh; i woul dhav ethought rare/magical items would "drops" for the heroes making them special. As folks have pointed out peasants are more powerful.I love th eidea of special skills/advancements for heroes and perhaps tactical skills (more tactical movement, terrain use, longer ranges, better vs. certain monster types) etc.

2) Mana regeneration. I agree 100%. The mana regen is fine for STRATEGIC spells but for the TACTICAL spells it is wholly inadeqaute. I love the idea suggested by someone that the nama pool for battles (starts full at each fight) is seperate from the main (straegic mana pool).

3) diplomacy - utterly Meh and bug ridden. You dont get your gildar and sometimes actually LOSE gildar because ther eis some kind of signed value problem. The amount AIs ask for a deal is insane.

Has anyone actually gotten diplomati currency??

4) AI - wakey wakey! are you there. It needs to be a bit more agressive, but at the same token get rid of the inifinite AI cash bug.

5) MAPS I : Truly random maps. I have played 5 games so far 3x I started on the same map.. and 2x on the same location. Given that the game is so wonky atm and multiplayer is not there - lets get teh variety of random maps and forget the MP for now.

6) Quests - ar ether actually any dungeons ??? I miss those from other tactical RPGs - great for hero quest where perhaps an epic monster or two may drop some random rare spells or items.

7) Magic (tactical). It needs beffing up. As others have noted spells like fireball are so weak they should be called firecracker ( a single target low damage fireball makes no sense), but spells like blizzard are devistating in comparison. Magic needs more bling!

8) MAPS II; more varied terrain - to much empty brown stuff, with huge stretches of empty territory that make cities only worthwhile near nodes. TRRAFORMING would be nice. Say spells to grow forest, summon wildlife (deer, cattle), dig mines or level mountains

9) MAPS III: make some spell/ability render mountains passible or add flight. I'm a powerful wizard that dominate sthe land.. Oops. have to walk round the hill.

RAT

1) Level adventuring, walk into hut, get 18 def piece of armor.

3) Yes I've gotten diplomatic currency, you need to have something in a towns influence which gives it to you, I had some waterfall thing that did it.

4) For me the AI is always broke, no money at all, also they tend to be extremely aggressive depending one which ones you play against. My last game two factions started a war with me before turn 30. Some are more passive.

9) Raise and lower land, you can make a mountain passable with enough mana, you don't even have to research the spells.

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Sadly all that you say is true. I like Elemental. A lot. But it is such an unfinished and incomplete game in so many ways. Some of the systems in the game would really have to be gutted and reworked and in the end Elemental will be a different game IF it actually was completed. Will that finished game be fun?

And then I think about the totally inadequate Herigamenon (or whatever it's called!), the pitiful manual (this is a stategy game Stardock!!!), and the campaign that paints its story in such broad strokes.

It's almost like Elemental was made for casual players but in a way that is totally inaccessible to them. It has so many fantastic ideas, is gorgeous, can be loads of fun, and yet is so flawed!

I try not to think about it too much, but it's very frustrating.

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Quoting spacecadet78,

reply 51

1) Level adventuring, walk into hut, get 18 def piece of armor.

Then fight something with 40 attack (like a group of 4 guys with standard maces trained in any city), get a low defense roll, and get one shot.

So long as it's possible for defense to simply not work when you roll badly, champions will always be incredibly fragile. It matters less with stock units because you can just train more, but you can't easily replace a level 7 champion that gets owned so easily.

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NorsemanViking

Join Date 03/2006

+19

I don't agree with you on the champions. They should be weak in the start, and not a non brain good investment. It's your jobb to make something good out of them, and making sure they are leveling up. It's so easy to win early battles already, so I don't see the prob.

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Lots of great suggestions and ideas in thread. I'm still having fun with the game, but I generally agree with most of what's been said as areas for improvement. I hope the devs are taking notes since I do believe them when they say they plan to keep working on this game for the next year or two.

What I think need to be priorities:

1) AI AI AI. I like that there are diplomatic and peaceful options, but the AI needs to put SOME pressure on the player, especially those supposedly evil empires? Right now in every game I've played the AI has basically left me alone until I'm ready to conquer them or win through one of the other paths.

2) Tech trees. There need to be a lot more techs, like 5x more would be good. The trees all feel very light and unbalanced. By the time I've gotten 4-5 good cities set up, have built up a decent army and am ready to go on the warpath (i.e. it feels like mid-game) I've already researched most of the technologies I need. Some of this is pacing too, techs should maybe cost a bit more to research to drag things out more, or tone down the bonus those libraries give + their multipliers. But I'd much prefer to just have more techs and more meaningful tech choices. Need to give players more reasons to specialize rather than just jumping from one tree to the next since you run out of techs so quickly.

3) Champions all feel bland and undifferentiated. Special abilities as part of leveling them are the key to solving this I think. My assasin character can level in first strike and poison abilities, my mage gets a mana regen ability, my fighter gets an army morale boost ability or a cleave ability etc etc. Room for some of these abilities to be unlocked by techs to tie the two together better. Also there need to be equipment restrictions and more reasons to equip different heroes different ways. Right now I'm equiping everyone in the most expensive armor and sword and shield as soon as I can afford it (including my channelers, outfitting Procipinee in full plate with a shield and broadsword is pretty ludicrous but I have no better options).

Basically they need to think about classes of heroes like an rpg rather than generic stat based leveling. Stats should level automatically based on class, equipment should be restricted by class (no mages in plate mail thanks!) and the choice the player should get to make on leveling should be which abilities they get, which is much more interesting.

4) Cities. This is actually I think the most solid part of the game right now, but there needs to be more reasons to specialize cities rather than just building every building in most cases. Also better differentiation between empire and kingdom cities as well as solving the issues when you conquer a city of the other type and then get to build all the generic buildings twice (i.e you end up with both the empire and kingdom version of the building if you want). Also balance resources better along with all their multiplier buildings, I am rarely struggling for food or gold once my first few cities are settled unless I get a really bad start location and am boxed in.

5) Magic. I think there need to be less spells, there are far too many right now. The issue is that the vast majority don't feel like they are worth casting, especially since it's going to take many turns for spent mana to regen. The only spells I really find worth using are a few direct damage, the occasional summon, and teleport. They need to make each and every spell more interesting and actually worth casting. Needs to be lots more linking in this area to the tech tree, currently it's only 3 techs to unlock all the spells in the game. More interesting choices needed.

6) More differentiation between all the different factions. They all basically play the same currently. They need to have distinct abilities, advantages and weaknesses, units and buildings, as well as their own unique spellbooks.

I think this game is fun and decent out of the box (barring those stability issues some people are having), but there's still a lot of work to do before it's a great game and a classic of the genre. I'm still pretty optimistic and think it'll get there eventually. I can certainly see all the potential this new engine has to take us there.

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Anyway, I firmly believe that good balance enhances fun also for singleplayer as it opens up options of how i can tackle certain challenges, the game play becomes more varied and dynamic. If you have several unbalanced choices favoring a particular option in a system that lives from demanding difficult decisions from the player then you quickly see how the game system falls apart as the one and only strategy dominates all choice alternatives. The player falls into some sort of auto-mode repeating the same strategy decisions from match to match as he/she found a dominant approach that overrules all other approaches.

I'm now beginning to believe that famous philosopher who said "People don't know what they want, they just want for the sake of wanting more". lmao

As I said Elemental just needs more of the same with a few tweaks an enhancements. It does not need any complete overhaul. Mainly because Elemental is Elemental not trying to be MOM or AOW or HOMM or Alpha Centauri or any of the others. That's the problem with a lot of these complainers it's not what THEY wanted it to be so the whole game is farked in their minds because of it. lmao I've already played MOM and AOW and HOMM and Alpha Centauri now I am glad to play something DIFFERENT but with elements from them all. That's what Elemental is! Don't you understand the title? )

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NorsemanViking

Join Date 03/2006

+19

With some research investment you can also recruit better champions over time.

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I agree with a lot of what you said, but there are some issues:

1. for some reason I am not a big fan of the wesnoth battle system, so I see no reason why replacing current system with wesnoth's would be a good thing... that being said, I am also not a fan of the elemental battle system.

2. Every city being able to eventually build everything is not really a BAD thing. Personally I like that, it feels stupid that a CITY cannot build any schools / workshops / whatever because it ran out of room.

3. Food eventually being plentiful is really not an issue in my opinion... nothing wrong with that.

Aside from that, I agree with most your points. BTW, the obvious solution to the exploit with the multiple healthpacks/etc is to limit each unit to one.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

Quoting OsirisDawn,

reply 10

Good post, i agree with much of it.

But i still think the game is awesome, keeps me coming back. Strange that.

Yeah. The game has lure. The overall concept is solid. Some elements show a lot of promise. But I agree with the OP's analysis.

I've been wanting to start a thread asking "Did beta fail?" because it's hard to believe this stuff didn't come up in beta. I preordered but I could never really get into beta despite trying with most of the builds. No part of beta really felt like these last 3 major builds, so it never really felt like you had a real/complete version of the game to work with - which obviously part of the beta process - many builds were primitive or game systems were extremely tweaked for test purposes. What was missing was testers getting anything close to the release version of the game to hammer on to produce the kind of feedback people are writing now at release. The polish phase was seemingly nonexistent.

IMO this game needs several weeks/months of polish that should've happened before release, and that polish probably will happen. Stardock is not beyond making huge game changes or adding huge new features, all for free, but the model of releasing a game that's not close to being finished and finishing it after lots of people pay for it kinda sucks. Plus the game and Stardock are going to get (rightfully) hammered over the current state of the game.

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Quoting NorsemanViking,

reply 57

You are missing the point - folks are NOT complaining about weak heroes at teh start of the game, but rather at the mid-game to end period. You can buy an oak spear for your champ at the start and on first strike she/he will do well. But as the game progresses the spells and the HP/armor/weapons the heroes get are WAY outclasses by the opposing units (squads, monsters) that they end up being one shot after considerable investment in items and time. They effectively become useless on battlefields by late game. In part because their weapons and spells just scale so poorly.

RAT

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a good start with heroes would be:

1. All of them can cast spells (no need to imbue)

2. All of them are equipped with the best weapon, armor, and enchantments your side has.

you are responsible for leveling them, and without significant investment in leveling up they will not stand up to a squad of fully equipped units... but they make good generals, and with significant investment they CAN stand up to a squad.

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I agree with almost everything the OP said (the stuff I can't agree with I haven't used yet). Also what Dethedrus and SqueekyRat mentioned, all good points. If a dev is reading this, pass this on to the other guys and get some ideas going. My only problem is, these points are so important, I can't say which needs to be worked on first because they're all so critical.

In regards to the MoM references, I agree with most of them; they don't have to make things overpowered, though, like in MoM, but it's a good starting point to see why people consider that the best of the fantasy strategy games. And like someone mentioned, it's NOT all about balancing. What's the point in balancing everything? If everything is equal, then that takes out half the fun of the game; there should be some units that ARE completely overpowered (paladins, slingers from MoM?) and some spells that are super strong, instead of the same equivalent spells for each spell book type.

A couple of points I wanted to add:

1. Most everything mentioned about tactical battles is true, but I wanted to add something. Tactical battles are SLOW. not in a good way either. The animations are slow and sometimes don't work (a fireball spell will show the animation sometimes, then the next time it will think it's showing it but you don't see any fire, then the next time it looks like someone off the tactical map is shooting a fireball through the floor?). And when the animations are slow along with this, then it makes it extremely boring, especially when the attack/spell might just miss anyway. Do I really need to sit there for like 5 or 6 seconds watching my archer shoot across the field when he's probably just going to miss anyway? And then I have to see him shoot TWICE. Why not make the animation only last for 1 second, and have the arrow move faster across the screen? The instant spell effects like lightning are ok, but there should be such a long time before I have control of my units again to attack. So animations should be faster and you should pass to the next unit more quickly instead of being in "animation lock."

2. Magical shards. I was hoping for something more powerful, but right now they're just a basic multiplier on SOME of the spells. Some spells from the school don't even use them. These are supposedly the most powerful treasure you can find out in the wilderness, but they only do THAT? There should be a lot more that they do for you, instead of a little multiplier on attack spells. How about they affect every spell in some way? It doesn't have to be damage related either; haste, if you have a shard, maybe it's affect is 50% more or you can cast it on another unit? Since spells are a bit weak at the moment (which needs to be looked at ) how about if you have a fire shard, 2 fireballs will strike your target for the cost of one? How about 2 blizzards will attack the enemies if you have a water shard? From my reasoning, you can see a pattern: they should affect more than damage, but maybe NUMBER of spells cast or enemies affected.

Just a few points, but please devs, read this thread and take these ideas to heart. Remember, it's constructive criticism; if we didn't care, we wouldn't be here trying to help improve the game.

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I agree on the champions. They definitely need more character. Giving them special abilities that can be picked would help out greatly in that regard. Sadly, loading them up with multiple repeats of gear seems the only way to make a physically strong champion. And turning them into casters by imbuing them is useless, with the exception of offspring.

My strongest champions are always my offspring. Why? Because they regenerate mana and health every round in combat and can start with much better base stats (though it's a bit of a crap shoot). This gives them the ability to cast much more often in combat without wasting their mana since it regenerates. I found myself taking on entire armies with just 2 offspring casting arcane strike. They were doing hundreds in spell damage to each group and would often one-shot squads of soldiers with high hp. Also, arcane strike is an aoe attack so I was taking out multiple groups with each cast. Sadly, not all spells are that good, as most spells are mitigated by armor, which I find to be a dumb idea.

I also thought magic was quite weak at first, but after playing for a while, I've changed my mind a bit. It still needs work, but it's not as bad as it seems.

The thing that really makes everything seem weak and sucky right now is the squads. The way they're implemented just isn't balanced. If that gets changed, a lot of things will fall in-line and make more sense.

As for city management. So far, I find it pretty good. There's a cap on the number of tiles a city can be but it doesn't really come into play until a city grows to level 4 when you have most buildings. At that point, it's a very real choice. I find myself actually destroying buildings and specializing because of the limit as I like to focus on making big cities. Though you won't really experience this if you take the cheese tactic of building a whole bunch of level 1 cities everywhere to get more gold, and research.

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Thanks for the review OP, it was excellent and summed up my major complaints with the game.

I think Elemental could be a good game with lots of patching over the next few months. I just feel sad that stardock would release a basically unfinished game like this. All the goodwill built up with me from the amazing Galciv games and sins has been dealt a tremendous blow. I know I wont be buying a stardock game on release date again, unless Elemental is radically improved in the next few months.

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I agree with the OP but I would take my observations even further. The game needs more than just balancing but a fundemantal re-examining of game concepts.

As for Stardock's response, I think it is noble that they responded, but their comment about tactical combat seems like a bit of a... bait and switch. I seem to remember quite a few dev journals that spoke very specifically about detailed tactical combat. As it stands now, I find Master of Magic's tactical combat far more meaningful, which is a terrible tragedy.

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Quoting rossanderson48,

reply 56

Wrong again because if you played Master of Magic you would know it clearly was UNBALANCED as hell and is the greatest of all of the strategic fantasy games today. You read everyone commenting about it. It had no multiplayer and was so out of balance from the word go. But, it had that one more turn feel. It had enough magic spells to keep you playing more games just to play with them all.

I'm now beginning to believe that famous philosopher who said "People don't know what they want, they just want for the sake of wanting more". lmao

As I said Elemental just needs more of the same with a few tweaks an enhancements. It does not need any complete overhaul. Mainly because Elemental is Elemental not trying to be MOM or AOW or HOMM or Alpha Centauri or any of the others. That's the problem with a lot of these complainers it's not what THEY wanted it to be so the whole game is farked in their minds because of it. lmao I've already played MOM and AOW and HOMM and Alpha Centauri now I am glad to play something DIFFERENT but with elements from them all. That's what Elemental is! Don't you understand the title? )

A little bit about balancing:

Cost = Usefulness

Therefore something that costs more should be more useful, makes sense, right?

Now expanding on that:

Cost also includes time taken to build and research it and negative stats besides basic resource costs.

Usefulness includes strength, defense, abilities, basically all the benefits that buying it provides.

Tying all this together:

Units (meaning armor and weapons), buildings, and spells should follow a basic cost to usefulness ratio. Otherwise, if they don't follow the ratio, they are either too powerful or too weak. And it makes you question why the devs would even put something so worthless in the game, or something so powerful that it makes everything else worthless.

Anyways, it makes me question how someone can think that having an unbalanced game is more fun or somehow better than one that is.

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Stardock Response:

Thank you for posting a very thoughtful and detailed critique of our new game. Below are some of our responses to this in an effort to encourage others to take the time, as you did, to make concrete suggestions for the betterment of the game.

1. We like your concept you propose in which players can choose to give the city a special slot to build a special improvement.

2. The guardian creature you receive is based on city level. We will likely modify this so that it is more likely to grant the player a better guardian unit (ala the Minor factions).

3. Exploits. We agree, exploits, when found needs to be eliminated. We suspect this will be an ongoing process as players learn the game and find things that we never would have suspected.

4. We don't agree with your view on tactical battles. Elemental is not designed to be Magic: Total War (though we think such a game would be welcomed). The tactical battles are designed as a relatively simple way for the player who wants to control the action. While we do plan to continue to extend tactical battles, I think your expectations on what tactical battles are supposed to be like is not in line with what we had in mind.

5. Groups of units (squads, parties, etc.) do fire as individuals. A party with a combined attack of 32 does not roll between 1 and 32. Each individual in the group rolls their own attack (1 to 8) against the defender's defense. Hence, a company of knights (12) with a combined attack of say 36 would likely do no damage at all to a unit with sufficient defense. We are, however, discussing better ways to present this since it does seem people are thinking that a group of units acts as a single powerful unit which they don't.

6. Mana regeneration is going to be hooked up to wisdom in a future update based on feedback. This should allow players to increase manag regeneration.

7. We strongly disagree that the Empire and Kingdoms are particularly similar. The individual factions within an Allegiance are very similar - by design. You may not agree with this design choice but it was intentional. Over time, we will continue to enrich each of the major factions just as was done with Galactic Civilizations II.

8. We are sorry you don't find the AI sufficiently difficult. Have you tried increasing the difficulty level? The "normal" level is very basic. In addition, Brad (the lead designer and AI developer) plans to continously update the game's AI.

Thank you again for taking the time to post this. We have forwarded this thread to the development team so that they can evaluate what things might make good additions to future updates to the game.

Thank you guys for answering it is really appreciated.

Few remarks on your response:

4. It's a bit unfortunate you won't completely overhaul the tactical system but pehaps I just play too long (and too much) video games / tabletop games so that I crave for deep game mechanics everywhere. But I suppose I could live with that 'simple system' as MoM or AoW1/2 hadn't sophisticated position rules either and I enjoyed them (but just pointing out that AoW had a nice twist that if your unit leaves the contact of an enemy it suffered an attack of opportunity from it - a very simple yet elegant rule).

Anyway, please differentiate weapons and troop types more so that the players are encouraged to field various types of soldiers in one army. Though their some abilities already in game please continue to build on that. If you need inspiration just ask us Same for the spells.

5. Thx for the clarification. Does it also apply on Defense Rolls and HP? Are these also managed individually?

6. Great, thx!

7. I'm looking forward to see what you have in store for us! As a side note: Although perhaps currently you can disregard that but as soon the AI catches up and starts to play well, please douple check whether the AI can handle a new feature before introducing it. I thought that GalCiv2 was a great game (it had some quirks but overall very enjoyable) but my impression dimmed a little bit after the last expansion (Twillight of the Arnor) as I had the feeling the AI had some problems to handle all these changes and played worse then in Dark Avatar

8. I played against the AI on challenging. According to the xml. files from there on the AI plays on it's highest intelligence level, higher difficulties just increase the amount of boni. When I find some time and muse I will monitor the AI more closely and perhaps write everything down I see, but for now I have to catch on with my work - slacked off the past days because spending all my time on testing Elemental

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Quoting Squiggled,

reply 63

I
The thing that really makes everything seem weak and sucky right now is the squads. The way they're implemented just isn't balanced. If that gets changed, a lot of things will fall in-line and make more sense..

I agree. A dev mentioned that they are not a uber powerful units, but attack as seperate individuals. Well, in the situation you hero attacks for 5 points then gets reamed on 10x counter attacks of 3 pts each. I honestly think that squads were a bad idea as it seems create all sorts of scaling issues. This is especially tough as you gain squads from the warfare tree and given how weak magic is everyone is basically going to need to max out unit size just to keep their units from getting one shot.

RAT

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I think the OP made a solid post. Like others, I pretty much agree with all the points, especially the tactical battles. It is the only portion of the game that truly disappoints me. They just feel woefully bare and thoroughly uninteresting (its plays in a simplistic move-attack fashion like Chess...but without the deep tactics and strategy). The mechanics are unimaginative; the sounds lacking (where's the crashing shields?!? The clang of blades??) and the animations boring. Surprisingly, the mechanics found in the freeware game The Battle of Wesnoth are superior. For example, having units level up and be able to choose a combat bonus is a great mechanic that I would love to see implemented in EWoM.

Just wanted to vent on this point because I really am disappointed. I currently find the battles tedious rather than edge of my seat thrilling.

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Quoting RooksBailey,

reply 69

Surprisingly, the mechanics found in the freeware game The Battle of Wesnoth are superior.

Yup. I follow the game development since years and it is so awesome what some people pull off in their free time. Especially as the mechanics are so lean and clean following the KISS principle to the letter but yet the game is quite deep and rewarding to play.

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I also find crystal shards a little underimportant as well, maybe having 'plain' shards in the wild that changes to a specific type of elemental shard based on the type of shrine you build on it would be interesting. It would cause players to specialize in a certain spellbook instead of everyone picking all of the elemental books. Also the shards need to help out strategic and tactical non-attack spells as well as tactical attack spells. Like element type summoning spells should summon higher level creatures the more shards you have, and maybe a decrease in mana cost as well.

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Agreed with everything in OP, and Thanks to stardock for reading and responding.

I'm a little alarmed to read SD response about tactical battles. Indeed they don't need to be Elemental:TW but need to be interesting enough to make other parts of the game compelling (unit design, and gaining warfare & tactical magic tech).

Not necessarily needed but ideally, it would have more interesting tac combat than e.g. AoW2 or MoM. IMO it currently is not better than those other genre games, by a long shot in fact, but the engine clearly has the potential.

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were not asking for Elemental Total War, were just asking for something equivalent to mom and aow. in fact it was stated that Elemental wanted to emulate mom tactical battles but that cant be done with units that are all the same and just have 3 stats, attack defense hit poitns

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Das123

Join Date 05/2003

+82

Ditto what the others are saying.

I doubt anyone wants a RTS Tactical Battle element, but gamers that play TBS tend to like a little more complexity, flavour and differentiation.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

A dev mentioned that they are not a uber powerful units, but attack as seperate individuals

Um, yeah.

Team/Squad "units" are insanely powerful and overpowered and make everything else in the game (sov, champs, summons, magic, everything) look pitifully weak.

I would agree that if you stripped out the squad mechanic a lot of the rest of the game would need far less rebalancing.

The squad thing is cool but it doesn't really fit the rest of the game and ends up being sickly overpowered.

As for Wesnoth - great game, awesome combat system. I don't know that it fits into Elemantal or its pace and amount of combat. Tactical would be vastly superior if it was wenoth-like but it'd take SO much longer to play out any given battle. Oy, it'd take weeks to finish one game.

At least the tactical system does give you a little more control over battles than uncontrolled and random stack v stack resolution. It's not perfect but it adds some depth to battles when you want it.

I have to say, when I first found Wesnoth, I was thinking, man, if you could have this style of combat with the city/empire building depth of civ, you'd have a wicked game...then the announcement for Civ 5 and details started hitting and I was like, oh my, yes! I don't think I've ever anticipated a game more.

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