Winning the game without buiding a city.

from Elemental Forums

I've been eagerly following this game ever since I read the Feb 2009 issue in Game Informer magazine (due to the negative reviews, I'm holding out for the demo before buying it). The magazine article spoke of the sovereign as a figure with power equivalent to Sauron in Lord of the Rings "before he lost the one ring".  Sauron chose to focus his magic on building armies and items (i.e., the rings).  But, the article mentioned that a player could just as easily choose to focus on building up their own character.  This suggested that it would be possible to win the game without building a single city.  This sounded like a great idea to me.

However, based on what I've read, "one essence" is the only cost to building a civilization.  This seems too low a cost -- especially late game when the civilization builder is likely to have all kinds of technologies and army stacks that could easily crush any player who chose to keep that essence.

I know this is a difficult thing to balance, and it probably makes sense to error on the side favoring the player who does build a city.  But, I do think it would be cool if there were a scaling penalty to building cities that was sufficiently limiting as to allow a skilled player without cities to win a lengthy game against skilled opponents who do build cities and armies.  To have any chance in late game, keeping that essence would need to offer some scaling advantage (i.e., permitted the player to gain XP faster, access higher level quests and loot, or gain scaling spell and summoned creature bonuses).

I know there are a ton of more urgent balancing issues to work on.  Just something to think about for the more distant future.

5,715 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I think the game has evolved to the point where building cities is a core part of the game. In fact, I don't know how you would find it fun to not pursue city-building since the current questing mechanics are generic and uninteresting.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The old "Going Gandalf" strategy:P I've long hoped that it would be a viable strategy, but as marlowwe said, the game has pretty much evolved away from that.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

The game is about building an economy and for that you need cities, I mean even for the adventuring victory condition you are going to need squads which means cities and economic development. 

However if adventuring gets better and players want to focus on that, I'm wondering if it would work to assign a proxy sovereign who will build up your kingdom and run it like the other AI's, while you focus on particular aspects of the game and maybe some high level decision making like diplomacy, if you wish.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting kyogre12, reply 2
The old "Going Gandalf" strategy I've long hoped that it would be a viable strategy, but as marlowwe said, the game has pretty much evolved away from that.
End of kyogre12's quote
Not only that, but essence has morphed into merely being the same old mana that's found in other games.

In early beta there was still the feeling that essence was special -- it had to be spent to place cities (unless you waited for the 'reclamation' to spread out and then settle there -- which added an interesting strategic choice of spending essence to grab a nice spot nearby now, or waiting til later and not spending the essence). [I'm ignoring the 'quest sites that pop up are 'reclaimed' and can be settled without spending essence thing, as it seemed to be a bug unintended feature]

New players wouldn't even realize essence is was supposed to be special and not just another name for mana.

Same observation for shards -- they lost most of their specialness and now are merely spell damage multipliers.

Elemental lost a lot of the specialness it started out promising.

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Nick-Danger, reply 4


Elemental lost a lot of the specialness it started out promising.
 
End of Nick-Danger's quote

Yes, I created another topic asking the very question... with Stardock having more developers than any previous games where was developer time lost:   https://forums.elementalgame.com/395477