Well, point is, if you want a great opponent playing quickly its turns, go play chess in a club....

Well its on your computer, you can do what you want. 

Certainly you can make place restrictions on yourself and play to them. Current game I decided that I would not build any units, just use heroes and heroins and city leveling units. Works fine, and the really cool thing is that I have not had to do ANY research in the hero tech line. All the other civs do it for me! (This really needs to be fixed – maybe have you maximum number of heroes and heroin linked to hero tech line or some such). 

So say pretending that that game 'only allows you to build within one square of a resource' is fine. 

It just reflects badly on the game when you have to do this sort of thing.

The OP's entire premise is flawed in any case. It is by no means necessary to spam level 1 cities to crush the AI. People are doing this because there's no downside if they have the resources to spare, but it's not necessary.

A stack of summoned creatures, e.g. fire giants, spy minions, anything with a good ranged attack ability, is usually enough to steam roll the AI decisively I find. Keep in mind that while it may send stacks to harass you, it's leaving it's cities virtually undefended. The best defense is a good offense as they say, send a stack to take their cities and you won't need to worry about them harrassing yours any more. If you find their sovereign, it usually doesn't take much for it to suicide itself against your stack outside of its area of influence, so you can get the whole war over in one easy battle (which really needs to be changed).

If there are suitable targets in range, I'd much rather have fully developed AI cities with resource nodes than a dozen level 1 spam cities with no resources. The AI has spent all their resources building your newly captured city up for you. There is no unrest.  No buildings get razed. There's no downside to conquest whatsoever. Once you start capturing good, well developed cities with lots of resources your economy and military start steamrolling through the rest of the game. There is no mechanic in place to slow you down or penalize you for rapid conquests.

As for the other debate, I agree with Falconne2. These are not exploits, it's just intelligent and strategic use of the game mechanics the devs have given us. And currently the AI on the highest settings is just not challenging enough. The AI needs to be taught how to use the existing mechanics better, and in addition the mechanics need to be better balanced and tightened up to make things more interesting, to give players more interesting choices.

The AI in this game is the WORST I have ever played against in ANY 4X game let alone comparing against great games like civ4.

To be honest I dont really think any of the games stardock made has very good AI. Even Gal Civ2 was fairly easy if you just kept your military at decent levels until you were able to build mass fleets of doom.

I mean playing diety on Civ4 VS 15 or 16 AIs is FREAKING difficult, this game is so so so below that level....

I'll start by saying that I disagree with the OP.  The AI should be a lot better than it is, and we shouldn't have to handicap ourselves to make it challenging.

HOWEVER...

I consider Elemental to be very unique among 4X strategy games in that it has huge amount of role-play mechanics within it.  Good role-playing games are peculiar things because to get the most out of them, they require the player to do things that are not built directly into the game itself.  They encourage you to play the game as if you had been placed directly in the shoes of your character, not necessarily how the game was programmed, if that makes sense.  

For example, when playing TES 3: Morrowind a while back, I created a Barbarian character with very low alchemy, low intelligence and very high strength related skills.  Even though the game mechanics allowed me to pick up alchemy ingredients, I choose not to do this simply because I wanted to play the character as I envisioned him.  Similarly, when in a combat situation where I could have won more easily by sneaking, ambushing or backstabbing, I choose to use brute force because I had decided that my character would be too stupid to figure that out.

The same thing can be applied to Elemental.  If your character has been given a weakness during character creation, or has some other background information, the game is a lot more fun when played using those sovereign traits.

For example, one faction (forget the name, is it Pariden?) has a "civilized" trait.  It wouldn't make much RP sense to spam hordes of nasty warriors would it?  It also wouldn't make sense to build cities way out in the wilderness with them either.  A civilized faction would be more accurately played using diplomacy, concentrating on infrastructure and the fine arts at the expense of their military.

So my point is that, handicapping yourself can work to a far better degree in Elemental because of the RP emphasis.  I think it can enrich your game as well.  When the game is played in this context, a lot of the shortcomings can be forgiven, because a lot of the enjoyment can be constructed from your own role-play.

TES example is not handicapping yourself at all; that's playing to the strengths of the character you designed. That's great. Elemental doesn't do that well.

To add to the above point, role-playing is a separate issue. We still need outstanding and well balanced game design mechanics that offer a range of interesting choices and viable strategies. The role-playing will take care of itself either way. I agree that it can be fun to get into character and try character/faction appropriate strategies. However we still need the basics to be addressed and I'd argue that the lack of a range of viable strategies is currently hampering role-playing options for those that are into that kind of thing. That's why you see the common complaint in this forum that factions, sovereigns and spell books currently all basically play and feel too similar.

Like I said, role-playing and game mechanics are mutually exclusive.  If I decide that my character is afraid of water, then I can decide to never build ships in my game.  If I decide that blood makes him queasy, then I can decide to never build soldiers.

These things have nothing to do with the mechanics of the game, but they support the role-play-centric world that Stardock created.  If you are not playing the game this way, you are flat-out playing it wrong.  Elemental is a two-legged beast - it cannot stand alone on its 4X aspects and it cannot stand alone on its RP aspects.  They both must be played equally.

If you believe an RPG is all about game mechanics and stats, then you don't know what an RPG is.

The problem with "easiness" is:

1. The "lost library" gives too much boost to the player if you tap one early in the game

and

2. There are 5 kinds of "tech" to research... but what matters quickly in the game is the "warfare" tech. Tap an "lost library", then research some armor, weapon and making a squad of 4 and you can wipe the map with the AI still researchign diplomacy and such. Actually you must put special efforts "not" to win with all this stupidities the AI and the ;ack of balance.

I'm not abusing any strategies and yet I win every time on "ridiculous" difficulty.  This game is too easy.

One other comment...perhaps pioneers should cost 1 food.  That would help curb the city spamming.

It seems like a pretty common sense idea to have pioneers cost 1 food! Dont know why that wouldnt be in the game from the start...

GUYS---

I did not mean to start a flame-fest. 

Let me explore the chess analogy a bit. When I first began playing, I knew only how the pieces moved, that the Queen is very powerful, and don't get your King cornered.

I was introduced to some books and practiced things like forcing a mate with rook+king vs king. Kn+B+K vs K, etc. How to force a draw in some of those instances as the lone king.

I learned about concepts like development, pawn skeletons, and where to station my knights for maximum effectiveness (vs up against one side of the board with only two places to go).  Tactics like pins and forks discovered checks.

I learned about those important central squares which would be the focal point of most early battles for control. I learned the difference between passive and agressive openings.

I never became a really strong player, but I was neither clueless.

Now for the analogy...

Some of the posts I referred to (complaining about the AI being to easy because I can do XYZ and totally pwn the game) sound to me like my kid brother when we played chess. He knew the mechanics of how to move the pieces but was very weak with properly developing his pieces. He would often send his Queen out without developing any other pieces for hit and runs where he could find them.  Eventually I learned not only how to protect myself from these raids, but also how to trap his Queen and force him to lose her to a lesser piece.

Your response to my initial post was, if I may paraphrase, are you kidding? OF COURSE I should use my bishops on the long diagonals and station my knights centrally, and bring my rooks in communication with each other! The object is to win!

Of course it is.

The point of my original post was, that if you find it so very unchallenging even on 'ridiculous' difficulty level, why not play without one of your knights? Or a rook?

I have played chess against youngsters just learning the game with such handicaps. You really have to know how to use the other pieces and how to coordinate their various attacks if you start with two rooks down.

I think we are using different definitions of 'exploits' so I will rephrase. The strategies (For the win!) I have read about seem to take things to extreme. For example: city spamming, creating little outposts in the middle of nowhere to expaind influence to help ensure the saftey of the 'real' cities from creature/barbarian spawns and if you get enough of them each with +1 gildar +1 materials etc, you are golden.

My 4x philosophy is normally not skewed TOO heavily in one area; in the case of EWoM, I start off with a couple of advances in the civics area to get the economy going, then some magic (because I thought the game would be War of MAGIC, if its just war units with great equipment I could play Gal Civ 2 or CIV. I was having trouble so I started levelling combat more often than the others to get weapons, armor, barracks, garrisons and such to defend myself from the inevitable overpowered army (I say overpowered because it has units much stronger than all of mine in greater number than I can achieve even focusing heavily on combat)

I tried making a Sov with high Str/Dex/Con and like 8  Int/Wis. Played the empire with the archers and anti-bonuses to arcane knowledge and focused on combat and civ stuff almost exclusively. Did not cast so much as a 2 mana ice bolt. I was lucky to get a quest that turned 3 stones into a powerful sword early and had 19 attack. I went looking for beasties. I got a cedar bow and was able to train a few archers.

I beat a few stacks but there was no where near enough gold to buy archer squads or deck out my heroes with the best armor I could get.

The evil empire declared war from afar and even within my walled city, I could not defend against the stack. All my archers, melee, spider units were decimated and my sov used magic to flee to the nearest (only city left with no archers, just 3 observers with staffs), so game over.

this is on NOVICE level.

I do not mean this to be nasty, sarcastic or whatever, but tell me again how TOO EASY even at the 'ridiculous' level this game is?

I'm sorry, but the reason you're having trouble is because you're doing all kinds of things with no real focus. It's a bit like trying to play chess and start out trying to promote all your pawns because you heard that you could, but that didn't turn out so well so you send out some other piece randomly and they got slaughtered. Just because you know the rules and how the pieces move, doesn't mean you know how to play. That doesn't make the game hard, it just means you need to learn more about the game (like all those strategies you read about). For example: the reason you can't afford anything is because you're not researching the exploration adventuring technologies in the beginning. If you do that, you'll have plenty of Gildar. Then you want to focus your effort on a specific strategy, like go after catapults, or recruit heroes and imbue and use them as either caster or use them to summon an army, etc... Even if the AI get tons of economic and resource advantages, if it can't put up a counter to any of your strategies, then it won't really matter. So yes, it is easy, even on ridiculous. To be honest I've been experimenting with even harder custom AI settings that give them even more bonus (and no, it still doesn't help).

If you want more information on the strategies that I was talking about, see this thread .

  [/quote]

The problem is that food is an income stream not a commodity. Something can't cost food, it can only drain food each turn, and as pioneers only exist for a short while and food only matters when its all being used this is ineffective.

I think what you really mean is that all cities should consume one food a turn on top of everything else. I certainly would agree with that.

Just a couple things here. First off, your morrowind example was more akin to not taking any points in swimming, then not trying to swim. That's a mechanically smart choice. It's similar to building a sovereign with low intelligence and essense, and then not focusing on magic techs. Its actually strategically advantageous to do so. Hampering yourself because you think it makes the game play more real to you, or involves you more is fine, but your TES example was not consistent with that.

Second, I respect your feelings that making up motivations/personalities/flaws for your character makes the game more interesting for you. However, you are absolutely not allowed to make excuses for missed opportunities in game design because you can use your imagination to fill in holes. Suggesting that the very small percentage of players who hamper themselves in order to feel greater immersion are the only ones who aren't "playing it wrong" is laughable. Avoid such statements in the future.

The first couple of games I played, I lost. By the fifth game or so, I am unable to lose even on the highest difficulty setting. Unfortunately, this is the plague of the modern PC game, weak AI.

Modern developers are too focused on graphics (bells and whistles, smoke and mirrors) to the exclusion of all else. The dominant feature of any PC game should *always* be AI difficulty, everything else is secondary.

It's my opinion that every single PC game made should have an *impossible* difficulty level setting available, say: beginner, easy, medium, difficult, hard, ridiculous, and finally impossible. It should not be possible for the average person to win on “impossible” without cheating unless they get unbelievably lucky. “Impossible” difficulty settings can be easily designed into any game by increasing the production levels of AI kingdoms (using this particular game as an example), say for example: for each gold, mineral, food, knowledge, arcane magic, crystal, etc ... whatever resources are in the game increase the output by 10/15 times that what is normally outputted to human players (under otherwise same conditions) at the highest difficulty (or 20 times, whatever it takes to make it truly impossible). The AI should thus be able to build armies 10 times the size of the human player that are also 10 times further ahead in technology, pretty much guaranteeing a human loss if the AI is actually programmed to attack (while covering its capital & sovereign at the same time). All the other difficulty should range linearly from easiest up to this impossible setting (say at average the AI only gets 3x as much increase in output, and no increase at easiest level .. easiest level it has same limitations as humans, pretty much guaranteeing a loss against even moderately competent humans). This should be enough to counter a person’s “intuition” and “advanced planning” that human brains are capable of but computers aren't.

It's very simple: computer AI cannot compete against the human brain on a 1 to 1 level. This has been proven over & over & over again in so many different games, that I can’t even count them all. In fact, I can’t remember that last time I played a good computer AI .. have to go all the way back to MOO2.  Computer programmers are not good enough to accomplish this 1:1 AI programming. This is no slight against the developer of this game, it applies to all developers of every computer game that has ever been made & are in existence. Non-strategy, or as I like to term them, "hand-eye coordination" games like FPSs don't need good AI; these games are not tests of skill but tests of hand-eye coordination. The only way a computer opponent or AI can compete against a human opponent (human brain), given otherwise average AI, is to artificially inflate the amount of resources generated (knowledge, gold, food, materials, etc..). This is a highly reasonable expectation given the advantages of foresight, intuition, and advanced-planning which are available to humans but not the AI (i.e. iow it's a reasonable tradeoff). Examples of a game that used inflated resource exploitation/growth was MOO2 which had a good highest-level difficulty factor using this idea. Again, this assumes the human player does not "cheat". Saving a game before a battle and reloading until you get the result you want is "cheating", no AI can compete against this. Players that do this should just play on "easy" difficulty level all the time if their game-playing enjoyment is married to their ego.

Early game human rushes & city spawning tactics should be very easy for AI designer to thwart, especially in a game like this which has numerous wandering monsters. Why wandering monsters do not attack city settlements in this game? It's unbelievable to me that wandering monsters don't attack weakly defended, or non-defended cities. This would be one way to very easily control early city spawning tactics by the human opponents. Also, AI kingdoms should automatically be given more favorable diplomacy points (or levels, whatever method is used in the particular game) as to other AI nations and automatically more un-favorable points to human players as the game continues on, after every every 20/40 turns (or whatever, some fixed number) say. After 200 turns (again, for example) all the AI kingdoms should all be so unfavorable to the humans that they declare war if they haven’t already. This method was also used well in MOO2 on the highest difficulty setting. Certainly this is adjusted downward for higher levels of difficulty so that the human player gets swamped sooner .. I’d love to see this happen in this game. It would be so kool to see my kingdom getting attacked on four separate fronts by the remaining computer kingdoms or empires by turn 100 or so.

I actually enjoy a game more when I lose, it makes me want to play again at any cost until I win. Conversely, just the opposite occurs when I win. Once I can win several games in a row on the highest difficulty, I’ve lost my interest in that game. I just don’t have a desire to play a game that I’m 100% sure I can win, there’s just no challenge or enjoyment any more for me. Unfortunately, that’s where I’m at now with this game. I know that the game is well supported (much more than most other game companies), so I feel relatively certain that the folks at Stardock will increase the game difficulty to a point that I can play this game without winning every time (or maybe that is too much to hope for? ,, I just don’t know, only time will tell).

As for the lack of good AI in modern strategy games: I can't even begin to underscore how sick I am of weak AI in modern PC games. I'm so far beyond feeling sick at the weak AI of modern strategy games, strategy games in general I've loved since I was a kid, that it's become more of a dull-nauseas-expectancy now.  I’m not into doing the MMPOG thing, since I’m simply not interested in playing against a bunch of hackers that know how to manipulate a game's source application to their advantage, so standard computer AI play is my M.O.

The thing is, and I think most of the other posters would agree with me on this, we don't feel we should have to handicap ourselves in order to balance a game (any game).

Instead, the AI should be handicapped favorably in order to balance the game. Using your analogy, I would rather see the AI be given an extra "knight" on medium difficulty, an extra "knight and rook" on hard, an extra "knight, rook, and bishop" on ridiculous, and an extra "knight, rook, bishop, and queen" on "impossible". "Impossible" is a setting I propose should be added to keep the game re-playable & enjoyable.

You say to-may-toe, I say to-mah-toe.

But I agree with you. AI opponents should be given an extra knight/rook/bishop whatever as the difficulty level ramps up. That is my expectation of AI in strategy games.

I am simply saying that since that is not the current situation, you can handicap yourself if what you really want is a challenge. Should you be able to consistently beat the AI at 'ridiculous' level? I don't think anyone should be able to do it consistently.

Will it improve? I think so. I think Stardock has a pretty good track record.

I stumbled on the thread regarding MoM... I remember playing it when it first came out and some of the posts about the amazing number of different spells brought back some of the games I played. I have to say that with a title like EWOM, I expected a lot more spells and more varied effects.  

I have tried focusing in one area. First in magic in my early games because I was assuming based on the game title that MAGIC would be a real game clincher. And then on combat because of all the trouble I had getting started and from reading suggestions to do so.

I haven't developed a lot in the exploration area because I read that the higher you go, the harder the random spawns become and I figured I should have a stronger stack first.

It seems I have also been plagued by crappy starting positions. I started 4 games in a row last night and had to abandon them quickly becuase 1st one had no farmable land in sight. 2nd one had numerous resources, but I had two opponents on top of me and before the 8 turns it took to train a pioneer they each had siezed a resource nearby, effectively hemming me in. My sov was running around with janusk trying to grab dropped purses, etc but there was an enemy sov doing the same thing getting to more of them before me. The random mobs in the area (this is in the first 8 turns) had AR 28 and since I was just starting, I did not have any armor or weapons to give to my sov, nor had I learned my first damage spell and figured AR 3 would do nothing but get janusk killed and my sov sent back.

After I got hemmed in, I created a 3rd map. I started next to arable land and began. There were no other resources nor any dropped purses or other goods to be seen. I went looking so I could build my farm. Eventually I got enough gold/mat to build the farm as I looked. I ran into 2 oppnent AOI's and one from a minor. I was frustrated and took Janus and the farmer I found and hired against the minor's city. Too strong.

I started the 4th and had what looked like a nice little area with resources reasonably close without being crowded and I knew I could cover the whole area with a level 3 or 4 city claiming all the resources. I visited a hut and was sent to another on the side of the mountain to my north. Thats when I found that the only access to my area.. the end of a peninsula.. was a narrow gap between the west end of the mountain range  and the coast. Hrm. highly protectable! I thought I finally had a beginning. Then I found out that I could go no further north because there was an opponent there. The spawned final hut holding my magic potion was there so I told them to screw off and went to get it when they complained.

I saved the game and will see if I can build my one city large enough and prosperous enough to arm and armor my sov and janusk and give them some soldiers to go and sack the opponent to the north.

Level: novice., Map: medium; all 8 kingdoms and empires.