Elemental V 1.09 feedback

from Elemental Forums

A good patch, to be sure.  It took a whole 475 turns for my computer to finally cough up elemental and die.  The only downside is the game doesn't start spazzing out before the crash, it just crashes, eventually.  :)  Still, a very drastic improvement, I couldn't get past turn 100 before.  Still, some things I'd like to see changed.

1:  Auto-moving in combat.  I can't tell you how many times I was mindlessly right clicking to try and attack waiting for the attack lag to clear up, and I accidentally clicked move with my archers, and my archers spent the next 3 moves running up to the spot I accidentally clicked.  In combat, the units should not auto move.

2:  Pathing UI.  The movement rates of heroes and units in tac-map still aren't real clear.  Either we need to limit the "move" to how far they can go in one turn, or (my preference) we create a dashed "path line" that shows our faction color for the possible move in that turn, then turns grey and counts off how far we can get in each subsequent move so we can track our movement better.

3:  Attacks per round:  Earlier I said archers should only be able to shoot once.  I changed my mind.  Everyone should only be able to attack once.  Attacking should end your combat turn.  There is absolutely nothing interesting about casting blizzard 15 times in one combat round, or attacking 3 times with swords, or 2 times with bows, every combat round.  There is nothing 2 attacks can do that cannot be consolidated into one attack per round.  It would speed up combat drastically and eliminate the combat lag associated with multiple attacks.  Just multiply everything by a number of hits in the background to calculate damage, no reason we have to right click every time.

4:  Resources.  My ability to generate resources tends to lean heavily upon the ability to find nodes.  Some games I have plenty of gildar, some games I have plenty of materials.  This game, I had over 5000 materials and was hurting for guildar the whole game.  I only had 1 gold mine and that was from an upgrade that gives me "more gold mines."  I would like to see the game less reliant on luck and more reliant on strategy, perhaps some ways to generate gildar.  Right now, I can only generate 1 gildar at the cost of 1 food, and then everything else is a % multiplier, which doesn't give me a lot of gildar unless I have mines.  Same with opposite gender heroes (I found none this game).

6,087 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree entirely with point one.

I agree with point two, if it uses the second implementation. The first implementation just sounds tedious, to little actual gain.

I disagree with point three. An attack can matter, if a fight is close. In practice, that situation is uncommon, but it should be less so as the game continues to be improved.

I somewhat disagree with point four. I think that random chance should be important early on, but it should be possible to obtain resources if you endeavor to do so. I find this to generally be the case, though this may perhaps be because I tend to play on larger map sizes.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

1), 2) and 3) will all be changing when tactical battles move over to an initiative based system (think ATB where combat speed determines your initiative and how often you take a turn). Along with this change, your turn will consist of one move, and one action (attack, cast spell, use item, use ability, etc).  I personally agree with you that auto move, and being able to set a destination beyond your immediate move radius is very unintuitive. But it was an internally requested feature so we put it in.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

or (my preference) we create a dashed "path line" that shows our faction color for the possible move in that turn
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Tactical Japanese RPG's do this and it works very well.

Along with this change, your turn will consist of one move, and one action (attack, cast spell, use item, use ability, etc).
End of quote

Awesome!

This game, I had over 5000 materials and was hurting for guildar the whole game.  I only had 1 gold mine and that was from an upgrade that gives me "more gold mines." 
End of quote

I like the way "that other game" does it where if you are not building anything, you produce money.  I think it could reflect the commerce that goes on in the city.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Loving the ATB idea, a lot.  That's absolutely fantastic.  Fast still matters, but it's not a click-a-saurus of attacks everytime it's your turn.

I don't think being able to set a path beyond your current move radius is a *bad* thing per se, it's just not extremely clear what's going on, how many turns it'll take to get there, who is "waiting" to do their move and stalling your auto-turn, etc.

In another game, you could set a destination any number of turns away, it'd plot out a little dotted line showing the path you'd take, and then give you little notification points that showed you how many turns it'd take to get to each point, and turn red if you had to engage in combat to take that path, and gave you a little icon to click to tell your hero to "keep moving along your predetermined path" everytime his turn came up.  That would definitely help conceptualize what constitutes a turn and give us a visual of what's going on move-wise.

New issues:

1:  I still think I'm encountering way too many misses in combat.  My heroes in platemail and a spear attacking a unit stack would go back and forth missing each other about 5 times in a row.  I think instead of armor creating a higher miss chance, armor should increase your damage reduction.  The situation in which a unit cannot hit another unit should be pretty rare.

2:  Combat damage for a stack of units:  The damage for a stack of units should be calculated on a per unit basis, so that the predictability of damage increases with the stack size.  With my stack of archers, my combat damage for a stack varied wildly from around 2 damage to 39 damage in two shots for one combat.  It appears that my "stack of archers" is being treated as a singular unit with a multiplied attack/defense values, and I think that they should be treated as a group of individuals which obeys the law of averages.

Thank you for the update and feedback.  Definitely looking forward to the new tactical combat changes.