109p - Please reduce the mob spawn

RE: caravn guard idea

Rather than having a technology to apply a caravan guard, wouldn't it be easier to just assign units to travel with the caravan? This way you could attach better troops for more dangerous routes. Also it would be a good way to train rookie troops. maybe each successsful journey for the unit would add a tiny amount of experience. It just seems right that new troops get assigned caravan duty, you can almost imagine them complaining about it

Caravans are so cheap that I haven't been sweating the monsters killing them too much.  I've come to think of them as my Monster Early Warning System (M.E.W.S.)...

Of course, you do tie up your training cue for three turns replacing them, but that hasn't been too big of a problem for me, as I usually don't have enough resources to crank out some other units as fast as I'd like.

It'd be nice if a 'assign escort' feature was added to Caravans, though!

I'm not seeing any monsters spawning inside my ZOC's, though, although they do wander in.  Keeping my cities tightly clustered, so the city ZOC's overlap, seems to help.

A game slider that controlled how frequent the monsters appear would be nice.  That way, those of us who get a kick out of monster hunting can set it high, while others who don't want to be bothered can choose a lower setting.

Yes. This. There's not reason not to have one.

You can change the world settings to find a monster balance more to your liking.  But then you have to go and change each opponents difficulty when you want them to be tougher than the world settings.  I wish we could select world difficulty without altering leader difficulty.  And have the abilty to change every leaders difficulty with a single action, while also being able to individually change them if we like. 

Actually, there are MANY reasons for not having a spawn frequency slider. For starters the game will be much harder to balance. The tech tree, the pacing, build times, AI and a whole bunch of other factors are all tuned for a specific spawn frequency. By introducing this slider, you might end up playing matches where the entire dynamics of the game our thrown out the window.

In this kind of environment, strategies cannot develop. How can you apply a strategy you've perfected in one game to another when they have different slider settings? Essentially the player ends up learning nothing between games.

More important however is the fact that sliders like this distort feedback to the player of how well they are doing in the game. If I'm not a good Elemental player and I lower the spawn frequency slider and start winning again is it because I got better or is it because I didn't have to deal with monster aggression anymore?

From a design perspective, Elemental is complex enough as it is and introducing another gameplay dimension in a game that still isn't remotely balanced would be a disaster.

isn't the problem with caravans not so much the caravan itself.. but lvling up the road or manually re-establishing the route that got destroyed?

None of these arguments hold water at all in my opinion. Balancing is not a problem. There would be a standard value to balance against. If users wants more or less than standard in their games its their problem. 

Apply perfect strategy? What? In Elemental you adapt to circumstances. There is no perfect strategy. It will vary in each game.

Distort feedback? This is just crazy talk

Sorry if I appear rude here, but I want the slider and your arguments are just weird to me...

Random anything is a slippery cornstone for game design and good luck finding balance with random number generators.  Some degree of randomness is necessary, but this one is burdensome.

Too many monsters, you cannot explore,  Too few and your sovereign does not level up.  It would be a lot better if they started spawning towers and dungeons after a certain point - static, non-moving places - that can be visited if needed and otherwise allow us to feel like the game is somehow progressing in fashion that provides opportunity without endless annoyance.

Also, a big part of the reason that this a problem with caravans is because the mobs come into our territories without any warning AND they are not especially easy to find even on a the cloth map due to the number of hirable heroes walking the lands like insatiable wilderness hookers.  The INN improvement would be a better way to find heroes for hire - without cluttering the map with meaningless blips.  Anyhow, point is, the tools that we have require too much scrutiney which is why monsters and bandits have any chance at all of reaching caravans inside controlled lands.

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And what would that standard value be? In the middle of the slider? The very end? 3/4's of the way in? How will the player know what the standard value is? These are tough questions which may not have answers given Elemental's complexity.

Perfect from the player's point of view - not perfect in an objective sense. If you cannot create, develop and enhance a strategy from match to match then you're playing an arcade game and not a strategy game.

That's quite all right. The concept of a balanced and rewarding game is foreign to many people on this forum.

We've already got it to a working degree.  The monster spawn rate (and net monster power?) is now influenced with the world difficulty setting.  And I like it!  Games are often used for personal enjoyment.  I like being able to tweak settings to maximize my enjoyment.   When people do use games to compete, they level the field and all work off the same standard.  Though sometimes handicaps are used.   A spawn slider would make for a decent handicaper.

Who cares?  Are you having fun?  That's what matters.  If your fun is based in competition with other players, you do have oppurtunity to join/create a ladder community where everything is standardized and you can properly gauge your performance against other players.  You all set the world difficulty and leader difficulties to same setting.  I don't see the problem here.

Turn 20.

The single peasant I've been able to train is killed during a battle with a single bandit.

Two more of the same kind of bandit await outside my city.

Then an army of spiderlings marches off map, that is 2x the strength of my sovereign and Janusk.

It marches straight to my only city and kills my sovereign and Janusk.

Turn 20.

Game Over.

It's like Stardock is determined to make creeps so irritating/numerous/difficult than no one will play with them enabled.

Zero level creeps shouldn't have higher attack than ANYTHING you can get without basic war research.

Monster armies shouldn't form immediately at the start of game.

And....honestly....players should not be used as the pointer for where monsters spawn. Now that the AI is functioning, there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT THEM EXCEPT FIGHT. They spawn on top of you and immediately attack. No warning, no chance to react, nothing.

To tell you the truth, monsters were more "fun" when they were stupid, at least compared to right now.

It would be nice if the monster spawn frequency could be set by the player (in the game setup options).

Regarding the 'game balance' issues with having a monster spawn slider (or multiple sliders if you also want to control how quickly the tougher late game monsters make appearances).

Yes, the 'default' position of the slider should be where the game is balanced.  Those of us that choose to deviate from the 'game norm' understand that we do so at our own risk.  Some of us like that extra risk and living on the edge!

And the slider 'default' can be linked to game difficulty (so normal difficulty has 'normal' monster spawning, while difficult level has 'difficult' monster spawning.

Some players genuinely hate monster hunting and there is an option in the game to remove them during setup.  Other players don't mind occasional monsters, so they should have that option, if they so choose.

Some of us like eeking out our existence in a dangerous world where the monsters are as much or more of a threat than the the other kingdoms/empires.  Let us live the dream/nightmare!

Now, in an online game, at that point ALL players have to live with whatever difficulty is chosen.  But what goes on in solo games really should to a degree be left up to the buyer of the game.  If Stardock can tailor the Elemental experience even further for varying tastes, so much the better.

If we were bragging about our high scores, and these were 'tracked' by Stardock, that'd be another matter.  But since each Elemental game is unique, and since we aren't posting our high scores, our individual game settings are really only relevant to ourselves.

There is an older game (the Warlords I, II, and III series) where, on custom maps, you get to choose how many cities, bonus sites and ruins appear ingame, how many landmasses the game has, as well has how many 'dice' are rolled in combat (to reflect whether you think quality or quantity should be the bigger factor in combat).  There is no reason Elemental shouldn't have some or all these options eventually, in my book.

An ability to control the level of neutral monster spawns is present in almost any RTS or TBS game available. I can't off hand think of any major game that didn't have that feature. The slider would be trivially easy to balance, since any change to the slider effects every player it requires almost no adjustment. And if your strategy is destroyed by a lack or overabundance of mobs, then your strategy was inflexible and probably lacking in the first place.

However, I personally have not had any difficulty at dealing with mobs at all. I just scramble around, pick up a half dozen champions real fast, then bunker myself into my capital until i can make troops with full leather armor and the big pointy stick. Then i pop out 4-5 of them, set them to auto-explore, and they basically clear the map while collecting any champs i may have missed. Maybe i am just getting lucky, but so far, i have been untouched by mobs.

Looks like the only way to make everybody happy is to have a mob spawn slider in options.

I see mobs as good because they give you an opportunity to level up, and having lots of them is fine.  But I can sympathize with people who see them has getting in the way and distracting from the main strategy game.

Maybe a compromise would be some good loot drops so that they wouldn't be as onerous.