Some thoughts going in to 1.1

from Elemental Forums

All right, guys. We are pretty well solid, and pretty well stable. Once 1.1 goes official, we have a whole new world of addressing balance and game play issues opening up to us. I know a few things REALLY stood out to me on my last few play-throughs of the last few patches.

 

Early game has shaped up pretty well.

-Levels 1-3 of city building are decent.

-Champion leveling is fun and somewhat meaningful for the first 4-5 levels.

-expanding and consolidating your borders for the second and third city move along pretty well.

-Tech pacing isn't bad.

 

A few things have stood out as pretty glaringly off kilter, however.

Armor Tech - Holy cow is armor still ridiculous. Each level of armor pretty much lowers the previous rank of weaponry to 1-2 damage/hit and the weapons prior to that totally ineffective. There needs to be some mechanism where armor does not totally absorb damage unless you REALLY beat your opponent's roll. At this point, it is still apparently better to be hit and wearing heavy armor than not hit at all.

My suggestion here is that the armor roll should be at least triple that of the damage roll tot totally block, otherwise, 1 damage is dealt per hit.

 

Strategic Spells (Teleport) - Yeah, we have heard about this one before. Caster only, please. In-city magic portals to move other units between cities, but teleporting armies around the map is just silly, even if it is only within friendly territory.

 

Strategic Spells (A Call To Arms) - We all know that Teleport is pretty unbalanced, but I just discovered that "Call to Arms" is pretty well the best spell in the game once your military is strong.

Seriously; queuing up 4 units of 8 claymore wielding warriors wearing full heavy plate mail and summoning all of them in one turn is utter nonsense. It is even more hilariously overpowered when you realize that any one of those four units can quite literally win you the game. ~100 Hit points at level one (but why not make them all veterans? It's free!), ~280 damage per hit, and enough armor that even that beast of a man at the temple of souls can only do 10 or so damage to them.

 

Strategic Casting (in general) - I'd like to see the amount of mana we can spend per turn limited as a function of Intelligence and Level.

 

Magical Equipment Research - We really need to have the military tech prereqs on the weapon-related magic gear so you cant just fire up the magic tree to get legendary plate and swords of wrath and use your level 6 champions to win the game without researching much by way of military.

elemental
5,519 views 6 replies
Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The best way to fix these spells is for Teleport to only effect caster, and Call to Arms to speed up production not make it instant.

Ya Armor is better but still ridiculous. It might be harder to lower though without getting in to decimal values because armor is divided into so many pieces. Get Armor tech and equip Sov then rush is the new cheese now that spell spam is gone. I believe a point in dodge only gives you a 1% bonus but a point in defense is alot more then 1%. I'm not sure I follow you suggestion but it won't really help much if instead of not being able to deal dmg we can only ever deal 1. 

Of course the beat is in Lock Down, so we will have to be happy with all the goodies they have already given us for now.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

the leveling is really for for the first 4-5 levels after that it get very slow :(

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that armor, particularly heavy armor, is overpowered compared to weapons tech (save the need to pierce enemy armor).  Get some decent armor, and you can romp through NPC (and often AI) armies with ease.  Dodge (the benefit from light armor) is also pretty much trivial unless you're abusing Guardian Aura and/or Legendary Shields (mmm, magical tech abuse).

Actually, there's a really simple way to solve magical equipment abuse.  Change all costs from gold quantities to their forging costs.  In other words, you actually would need crystal to load up on trinket buffs, and you'd need elementium to load up your champions with "legendary" gear.  Honestly, it makes little to no sense that you could just buy stuff like that off the shelf.  It really disrupts the feeling of having to develop a civilization, to rebuild the world, when you can just walk into the store and buy anything for a sack of gold.  Build the damn infrastructure first!

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Dsraider, reply 2
I'm not sure I follow you suggestion but it won't really help much if instead of not being able to deal dmg we can only ever deal 1.
End of Dsraider's quote

 

Just to make sure that a unit of men with spears could still potentially deal 8 points of damage (1 each) to someone in legendary plate, provided that the plate wearer didn't get an amazing roll. Seriously, right now, a single person in light plate is essentially immune from groups with spears.



Quoting Dsraider, reply 2
Of course the beat is in Lock Down, so we will have to be happy with all the goodies they have already given us for now.
End of Dsraider's quote

 

Absolutely. This is for after the holidays when we get back to fixin' systems.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

My suggestion here is that the armor roll should be at least triple that of the damage roll tot totally block, otherwise, 1 damage is dealt per hit.
End of quote

That's not a complete solution since you also complain about slightly lower tech weapons only doing 1-2 damage per hit.

 

The problem with Elemental is the following: each tech is a real leap in power with respect to the previous one, even though you can research them right after the other. You can go from padded armor to heavy plates in no time, same with the weapons. So the system should NOT be based on obsolescence, like it is right now. It should be based on opening options.

Right now, this doesn't work. Why? Because armor values are still relatively far away (well, nothing can be done without changing the defense vs attack calculation system, because the increments in armor are as small as they can be with 5 armor parts per technology). And because weapons have the same issue: early weapons are too weak (the spear is alright... but the axe, mace, shortsword and broadsword are utterly useless. Especially the broadsword, which has NO value whatsoever compared to its tech-level rival, the battleaxe. Yeah, you can put a shield, but why would you want to sacrifice 8 attack for 3 defense, at a greater overall cost ? There is no reasonable situation in which dealing ~6-7 more damage per hit is better than soaking 2 more.)

And I mean, seriously, that trog scimitar: 28 attack +2 combat speed ? Compared to its same-tech rival with only 18 attack ?

Balance is better than before, but it's still completely inconsistent with the mechanics of the game. With the current tech research system, maces should NEVER be obsolete, and Lordhammers/Great scimitars should be rare weapons for advanced units.

I personally modded the whole thing to reduce late-game weapons and increase early/mid game weapons.

 

is overpowered compared to weapons tech (save the need to pierce enemy armor).
End of quote

Trog Scimitars, Lordhammers and Battlehammers, Claymores, Battleaxe work here. The issue is, they make lower armor obsolete (another bad thing: lower armor doesn't offer protection against slightly higher-tech-level 2-handed weapons because the numbers jump so high, so quickly), so the game is really only about the "best 2-handed weapons vs. best armor". 1-handed weapons are bad, atrocious even. Sure, you can put a shield, but it's nowhere near worth it.

That's the biggest problem in Elemental's balance: it has a technology system that allows you to research late-game techs in the early game, but is not balanced with that in mind because the weapons and armors jump from the 10s (spear, mace, leather) to the 40-50s (Great Scimitar).

The best regular armor in the game is 26+shield (32). That's still a bit high, but okay. It should be made more expensive though (cost scaling is bad...).

The best regular weapon in the game has 50 attack. It should have at MOST 40. And more regular weapons such as the broadsword should be around 17-18, at least. And great axe at 23 is too good.