Elemental Forums
What do people think?
Best regards,
Steven.
That's only because a bunch of us 'old guard' types have gone to lurker mode or are trying to keep ourselves restrained. I piped up in the poll thread about magic, but I'm equally interested in seeing serious follow-through on early talk about making the victory conditions more like equals instead of Conquest Is The Only True Game and everything else is Just There.
A big part of that for me was hoping to see related follow-through on the connecting-simple-systems-for-big-fun notion, which relates to my disappointment with magic so far. There are no spells to affect the dynasty system or meaningfully affect diplomacy. There are no spells available only through quests. There are no spells you can only get by recruiting a Truly Spectacular Champion. There are no spells that require you to work mult-turn magic in concert with an allied sovereign. Yada, yada, yada...
Don't see why. You may well be right about the total opinion breakdowns and I could be far more alone in my hopes than I imagine. If Denryu were still around, we could get him to do a free surveymonkey poll for us; I'm too lazy.
p.s. It was nice to see a few "no MP at all" posts in the poll thread.
Honestly haven't been saying much myself because my biggest wants for FE - things like completely redone tactical combat, or a more fleshed out and dangerous fantasy world to explore - are the areas Stardock has already recognized as needing improvement and promised to work on with FE. Since they acknowledge the game's biggest problems (as I see them, anyway), and intend to do something about them, but we don't know specifically what they intend to do - what is there to be said? I'm just waiting with cautious optimism for more detail.
Not that I have anything against the two features the OP brings up, I'd be glad to see both of them; I'm not interested in any MP that leaves out tactical combat, but MP that basically copies the SP is something I'd try, and 'epic' battles with larger armies would be a definite plus, assuming the game balance and engine can support it. But they're not my biggest concerns, and Stardock has already recognized and presumably started addressing the things I'm actually worried about.
Honestly, you should probably rename it to something a bit less definitive, as these are probably not the biggest "wants" from the community. While many community members might express their desire for more epicness, they rarely can agree on exactly this epicness looks like. For some, this means battles where units have troop counts in the thousands, while others want larger battle arenas with unlimited units. Yet, no one seems to ask if these types of changes will actually result in the game becoming more fun or interesting, and if made what levels would be meaningful. To this point, let's discuss both epicness in terms of unit troop count as most people can understand the inherent problems of enlarged unit limits with respect to adding tedium to battles.
At current, a level 5 kingdom city has a population floor of 750, and has the potential to build units of count 1,4,8, and 12. Thus, a level 5 city has the population to support at least roughly 62 units of count 12. Assuming these units are evenly distributed into 12 unit size parties, we have enough units for 5 full parties for a total party troop count of 144. If one expanded troops count potential to be 1, 8, 16, and 24, our same level 5 city would now only be capable of supporting roughly 31 units distributed into about 2 and half parties of 288 troops each. Yet all of these numbers assume that our level 5 city has used none of its own population to build any buildings. Thus, assuming half the number of population is used for civilian purposes and the other half for military, we further drop our possible units to around 15 resulting in only about one full party. Thus, too support even this simple doubling of troop counts, every city would have to be also resized, and prestige/food/housing would all have to be rebalanced. On top of this, population costs for buildings would have to be rebalanced for this one simple change. Now, we must ask ourselves, if this one step towards "epicness" is worth all of this effort which must then be diverted from all other changes. In my mind, it simply is not with these systems are already moddable for those wishing to undertake the effort themselves.
As for MP, I wonder what percentage of Elemental players wish to play primarily MP, what percentage wish to play a couple of games, and what percentage don't want to play at all. I would bet that probably 1% want to play a lot of MP Elemental, 10% might want to play a game or two, and the vast majority have no desire at all to play multipler. If you were a game developer, would you reallocate the time and resources from SP to enhance MP under these conditions? If one looks at the numbers in the Arena section, there are currently only two ranked players listed, and the game totals are at about 120.
Agreed.
No one wants to play MP of "Elemental-lite" that has many core features of the game removed. What is wanted is for them to stop trying to make a second game that is MP only. Unless the quest system is incapable of handling more players, then the only real work other than what has been done already would be handling TC. That would still seem to be less work that effectively making another game.
Agreed. As I said in the Poll thread:
I think that about sums it up. So far, we've never had *any* chance to appreciate MP, because what has been given to us has never been worth appreciating. Give us a good co-op MP, and hotseat would be fantastic if you could make it - as that is one mode that especially favors a good co-op game - and *then* ask us whether MP is worth extending. It can't be done any other way.
Best regards,
Steven.
It's still too early to discuss because we really don't know anything in detail yet. Hopefully that will change soon.
Xia, I wanna play a coop game with you! 
Yes. 
Best regards,
Steven.
Couldn't we just multiply everything by 10 to get a feeling of epicness? Beyond the units needing new graphics to include the look of more units, what are the negatives to the mechanics?
Having a hero take on a group of 10 bandits vs. 1 bandit or 6 groups of 10 spiders each does have a more epic feel to it.
You're sort of forgetting those of us who might think that 'epicness' resides in the larger game, not simply the combat math & GUI. For a game to feel 'epic' for me, it needs much more than hordes of 3D units on a massive tactical combat map. It needs computer players that have personality shaping what they do with their smarts. It needs critters, quests, and events that can transform the course of a game in different ways depending on how the player works with them. It needs magic that feels like it's part of a coherent world, not decorations on a few simple combat rules. It needs dynasties whose members are more than free champion units or commodities for the diplo interface.
Not that I would mind a Helm's Deep-style battle near the end of a gloriously long snapping-turtler game...
Umm, you probably know this already (or, I hope that you do), but multiplying prestige, population requirements, and housing by 10 gives the exact pacing that we have now.
It would be really interesting to see a diplomatic system that had as much depth and strategy as the military sytem, but would be better off as trade wars, political intrigue, and espionage. I don't like the idea of winning "diplomatically" by throwing a bunch of spells around.
In fairness, the resources and unit strength could all use a good rebalancing anyway, so anything should be open at this point. Also in fairness there is no real reason to play multiplayer as it is, I would have a hard time convincing a friend to spend his time on this.
That was some rhetorical ranting on my part, definitely not part of a master plan to redesign the game. I'm a player, not a dev, nor even a modder. The idea of pulling off a diplo win just through spells with diplo impact could be boring if it were like the current weapon tech trees, but could be fun if it was part a game with more/better diplo functions and a much larger set of options for using magic. That way, if I got in a diplo-win rut, I'd be able to get very different games with the same basic settings just because a diplo win meant finding the right balance of guns, butter, spectacles, and spells for the given map.
Agree but multiplying by 10 and having the monsters and normal units reflect increased count, in my mind, adds to some epic feel. Totally agree it does nothing to change the pacing or other opportunities to improve the gameplay.
[Edit] Unit graphics would need to be updated to reflect the higher count. It does nothing to say a unit means 10 and yet still only show 1. Just throwing out ideas as I don't think this change would require much of an update.
They are allready redoing the entire economy and the way population works, so there is no reason at all to keep using the current values. Even if it's mainly numbers, I signed on for building an empire and having the occasional titanic battle, not managing a few hundred people and squad based combat...
I will admit that a discussion of both MP and scale are worthwhile, yet it is moderately silly to discuss both at once. As most know, I got the chance to discuss my wants to the dev directly, and as far as I am concerned, they were open to a rational and well thought out arguments. Yet, while this thread could house such arguments, it is more self serving than genuinely concerned with having the community discuss real points about the various aspects of Elemental. There is no reason to have this thread at all as the title can describe the fundamental point of the general and ideas forums.
As consumer we feel vested in the game, we used our money to pay for the game and we desire to get the most out of that purchase. I completely understand the desire to have that purchase fulfill our wants from the product, but we must be very clear on a particular point. There is a whole group of people who are working on this product, and a company behind them spending large amounts of money to produce the product. If we as a community push them to make one unplanned change, we take away resource from two. Thus, we must ask ourselves is having them spend the time to redesign and reimplement entire systems to allow for co-op multiplayer or just making the game feel epic worth them being able to redesign tactical combat or the economic model. I think, if we are thinking carefully about it, the answer is no. Especially, since we don't know exactly what the finished product will look like. Perhaps, even without quests or tactical combat in multiplayer, the game will be loads of fun to play multiplayer, but this is a point to bring up during the beta when we can readily see whether it is or not.
Previous comment aside, I might agree with you (I'd have to think about it a bit). Of course, this would entail much much smaller unit graphics to accomodate 120 men on a tile, which I'm not sure I'm a fan of. Honestly, I just want a little bit of complexity in the mechanics more than anything else. As it is now, I could teach my dog to play this game pretty well.
And ok, I'm sufficiently off-topic.
Not every thread has to have 100% rational, logical arguments (if that's even possible with our emotive brains). I was just wondering about the general idea. I have a lot of faith, based on what I know, that FE will be a fantastic game. It's just, based on E:WoM, it is reasonable to have a few doubts. In the end, Stardock, with the capabilities they have on board, will make their decisions. I think they have a much better idea of the kind of game they want then they did the first time round, but if they are thinking about something, I did want to let them know there is some want for certain things.
And besides, even if the first incarnation of the thread's starting post implied community acceptance (which I did not aim for it to do), I as one person am not the community. But I still wanted to get a general idea of what people thought on these two topics.
And when you think about it, most of the things we do as humans are self-serving anyway. 
(Even when tackling the issue of climate change and doing things like putting a cost on pollution, for example. =))
Best regards,
Steven.
There's some factors that go into that number though:
1. MP didn't exist until what, a month after release?
2. MP is a stripped down "light" version of the game.
3. MP is geared towards competitive play, which is not something lengthy TBS games lend themselves to on the Internet.
4. MP support for people who want to play co-op is completely non-existant, and for this type of game that's a sizable group.
With the deck stacked that far against it, is it any wonder that MP failed to find an audience?
No, this is a point to bring up now when it's possible to do something about it. You can't at the last minute test it and go "oh yeah that doesn't work, we'll go back and add in all the missing stuff now."
Besides, in the last beta round MP wasn't available at all, and stuff like tactical battles showed up very late in the process. What we actually got in MP was a "Surprise!" moment very close to release, and that's not something I care to repeat.
Baby, if you want to play with me, you gotta play Domminions 3!
That rhymed, which is awesome, and I do play co-op games of Dom3 with some other people here from this board. That game is more suited to multiplayer. And it's more fun...
I haven't read every bit of this thread, but I did glance, and a lot of people are talking about combat, and multiplayer. I'll leave the multiplayer part out, because I have zero interest in it. I'll let those who truly weant it, and would play it talk that one out. It's not something I have any interest in, and I wouldn't ever play it. As long as the single player experience is not affected detrimentally.
I do agree with that overall epicness feel to combat, in both the tactical battles and the array of enemies being faced.
And one final thing, I don't know how many people have mentioned this or given it any thought, but I do not get the feeling I am building an empire whan I play the game. I can't quite define what is missing, but I have close to zero emotional attachment to anything I do within the game. It all seems so very mechanical. I know that's not much to go on, but I hope for a more emotional, epci feel to the empire building as well.
I haven't played in a while, has there been a path indicator included now when I select a destination? SOmething like in the Civ games that shows the path the character will take, as well as the number of turns it'll take to get there?
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