Core gameplay goals not met

I disagree with most of this.  I've found that Champions are on the overpowered side, a group of them mid-game with good leveling and gear (specifically enchanted/magical equipment) can sweep the map.  The fact that you are seeing the same problem from the other side shows that it's actually pretty balanced and both of these examples are just strategies that work well rather than a balance problem.

And partially because you can't help but compare FE to WoM for tactical combat I'd say it is very fun for what it is: a Might and Magic grid battle system, and it works, it has the same feel as that classic system for good and bad, but I'd say it definitely is fun.  Perhaps not as fun as it could be but certainly not boring or downright tedious like WoM's tactical combat was.

I'm playing through the Early game at the moment and when the AI is fielding level 6 champions in full metal armour with sword, board and mount it is still not worth attacking the champions till after all the leather clad, spear or bow wielding groups are dead.

The champions finally have a reasonable amount of hp, but they don't hit hard enough to make them a priority, and their higher defense means you spend more turns damaging them.

 

And oh god, the early game trolls and mother spiders...

Are the monster ignoring AI players towns?

Funny, I see the opposite. Very quickly, I can literaly step on death demons and dragons, my best field units are much, much less powerful than my heroes - who usually have between 30 and 60 attack, thanks to all the loot found on monsters.

The more I play the more I see this isn't the case. People are just focusing on the champions because they are fun, and because they are focused on they are decently powerful.

A single 5 stack of spearmen in leather, with +str and +con talents and maybe some cheap magic rings will make level 10-12 champions look like a waste of time. Level them just a handful of times and they become unstoppable gods with hundreds of health and damage, all while using the lowest level equipment in the game. If you marked them as upgradeable though you can just make them exponentially more powerful with each tech upgrade.

Normal units really are the most powerful in this game with fireball being the only danger to them. The problem is the AI doesn't know what to do with them and just gets them killed before they can level at all, so enemy stacks are usually full of weak level 1 units. Unfortunately it looks like the game was balanced around the AI being stupid with their units, so high level champions don't hold a flickering candle in a rainstorm to high level unit groups.

There is a simple solution here.

1. Make the AI better. Already happening if you downloaded the Friday Frogboy patch. It's a little better. 

2. Then the regular army need to take longer to level. Not much, but higher levels are so powerful, it should be harder to get to. 

3. Monsters should be a little farther from your start and much more varied in power. Call me old fashioned, but I expect to kill rats, bats, spiders, wolves, tigers, bears, ophies, ogres, slags, drakes, wurms, dragons and in that order. Starting at ogre is doable, but it is more fun to have a progression. 

Just have a Life champion follow them around to cast Grow/Haste on them! 

From the outside looking in, hearing all the "this is uber", "that is uber", "I pwn everything" - this is exactly what SD wants to hear.  They specifically said they want to know how people are winning the game, and what tweaks they would need to make.  To me, it would seem like, well, basically what seanw3 said in his post above.  The AI needs work. Tweak leveling.  The monsters need to scale better, and be more logically placed.  And it seems maybe the loot needs to be balanced as well.

What I'm not seeing is what difficulty level y'all are playing.  Are you doing this on ludicrous difficulty?

What it needs is multiplayer, so we can actually pit our uber champions vs some uber spearmen, and see who wins.

I just finished a game on the largest map size with the highest number of factions.  I won by having a party of six heroes outfitted to the gills using a strong economy to buy them any upgrades I could research.  One was a pure caster, one was my Sov who was Air/Fire, buffed with everything and made for decent melee, and the other four were varying degrees of melee strength.  

I won the master quest fairly easily.  Reloaded and continued on and won by conquering.  My only use of armies were spear wielding horseman who would follow behind my super party to lock down conquered cities while said super party cleaned up the area of enemy monsters and factions.  One or two fights were close (the master quest one and the big battle against the biggest rival faction).  Other than that I steamrolled.  

A few other things:

It seems to me like balance is closer than people are making it out to be if you're able to play the way you want and win.  

I personally love the strong monster near the starting point.  It makes the early goings stressful.  I think I'm in the minority there though.  

As for the tactical battles, they're light years ahead of WOM's.  However, I think they are still missing some more tactical elements.  My strategy with my super party was the same no matter what I was fighting.  Find the most damaging enemy unit I could kill in one or two hits, rotate through champions and their special abilities until I killed it, move on to the next.  There needs to be something more in the battles to force you to actually adapt when starting each battle.  I SHOULDN'T be able to use the same strategy every fight.  I'm not sure what that something is.. flanking, terrain, interactive objects on the battlefield.. it could be any number of things.  But there needs to be something that potentially forces my army out of its comfort zone at times.  Even my few really tough fights, that I would have lost with one more enemy dodge, weren't touch because my army was poorly setup.  They were tough because they were the only times I went up against an enemy force as powerful as my own.  

Disagree. In fact I hate doing anything other than Tactical battles because auto-resolve wastes tons of mana to win. I've not yet gotten bored of tactical battles and with some more tactical choices added in I shouldn't ever need to.

This.

I love the monsters as well. The world is supposed to be dangerous. Adapt your strategy depending on your situation. 

I think it's because game have no variety in enemies. There is almost no enemies with range attack/special abilities/spellcasters. 

This2. The game should be stressful. Moreover, not every game should be winnable!

ps You do still love those little sneaky spiders, Zozz!? 

But once you kill the ogre, the rest of the baddies are easy by comparison. I get that is just risk/benefit there. So have at it.

 

BTW most of us are playing on normal difficulty and medium to small maps I think. That is the focus of this stage of the beta. 

This game is great. In terms of gameplay it is far better. I think that Derek Paxton and the guys have got all the gameplay in place.

I am quite happy at this stage.

My only limited suggestion is that I think the game tends to be more like Civilisation, or even (whisper it) Fall From Heaven insofar as it focuses on units and magic is more support-y.

My hope is that once the game is released we can look at more stuff. Basically I think we need item crafting as in Master of Magic or Age of Wonders - Shadow Magic. In addition I would like to see more excessively powerful, unbalancing spells and a longer tech tree with more equipment.

I would like to see, at the higher levels, silly and unbalancing tactical and strategic spells, item powers and unit traits.

But this game is very, very good now once you get past the bugs.

LOVE sean's summarization of ideas. sounds like its exactly what we need. but also i seriously think sovereigns and champions should be much stronger then units you can just make. the point is they are special and more powerful than normal people, and they should be key to beat other champions or strong monsters. Units can be strong, but it should take quite a few of them to to kill one uber powerful champion. maybe im in the minority too though.

i also think stronger monster=better loot. i haven't gotten far enough to tell if they have done this yet, but if not they should, because the loot i've gotten so far for killing a few single-spider parties is pretty damn good.

Tactical combat should have more tactics involved. honestly, i just set my guys up in a line and when the enemy gets close i pounce. wheres the tactics in that? i think a good idea here is to make more than just a little path for the combat map, and allow groups of the same side to join in a battle if they are adjacent to the defending party (AKA like the idea in Age of Wonder)

 

I agree.  While tactical battles are far more interesting than they were in WoM, they're still not interesting enough.  Like you said, I usually just line my units up and wait for the enemy to close with me so I can start killing them.  This is okay for some small skirmishing - in fact, it is appropriate - but larger battles should be more interesting and involve larger maps with more interesting mechanics, maybe something like King Arthur's battle map objectives that give one side or the other some bonus in combat.

Was that explicitly stated somewhere by Brad or Derek?  I'm here quite often and don't remember reading it.  I may have missed it though.  Although if it was the focus, why wouldn't it be the only available options?

If it wasn't said, then it's pretty bold for some random user to claim that is the focus of this stage of the beta.  

I agree with this too.  It's what I was trying to express in my earlier posts.  There need to be some other elements to tactical battles that force you to use different strategies depending upon the individual battle.  I'm not sure what mechanics get you there, larger maps, terrain/obstacles that impact the battle, important locations on the tactical map, flanking mechanics, or something else.  There have been lots of suggestions here.  The current tactical battles have the actual unit to unit combat down nicely (although probably needing balancing still) and are lightyears ahead of WOM.  However "battles" should be about more than just unit to unit. 

 The forum software has shit the bed as usual on this post, so sorry for that. Notice where the quote tags are and pretend they work. It isn't saying whose quotes I used in all of them, so people responded to directly in this post are seanw3, Strumpetplaya, Rishkith, and id_est in that order.

That's gonna be helpful, but it doesn't address the core issues.

A good start, at least.

I do not agree. Random placement is good. I mentioned my game where I was trapped on a spit of land, but that was still a fun game and being isolated from the world allowed me to build a single big city with substantial industrial capacity. It was a hindrance in some ways but it made the game more interesting, and preventing situations like that from happening will simply make people get tired of the game quicker.

A testing arena with players designing and perhaps controlling both sides (if that's viable from a code perspective) would serve that purpose just fine. This should be one of the first utilities to appear in the modder's workshop, since it will aid substantially in testing the beta.

As I said, will only be used in situations where the auto resolve button would cheat the player out of something. Mana is the biggest thing it cheats you out of at this point, that will hopefully be changed to conserve mana later, but that's a separate issue.

More variety is gonna help for sure. But the reason there's not more variety now is in large part because variety is not advantageous. Everything boils down to damage dealt vs damage received, because there's no mechanics in the game to stimulate or support tactics.

There have been many areas whee I have said, "Gee, this would be a good battle if the enemy could cast a spell." Healing and AoE's would greatly increase the AI's chance of competing. I have also noticed that most tank type units start in the back and have to wade through peons to get to the front. It makes it easy to ignore them. 

As far as support tactics, I don't see lots of change happening to the core mechanics. We have all cried out at one point or another for the long list of tactics, LOS being most desirable to me. The best one can expect from this Elemental is probably some good buff spells for intelligent enemies. I would also like to see some more mundane abilities for creatures, like special attacks and defenses. But don't stop asking because there is a whole expansion after this one. 

So we have threads with people complaining that heroes are overpowered and threads where people are complaining that normal units are overpowered. I think this means that 1 -1 = 0. Sounds like balance to me. I believe the issue isn't that these things are overpowered, just that the game isn't challenging people who believe they've found the ultimate, overpowered strategy.

 

Who said that? 

@Kantok,

I was merely stating an objective fact about a good beta rule. I was one guilty of indulging the ridiculous difficulty on custom map that were immense by any definition of the word. It hurt the process to have me going on about how fun and exciting it was to kill swarm spiders and fight legions of Umber. 

Of course you are free to play whatever difficulty level and map size you want with however many resources you want with whatever spawn level with however many opponents you want with whatever mods you want. But comparing experiences with other beta testers becomes irrelevant at some point. If your monsters have twice as much health and are super aggressive, then they might seem balanced with the current leveling system. But at normal it is a whole different story and posting about how balanced things are will hurt the beta process. 

I am currently starting games and playing till turn 100 at each level just to see where the games starts to feel balanced. Then I will mod the leveling system and erase the +1 per level traits. Then I can compare that to the absolute vanilla game and see if things are balanced better. 

There's a whole expansion after this one, yes. Personally I'm hoping it will see the return and enhancement of dynasties, as well as a lot of interpersonal relationships for champions, and things like captive taking, and subsequent interrogations. That would be a good focus for an expansion.

However one of Fallen Enchantress' original listed focuses was making tactical battles fun. Fallen Enchantress has failed to do this. We're in beta now, we need to tell Stardock when things are wrong. Frogboy has indicated a strong desire to make this game the best it can be, and tactical battles are at least ostensibly a big part of that. If they're not going to continue developing them to the point that they become fun, then they might as well turn tactical battles off all together and not advertise them, like they did with dynasties and multiplayer. I would very much prefer that they take the time to make tactical battles good, however.

The problem is that you assume both opinions take everything into consideration. It is very much true that a powerful champion can tear through mountains and the low-level units that the AI sends at you. However a powerful champion takes a vast amount of resources to cultivate and equip when compared to trained units. Trained units are slightly more powerful from the get-go, since they come in groups, and become considerably more powerful once you research Logistics. A champion can become very powerful through leveling and equipment. But a unit with your best equipment is cheaper to make, and is far more powerful with equivalent leveling. Champions have the advantage that they can do quests and can benefit from items gained in quests, and they're needed as a source of spells, so it's important to have a few. But in combat they're not optimal. This is not necessarily negative for gameplay, but it's not in keeping with what we have been continually told is the intent of Champions, hence why I bring it up.I have been playing with all settings at default, besides map size. I notice that powerful monsters tend to be easier to avoid on large maps, but otherwise these things seem to hold true on small and large maps. I haven't played on medium or tiny yet, but I would be surprised if these trends do not hold true for those sizes.