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Early Game:

Scouts - These units might as well be removed from the game because they are completely worthless at exploration. Given the amount of monsters in the world right off the bat, they make it approximately 2-5 turns before they are anihilated. What a complete waste. They need to be immune to attack by wandering monsters (an army composed only of 1 scout).

 

Exploration - I just started a game and I realized, I can basically not do much without getting anihilated by Knights of Asok, Drakes, Cave bears, and just about everything else on the board at teh beginning. I have NO armor early on. These creatures are extremely agressive on the board in chasing me down, or attacking me as I try to walk by them. I have NO HOPE AT ALL of beating the majority of stuff on the map in teh beginning of the game. The map is completely cluttered with aggressive monsters and this STOPS almost all exploration my sovereign can do. I'm tired of getting ganked by crap I have absolutely no chance to beat. Don't get me wrong, I love how cluttered the map is with creatures, quests, and other things to do. You need to change the agressive stance of creatures based on the turn number in the game. For example forest drakes won't do anything but sit there and be attacked until turn 100 (or whatever is reasonable) or make them not leave their den at all and let their minions they spawn do all the attacking. The way the exploration is working right now isn't fun at all. I can hardly find a new place for my 2nd city without getting destroyed by crap i can't beat. WHat are you expecting the players to do, tech up to leather armor and build 3 units of spears just to start exploring? This needs to be addressed, in my opinion.

 

AI Agression and expansion - I'm not even sure where to start with this one. The AI must build nothing but miltary units and pioneers until the entire length of the map is completely controlled. The AI is HYPER AGGRESSIVE when it comes to expansion and claiming land. They are a land grabbing machine, they don't give a crap if its right next door to you or a resource you have right next to your city. They litterally put up an outpost around EVERYTHING. Any single resource. The worst part is, they will build it all over the map. I'm not sure if you have sat back and watched what happened after teh AI populates the map but it looks something akin to a checkboard made of multiple colors. They have no concept of "I better not build an outpost on the other side of the continent because I coudlnt possible have any way of defending it and I woudlnt' make some people very happy.

I think this is utterly out of control. The AI has no sense of territory. They have no sense of a contiguous empire that has ways to defend itself. We need a mechanism to keep expansion in check. Quite litterally by the end of turn 100 the entire map is covered with outposts and cities any place they might have a food.

Outposts need to not be able ot be built more than say 5-10 spaces away from your territory or a city of yours. You shoudln't be able to run over next to the player on the other side of the world because your AI ESP has detected that I haven't grown my area of influence enough to encompas a fire shard. Its rediculous the wayt this works right now.

On this topic, what is with the monsters ignoring AI outposts? They sure has hell don't ignore mine? Why are they leaving the computers alone? They certainly should not.

We really need some simple game rules to make empire expansion a little more controlled. All the good 4x games have this feature built in. Look at civ5 and their happiness mechanic. I don't want that, but we need some rules to keep the computer from scattering every outpost accross the entire globe.

AI Agression - The AI has been very agressive to me in the early game. Perhaps because they double my forces in militia units and I dont bother building alot of soldiers. Regardless they like to extort me and then declare war on me because I only have 3 heros and 3militia units in my 3 cities. Is it possible to tone the calculations the comptuer has of whether or not it should go to war until a little later in teh game. Also when there is alot of land for expansion I would think war would be one of the last things either sovereign wants. After the land grab its time to get it on. This gives the player at least some time to develop before i have to defend one of my fledgling cities against 5 stacks of club weilding peasants. Given the problems I've noted earlier with exploration and expansion this is an especially hard time to make progress.

 

Quests:

I love them! keep the variety coming. I was pretty excited about the boar mount reward on one of them. Keep up the good ideas.

Archery Gear:

I like the varieity of gear you can get for your heroes. I do however notice that there seems to be a distinct lack of archer items. I think on average I do one quest for one bow very early in the game, then I never see another bow again. I find my archer hero ends up having to be a spellcaster or switch to a melee to contribute later on in the game.

Cities Near the "Monster Zone Areas":

it seems like some of hte most fertile land is on a tiny sliver directly adjacent to (and around the entire area) of the monster zones. I call them the monster zones, they are the area quests vs epic creatures. Is it possible to remove most of the fertile land within 5 or so tiles of the border of the green? These cities are very tiny and do not look right at all, but they are always there because the AI sees a single scrap of land that is fertile and it MUST build on it. We end up with a city that has room the build one building. Its just silly.

Starting positions:

This is starting to be one of my peeves about this game. I purposely play a medium map and remove all but 3 computer opponents just so there is a small chance that I might not run into 2 other factions in turn 10. It seems I am unable to have a starting position that isn't almost directly adjacent to another faction. Please give me my space if I have a large map. Otherwise what happens is I defeat a faction that has one city and 2 units in turn 15 because tehre is no way in hell i'm going to split the land with them. They are too close. Give us some space ot expand before we run into the next factions cities/outposts. This needs to be looked at, please.

 

Crits:

Crits are rediculously powerful. I think these things need to be put in check. Perhaps more crits for less damage so they are actually a part of the game you can embrace without making certain types of units overpowered by killing a dragon in one hit. Bad implementation currently.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Regarding some of your points:

Starting points - while I agree that map generation leaves a lot to be desired, the spacing of the players has been fairly decent in my experience. I don't know how you are running into 2 factions on turn 10 unless that is a gross exaggeration. Play on large map if you want more room - I don't know why you are even complaining about medium maps when you can just up the map size...

Scouts - those are there to explore, and yes they'll eventually die. They are expendable units that moves through rough environments (forests, hills, swamps) without difficulty, and if you use their movement carefully, it's actually rather easy to dance around monsters (by playing keep away and darting past once they chase you) to live long enough to explore quite a bit of the map. If you can do the same with your sovereign, you can certainly do it with scouts. You generally only die if you run into way too many monster groups at once. They are only wasteful because you aren't being careful with them, although you don't always need them (if you use heroes/pioneers to scout). Only Tarth's scout are worthless (because all their units have trailblazing by default - so it's only a +1 sight unit).

The monsters are strong if you just run up and try to stab them with your starting weapon, what you need is specific sovereign strategies built to deal with them. You can either be caster (using overland spells like pillar of flame or tremor), summoner (using the summons as fodder to weaken and distract them), buffed fighter (take procipinee's crown and buff yourself to kingdom come), commander (field a bunch of spearmen and stab everything), or a combination of all of those. Those are what is known to work, if you don't like those for some reason, come up with your own... if you want him to start with some armor, there's a gauntlet that you can give him. Still, whatever strategy you use, it would be wise to stay away from the drake until you think you can handle it. If you know you can't, then just play keep away, the same as scouts, stay one tile away from them at all times (buy a horse early, it'll make your life easier), and don't settle too close. The whole point of those harder monster is to guard those prime real estate spots on the map. They provide a challenge for you to overcome. If you kill them, you can then settle in those nice spot. If you move them away from those, then there wouldn't be any real point to having them around except to be exp.

Yes, the AI is expanding like crazy, but to be completely fair, that's a really effective strategy in the game as long as you can keep your empire from being stretched too thin (and outposts doesn't hurt at all). They are essentially doing what a player would be doing, putting outposts to stake resources anywhere they can get away with... and, if they can't, they'll fight for it. Because if they don't do that, they'll never be able to put up any semblance of a challenge. Also, there is no need to worry about that outpost and your nearby fireshard. Once your ZOC grows, it'll override the outpost's, so basically, he's just building it for you and getting a tiny bit of use out of it before you take it back. Heck, you should have build that outpost yourself, but since you won't, he will. If you think the AI outposts are bad, you should see what players do with Arcane Monoliths. As for the monster destroying AI stuff, they do raze AI stuff... just not always. There are some slightly buggy behaviors that are hopefully being fixed in the next patch.

Regarding AI aggressiveness, the AI will go to war based on a variety of factors: 1) Room to expand (if they are still settling, then they won't move to war, but if there isn't any where to settle, they need to expand by conquest), so play on larger maps to increase the time you get in the beginning to build up while they are settling. 2) Military strength (easier to beat someone who's weak), so try to keep your military up to par or everyone will jump you. 3) Relations (empire/kingdom bias, past actions, influence, treaties, etc), some of which you can influence (like setting up treaties early or build up some influence). No offense, but it just sounds like you are turtling too much...

Crits are also being addressed, but could use a second look in their overall implementation. Archer gear is neglected because for the longest time range attacks was very OP since the AI didn't know how to use/counter them. At least with spells, you have mana concerns, with archers it was just ran away and shoot... which still works a little too well.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I do agree with Kilijan about the scout unit; it is rather underwhelming considering that it (a) costs wage per turn and (b) takes more time to build than a pioneer. 

 

Also, consider the fact that there is only ONE scout trait and that the scout unit is easily ignored in the late-game because of its uselessness. I think that there could be two solutions to this:

 

(1) Take Kilijan's idea: make all neutral NPCs non-aggresive to solitary scout units. This allows for early game exploration without too much micro management.

(2) Add a "invisible" trait that is unlockable in the magic skill tree. This trait makes the unit unable to attack, but it prevents all other units from attacking it, and it prevents enemy AI powers from detecting it on the world map. This would make for a great late-game scouting unit, capable of providing good intel on enemy cities and army movements. 

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I completely agree with the OP.  I too feel that "Explore" (especially for scouts) should not wander the scouts directly by monsters, much less attack them.

The NPC AI is WAY aggressive.  Yes, it is a viable tactic.  However, I expect lower difficulty settings to lower the difficulty in overcoming that issue.