simon_doe

Join Date 04/2012

[Suggestion] A solution to keep the game's flavour intact after midgame begins.

So here's a solution:

The first city is founded by the sovereign, and he can found only one. Cool.

Now instead of pioneers, have heroes found the cities, one per hero!

This is consistent with the way the first city was founded.
It leads to cities being a rare sight on the map - keeping the wildland feel for the entire game.
No longer will you have enough cities and build queues to do everything - now choice is really required.
The AI has an easier time focusing on building mighty defenses to counter the player's spear tip.

Pioneers could still be used to found outposts, with the added twist of fortress cities being able to man outposts with their own garrison.

Tell me what you think!

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I don't like it. The end of midgame does have problems as you say, but drastically changing the basic game mechanics is not the answer. I would much rather see the AI stack up larger armies with better composition. I would much rather have some epic midgame random events to give the player new scenarios each game at this dull point. I would much rather see the AI go after the Spell of Making and Masterquest. Keep in mind that we are almost at feature lockdown, so any changes at this point are going to be minor.

Still, it could make for an interesting mod if you are so inclined.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

I think most of us agree that the game is excellent in early and mid game. But when all areas are settled, when there are a lot of cities to govern and the factions begin swarming the countryside with endless waves of grunts, the feel of the game changes substantially. Mopping up all those cities and fighting so many pushover battles against enemy armies can quickly become tedious work.

So here's a solution:

The first city is founded by the sovereign, and he can found only one. Cool.

Now instead of pioneers, have heroes found the cities, one per hero!

I think you're absolutely right that when exploration is complete, things lag. But the answer lies (to me) in a combination of better combat AI, more diplomatic options (such as EU3-like alliances against one player), and a far more robust quest system. As SeanW notes, we're too far along in the beta process for the kind of very basic change you want, but other things can be tweaked and improved to continue the exciting experience found in the earlier portion of the game.

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I am aware that drastic changes are out of the question at this point.

But when i wrote this i envisioned it as a small change to implement. After all, all it does is keep the number of cities to 2 - 3 for most of the game, which is the number most sides are building on medium-sized maps anyway. And you will still get to govern a large empire once you start conquering other cities.

All it would do is keep the focus off city management and on exploration for a longer period of time.

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I do see your point, Simon, and you perceptively catch that it's a major flow issue in the midgame. It's just that Stardock created the pioneer mechanic early in the game design, and they've stuck with it, since. Removing that would seem to mean recalculating a whole raft of things. Not just the way cities were created, but the use of pioneers to deliberately slow down building queues and scouting, as well as supplying a counterweight to Pariden's spell-based arcane monolith spam. I'm not arguing with your idea. I think it's a solid one. But I can't see Stardock making a change at this level, at this point in their development cycle.

SeanW has suggested this would make a good mod, and I agree. I'd really like to see how this works out.

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End game needs to have major events happen. New factions appear or monster zones that just spew hordes of various beasts. That might make things a little more interesting.

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I can't say I like this idea too much, only 2 factions are really hero dependant and would have some major bonuses over other factions, and also this idea would make luck even more important, since now you need both good city locations and the right amount of heroes, I have had games with 6 heroes near my starting area, some of them high level, but I will pay top gildar for a new city...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

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Well that ties into another pet peeve of mine: Heroes should not stand around the map all game waiting to be bought or killed. That is not heroic at all, and many others on this forum have said so. They should come as quest rewards only. But that is another topic altogether.

Regarding my idea, it might or might not work well, let's talk about other ways of making the lategame fun. Because the game does change around midgame, and not in a good way. What can be done?

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The cities must have additional building upgrades available for them as well. In late game all the cities do is just sit there. Not fun.

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I am not sure the solution is to have more things to fill the building queues - after all keeping the player busy like that is a bit cheap.

This is one of the things that do not add to my enjoyment: "Oh the +5 food building is done, now let's add the +10 food building to the queue! And after that ... +15! And in all my other cities too! I can't get enough of it!"

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I wouldn't want heroes to become even more centralistic to the game. It would become 'he who has the most heroes, wins'.

I agree, pioneer spam is a problem, and I still think that increasing a pioneers cost is the way to go. This obviously would slow the game down way too much, unless you reduced the pioneer's abilities to only building cities. Outposts could be constructed by another unit, a perfect example would be the unused scouts, and everything would become right as rain. imho

As for mid-late game crunch, spawning monsters and quests should be the solution; such that your land becomes dynamic instead of linear.

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So, in order to make the late game interesting your ideas are:

Major random events

Better AI for army composition and tactical combat

More diplomatic options (like what?)

A robust quest system (I take that to mean more quests?)

I would like to add:

A fully fleshed out spell system, the current one feels like a skeleton.

I want to see spells that change tactical combat, not just the numbers. I'd like to see the spells balanced without the crutch of increased casting time - use cooldowns instead, it has a much better feel to it. I want crowd control spells. I would love to see direct damage spells used by the AI to deal damage where their useless troops can not.

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