Elemental Forums
My first game with the new 0.85 patch on the Anthys map and absolutely no essence in sight. This is unacceptable! Your capital should have essence. In general I don't understand why there is so little essence on maps already - this is supposed to be a fantasy game in a highly magical world after all.
You are wrong, this is supposed to be a devastated world that suffered through a cataclysm brought upon by rampaging Titans. Civilization and Magic is lost and the world has to be "re-civilized".
yup on the 'gotta get re-civilized' part.
Also, Derek has specifically stated (somewhere) that he's not interested in properly balancing start locations, so if you get a start you don't like, just reload or roll with it. Consider it a better handicap.
That sort of start (no essence) means make your capital a town and then add the monument and the Town Hall for 3 extra distance on your borders. Push out into a non-swamp/desert area and new settling locations will appear.
I have noticed that Ctrl-N eventually breaks the game if you use it more than once/twice in a row. I think they have a problem with not dropping all used resources when they remake the world map, so it gets slower/eventually crashes if you use it.
A slower but more secure method is to quit out of the current map and start a new game (don't actually leave FE). This method seems to ensure the code drops all used resources.
That is a strange game design in my opinion, because no essence at the beginning of a game reduces the strength of the player AND the AI.
the way i see it, i'd rather have them invest their development time in other areas. it's not nice to get a start with no essence, but you can easily fix it by re-rolling the map; or you decide to play out the harder start - your choice really. can be fun to play a "harder than usual" start sometimes.
afaik, it doesn't affect AI anyway. don't know about the low difficulties, but on challenging or hard, their capitals always have essences. i don't think i ever saw an AI capital with less than 4/3/2 resources - i guess they just get those values for their capital regardless of the actual tile yields it's founded on.
Oh, i did not know that. In that case starting without essence does not matter, because you can always start a new map.
I think the AI, on harder difficulty levels, actually gets an additional essence when it settles a city.
The first time I used Ctrl+N, the game crashed immediately, so I don't bother with it. I also make sure to completely reload the game any time I start a new map. Perhaps the .85 crash fixes have addressed that? We'll see. If not, I really hope they do address it at some point.
Does your computer have very little memory to access? They have been dealing with a memory leak in this game for a long, long time and it sounds like you are victim of this problem.
not mine. I've got 8Gb available memory for the game, so it should never have an issue with that.
I've got 8GB of DDR3 installed. Resource Monitor says LH is gobbling up 1.5GB. The second largest memory eater running right now is Steam, at all of 238MB. Total of 32% physical memory used. I think I have spare, non-paged, RAM = P
I've used Ctrl-N extensively, even 20x in a row and gotten a great start position. It should not cause a crash. I'd look into your drivers.
On a related note, the latest Nvidia drivers were making my pc crash during and after playing FE/LH (and Crysis3). I downloaded the latest beta drivers and not one crash with either game. Rolling back may have fixed this as well.
Ctrl-N works fine if your pc is healthy.
I don't think the AI has to worry about start locations, they get bonuses or something.
They do, I observed an AI settling on a 4/3 tile. When I conquered the place it was 4/3/2.
When I think gamer, I just assume entitled. Like if you say sandwich, I assume it will have bread.
Word.
I think the best start I got on a random map was when, after founding my capital city, I realized I was on a little peninsula with only a two-tile-wide spit of land about 10 or 15 tiles long connecting it to the mainland. Which would be fine, except that little spit of land was utterly clogged with Brood Hunters, Escaped Juggernauts, and Dragons that I couldn't walk past due to all the terrain being swamp.
That was one of the only instances I have restarted to get a better starting position, after I realized I would need to spend my next 100 turns building enough military units to actually get off my peninsula and found a second town. The other time was when the only, and I mean ONLY, settleable spot near my starting position had 2 Grain and 3 Material and the only resources were two Iron Mines, and everywhere else I could see was desert.
What's entitled in this thread?
Seems people are overusing the word lately.
Edit to add: I was reminded of this Forbes article:
On a related note please, please, PLEASE drop the 9 resource per tile cap or at the very least make it so that mods can turn it off. Most annoying change ever. (apologies if it has already been dropped, I haven't been able to play for a week or two).
I like the 9 resource cap. I'm sort of a perfectionist, so I like that I can easily find tiles that have "perfect" stats. It's annoying going on a fifty turn quest to max out your tile yield.
I have, on several occasions refused to settle in the location initially offered, and set out to find a better start. It cost me, yes, but by continuing to fight, my sovereign was still at about the development per turn that was expected of him, and I was generally able to find a high quality location to settle and win from. It's not impossible to win if you refuse to accept your starting location but feel that control+n is cheap.
(I try to make it a habit to just accept my human flaws while playing. If I miss-click, attack an enemy way over my power level, etc.- this sort of thing helps balance out the AIs stupidity, with less cheating required on the AI side.)
From: ElementalDefs.xml
<!-- ** minimum materials yield at any tile with a grain yield ** --> (I'm not sure if this hides tiles with Materials < 3, or forces 3 as a minimum Material tile yield.)
<MinMaterialsTileYield>3.0</MinMaterialsTileYield>
<!-- ** minimum combined tile yield at a tile needed for it to have a tile yield at all ** --> (Tiles with total yield below this number will simply not show up as colonizeable space. Maps will seem more sparse than usual, but won't be flooded with crap tiles.)
<MinValidTotalTileYield>6.0</MinValidTotalTileYield>
<!-- ** maximum combined tile yield before it is forcibly reduced ** --> (Setting this higher should create the possibility of super broken tiles. I have no idea if there is a hardcoded cap.)
<MaxTotalTileYield>9.0</MaxTotalTileYield>
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