Sethai

the formula is a really good idea and what i was hoping for. from a glance it looks like it will come up with higher costs than i would have aimed for, but i'm sure that quantitative balance will come in time. as for the issues over paying high costs when you have the resources, i think the simplest issue is to add a "craft" button to the shop interface, which sells it to you at the same prices it costs your troops. then we will have proper normalising across the board. i can

[quote who="Clawdius_Talonious" reply="29" id="2781694"]I really have to say, this is a logical concern. But then again I feel like something is missed out on by not having multiple houses in a block of hut or house. I'd personally love to see several huts, houses, etc per square but I know that the current system isn't set up for anything at all like that. I think a row of homes that would tend to have a lane along it would add aesthetically to an already charming graphic system. I

yeah, these tweaks to building costs are just one step forward and one step back, even if they were inevitable. nothing will ever work properly while they choose to stick with such fundamentally flawed game systems. see "houses don't eat food, people do."

yes, the performance improvements have been really undervalued by most people so far. for all my ranting about game mechanics even i on my quadcore machine was struggling to get this thing running smoothly. the basic functioning of a game as an application is massively important and i'm glad this has been adressed first. next stop game mechanics!

this is really annoying when you go through the robes. all my kids who spawn wearing hoods are bald. signed.

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="25" id="2781090"]Well, I think some buildings should be more effective in high pop cities, and other buildings should be just as effective in any city (yet all costing maintenance of some kind) I'm pretty sure most developers should know that using building-based maintenance is a *primary* concept consideration when your using a global system without distance modifiers. [/quote] i'm going to focus on this point because it's the o

i wish there was no such thing as a minor civ. it's an obtuse and arbitrary distinction just like it was in in GC2. if you want smaller factions that fit the lore of the world and serve all the same purposes then just make them lack channelers, have lower stats and use a less expansionist ai.

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="123" id="2781486"] I as more concerned over the question of players understanding what's going on under the hood; to avoid posts like "This game is full of bugs my mana regeneration rate keeps changing!" I think as long as it was explained well it could work though. Computers can handle a simple formula like this easily enough it's making sure all the players understand what's happening and that it's a design decision not a bug. [/quo

i'm going to go against the grain here and say i really approve of the global mana pool, especially if it regenerates non linearly. i don't think there's any need for individual mana pools. with magic as powerful as it is (and there's nothing wrong with the power levels) making channellers autonomous units in any sense just makes balancing far too difficult. in my last game i got 7 channelers with only one imbue (my spouse, spawning a daughter and two sons, each gaining me a daughter in

additionally, the simple model in the OP also allows for a more city-state type approach. you can found a few outposts to control resources, but prevent them from growing too much by not contructing housing. so that way though you're still making less money from the people there than those in the big city, they only represent a small fraction of your total pop and you can take that small hit so you control more resources. that way power remains concentrated in the capital and the stre

[quote who="greggbert" reply="18" id="2780961"]We probably wouldn't be discussing this if it weren't so easy to beat the AI with city spamming. I think food is a reasonable abstraction on limiting how much you can develop certain aspects of your cities economy. Also food directly contributes to your pop cap via housing, so even if it's wonky (market, merchants), it's still like 75% "not wonky."[/quote] perhaps, but there's no good reason for it to be. the food issu

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="7" id="2780736"] With the kingdoms (I am only sure this is not true for the 5th city level for the empire) the "base" population provided by a city exceeds the amount needed to get to its current level (4th level kingdom city requires 1250 to get to level 5, and a 5th level can support 1500 people without housing). I have an thought which I have posted before and will be posting soon in my city revamp thread in the Ideas board. [/quote]</

[quote who="billbisco" reply="11" id="2780849"]Merchants should not consume food!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU![/quote] yeah, this was a silly workaround that attempts to fix a problem that needs to be fundamentally rethought.

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="12" id="2780631"]Right now, city spamming generates food on a linear progression. Build one house. When city levels up, build irrigation. Those two steps are optional but that way the one house is free and you get a somewhat larger ZOC out of the deal. But no matter what: every additional city = 1 additional caravan that can be sent to the food producing city. That is the net gain. For every s

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="5" id="2780663"] Last I remember soldiers still need to eat after all an army marches on it's stomach. Of course you could argue that that should lower the population cap of your town, since they can't refill thouse houses unless they also have enough food to feed the army and the new people, but I think they are happy to leave that absracted out for simplicity.[/quote] i was about to say the same thing. however you do it, the behav

[quote who="econundrum1" reply="2" id="2780614"]Yes people eat food and they live in houses, shacks, huts, etc. It's all very well to build those buldings but if you can't feed the people they attract they aren't going to stay. Hence the abstraction in the game you see.[/quote] but if the people die the houses still cost you food! and if you don't link income to population there's no penalty to shipping people off to found new settlements. when you can easily build a se

similarly, buildings don't pay taxes, people do. this is another one of the silly abstractions in this game that i've never been able to understand. it is my belief that linking food and income to buildings rather than the people who live in them is the single biggest problem with the strategy side of elemental. moving to a population based system will be more intuitive, and prevent city spamming. here is how to do it. add up your total civ food production. divide this

buildings and units shouldn't cost food, population should. divide your total food over your total faction population. if you exceed a certain ratio of food per person, you get a bonus to population growth in that settlement (there will be other factors like buildings and overcrowding). if it is less than a certain ratio, you get a negative bonus to population growth in that settlement. display the various population growth factors in a simple screen like in the total war games. house

i hope no one minds me reposting this; i got in just at the end of the page and before brad's post, which pretty much guarantees no responses. you might also do better with mana regenerating with a non linear formula. if you use mana = max mana x (1 - e ^ (- game constant x turn number)) this chart shows mana regen over turns on the x axis, with a max mana

i think they should just normalise item costs across the board: i should have access to any item i have researched in the shop, for a gold price that is roughly equivalent to what it costs for my troops (ie, most mundane items should be less than 10 gold). it's ridiculous that my troops are generally better equipped than my sov. this means a big power increase for sovs, which i think is a good thing. if your worried about players getting "everything" too quickly, then what the stores need are

you might also do better with mana regenerating with a non linear formula. if you use mana = max mana x (1 - e ^ (- game constant x turn number)) this chart shows mana regen over turns on the x axis, with a max mana of 20 (red) and 15 (yellow) then your mana regenerates at a decreasing rate until it reaches your max mana. every summon or channeler reduces your max mana by one or two points

generally me likey the numbers involved are obviously sketchy at this point, however from appearances it looks like the negatives could start outwaying the generation very quickly. if you have a sov and a shard and you imbue a channeler and summon a beastie, then you'll already be in a no-generation scenario, which is messed up. i can see the logic in mana maint for summons as it requires energy to bind them to the material plane, but channelers are just supposed to be conduits. i get

[quote who="sagittary" reply="6" id="2773268"] What I mean more is that new spells should introduce new stuff and abilities rather than rehashing the same thing. I'm sure we both agree that going from say... Fire Bolt to Fire Ball to Fire Column isn't really 'cool new spells' territory; they're basically just "do more damage than before". The spells aren't really any different or special or unique; just more pretty graphics which is only part of why we like spells (we a

One of the first pieces of advice given to me was to make squads my first military tech and i know a lot of others play the game this way. And to my mind, there should be no such thing a necesarry choice in this kind of game. If we can't make it non-necesarry, we can at least make it automatic. Advantages of making all recruitable units groups of 3 by default: 1 It will increase the "epic" feel and look of the game 2 it will reduce randomness as we will always be

i love the way that tactical mana regen was implemented for summons but not casters; like they suddenly realised that slow mana regen was a problem but never considered fixing it for channelers; a far more important aspect of the game. ridiculously this actually means you can replenish your mana faster by fighting than by doing nothing, so long as you don't use those abilities in combat. really, i don't think sovs need mana regen in combat: plenty of games give you a finite amount per