Sethai

Ultimately, whether a trait in considered meaningful or superfluous is a completely subjective decision. Personally stuff like defence bonuses below 50% falls a little south of the line because when I ask myself "how will this alter my approach?" the answer ends up being "probably not much." It just seems like a round about way of saying "tougher than average," which I believe can be said more straight forwardly. You have to look at it individually. I only raised the point because I&#

@Heavenfall Yes, those are the sorts of things traits should do. Infact, i think i suggested the woodsmen one somewhere myself. Glad we agree.

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="25" id="2956204"]Sethai, I cannot express properly how much I disagree with you. Special traits SHOULD change how a unit fights or acts. These boosts to unit statistics that you suggest is exactly what makes E:wom stats such a boring and static system. Let there be a hundred different traits, and 3000 different combinations. [/quote] But why have a trait that changes the stats, when you could just change the stats? So Tarth units

Great news. Traits are a great idea: there is a reason i think why almost every RPG system ends up having a feats, perks or traits system (or something similar). I also love the new interface and all the art that is coming into the game generally. I am however, more used to trait type features for characters rather than units. It’s important that they are exceptions to the rules, rather than the basis for the game. I’d hate them to become the equivalent of gear in WoW, whi

[quote who="Das123" reply="13" id="2954157"]I'm trying to understand your system, Sethai, but I'm not quite grasping it (I don't think). Could it be summarised as follows: Food is an empire-wide factor that doesn't reduce. Empire-wide population growth is determined by (Food / Population) * Growth Factor Population itself is city-specific. The rate of growth in each city determined by number of houses within each city. Eg. A bigger city will have a l

[quote who="Bellack" reply="6" id="2954622"] Quoting Sethai, reply 4 Well I perfer the specilized city approch. I don't want the game to only have one big city and a few little towns. After all you are taking over a world so there should be lots of cities and to be able to specilize would enhance the game. Oh and Lord Stannis city was specilized in building ships in Game of Thrones. [/quote] Maybe at a stretch. And maybe

The first and most obvious thing I would do to improve replayability would be to balance the hero focused, military focused, monster focused and magic focused approaches until they're all equally viable and fun. But some people would just call that making the game better.

Well don't I look stupid?

This may sound like a huge revolution, but I always thought it would make more sense for groups to simply have more attacks rather than higher base attack strength or defense values. Ie, you'd make multiple rolls to damage at the same time and add the damage of each of them together. ie: attack = base weapon damage (doesn't vary much) * (experience + weapon enchantment + st

[quote] I would suggest that for gameplay and feel, it would be easier to adopt a capital + fiefdoms model, which gels with a lot of fantasy settings (King's Landings, Minus Tirith, and of course, Ankh Morpork!). [/quote] Exactly. The best model to encourage in terms of economics is the city-state, surrounded by isolated and undeveloped faming hamlets / mining villages (ie,settlements with no meaningful population). If population growth is global for your fac

[quote who="riadsala" reply="27" id="2954577"] I'd say the USA is closer to city-spam, rather than the smaller-number-of-specialised-cities. (but due to a quirk of history and geography, a small country ended up with a whole continent to expand into.... so lots of space). I'm no expert geographer though. [/quote] I'd argue you're better with historical examples like medieval Venice vs. Russia. It's more a question of size vs number. Given that

The point I feel I need to make is that there is an important difference between citizens and population. Population was in the game long before citizens and I don’t think anyone wants rid of it. Originally population was just a means of obtaining levels. We had merchants and workshops you could build one of in every city, and so the only way to increase production of gold or materials was to get more cities. This lead to city spam. Far worse than it is now. It was recognised th

This may sound like a huge revolution, but I always thought it would make more sense for groups to simply have more attacks rather than higher base attack strength or defense values. Ie, you'd make multiple rolls to damage at the same time and add the damage of each of them together. ie: attack = base weapon damage (doesn't vary much) * (experience + weapon enchantment + str) defense = armour * experience factor * dex hp = base * squad size * con (the b

And I have a new desktop. All looks very good. The empire/kingdoms restriction seems a little artificial to me, but it's your lore and I can't blame you for running with it. Otherwise it's pretty much as I would have done it. I'm intrigued by the idea of "weakening" and "strengthening," dare I hope this is how essense is being reincorporated?

Agree with everything in the OP (I pretty much have to lol). I realise that my whining must be getting to some people, and I apologise if it has lead to hair pulling. I have little enough of the stuff myself these days and can sympathise. I really think I'm right to oppose the citizen system though, and i will be the first to apologise if this comes back to bite me in the ass. But I'm glad I've stuck to my guns because citizen (especially as they are now) were effectively creating

Actually the system I was talking about (using levels instead of citizens to limit buildings) is all about stopping city spam. To beat city spam you need a system where - 10 guys in a developed city are worth more than 10 guys in a hamlet, and are more productive because of improved infrastructure - Pursuing that is made viable because getting 10 more guys in your city is just as (if not more) easy as getting them in a new town. The first point is how buildings work. L

[quote who="dragoaskani" reply="4" id="2953775"] Your proposal to limit the number of buildings to the city level is nonsense in many ways. It completely negates choice. If you have lvl 3 and can build 3 studies in your system you do. In such a system why bother building them at all? Might as well have the city just start generating the tech when it levels up. You've not thought your proposition out. There are more flaws with it, but this is the most glaring one in my opinion.

Nice to know i'm not the only one who dislikes citizens. There are only two possibilities for their effect on gameplay. Either 1) they are never relevant (as before), because gold main or the tile limit are more important or 2) they are annoying, and succeed only in forcing the player to check back on the settlements every 5 turns, to see if there are 5 more people yet so he can build his 30th study. Here's the link again. <a href="https://forums.elementalgame.com/4091

I know I sound like a broken record, but I really don't understand why you're persisting with the citizen system. Sure, it's great to limit the number of buildings by a settlement's population, but citizens seem like a massively complicated way of going about it. I spoke about this more here. https://forums.elementalgame.com/409198 I've really tried to read the explanations for the system, but none of th

[quote who="andreharden" reply="63" id="2951945"] I much prefer a game where each city has meaning and expansion is difficult and largely based on resource acquisition. If this system worked a little better one would be rewarded for gathering their experts together to take advantage of %bonus buildings instead of perfoming the same builds in each city. One would even benefit from demolishing buildings in captured cities to 'migrate' the specialists to great cities that are

[quote who="andreharden" reply="53" id="2951754"]I think demanding a larger and larger pool of available specialists to build repeatable buildings is a workable idea - but this should be a check, not the actual cost of the building. The purpose of the dynamic is to slow and restrict building, not mysteriously vanish huge (unskilled) groups of the population. If my tenth study has an increased cost of 100 specialists, I should not be able to build one unless I have that many free p

[quote who="Almonihah1" reply="69" id="2951139"]One major problem--the increasing population requirements for structures mean that, quite often, conquering a city means you suddenly need several hundred more people than you did before. If you were already near full utilization of your population, and near your current population cap given your food supplies, it can make it nearly impossible to build anything anywhere for several dozen turns. [/quote] Thanks, i will add that to my

Good stuff. Most excited about the performance stuff, and to see how the unit size changes pan out. Even if it just means a more gradual increase in power through logistics techs. But the citizen stuff... I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but I still just don’t see the point. The increasing costs just seem like a very convoluted and confusing attempt to make the system relevant. We already have a method to limit buildings by population: settlement level. This would

More diaries are always interesting. And they give me stuff to complain about, which is always nice. Personally I'd be surprised if there is much AI work going on though. You've got to settle on how the game wors before you teach someone how to play it. Most of the problems I have with the AI would be more easily fixed by changing the game. Ie, stopping the player using teleport all the time so the AI, doesn't have to compete with that, or simplifying the settlement system

I know the feeling. You spend the whole game developing until you can afford to build the solid, capable army you always wanted, and once you have it you realize it completely exceed requirements. I'd say there are two things that elemental can do. 1 - The World. The World can react in a dynamic fashion to insert extra challenges when a faction is overshadowing the others, effectively acting as a built in DM. More dragon attacks etc. 2 - The shape of factions. Cu