Lycenae

I've been reading quite a bit on the forums about just how boring the magic and combat systems are in this game. And, sadly, I have to agree with most of them. I couldn't really put my finger on why until the realization hit me (and many others, I'm sure) that the element that these two boring and flavorless systems share is the 1DN resolution system. That one design choice means that all attacks and all defenses look precisely the same save for their scalar value.

[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="123" id="2743265"] But if there's NO plan to provide one (because it's difficult to make, because it's too costly or what have you), then people, we DESERVE to know. Truly random maps are defiantly in the pipeline. We figure there are around 80-100 man-hours left to get them up to speed (they were working pretty well at one point, but got messed up along the way, plus we need that stamp intergration, ways to ensure players dont start i

Using the (current) logic of rings and amulets, I should be able to weild 100 staves to get an attack rating of 300. And, I should be able to wear 50 suits of Leather to get a defense of 100. They say you should wear layers in winter, right? :-)

I saw an AI who had a weaker military than me with -3000 gold in his treasury. He declares war. I march. 20 turns later his military is twice as large as mine and he's at -12000 gold. Yeah... neat trick. :-(

I have played the "sandbox" game a few times up to the mid-game where I've gone toe-to-toe with a few Empires. Overall, the game has become much more fun than the betas and is certainly worth playing now. I look forward to seeing how the game develops. Here is some feedback on the experience so far: (1) Magic system is still a tad boring. I know people have beat this horse to death, but while it is fundamentally the same as MoM (which is good), I think it lac

Mod-master, huh? I thought it was you that said that the community would put you to shame in the mod department... :-)

I also like the ideas from the poster above that in order to break a treaty, you need to spend DC. Not enough DC to pay the cost means no breakage of the treaty. DC could, in that case, represent the level of control you have over your own government. And, DC doesn't necessarily mean positive diplomacy. It could also mean threats and intimidation in the case of the empire player. Such a player might be able to acquire DC through the use of very nas

I would like to say that I'm a big fan of the DC mechanic so far, and I would definitely second that it should be able to be used against human players (in SP and MP) to force treaties. Personally, I don't see that the use of DC against another player to "force a peace" requires too much of a stretch of the imagination. In monarchies or empires, the sovereign rarely rules unimpeded. Typically, they are surrounded by powerful families that are kept barel

I noticed today that when autoresolving battles, if my sov casts spells the points are not subtracted from my total. The battle log shows that I cast "burn enemy" almost every turn, but I am left with full spell points at the end of the battle. In contrast, when running the tactical battle, the spells are properly counted against spell points. Nice little exploit there. :-)

I encountered a crash when leaving tactical combat. I cast a few "burn enemy" spells and when all foes were gone, the game abrubptly disappeared. Crash dump files are here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2741369/Elemental0_92-2010-07-24T11-29-15-370.zip

Interesting post. In my opinion, one of the most jarring things about the game is that cities take up so much space on the world map. Now that you can build on any resource in your sphere of influence, it makes no sense anymore to have to build out. I think that city tiles should be moved off of the world grid and onto their own sub-grid. This way, cities won't step on adventure sites, and won't be blocked by the same. One game I had last week, there

Ah, yes. MoM. A great game like MoM will always have legs. It is hard to imagine that anything will boot MoM off my HD, no matter how good it is. I will always have a periodic urge for retro-gaming that no modern game will sate. So, I'm not sure the measure of success of Elemental needs to be the "dethroning" of MoM. While I think MoM is more-than-great, MoM is far from being the "perfect game." MoM was actually almost unplayable up until

As adventure level goes up, far too many sites appear on the map that have no function at all. That is, when I step on them, they do nothing even when my adventure tech is sufficient. I suspect that the quest that they fire has already been completed, so there is nothing for them to do. So... there they sit... forlornly awaiting a visit from a champion. Quests should be world unique. That is, only one site should spawn them. This gives an advantage to the

I noticed the other day that characters with a combat speed less than 1.0 in tactical combat never actually get to do anything. Except maybe defend themselves when attacked. Additionally, if the character has some extra speed from some sort of bonus, it is wasted unless you can get the bonus up to the next integral number. So, I was thinking, why not let fractional action points carry over to the next turn? That way, a character with a speed of 0.5 will get to move o

I need a better quote too.

I was exploring a little in the early game, and I had just got the notification for level 2 in Civ tech. I right clicked on a tech to get to its heirosumthinorother entry and got a CTD. Here's the crash dump zip file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2741369/Elemental0_806-2010-07-15T00-44-48-318.zip

I can see (both) your point(s) that magic is not what it could be. But, I would maintain that it wouldn't take much to fix it. It is definitely a mistake to require shards for lots of low level spells when shards are always so scarce. And, I also agree that shards should be needed to cast/maintain magics of world-altering power and no less. That said, the game should have shard outcrops that provide both shards and spell points like Nodes in MoM. And, suc

Thanks, folks. :-) I like the idea of starting the game with a number of books based on your INT. Makes for another good excuse to invest in the stat. I've been reading alot of other posts about the magic system, and I don't have the impression that it is as broken as people think it is. Its just kind of... dull. It will get somewhat better with more spells. MoM had lots of spells spread across 6 schools, and that was plenty enough to insure lots

Impressions so far, Beta 3A: (1) Magic: Magic doesn't seem all that epic. It seems too easy to power-through spell research with a few Arcane Labs and a few Heroes on your side that generate spell points. The number of research points that it takes to learn a spell should be doubled, at least, and then strongly exponential after that. To take the edge off of this, you should start off with a small grimoire of spells based on your starting book choices, spell ch

Yes, there is a distinct lack of tension and tradeoff. That said, I suspect alot of that comes from the liberal allowance of city slots available. When you can literally build everything, and cheaply, and fast, its all a no-brainer. Brad said that he was going to cut back on the slots, so I hope to see gameplay tighten-up just from that. I seem to use spells a little more than you do. I use city enchantments to bump materials and research

In MoM, I thought the use of a "global" food production value was pretty decent, and could be a model mechanic here. Any excess food produced by a city was placed in the global production metric and was solely used to support your units in the field. It could not be used to support populations in other cities, so you still had to be careful about where you placed your outpost. A town in marginal territory could easily starve if

I've been playing a medium map with multiple continents. Some observations: (1) My starting location is always the same. While it was stated that the "random" map feature was using a small number of hand-crafted maps with some randomized components, I would have thought that the starting location of each faction would be random. Is this a bug? (2) The location that I start at has no metal or shards anywhere near me. Not even "moderately far aw