Austinvn

I think there's confusion over the word 'complex.' If a game has really only one system you need to manage, but it's a difficult system that can be dealt with in different ways and is possible to completely screw it up if you're not cautious, is that a complex game? If a game has many relatively simple systems that one must balance, sometimes prioritizing one over the other, sometimes vice versa, is that a complex game? I think from an AI perspective, the first is much easier - computers are

Oh god yes, agreed with everything. It may not seem like a big deal, having to cycle past a unit that you don't want to give orders to (caravans on trade routes, units assigned to guard, units that already have prior move orders they haven't carried out yet, etc.) - but when you do this for 5 or 10 units every single turn, for a hundred or so turns, the frustration builds up and detracts from that magic "just one more turn.." feeling that drives TBS games. After a while, instead of wishing fo

[quote who="Sythion" reply="76" id="2765678"]The save/reload issue becomes a non issue if sovereign death is unavoidable. That is to say, Sovereigns can (and absolutely will) die from old age. Suddenly the idea of succession is viable and important, and strategic choices regarding your dynasty must be made game-years in advance. Succession wars become possible. Traits revolving around succession become viable. Marrying off a daughter stops being the most tactically retarded thing c

[quote who="Mistwraithe" reply="8" id="2765946"]He has a point though. Gold mines are the only really viable way of building an economy early game (and they still make up the bulk of the economy late game too!). Sure gold is useful in real life too but somehow real life historical kingdoms managed to get a lot done and accumulate a lot of wealth without having huge gold deposits! In fact pretty much every big and wealthy historical city was known as wealthy because of tr

Summons are the best magic currently, I find. They're not a match for squads mid/late game, but rather powerful early game (not even counting the Empire summon that does 10 defense-ignoring aoe damage, which is just imbalanced). Damage spells suffer from several problems - bugged scaling with shards, 0-N damage that can still get unlucky and miss no matter how good your stats are, and most importantly: horribly slow mana regen. You just can't afford to cast enough damage spells (especially wh

[quote who="VR_IronMana" reply="43" id="2765161"] Quoting ddd888, reply 40the most important thing is another you guys dont consider that multiplayer is the BEST balance workshop I absolutely agree... ...assuming the players are of high skill level. While, granted, they are (likely) going to be better than the current AI and I agree that MP certainly gives a lot more data for consideration (strategies, abilit

[quote who="DKL" reply="13" id="2754202"]Such limits are stupid thing. Do not want. Food already limits city development, there is no need for hard caps.[/quote] The problem with food limits is they encourage even more spam of undeveloped level 1 cities (as would any system that limits large cities but allows limitless small ones). Either way it would just exacerbate the current problem, which is covering the map in lots of cheap level 1 cities. Then caravans make it worse;

[quote who="Nick-Danger" reply="35" id="2763068"] Quoting b0rsuk, reply 34Austinvn summed up my stance almost perfectly...I'm assuming this quote of Austinvn is apropos: "...while dynasty inheritance is a fascinating concept for a save/continue game, it's pointless for a save/load game..." Couldn't disagree more regarding "pointless". Just because one could save/load after sov death does not mean it would always occur. Saying it's "pointless" is assuming your value is th

[quote who="Gene1966" reply="12" id="2764216"]FWIW... my two cents I think the current implementation is a design trade-off decision, I have no actually proof it's only my opinion or guess. I based this off existing game mechanics of Food Production. Unlike most strategy games were food is a required resource to expand one's population AND farms or other food producing improvements can be constructed, in Elemental only nodes that are fertile can produce food

[quote who="seanw3" reply="28" id="2761802"]Okay b0rsuk, I get it now. I am a little slow sometimes. It would be nice to have a hardcore mode as you say, but dynasties should be in both flavorss obviously. I guess I didn't understand because I only ever load a game when there is a bug or a crash. This game has alot of those right now so it makes sense the way it is. After the first expansion I would really like to see a hardcore mode for better imersion as it would give me extra bragging righ

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="2" id="2752844"]Cooldowns would be a huge improvement for unit/item special abilities, so you could use mana-free effects for trained units - among many other things. Call them melee disciplines... stuff like the "Bash" spell that could be on the shield of your soldiers or a "Charge" spell, that would be a spell on their "horse" item. Battles are short but it stands to reason that the cavalry might get one good charge in...[/quote] <p

Supposedly 1.1 is the first major update, where they'll be incorporating feedback and such. Everything up until then is bug fixes/minor tweaks. So yeah, I agree that the system needs to be completely reworked, but if that happens it won't be until 1.1 anyway. In the meantime balance passes to the numbers are relatively easy to do (you can even do this yourself in XML), so they might as well.

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="8" id="2759474"]I'm still leaning towards using the strategic speed for movement but I wish I could find a better AP based system that unifies combat actions to one stat. Even spell casting should be affected by the CS penalties of full plate, which isn't possible in an AP hybrid system that uses up say 50 % of a unit's CS for a spell. Same with bows. If their rate fo fire is never affected by full plate then you can indeed make them use 10

I agree with that the current implementation of combat speed needs to be completely reworked. At the very least (as an easy but hopefully temporary band-aid fix) no weapon should increase combat speed, it should be varying amounts of reduction so you can never run faster holding something than empty handed. A better but more complicated solution is to have different weapons have different costs to swing, i.e. dagger takes 0.7 AP and short sword takes 1.0, two-hand sword takes 1.5, etc

[quote who="ArcaneBoozery" reply="11" id="2760736"]I am also for making monsters drop items for adventurers rather than money or anything else for cities/armies. That would be a simple way of rewarding adventuring types without ruining things for army/city types.[/quote] Thing is, you could just sell those items for gold - a lot of gold, remember how absurdly valuable champion gear is compared to what cities can generate? That's the whole problem, monsters have to dr

I also think it's an undesirable combination, to have powerful ranged attacks that can easily 'assassinate' a single (non-squad) unit, and making one unit so valuable that you lose the entire game if he gets hit by a couple catapult boulders in enemy territory. There are 3 solutions that I see: -Never ever let your sovereign enter enemy territory, and teach the AI to do so as well. I really hope we're not reduced to this; it's horribly boring and cripples a major element of th

[quote who="Nick-Danger" reply="4" id="2759193"]Release took a big step back from this, removing the increasing cost per city constraint on city-spamming. No explanation for it, either (I've looked, did I miss it? Please to link or point me in the direction if so) .... If brad doesn't want a 'small empire' strategy to be viable and if city-spamming isn't intended to be a main part of a viable strategy, then I wish he'd say so. Otherwise, there's some work to

Well, tactical combat certainly needs something - there's just nothing to differentiate most units currently, and not much to do really aside from charge in and time it so you get the first hit in. More unit abilities, both passive and active ones, would fix these problems. In the spirit of custom units, I'd rather avoid Civ4-style systems like "Spearmen get +50% against Cavalry" - but it's possible to implement something similar without being so strict. For example: spears c

Well, Elemental vs. Civ5 is definitely a question of "new and innovative" vs. "reliable but predictable sequel," and it is unfortunate that the average player unhesitatingly goes for the sequel, us lovers of innovation are few. But to be fair, Civ5 is shaking things up a little bit - the one-unit-per-tile thing will make combat quite different, the 'policies' sound like an interesting evolution over Civ4's civics even if they're not radically different, and the neutral cities are a

Confusing, overly-complicated UI and gameplay are closely related - that is to say, bad UI makes the gameplay seem more confusing than it'd otherwise be. Like the combat mechanics, specifically as they apply to squads: you might call this aspect of the gameplay complicated, and maybe it is, or maybe it's simple and intuitive. The problem is, we don't know , the UI ain't telling us. The UI is not just obstructive and uninformative, it's actively misleading; it's implying squads are com

Agreed with most of the suggestions, one thing though - I think it's too soon to worry about the lack of "oh crap!" moments, the "safety" of the game. Elemental already has the groundwork for unpredictable, exciting gameplay, many of the things you praise about SotS and GC2 are already here - random events, random research, relatively tough wild critters spawning unexpectedly, AIs that can use a variety of units and theoretically cause you problems, starting positions that are worse than othe

[quote who="tevans6220" reply="193" id="2758829"] Quoting Zalusithix, reply 173I don't get what confuses people so much about the financial situation here. And on a somewhat unrelated note, I find it amusing how much people get all flustered over Stardock being evil or something for this, while the big studios routinely do this on a larger scale, even when the game is a massive hit. I can tell you why. Brad went around shooting his mouth off where he shouldn't have. This

No one (outside the devs, obviously) really knows. In fact, of all the many undocumented and frequently changed game mechanics, this is the one I'd most love to get an official Stardock explanation for. In an attempt to be constructive, I'll tell you what I do know: You can miss against 0 defense, and 1 attack vs. 1+ defense can still hit for 1, which implies both attack and defense have a minimum roll of 0 (not 1 as with typical dice rolls/D&D-based systems/etc).

Huh, it used to be League of Legends for me too, had no idea there was so much overlap between it and Elemental's fanbase - they aren't very similar games. Lately been getting back in touch with my tactical FPS side, however (Red Orchestra, and its mod Darkest Hour). Sticking with the theme of "something as different from Elemental as possible," I guess.

Yeah that's a known game imbalance - one of many, but arguably one of the worst, there's at least one thread complaining about it. You didn't do anything wrong, just watch out for those guys and kill them first if possible until they get fixed.