merlinme

The AI can upgrade outposts? Awesome! Seriously, I'm surprised more people haven't commented on that, it felt like one of the biggest human exploits, where I could turn my settlements into powerhouses of... whatever, and the AI wouldn't even try. I'm looking forward to better AI in general as well; all the work to make strategic and tactical spells more effective will be gratefully received. When I've finished my current Rome Total War 2 game as Carthage it will b

Sounds really interesting, glad you're still investing time in the Elemental universe. I personally think an asymmetric game where you have a series of challenges to overcome without necessarily having four AIs doing the exact same kind of thing as you at the exact same time could be really cool. It might work best in some sort of campaign mode, where you can have a story that you have encountered an old empire which you have to destroy or make your friends, but having said that you could

Glad to see you're still thinking about the game. I haven't played in a while, but it was definitely my favourite game of the last couple of years. Back to topic: 1) I like that there are so many different tactical and strategic possibilities. There are a lot of races and sovereigns, and they have significantly different strengths and weaknesses, which massively increases the replayability. I enjoy sitting down and thinking out what the best strategy is, bearing in min

Some of the ideas in the original game were undoubtedly interesting, but at this stage I think resources would be better spent either bringing the best of them into Legendary Heroes via paid for expansions, e.g. the Dynasties expansion, or just designing a new game from scratch. In the short term (and especially bearing in mind how burned you got last time with a very ambitious new game) I think expansions to Legendary Heroes are the way to go. To take the obvious comparison, Civilization IV

As I understand it, relations always start as neutral, and you should be able to get treaties and caravans with factions you are neutral with. If you can get an economic or science treaty and caravans with a factions soon after you meet them that will give you +2 relations with them, which will help quite a lot in getting them to like you. Be prepared to pay gold for this, so clearly it helps if you have a certain amount of spare gold. Also be aware that relations get some big negative modifi

I reported some alliance weirdness a while back. I have won the game using an alliance victory, sometimes it seems to work properly. However I have seen the problem you described, where the alliance seems to get cancelled after one turn.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Nature's Cloak (Earth spell). With a few Earth shards and troops wearing Dragon Hide Cloaks it's perfectly possible to get 100% Fire resistance for your entire army, which makes things vastly easier; you can ignore the dragon's breath attack, which is what does most of the damage. Protection From Fire is another possibility (under Abjuration in the Mage path), although it takes more picks to get and is tactical only, so you can still take d

[quote who="Borg999" reply="24" id="3424243"]That is, a decision is made by the execs/owners as to what actions will generate the most long term sales.[/quote] Brad has clearly said in interviews and online posts that one of the main things which motivates him is interaction with users. If the only thing which motivated him was money he would presumably have kept Impulse and refocused Stardock around that money making machine, rather than selling Impulse and using the money to build t

Heroes never die, and in my current game I've experimented with letting them get injured a lot more. A lot of the time the injuries are not that bad, e.g. I don't really care about -50% poison resistance or -50% cold resistance or -1 physical attack. Some of them are pretty bad though, -25% experience, -25% hit points, -1 hit point for every unit in your army. It's a lottery, and it's very expensive (and late in the game) to use potions to heal injuries. I think the ba

I've had a few hangs at end of turn with 1.5. All of them were resolved by reloading. This is nowhere near as bad as 1.4 was for me, which became unplayable beyond about season 150. 1.3 was pretty rock solid for me, however the developers have made quite a few changes since then. It's unfortunately the nature of programming that you make some things better (I believe performance was a priority) and run the risk of making other things worse. Hopefully they can con

I didn't actually realise that disbanded armies population was added to the nearest city. Is it at a rate of one per figure? It could presumably be used as another way to get Dead cities to grow, crank out cheap units from your capital. Might be worth it to get villages to level 2.

It currently says I spent 400+ hours on Legendary Heroes, I think I spent 150+ hours on Fallen Enchantress. Given that even with games I enjoy and want to finish I rarely spend more than 130 hours on them, that's a lot of enjoyable game play. Certainly awesome value for money. Thank you Frogboy.

I've really appreciated the work put into the AI in general, it's made the struggle against the computer controlled factions a lot more epic. Based on my (limited) experience with 1.5 I haven't noticed a massive change with the diplomacy. The AIs still go to war with me in fairly short order after season 100. If my power rating is ok and we are on the same side, then if I can get some treaties going I may be able to get them to positive relations, but otherwise it's pretty har

Sure, data is good, but as far as I can see the data shows that there's no problem with the random number generator. The problem is that people assume if you get a lot of an item that's not random, which is simply not the case.

I did rand(1,165) 180 times in Excel. I then copied the values to a different part of the spreadsheet (so they don't keep recalculating) and sorted. Based on eyeballing, results are as follows: 90 came up six times 59 came up five times 52 came up four times 69 came up four times 81 came up four times 82 came up four times 143 came up four times 159 came up four times 24 came up three ti

There's quite a noticeable step change at season 100, where modifiers go from probably positive ("we are still settling") to probably negative ("our ambitions are rising"). In my game the modifiers went from +1 with Magnar to -2, and with Capitar from -2 to -6. One of the things which changed in 1.5 is that they reduced the positive modifier for being from the same side, i.e. Kingdom or Empire. Prior to 1.5 it was fairly easy to be on good terms with factions on the

I've noticed before that the diplomacy modifiers in the Foreign Relations screen are not there when you load a game. They should hopefully appear as soon as you click End Turn though. If you care enough about diplomacy to be looking at this screen, do you have any views on how diplomacy seems to be working in 1.5? See my other thread, https://forums.elementalgame.com/450469/page/1/#3422704

I've edited my original post based on what Illauna said (i.e. the modifiers are applied each turn they don't actually show your current relations). What seems to be happening is that after changing relationship status (or changing sign of the modifiers) relations will not change for nine or ten turns. Presumably this is to stop relations changing too quickly, but it does have slightly odd effects, like for example it doesn't seem to matter if an AI dislikes you by -6 a tur

I like Illauna's ideas. GFireflyE's are interesting but generally look to be more work and more controversial. Heroes: I don't particularly mind either way, but why do you think it's better for new heroes to appear at capital rather than sovereign? I disagree on Outposts, I build them quite often, and frequently build Stables and High Towers. The Dead more or less require Consulates if you don't get lucky with Death Shar

[quote who="onomastikon" reply="10" id="3422454"]I had interpreted the OP to mean that the AI has increased greatly from 1.4 to 1.5.[/quote] I think that was a misunderstanding then. The OP said: [quote]Awhile ago I complained about how the AI really sucked at managing it's units strategically[/quote] and then went on to say how much the AI had improved. Given that most of the AI work was actually done in 1.3 + 1.4, and DsRaider had not played in "a while", I assum

Thanks. I'll take it as a compliment that you expected me to understand that! As it happens floating point number to integer conversions are a significant part of my day job. [e digicons]B)[/e]

Hmm, fair enough. I'm still not convinced that it explains 100% of what I saw, but it does help somewhat. Thank you. My previous reply came out rather sharply, I was just a bit miffed that I'd spent several hours trying to explain my problem in detail and then discover that it's another badly understood game mechanic. I still don't like how important parts of the game (e.g. how do you stop someone casting the Spell of Making?) are explained nowhere at all that I can find.

And this is explained where, exactly?

EDIT: Illauna has explained that the Foreign Relations listed modifiers show how your relations are changing over time, not what your current relations are. So in other words If they sum to -2 then that adjustment will be applied to your current relations with the faction. Fair enough, I can see how that makes sense. However, I still think there's something weird going on. If I load the save game below and keep hitting End Turn, this is what I get: Season 86: meet Capitar, Neutral

Music in Legendary Heroes is fine. It doesn't irritate after 100 hours of playing, and that's all I really ask for. The only game I can really remember the music making an impact on me other than either just providing background or irritating the hell out of me was in Civ IV. But they cheated somewhat by using existing classical pieces.