merlinme

Pretty much what everyone else said. I don't think adding more complexity would add fun. And if you really want to, there are plenty of opportunities for micromanagement. Is it better to build the +25% research buildling, the -10% unrest building, or the +1 mana buiilding? When should you rush? In a fortress, should you train troops (big army now), build a production increasing building (bigger army later), or build a building which upgrades troops (better army later)? One of my micr

Did I understand you right, that Ceresa stole the Consume Spirit spell from Gallowman? How did you do that? Steal Spirit? I didn't realise you could steal unique spells like that.

I actually find shrills quite dangerous. If they really get going targeting a low hit points unit they can kill something, and I hate losing units in battles. They can usually all get off at least one attack each before I can attack them. I want fairly strong units and a way to bring the fight to them quickly if I'm going to attack them. As others have noticed it may depend on what difficulty level you're playing on. On Ridiculous I want to be pretty confident I can kill

Yeah I saw this last night. I captured an AI city on top of a crystal mine. The stats of the city were so rubbish I decided to raze it rather than take the unrest penalty. As soon as I razed it a bunch of good city sites were revealed next to the useless (and illegal) one which the AI had decided to build on.

Blimey, 25 shards and 2,500 mana as you move into the endgame! Your victory is still impressive (one of these days I'll give Insane a go), but certainly magic centric strategies become a lot easier if you can get that much mana. And pretty much all my strategy revolves around getting a powerful mage with a stack of doom and killing everything. It's good to know that the AI has got so much better at using strategic spells, a few people have reported the AI using a lot of strate

[quote who="parrottmath" reply="12" id="3376703"]Fear is not working as intended. Fighting against Abeix my units were under the fear effect, yet the afraid didn't remove before I was able to act. If fear was working as intended, my units turn should be skipped as they are with dazed, but in fact they are not. I would have to show screens to prove it to you, but it is not working appropriately. The resist to the spell should only occur the first round, which I do see some of my units resi

The 1.1 patch notes say cost of Tornado was raised to 150 mana.

If you have access to Nature's Cloak (Earth spell) I imagine that would immediately solve the problem. It's cheap enough to cast on every unit in a stack, and will give +25% resistance to all magic elemental damage, + x% per earth shard. (It says +10% per shard online but I thought it was +5%.) Even at +5% per earth shard, if you have four shards that gives 45% protection against all damage. If the AI only has access to one damage type, with the right cloaks you can give your tro

I agree more information as to what happened would be helpful, but why is it unbalanced? You wouldn't say it was unbalanced if your armies had been defeated by the AI with armies, so why is it unbalanced if the AI beats you with spells? I've not had this happen to me, but I assume spreading your troops out more and giving them magic resistance cloaks would help. Falling Star specifically says is does fire damage, for example, so fire resistance should protect against this. If

+10 for number 2). This is my single biggest UI gripe. Even with the grid turned on, it's ridiculously easy to select the wrong tile on a large tactical map. I normally end up having to move the mouse until it's over the unit I want to move next to (i.e. the icon changes), and then move it very slowly until the icon changes again, at which point I know I can move to that point. This is painful, to say the least. Even then I still make mistakes. +2 for number 4), the upgrade ex

Glad to hear that the AI is using strategic spells effectively, even if it's a pain in your case!

It's not hard to counter archers. As others have noted, when you get into melee they will have fewer attacks because of lower initiative, no swarm bonus, lower damage, no shields and no special ability. If you've got the very cheap Air spell which massively increases dodge against ranged attacks, they're almost toothless. If you took so much damage being shot at while killing their melee defenders that you died when you engaged them, well then you had a wors

Which is the best weapon, the crystal version or the "iron" version, does depend to some extent on where you are in the research tree. For example, upgraded weapons (e.g. boar spear, damage 9) can be better than the first level of crystal weapons (ice spear, damage 7). Magic weapons will do some magic damage though, which is significant if you're facing high armour troops. Staff wielding troops can devastate armies which would be barely touched by archers. I usually

A lot of interesting strategiesin this post, thanks. It's nice to get ideas which aren't just outright exploits. I'm planning to try one more game on Ridiculous with 1.2, to see if the AI has improved significantly. If it's still straightforward I'll try Insane. I'm fairly sure I could beat Insane if I had Tame or if I used the Summon Skeleton Horde + Cull the Weak exploit, but I'm expecting more of a challenge if I use other factions.

One thought I had for making Tame less overpowered is to only allow it to be used on animals which are the same level or lower as the caster. That way it is still useful, but just not so overpowered at the start of the game. Playing on a higher difficulty level which makes monsters higher level would then at least mean that your sovereign had to do a few battles and quests without beasts before building up a free army of bears and spiders etc. Consume shard and Cull the weak does

[quote who="Morikar" reply="14" id="3377938"]If you use the pioneer bank you have a permanent +3 growth from food surplus alone in every city [/quote] Well- that's quite a big "If". That's not how the game designers intended the game to be played, is it? If we were aiming for the growth levels they had intended (without the exploit) then +0.5 per grain is much closer. Personally I don't use the exploit (except to the extent that I build a pioneer if I&#39

To be honest I hadn't read the original suggestion properly. +0.5 per grain could work. +1 per grain is surely too fast, most of the time at the moment growth is +1; +1 per grain would double that even for a two grain site.

It's very easy to understimate the importance of initiative, by the way. Because of the way unit damage decreases as units take damage, just going first is important, above and beyond any extra attacks you may get. So, simplistically, if two spear units of four troops face two club units of four troops, let's say one spear unit impales, so they do 10*5 damage, and two club troops are killed. The club units now do 6*7 damage, +100%, killing four spear troops. But the spear un

Yes. I think they decided it over complicated things for limited benefit. Things which modified encumbrance now generallly modify initiative directly. It now requires a skill slot to use chain, two slots to use plate armour.

Re: the non-spear weapons, clubs/ hammers are probably my second favourite to spears, swords are even higher initiative than spears and fine if you have decent swords and decent shields (especially if you have access to the special swords). The one I almost never build are axes. They take a lot of research, have an initiative penalty, and you can't use a shield. It's very unusual that you can actually hit three enemies with cleave; if

The user interface would definitely benefit from a bit of polish. My biggest personal gripe is that it is far too easy to select the wrong tile to move to on large tactical maps. I've lost count of the number of times I've selected a particular tile to move to so that I can use a special ability other than my normal attack when I get there, but I accidentally select a tile next to the one I meant to, meaning I can't attack at all. The tile you're hovering over is not high

Banshees will kill your entire army if you don't have some way of hitting them with enough magic damage. Even if you can inflict magic damage they can do a lot more damage than you would expect when facing one unit which is officially "Medium" difficulty, I think.

High level mages can win you battles single-handed, but you only really want one, because you probably haven't got enough mana for more. I generally don't find it very useful to have more than two, or at the most, three heroes in an army, because of the experience split, and because a trained unit is generally better for absorbing damage. Heroes can be quite fragile, if possible I don't like to leave them where they can get hit. The one case I can think of where an al

I don't mind spears. I tend to have an army of high movement and high initiative units, e.g. a couple of heroes, a couple of summoned units, two or three trained units. My problem with clubs/ hammers is that my high movement and high initiative units have already engaged the enemy before the hammer units get involved. Crushing blow and shields are certainly nice, but I just find that units armed with spears get into the action more. At the very start of the game you don't even ge

Only allowing one pioneer in the queue sounds like the simplest solution to me. It's not a perfect solution but I assume it would be a lot simpler to implement than having to check if you still have resources available when your queued unit reaches the front of the queue. Queuing up one pioneer is going to be a pretty marginal exploit.