Seems to me the only thing you can learn from that, is that the majority of the review scores used by MetaCritic, were pulled out of the reviewers hats. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing for you guys, though. Because I'd have rated most of those releases lower. And hey, 5'ish for E:WoM is extremely generous. At release it wasn't just a terrible game, it wasn't in a playable state. It should have gotten a 1 :D
I. Pathfinding - As many others have mentioned, stacks occasionally take the scenic route for no reason. I get the impression this mostly or only happens when they're traversing a tile that has changed in some way, and there's definitely tiles that all stacks consistently won't recognise as ones they can walk on. In my last match, an outpost in what became the heart of my empire was razed early in the game. Afterwards all stacks, roaming AI stacks, rival faction s
I vote for developing FE, whatever you decide to call it. Stray thoughts: Tactical combat - as it currently exists it's pretty crap. But it could be brilliant. Zones of Control (think Panzer General or Blood Bowl), a Move or Fire/Cast rule, Terrain Modifiers (attacking a lower tile gives a bonus), Line of Sight (can't see or directly attack units in or behind trees)... Stuff like that would make what's already there enormously much m
Tactical battles need some pretty serious tinkering to be interesting, I think. Zones of Control is high on the list of things it is in absolutely dire need of. Disengaging and running past enemy units should be extremely dangerous. Because otherwise movement is basically just shuffling a bunch of Rooks around. Uncommonly tootless Rooks, unsupported by any other kinds of playing pieces. Or... Not having zones of
On the world map, not in tactical combat. I'm not sure if the issue is specific to the Compass item thingy, or if it's a general thing. Whatever the cause, the stack's movement allowance occasionally displays wrong in the stack info, and/or the stack doesn't get the movement allowance bonus from the Compass. Related, I'm unsure whether the Compass is supposed to be a unique item or not, but I've currently got two of them.
By all accounts the Civ5 AI has the same problems as Elemental's, so... GalCiv2 is out, rest in piece Civ5 & Elemental? As for the topic of the tread, I have two suggestions: Copy SupCom's camera exactly (but use a different hotkey). Make the clothmap display the terrain colours (white for snow, yellow for desert, blue for water, etc). Beyond that I really don't care much about graphics.
[quote who="GaelicVigil" reply="34" id="2769553"]I'd just like to know who whined to Brad that combat simply HAD to be a turn-based. It's obvious what we could have had (see screenshot) vs what we got, had the old system been left in place.[/quote] I'm one of them. As far as I'm concerned, RTS games ought to be called STM games: Strategic Time Management. Outside multiplayer it doesn't appeal to me. Granted, there's games like TW, but I utterly fail to see how those wouldn't hav
[quote who="Tasunke" reply="27" id="2769271"]Lol Simsum, tile-based battles won't EVER look like that ... I didn't say you couldn't pull off a battle with that many soldiers. Its kind of like Paradise Lost, only its Epicness lost.[/quote] Depends on what you mean by "look like that". What seems to be happening in the pic, are multiple melee units in formations, trying to outflank & gank a dragon, while the dragon uses an arc-shaped AoE, its superior melee reach and char
[quote who="luketan" reply="115" id="2768901"]LOL. He said will be "modified" not build from the scratch. Don't get your hopes up too much. While I like the idea of separating attack stat into Melee, Missile and Magic Attack stats, different resistance types etc. . all he said was he will fix the 1DN rolls not add new stats.. could be as simple as adding +X to each roll for example..[/quote] Hehe, my hopes have been too high since falling in love with GalCiv2 and
[quote who="Tasunke" reply="9" id="2766254"]Agreed. But that screen-shot wouldn't really be possible in a world of Tile-based combat anyways. Not that I'm complaining about having tile-based combat (my current goals for advanced combat are rightfully abstracted because if it) ... its just that you don't get the "feel good" battles the picture may lead you to assume are in-game.[/quote] Why? Other tile based games have managed to scale to massive unit counts and include stuff like faci
[quote who="capwdg" reply="27" id="2768904"]I agree, the stack mechanics are messed up. why do groups of units have thier defence sumed?[/quote] They don't. Each individual makes it's own attack & defence rolls. Unfortunately the way units with more than one individual calculate their individual attack & defence ratings is currently screwed up, but it should be fixed in the next patch (there's a post about it elsewhere in this section of the forums). As for your sugges
1. Drastic shifts in numbers I'd like to nerf those numbers even further, and replace the combat mechanics in the process. Instead of +2 for each improvement, I'd like it to be +1. Give every actor the following offensive skills: Melee, Missile, Magic And give every actor the following defensiv
Well, I can't say there's anything much I like about the game right now. An unexhaustive list of stuff-that-bugs-me, in no particular order: [b]Graphics:[/b] I love [...], but not the execution. That's going to be a recurring theme in this post. In this case, it's the art direction I love. That the models are terribly blocky is perhaps not the most realistic complaint. I do realise there's both technical & monetary limits to what's possible. However, the cloth map would have been
[quote who="reavenfrost" reply="312" id="2767966"]So if you are on the fence still, just hop off and do it.[/quote] I'd like to say the same, but I can't. The art direction is charming and the game finally appears to be stable. But presumably those aren't the only considerations for potential buyers. MoM and other great oldies weren't great because they had solid AI & balance. None of them had either (nor does Elemental). What they did have, though, were instantly
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="103" id="2765685"]We agree with you. It's going to be modified coming up.[/quote] But how? Any chance you'll explain the revised system before you start implementing it? Since you'll have to do surgery on the mechanics and completely rebalance everything, I have a suggestion for you guys: Make the "dice" two-sided so they can't roll anything other than 0 and 1. Use the various unit stats as the number of dice the unit
The basic combat mechanic is "rA-rD=damage", where rA is a random number between 0 and the attacking unit's Attack value, and rD is a random number between 0 and the defending unit's Defence value. But there's more to it than that, and exactly what the "more" is, is evidently some terrible secret the nice little Stardockians have sworn to take to their graves. Or at least, they're the only ones who can give you an exact answer and despite countless urgings to do just that, they haven'
Speaking of location, one thing that could alleviate the extreme resource randomness mess, is to show an outline of the map and the resource tiles through the fog of war/on the cloth map.
In addition to B0rsuk's suggestions, I think you should consider combat roles.Assuming changes along the lines B0rsuk suggests, I think there's basically two ways to do it, and I'm guessing the most fun is a combination. The first way is to limit the combinations of equipment units can have so, for example, a bunch of guys with crossbows can't also have mounts, field plate & awesome melee weapons (and again, Dom3 would be the go-to source for good examples). The second is
Wow... I'm not surprised, but that's sad news. And I can't imagine how much it must suck having to fire what's basically your co-workers for mistakes that are mostly yours. My sympathies to all of you. Hope the guys you're letting go land on their feet.
[quote who="Sir_Linque" reply="176" id="2754317"]Rushing into rash judgments as per your suggestion and starting a debate with the community about how to improve the game right now is a bad, bad idea. The community would have a very clouded opinion about a lot of issues right now. This is one of the situations where I would vote an absolute no to getting the community too involved. Gathering and accepting feedback is extremely important, but the team needs to brainstorm and get their be
[quote who="Cryptomancer" reply="152" id="2753854"]1. Official, release-date (August 24) version 1.05 was not worse than most released games (mega-rich Blizzard games excepted) -- which are full of bugs and broken features, and which are rarely patched as quickly as Stardock patches.[/quote] Oh yes it was. The actual release version, v1.00 was buggier than the release version of Daggerfall. v1.05 helped some users a great deal, but the game remained literally unplayable on some of the
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="87" id="2753375"]I think most people would agree that Elemental is a fantastic game -- once you get past the idiotic UI decisions, balance, etc.[/quote] I really don't think so. Elemental is a pile of conceptually fantastic parts of a game, not a fantastic game. Building cities piecemeal on the actual map is a great idea. Using hands-on dynasties instead of various government techs in a fantasy 4X is pure awesomesauce. The inclusion of tactical TB combat, e
[quote quoting="post"]And this point, there is not point in NOT picking all spellbook, as well as there being no "consequences" in doing so.[/quote] The shard spawn system & map overview combined could make it advantageous to invest in all the element-based spellbooks. But the keyword here is "could". As it is, the shards give no modifiers. Moreover, if even if they did give modifiers, they only give modifiers to combat magic, and only after tech'ing - tech'ing that will g
[quote who="BoogieBac" reply="53" id="2753064"] We just didn't see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something. I expected the 'big complaint' was that we didn't have 'Fallen' versions of the victory cutscenes. Off by a mile, to say the least [/quote] And then some. I still don't understand how you guys could come up with the game mechanics, try to combine them with things like character developm
I'd like to see the game differentiate between hero stacks and army stacks. I'd like to see the default military unit size increased to 5 individuals. I'd like the introduction of a new Adventure tech enabling factions to create "adventuring companies" - hero stacks. I'd like the game to require that hero characters & sovereigns join a retinue to join an army stack. I'd like hero stacks to be unable to attack army stacks and settlements. I'd like he