Demiansky

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="13" id="2424706"]I think some of you may be over-thinking the battle mechanics necessary to effect a satisfactory outcome. Let's take a dragon who has say a 20 attack and 10 defense. Its minimum defensive roll is going to be 10% so it will always get a 1. Now, if you have a really basic archer its attack and defense might be 1 attack (bow and arrow) with just a shirt (0 defense) with 1 HP. His arrow won'

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="70" id="2424707"] Ouch, so am I correct in assuming that this means a spearman--- having seen 1000 victorious battles and slain 1000 other spearmen--- would gain tons of hitpoints but still only have 1 attack and 1 defense unless he is upgraded with better weapons? It seems a bit counter to one's intuition to the point of being outright bizarre, even as a game mechanic function. I am not sure how the world's best spearmen are t

[quote who="Climber" reply="67" id="2424672"] Quoting Demiansky, reply 64 That's because in Elemental, training and such affect HP, not attack and defense. Ouch, so am I correct in assuming that this means a spearman--- having seen 1000 victorious battles and slain 1000 other spearmen--- would gain tons of hitpoints but still only have 1 attack and 1 defense unless he is upgraded with better weapons? It seems a bit counter to one's intui

[quote]In fact, if you have reclaimed the land near a min eyou can just build a town near it without using essence, then construct some hovels and the mine and leave it as is ... it's exactly what you meant : a mine, some folks around and that's it. Try the following : build a city far away from the mine, wait to get the reclaimed land, then go build a city ... you build the mine and voilà !![/quote] Sure that can work, but will it interefere with a host of other mec

[quote]That's because in Elemental, training and such affect HP, not attack and defense. [/quote] Ouch, so am I correct in assuming that this means a spearman--- having seen 1000 victorious battles and slain 1000 other spearmen--- would gain tons of hitpoints but still only have 1 attack and 1 defense unless he is upgraded with better weapons? It seems a bit counter to one's intuition to the point of being outright bizarre, even as a game mechanic function. With

One thing that I find always lacking in most strategy games with civilization building is that the biggest cities always seem to be the ones that produce the most food. In the Civilization games this has always been the case as it has been in Master of Magic, Galactic Civs, and most others (Master of Orion 2 being an interesting exception.) In Elemental, however, it's unclear what the relationship between population growth, food, and prestige will be. Yes, we know tha

[quote]Ahaha, this post wins [/quote] Alright, I'll let you win out of sportsmanship ;-)

[quote]Spearman beating Tank came up because its an actual example of broken game mechanics. In earlier Civ games (Civ 3 in particular IIRC) it was something that occured with alarming frequency. It infuriates a lot of players and shows just how RNG based the combat system is. (Civ 4 is generally speaking better behaved, the Spearman can damage Modern Armor but unless the unit was already weakened will not be able to kill it outside of a one in a billion moment.) So when you say it

If players are rewarded in Elemental for having non-Monolithic armies, I definately don't want it to be for reasons like "leather armor and plate armor both serve different, but equally legitimate roles." In other words, certain improvements in equipment and soldiery should simply be more expensive and better (sure, a soldier in leather armor might be faster, but still not as valuable per capita as a plate wearing soldier.) The strategy in that regard ultimately would come

[quote]But that forces you to field armies of troops of all sorts and quality. The best strategy would be to train all your exceptional recruits first, and work your way down the list... That's a little better than when the best strategy is just to mass produce your most powerful troops, but it's still not even remotely ideal. I don't think it's worth settling for that when it seems perfectly well within reach to have a combat system that allows all sorts of viable strategies when it comes to

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="55" id="2424087"] My aim, which has been frustratingly overlooked by people offended by the dragon-one-shot sideshow, is that no unit would ever be 100 percent antiquated. This leaves the option open to adopting strategies under the right circumstances to produce lower calibur soldiers in outrageous and exceptional numbers. The vast majority of the time, I would expect that the resources necessary to procure and court

[quote]The solution, IMO, is just to balance that initial training and production costs, as well as upkeep costs, so that there is a reason to build units besides the best they possibly can. Although honestly I think shying away from restricting army size will mostly solve this problem on its own. Total War is a good example - towards the beginning of the game, before you're anywhere near capable of fielding a maxed out army, you are generally better off by mixing troops of varying strengths

[quote] personally am in favor of creatures like Dragons being impervious to the attacks of the weakest units, but if that idea ever gets nixed, those units should still have very small chances to do damage at all, and their maximum damage potential against such targets should be menial . [/quote] This is 100 percent what I'm aiming for, and I've made reference this is every post I've written so far. I'm glad we agree. My only point in stating that a p

Deleted, doublepost.

[quote]Really? I can't. Not unless the spearman is carrying explosives with him...[/quote] Okay, this is beside the point but... A tank isn't a solid hunk of metal with no joints, moving parts, or no entries in or out. A tank doesn't split CO2 back into breathable oxygen from within. Tank shells come from a turret that can be jammed. A swivvel machine gun turret can be wrenched or damaged surprisingly easy. So ultimate

I agree with Raven completely, although either method would produce a different strategic landscape. I think the implications of requiring cities to gain resources will have very strange and aggrivating implications in war time. It basically means that you must capture and manage or raise an entire city every time you want to eliminate a specific resource from a player's repetoire, which means that raiding a player's resources as a viable warfare strategy is greatly neutered,

[quote who="pigeonpigeon" reply="28" id="2424014"] If melee units were strongest, then flankers, then ranged then ranged, it still made sense to build armies like 4 melee, 2 flankers and 6 ranged units, because the flankers and ranged would attack the enemy melee units and kill them faster than lone melee units (getting 3 attacks agaisnt 1 unit). But, come end-game, is there ever a reason to make an army out of anything besides, to use your example, 4 of the strongest me

[quote]This is still somewhat relevant even though it isn't what the OP was talking about. I kind of missed the part where "monolithic" means large, powerful and indivisible. I don't think that's a problem either, though, because the opportunity to get ahold of such powerful individual creatures sound like they will be pretty rare. It would be a more of a problem if troop count was going to be capped, but it doesn't look like it will be (or the cap will be so high it shouldn't really matter).

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="5" id="2423563"]yea, I think anything using randomness should have a nice ... high bell curve, so that 60 times out of 100, the events will meet at 50% probability ... of either damage, attack, or defense range. This just means that out of the hundreds of permutations, 60% of them will be in the middle range (45-55% likelyhood) or so ... I think its hard to explain comparing percentages to other percentages, but its like 3 + 4 vs 4 + 3 ... they both arrive at the m

Oi, once again, I don't think we're properly understanding what I mean by randomness (I'm sorry if I sound rude, but I'm a biologist and have to confront people's statements about biotechnology on a regular basis based upon gut feelings and prejudices rather than technical discourse, so my patience is already a bit exhausted.) I'm not suggesting that there should be randomness in the game that swings so violently that nothing is predictable. Not even close. As a matter

It seems that people have an aversion to the term "random" in the same way that many people have an aversion to the word "taxes," without recognizing the necessary nature of both. Having no dice rolls whatsoever will produce formula outcomes. I was once a very serious chess player, playing competitively in tournaments and studying strategy books. The reason why I turned away from chess is because it became a very predictable game of pattern recognition rather

[quote who="Climber" reply="38" id="2423349"]Demiansky, rgds to your bolded question in Reply37, Frogboy has already answered it in Reply#23. Frogboy's Reply#23 While the battle system in Elemental is still something to be fully fleshed out, I'm of the opinion that when a unit rolls their attack and defense that the minimum should always be say 10% of their max value. I.e. if the dragon's armor is 50 then even if he rolls a 1, he's still going to get 5 and i

Interesting post, and something that we've definately neglected to discuss much in the past. If we're to assume that Elemental: War of Magic gets its namesake from the classic Fire/Earth/Air/Water interpretation of elements, than presumably water should play a notable role in the game, granted, an inland empire that has neglected mundane and magical water aspects should be perfectly viable. A meritime strategy would be a very fullfilling strategic option, too. Being

[quote]Good post. And not only class, but it boils down to how armies were formed: the king wouldn't pay to equip anyone, he would make a call for his nobles to go to war, his nobles will call their own vassals and so on. Then each noble would come along a small band of knights (or better equiped troops, his retinue) and as many peasants as he seemed fit given the part of the year, his loyalty,...[/quote] I remember making a thread awhile back that suggested making this a game fe

[quote who="Ephafn" reply="14" id="2422853"]Is it me or many people understood that "monolitic armies" = "armies with a maximum number of troop"? (When reading the title, I though that "monolitic armies" = "stacks of doom".) If I understand the original post correctly, you are asking for reasons to mix strong and weak troups in the same armies. Historically, I guess that the reason such armies (knights and peasants) existed was that it was the best armies their so