[quote]My epic, immortal sovereign walking around the map conquering my enemies with a couple of guys with sticks just doesn't feel like a "grand strategy game."[/quote] Agreed. The fact that its expensive to outfit a single guy with a club or a simple wooden spear or a single set of leather armor is just.... It doesn't me that much if the gameplay is good, but definitely thi
Yeah, it took me ages to figure out how to equip a purchased item. That button doesn't look like a button. Poor UI choice.
My thoughts on all this: 1. Planescape:Torment still has the best writing and story of any CRPG ever made. Not only that, but dialogue was part of the game. If you got to big defining conversations (like the one with Ravel) then the dialogue options you chose closed paths off, and affected the flow of the dialogue. It actually seemed like a real conversation. Modern CRPGs have lost this. Your conversation choices don't matter, and what you say doesn't m
I strongly support this. I understand the commercial pressures that push for release, but you are doing no favors when the version that reviewers use has not been sufficiently polished, even if that polish comes in the month after release.
The problem is that there are no early game decent defensive units that are tough city defenders. In Civ there are archers, which are a hard-counter to an early game rush.
I think instant razing is a mistake. I'd really prefer something like the Civ5 system, in which cities being razed reduce 1 pop per turn until the city is gone. Maybe: city loses 20% of its population per turn and one building at random, so it takes 5 turns until the city is gone completely. Something that lets a defender retake a city rather than having it instantly annihilated.
In particular these belong in the Summoning spell school, which currently has basically no tactical spells.
Changing how squads work, so that squad boosts and veterancy weren't such massive incremental increases in power.
[quote]Walls in tactical combat go a long way to doing that. If I can sit my ranged guys on a wall and snipe you while you have to breach the wall to fight back without LoS penalties, AND I get a millitia bonus, cities are a tough nut to crack. AoW 2 did tihs pretty well in a TBS style.[/quote] Agree that the AOW2 model was a good one. But those defenses were far cheaper and easier to access than they currently are in EOW2, and ranged units were also more accessible - everyone c
I don't understand why reducing incentives to focus-fire is a desirable design goal.
[quote]But in beta 4, the values are jsut place holders[/quote] Thanks for confirming this. [quote]We don't try to balance items in the public betas because if you attempt to balance in beta, you end up with battles between fans and critics which causes splits in the community.[/quote] I totally disagree with this argument, but its good that you're aware that there is a TON of balancing work that needs to go on relative to the beta4 build. Very glad you're workin
The problem is more pronounced than just needing population to fight as very weak militia. [Though, that's a good idea. See Empire:Total War for a nice example of implementing this.] It needs to be harder to attack a city than it is to fight the enemy in the field, so that a weaker army can retreat to the safety of a city, while the stronger army pillages the countryside. Think of how this happens in HOMM with the castle defenses and arrow-towers. This d
Strongly agree that there needs to be something to make it harder to blitz cities in the early game. Think of how the Warrior and Archer unit make city conquest hard in the early game in Civ without a very large numerical advantage, and how there are city defender promotions that make it easier to defend a city than to fight in the field. We are missing any similar mechanic.
Is it possible that there is intelligent life out there in the universe? Sure. Is it likely to be similar to anything we can conceive, or able to interact with us in a way we can understand? Unlikely.
I'm glad this isn't a total war style game. But I think surely tactical combat should be at least as interesting as it was in MoM.
It *seems* like the intention was to have two different types of adventure location, and one set of techs boosts one while another set of techs boosts the other. But its very confusing when there is only a single "your adventure level" stat displayed.
A scroll would work nicely as a magic item; grant access to a cool spell, but only for the particular Sov/champ who has the scroll equipped. Also, wands as a missile-damage ranged attack that do damage of a particular elemental type (and maybe work off intelligence instead of strength?) would be interesting, so spellcasters still have some power even once their mana is depleted.
Some good stuff here. Some things like the memory leak are known issues, some (like the Empire tech trees) are just not fully implemented yet. Tactical combat is broken as it stands, hopefully this will be fixed.
[quote] and no matter where I build a city I am liable to get 10 or more resource plots easily[/quote] No matter where you build a city? seriously? I cannot replicate this. Please post some screenshots. I have observed the exact opposite in most games I play. In about half of the space, cities would get zero resources, and in most of the rest they'd never get more than ~2-3 until they grow to truly huge influence radius. I've had games where
Sadly, no-one seems willing to make top-down turn-based tactical games anymore. Imagine if someone could have made a huge fallout-3 sized game but with an action point turn-based tactical type engine.
A simple way; you enter the deployment phase with the units already set up by default, depending on the party order in the strategic screen (first 4 front row left to right, next 4 back row). You can change the deployment if you like, otherwise there is a single mouseclick to start the battle. And then make it easier to drag units into whatever party order you like in the main strategic screen.
I don't think we should allow ranged units to move and shoot in the same turn; that kind of kiting will make it very hard to balance ranged units. The exception would be if we had some short range javelin or slinger skirmisher type units. Peltasts, Velites, that sort of thing.
I strongly support a deployment phase. It should be possible at least to make a Sov into a Sauron-like melee-monster - who you would certainly want in the front row.
[quote] I love resources but that seems a little over abundant. [/quote] I think this is a mapscript issue and not a gameplay issue. I've noticed that many maps have a tendency to have a "central" region that has a lot of resources - particularly one that is a crossroads between various start positions. This is a highly strategic (and conflicted) area, so I think it makes sense for it to have a higher resource density. I like this. I think the challenge
I definitely think that Memento is superior to Inception. In Memento, you really can't understand the movie until the very end (err, beginning). And it works both as a story and as a film about narrative construction. Agree with the point that Inception, once the concept is presented, is pretty straightforward. You're just along for the ride. Great ride though.