Haste (which is still broken...) plus deflect is basically unbeatable. You can create champions, summons or stacks that can attack 30 or 40 times in a turn and don't provoke counter-attacks. Simply broken...
Saving these books isn't entirely senseless. I often dump all combat-related stats on my sovereign to focus on spellcasting and economy-boosting perks, then pass on any combat-related books I find to my kids or maybe a nice champion.
NPC's and quests both get really predictable in this game. The game doesn't even attempt to mix it up, it's the same quests and NPC's over and over. After a while you learn this quest site is just an 800 GP treasure horde, and this other quest site is a death trap full of spiders.
The problem with sovereigns and charisma is a major one, but there's also the issue of champions and charisma, where this attribute literally does nothing at all.
[QUOTE]There is a number of spells in the game which are overpowered. Such as "Chain Lightning", "Arcane Strike”, “Fireball”, “Morrigan’s Spite“ that can destroy a char or a group of chars in one battle turn.[/QUOTE] The problem is that the early-game armies (the only stuff the AI [i]ever[/i] makes) gets cast aside by these spells, but the late game stuff can take it. Towards the end of the game, you can produce units with over 500 hit points
[quote]It would be nice if charisma would also effect the price of equipment making it worthwhile to invest in.[/quote] While I'd like to see charisma have an actual use, this would just lead to you buying equipment with a single guy with a high charisma value and then trading it off to your other champs.
[quote]any custom faction I put together seems to have ridiculous advantages vs. regular factions.[/quote] This is the big problem currently; the stock factions were [i]not[/i] built to the same allowance as the custom factions, and as a result they are much much weaker. A typical custom faction for me looks like this: Master Archers, Brave, Master Scouts, Educated, Influential. Five perks, no disadvantages. [quote]There's a manual?!![/quote] It's
The main problem with these guys is that unless you imbue them, they're just powerful singletons that cost a small [i]fortune[/i] to equip. They need unique abilities, both as "governors" that boost the city and as "commanders" in the battlefield. Right now they have very little role in this game, though I do like farmers and administrators. They need more variety, purpose, and flavour.
[quote]but as a concept, changing the world setting to fix a bug is not a good idea.[/quote] But in the current world setting people [i]don't[/i] age. Your children reach adulthood and your sovereign isn't even middle-aged. [quote]There's no real calendar in the game, so it just doesn't make sense to give unit ages in calendar terms.[/quote] This is probably the best solution. Just remove all references to the actual passing of time and leave it open
[quote]That's not a minor handwave, though.[/quote] The current hand-wave of differing "aging" rates is a [i]much[/i] bigger handwave currently, so I don't see the argument. My suggestion is to change a big senseless handwave into a small reasonable handwave. [quote]That's a signifiant setting change, and I don't support doing it for something this silly.[/quote] How is it significant? How is it silly? This is a fantasy world, with magic and dragons a
[quote]I could argue metal-wise that with a custom faction with both Resourceful and Brilliant, and playing Kingdom, I could have an Axe-wielding troop by about turn 16[/quote] If you want to rush out powerful units, the way to go is "master archer". I can easily have an archer out just when you're getting that axeman. [quote]Without that +10 materials up front you can't theoretically start production on a pioneer until about turn 13 baring any finds from crates.[
The benefit of "resourceful" is essentially a gamble. If you can scavenge some materials in the first few turns, it's a moderate boost, but not worth sinking an entire faction perk into. If you can't scavenge some materials... this is [i]game-changing[/i], putting you ten turns ahead of where you'd otherwise be. Problem is, you don't know until you're actually in the game which trait is worthwhile. The metal boost is close to useless. You don't even have a [i]u
Just make everyone age at the same rate, then ignore age-related effects completely and allow heroes to reach ages potentially hundreds of years old. Hand-wave it that in the world of Elemental, there is no such thing as growing old.
I've found decking out my sovereign so he produces arcane knowledge and tech knowledge on his own is [i]very[/i] beneficial. What it means is that I can focus my starting city on getting gold and materials rolling, and skip over research until later. Economically, your top priority is to get those first few levels of adventure/domination going, because you can earn [i]far[/i] more from doing these tasks than what your first city can offer.
The attribute system needs to be fleshed out a bit; right now it's not doing very much, and we may as well just rename strength and dexterity to attack and defense.
[quote]Requiring a specific tech level would do much the same as atternating armor and weapons[/quote] Unfortunately, the tech tree doesn't work like that. It's just simple prerequisites. [quote]Padded armor needs to come with the equipment tech[/quote] Agreed; armor generally needs to come earlier in the tech tree, because right now you have to wait WAY too long for your first piece of armour. Heck, you can have bows researched by that time (and you have t
[quote]Longbows should only be usable by Expert or Elite trained units as it requires years of training to use a longbow effectively, whereas a crossbow can be used after a week of training.[/quote] Just represent that in the unit's build time. Longbow units take a long time to train, crossbow units a short time.
[quote]Do I really have to check all the cities and find which one can build a caravan?[/quote] Or to figure out which cities already have functioning trade routes between them? It's very easy to lose track of this stuff, especially with wandering monsters knocking off your traders. Given that trade routes are trivial to establish once a road is up, why do we have to manually replace the trader? Why not do it automatically and leave us to the task of taking o
I definitely agree on cutting/blunt weapons. I [i]never[/i] research both because once you have one the other is essentially redundant because different weapon types are too similar to begin with. As for armor/weapons alternating, I think that's probably a good thing. The way the tech tree works, it's [i]really[/i] easy to bee-line to a specific tech, so forcing you to balancing your weapons and armor techs so you don't get out of whack is probably for the best. The
Indeed; there needs to be a disassociation here so that ranged attacks and spells can be limited further. I don't mind moves and melee attacks being linked like this, but ranged attacks and spells presents a problem.
Yeah, it's virtually impossible to reach it. I've only reached it once, and even then I solved it by demolishing an old workshop.
[quote]AI Sovs beg for peace when I'm thumping them but never make an offer to sweeten the deal.[/quote] I've found this to be a serious issue. In fact, I once had an AI who wanted [i]me[/i] to pay him thousands of gold pieces even though he only had one stack of units and one city left. There is literally no reason to ever declare peace once war breaks out, because by the time the AI will actually make peace on even terms, they're already on their last leg. <br
[quote]I've never seen the AI use mounts[/quote] I almost never [i]FIND[/i] mounts on the world map in the first place. In fact, the only time I ever saw one was a group of wargs, but I was kingdom so [i]I couldn't even use them[/i]... ugh... I've never seen the AI use ships.
[quote]Crossbows cannot be 'inferior' due to physics. They provide far more kinetic energy to the projectile, and there's nothing you can do about it with any level of 'skill'. Its same in terms of accuracy, skilled bowman will be at best at same level of accuracy as average crossbowman. Plus projectile itself is completely different and is better at penetration.[/quote] It always depends on which era you're talking about. It seems some people here are talking about classical cr
Same here; never found enough Elementium to actually do anything useful. It's not like the magic armor is actually much better than the masterwork stuff anyways...