Maksim42

I've been playing the game, and it got stuck for several minutes on an "end of turn" animation. Unfortunately, the nearest auto-save was over a dozen turns before, and on repeat playthrough, the problem did not re-occur. One thing that was happening on the inter-turn was that the wandering monster was about to destroy my outpost. However, debug.err suggests that maybe the wandering monsters destroyed an enemy civilization, perhaps? Dropbox for the debug.err is <a hre

Option 1, I think, would be quite easy to mod into the game – just unlock the appropriate technologies for each faction in the XML. So that’s something the modders can do, rather than having Stardock do it. Now, I do agree with Mistwraithe that the options on what to build can look rather lacking at the beginning of the game. Still, consider – tower of dominion for the city growth, barracks for the army training, workshop for more production, militia for defense, or

Hmm... That is a shame. For the healing spell, my alternative would be to have the healing be based on the percentage of unit's hit points. Something like: "Calc = UnitStat_HitPoints * 0.75 - CurrentHealth; Value = Calc / 3". This would heal about 25% of a unit's health if it is close to zero, and about 15% of current health if it is at 30% health. Of course, the value would result in a negative value if the unit is over 75% hitpoints, but hopefully t

Hmm... That sounds like a slightly different issue from mine. I'd suggest you report it in a separate thread, if you have not done so already.

Hi, everyone! Just a few questions on whether some of the ideas I had could be implemented using the current mechanics. I’d like to create a healing spell that has an upper limit (e.g. heal a fixed amount of HP, but can’t heal more than up to 75% of max HP). Is that possible? Conversely, I’d like to create a damage spell that won’t hurt the target when it is under 25% maximum HP. What if this is a Poison continual-damage type spell (i.e. lose 1

I have been playing for a bit (restored from an earlier save), and had been moving heroes around, building shards, accessing diplomacy screen in early game. My race is Gilden, and I’m using a custom sovereign. There was a monster near my hero Elisabetta, so I quick-saved and went to attack it. The monster promptly killed me, so I reloaded. Upon reloading, I found that although the cloth map loaded fine, and so did Elisabetta, nothing else loaded – I had no faction, no lair

Hmm... I’m still in the armchair general phase at the moment. It’s a shame that spells cannot inflict or remove statuses – seems like a fairly limiting omission from the design. Ideally, it would be nice to have status effects – Poisoned, Diseased, Dazed, Bleeding (different type of continual damage), Afraid, Horrified etc. Then you could have spells which are countering specific statuses (i.e. "Armor of Faith" helps with Afraid\Horrified, "Cure Ills" helps wit

Hi, everyone! I have installed the game a couple of days ago, and started playing it. As I was playing it for the first time, without any preconceptions, I’ve written down all the user interface things that threw me for a loop. Hopefully, this would provide a good indication of a first-time player’s perspective. Apologies if any of these are already known or fixed, or if something is existing but I have overlooked (in which case, I’d be glad to hear what I mi

I've been looking around in the XML files, and what I'm wondering about is - how could I implement a Neutralize Poison spell? Ideally, I'd want to do something like Poisoned , but the XML does not seem to work that way - the Poison attacks just do continual damage, rather than creating a Poisoned status on the target. Hence, the Neutralize Poison spell does not have a way of knowing that there is ongoing damage from Po

An interesting post! Having a lot of options is good - but having a lot of options which are balanced against each other is more difficult, as each new option added has to be compared against existing ones for balance - e.g. if there is a spell that increases Dodge, should there be another spell that does the same thing? If so, how would this be different? If it is highly specific, will anyone ever use it? Furthermore, adding complicated options means that the AI likely

[quote who="tanafres" reply="260" id="2980303"] I'm constantly seeing posts that argue that there should be no limiting strategic choices - I must be able to [change shards to my original sovereign preference / be able to get all spell books / have the resources that best match my character waiting for me at my spawn point]. What's fun about that? Bland central! Make me choose between meaningful options that close off other avenues of endeavor. <br /

[quote who="stevelamperti" reply="259" id="2980289"]Speaking from a make the game interesting point of view, I quite like the idea of specializing in different elements. For example, as in a previous post, you've been researching fire magic, have a couple of heroes who specialize and then you get a few air shards. Great! This will make you have to adapt to the conditions of the world. The player will have to consider changing tactics to deal with a new situation.&n

[quote who="seanw3" reply="258" id="2980240"]How much have you played WoM? This game will use those basic elements. The fighting mechanics are fairly well lined out. The magic system is going to be very similar. The only real question that is left is about city building and the tech tree. You just spent a wall of text on criticisms of mechanics and level of spells that is pure conjecture. Quite negative conjecture. How about waiting until the beta opens before making a verdict on every spell

[quote who="seanw3" reply="256" id="2980108"]Your comments show a lack of understanding of the basic game. [/quote] Assuming this was directed at me, care to elaborate? Considering that the "basic game" in question has not been released yet, and the details of its mechanics are quite vague, if not in flux right now, it seems a strange comment.

Although it is hard to comment on the individual spells without seeing the overall shape of the game, a few comments none the less: Paragon – should there be a limit on how high a level can the champion get from this spell? Steal Spirit – should this be a Death spell? It seems like a fairly evil thing to do. Titan’s Breath (Air 3) – the effects seem rather small for a level 3 spell. Cloud Walk (Air 3) – teleportation being present

Looking at magic proficiency levels, it seems like the intention is to limit access to spells by several factors: the research to actually discover the appropriate spell book technology, the magic research to discover the appropriate spell, and the development of heroes down the same branch (i.e. if you are researching Fire spells, best make sure that your heroes go up the Fire Adept\Disciple branch). It also means that if you pick up in mid to late game some additional shards of a ne

From what Derek said in his journals, I think we are well on our way to getting there. Champions\heroes will be specialized units - they have a higher accuracy than normal units, and monsters don't get to do overkill damage to them. I expect that they will be able to pick up additional abilities, such as Monster Slayer (+X to attack, damage and defense versus unit types Beast and Abomination) and Evasion (+X to ranged defense, to simulate that it's rather more difficult to

Hmm... That would allow a classic "Bomber" unit that would blow up on death. I'm not sure how the traits work though - can they trigger an activation of an ability - if so, this could be used for such traits as: Bomber - "OnDeath", causes an area of effect attack (range 1), with X damage Spirit Link - "OnDeath", heals all allies on the battlefield by X hitpoints Brotherhood of Arms - "OnDeath", all allies on the battlefield gain +X to attack\de

As per one of Derek’s dev journals, traits in Fallen Enchantress can be made conditional, with the following tags existing: vsDamaged, vsHigher, vsLower, vsOtherAllegiance, vsUnitType, WhenUnderPercentHitPoints, xActions. I would like to propose a couple of extra tags: [b]WhenAtLeastXAlliesWithTraitY[/b] – trait is active when there are at least X allies with trait Y on the battlefield. This allows generation of combat scenarios where a boss monster is powe

It is hard to say what can and can’t be implemented for an AI when we do not know the rules of the combat engine which can greatly affect the overall desirable tactics: [b]Will there be zones of control?[/b] The presence of zones of control (meaning that once a unit engages in melee combat, it cannot easily move away, either taking a free attack from the enemy or simply unable to move), opens a lot of tactical options – e.g. having the melee units guard the ranged

[b] What are Roles?[/b] Reading a recent journal entry on starting work on AI got me thinking about the different ways to approach it. One source of inspiration that I would suggest is the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons, specifically, the way it suggests to the game master how the monsters should be used - by assigning Roles to them. These roles are (simplifying a bit) Brute, Soldier, Lurker\Skirmisher and Artillery\Controller. Brutes are bi

[quote who="Lonemessiah" reply="1" id="2862373"]Interesting post. Just one query, how does limiting a building to one per city reduce ICS? Seems to me that it would actually make you want more cities, not less. [/quote] Thanks. What it does is limit the amount of research\gold a single city can provide, and thus reduce the potential of many small cities. Let's say you have a food surplus of +3 food. At present, you can either invest it into three small

"Infinite City Spam" (ICS for short) is a strategy of rapid expansion, putting down cities\colonies everywhere in the early game, rather than following a more balanced approach. In some games it's very effective, others not so much. When it is the optimal strategy, it usually doesn't make the game fun to play, as it limits strategic options and introduces too much micromanagement. Various games tried to address this issue, for example: Master of Orion - many

Good list, and I agree with most points. However: [quote] Races need to be each unique either through appearance of armor and weapons, and/or through bonuses and penalties. Each race should look different in their armor. Having slightly different eye/skin/hair color among the 6 tribes of humans means shit under the armor, they all look alike. [/quote] I'm not sure that having different weapon\armor models is necessary. It takes up a lot of art resou

[quote who="Alstein" reply="3" id="2856630"] I like this idea as a general rule. That said, it's hard to balance this way. [/quote] Thanks - as to the balance issue, of course it's going to be hard to balance, but it is an attempt at balance between monsters\heroes\armies. At the moment, I don't see any balance at all. [quote who="Alstein" reply="3" id="2856630"] Heroes will also need to be magic resistant, or armies will need to be vulnerable