paladinjb

I am sad that this discussion has become all about Steam rather than the great features and changes that are being brought to the world of Elemental.

Right now I feel one of the weaker points of the game is the whole sovereign, champion, and even henchmen thing. You pick your sovereign based on a playstyle, spells, and abilities that you want to play and then you find some champion or power level some henchman that makes your sovereign irrelevant in comparison. I thought the sovereigns were supposed to be the premier channelers in the game. Why is some champion that I just found sitting in a hut loaded with magical paths

Here is how to make crafting simple, fun, and intertwined with your empire: 1. You need to research certain techs to make items. I think you should really overhaul all three tech trees right now anyway, but depending on how many techs you want to add you can go simple if using the current tech tree which would just have different general categories like lesser artifact, greater artifact, and epic artifact. You could also break it down further like armor, wea

I think to answer the question properly and fully we have to know what is planned for the expansion and what this game engine is truly capable of. Without full knowledge of how the underlying code really works I can tell that there is a game of epic proportions waiting to be unveiled. I know that your team has put a whole lot of work into "Elemental" already, but it will be worth it to keep the game going in a positive direction until it becomes a true masterpi

Champions split the xp up when together, and that may discourage you from massing them up, but here are a few points: 1. Loot can only be used by champions and henchmen, so while you have as much standard equipment to create custom units with as you have metal and crystal, there are some fancy items which far surpass anything that you can make, and only champs can use em. I find it also a lot easier to tank up a champion than a trained unit starting from the early game. Ma

I like the patch so far, except I notice something probably game-breaking about the new mechanic. You can queue up a pioneer and it will subtract the population, and then cancel it later and it will give you the 30 population back, even putting you over your food cap (which lets you cheat). Territory does seem like its more meaningful now that you can't just spam pioneers and make cities/outposts to cover the map and the race between you and the other factions

So as I was reading about the desire to create more of an intertwining between your empire and your champions. What if by default, you could only have one champion at a time per stack of units? I think you would be forced to create more units, which would in turn force you to build your empire and research tech to more directly affect the outcome of your army strength. There could even be buildings (probably requiring a high level city and/or a tech) that would allow you to

There are going to be a lot less outposts with the -30 population cost. Here are some possible changes that I was thinking about regarding them: should their starting area of effect be larger? and should the high tower addon add 2 range? more range would make some of the other addons better. i suspect not many people use some of them is consulate fine the way it is? should it be earlier in the tech tree or cost less to build? since an outpost i

1. AI tech cheating and diplomacy 2. Pathfinding 3. Auto-combat/auto-resolve 4. AI buying items and design of units 5. Deorcnysse wildands bugging on city capture and not being defended (not sure if the bug only happens on "the wildlands" map) Also I think some quests are too game changing early on, most notable the archers. By getting the archers you can really jump in power. The bow techs you would need to reproduce comparab

How about a playable race where the tech tree is more about unlocking new unit types (like a twisted faction that goes from darkling-ogre-troll) with unique abilities over weapon and armor upgrades?

Actually on that note i just thought of a few things. More multi-step encounters would be cool, kind of like the arena, but not on that scale/level. Also, maybe whenever you engage a stack on the map, nearby stacks are automatically engaged as reinforcements at the end of the current battle. This could change the game strategy from using just one stack of doom to having to create more units.

or that you think the lair was empty and mama bear comes home angry!

Also if you want to equip your "real" champion, another henchman, or your sovereign with a set of newly researched armor or weapon it is also cheaper to just train up a henchman with the armor on. You can then trade the armor to whoever you want or even sell them. If you were to buy the pieces from your shop it would cost a ton of gildar, but production is easier to come by. I also noticed after you trade the armor off the henchman sometimes keeps his defense rating until yo

[quote quoting="post"] *** Unreleased *** Shards are slightly rarer [/quote] Also depending on how rare the shards will be, and even with current default settings, some of the spells might need to be adjusted on how they scale with shards. By the time you will be able to conquer a reasonable number of shards, the other spells that scale to caster level (like fire bolt) will be so powerful you won't even waste mana on the other spells. I guess it depends

I think pioneers costing population is good to balance out the creation of new cities, but when taking the ability to create outposts into account it may wind up being too pricey for that. Is X amount of population to create a city balanced, but overpriced to create an outpost? Might have to find a way to differentiate the cost on those two abilities. This would also makes the spell arcane monolith, the one that creates outposts, very powerful, because you are esse

So going through a bunch of different playthroughs, I have noticed a continuous theme when deciding to outfit my sovereign, champions, or henchmen with a weapon. That theme is no matter what fancy weapons I picked up from loot or quests, or what weapons I have available to buy/create through researched tech, that the Lightning Hammer will outshine 95% of the weapons (lol Curgen's Maul and Scythe of the Void). The Lightning Hammer is a weapon that you can not only find at

So I noticed that the AI can recruit champions without having a city or unit next to them. I saw an AI unit get close to a champion and I split my army to block their path, but the next turn the AI unit was in the same spot, 2 squares away, and the champion was recruited by their faction. Not sure if this is intended or not. Considering the AI gets a gold boost, this sucks!

I don't create swords too much either for trained troops unless I have the unique tech for it, but I do use them a lot on champions as I find a lot of good daggers/swords for them in the world, especially for the casters. I find them effective when you can buff their attack through spells or items. For trained troops I usually use spears with mounts and charge. Otherwise I do think the value of having a high attack is generally undervalued, but spears would still would b

Perhaps path of the governor should also add xp for sitting in a city? I also think that adventurer's guild building should be buffed, well at least the xp per turn part.

I think that it doesn't have to get too complicated mechanically to add some variety and depth to the late game "cavalry charge" but some changes would really improve this part of the game and make you think a bit more on your army composition. Increasing production costs or maintenance makes sense when thinking about the care of the mount and the added equipment that would go along with using a mount,but I don't think that alone would be enough to deter people from using them

Just played a game where the AI settled right near an ashwake dragon. The dragon ignored the AI city and attacked my city which wasn't anywhere near the dragon's lair.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8811733/Elemental0_805-2010-07-04T22-46-58-988.zip http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8811733/Elemental0_805-2010-07-05T03-27-21-612.zip http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8811733/Elemental0_805-2010-07-05T03-38-43-9