Good points. I would also say that strength is often relative. It would be good to have a relative threat ratio just before you go into battle if possible. e.g. if you're a spell-caster going up against magic-immune obsidian golems, that battle is going to be harder for you than if you were a warrior, unless of course you have direct damage spells.
Yes, that's what I meant :-)
Good idea. Anything to reduce micromanagement would be welcome.
And what would these boosts/hits be? Being overtly hostile seems like it would always have a negative impact, which is why I am guessing it is always an apparent friendly greeting until you, e.g. declare war.
Thanks for the comments guys. I will have to try Insane when I get the time, hopefully this weekend. Those AI advantages really are "insane". Sounds like you really do need a super sovereign to take them out.
I'm fine with it either way, as long as it is balanced. With it only costing 1 faction point to get Heroic, at the moment I think it's a good idea that you need heroic and altarian to get henchmen. Otherwise we have Altarians or Trogs as a race being imbalanced, or heroic/axes being imbalanced.
It says I have the latest game version 0.915.054 or something like that, so it won't let me install.
I do not have strong opinions on this yet as I simply have not played enough games, but I get the feeling that the current effective strategies [at high level, e.g. expert, ridiculous and beyond] are geared more towards peaceful rather than aggressive expansion. In the early game, where you only have a couple cities to defend, you can only afford to start a war that you can end almost immediately. Without a clean kill I feel that both warring teams will be at a massive di
I haven't tried insane yet but faction power of 1676 by turn 40 is "insane". Was that a freak result? You say you didn't settle cities by turn 40 but by turn 40 I probably had about 8-10 cities so I would be using a different strategy to you. I guess it could only win in the long run if I didn't have CPUs breathing down my neck, so I would probably have to use a custom sovereign + faction and abuse the OP customisation, possibly with some diplomacy perks and a
A more complicated tactical battle would involve way more complicated AI. It's not going to happen this late in the development imo.
You're not in the minority Kalin. Master Scouts makes Insane level difficulty easy. The problem with not making cities immune to monsters is you can just stick a unit in the city or outpost, and voila, a monster-immune city. That's what I do with my outpost/shrines. Just stick a pioneer in them and they're immune.
I have Poko8. I think Henchmen are attached to the Altarian race, NOT the heroic ability. I think quest maps are to if I remember right, but I could be wrong.
Re: Bellack I just tested the strategy again on Expert, and it's still broken. I've submitted 3 out of 4 opponents without even a single battle. I have twice the faction power of the opponents I meet early on, which eventually grows to 3x and 4x the faction power of the final two opponents. Early submission means I get all the perks of those sovereigns to, including the Merchant +2 Gold. You can win this way by ONLY building pioneers constantly with M
I think materials are more useful early on, especially if you have enchanted hammers. You can double or triple your production output very quickly. Food is only useful insofar as you have "enough" of it, which you always will have early game. But you can never have too much production. Also note that the amount of food does NOT affect growth rate, which is why it does very little early game. I'm still trying to work out the mechanics of population, seems
I find expansion very difficult to unless I am using Master Scouts trait, in which case I expand like crazy. Otherwise, Bellack's advice is good, although I disagree about the faction power being useless. Having a higher faction power than someone else means the AI is less likely to declare war on you, and also is more likely to surrender if you are at war with them (I think if your faction power is double opponent's they will surrender). With the Master Scouts e
Did you check the victory condition for master-quest? I'm also finding a lot of bugs with the quests. I couldn't actually return the Dragon Eye and do the master-quest, where previously I could. Moreover, after clearing out the wildlands zones, the borders never disappeared so I could not exploit the resources. I cleared out ALL Wildlands and NOT one "green" zone was clear. It was frustrating looking at all those shards and not being able to bu
OR alternatively make picks for custom faction similar to picks for sovereign: 1 from the following of Enchanters, binding, master scouts, heroic, etc. 1 from the following weaknesses you get the idea.
The most logical way to deal with the imbalance is to make the OP abilities more expensive (e.g. 2 or 3 picks). This is how they deal with it in a lot of other 4X games where you can customize abilities--MOO, MOM, etc. Otherwise, I wouldn't go tweaking many of the abilities too much, maybe just a few.
I agree with the poster. My computer is only one year old and yet when I get to late game it becomes VERY slow with all the units on the map.
Right now the kinks are in the player's favour in general. Stop making excuses about why you "need" to cheat and just say you want to! As long as you're not playing multiplayer no one really cares :-)
That was on challenging, but I figure if it works that well for challenging, it should work on higher levels to.
The question is not what unit or ability you can nurture into becoming OP, but how fast you can abuse that ability to be OP. On this basis, I am finding the Tarth scouting ridiculously strong. All you have to do is pioneer spam from the beginning and settle as many places as you can early on, then cast city improvement spells like meditation, inspiration and enchanted hammers to get your power base going. Once you do that, no one declares war on you, which means you don'
I got the same bug, except when I reloaded from save it didn't fix the problem. Had to abandon the game.
Also, auto-resolve doesn't use mana, which is useful.
Game is becoming a lot more like Master of Magic. Balance is created through many overpowered abilities, but everyone has them so.... All in all, it's a hell of a lot more fun than previous updates.