Mistwraithe

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="45" id="3098801"]Now, I saw someone say the Barracks is useless. It reduces the training time quite a bit. So my question is, what would make the Barracks more compelling?[/quote] The reason the barracks is useless is that production time isn't really a limit on the number of troops I have. Gildar is pretty much the only real limit on troops numbers (perhaps population too if you really went crazy on troops). Production isn't even close to lim

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="12" id="3098725"]Again I'm not saying we should be getting less resources, just that we should be able to and to a certain degree have to specialize cities around specific resources. This would make every city different and make designing cities interesting and important, especially if you also have different tech paths that help you with specific resources.[/quote] Your point is a good one. There is a real dearth of buildings for cities to build early

All the discussions in the thread sound good. Actually what is good is that everyone (but most especially Stardock) are thinking about how to solve these problems. Note that if the ability to sell items to the shop is nerfed (which seems necessary and inevitable) then the early 'normal' economy from cities needs to be beefed up. By coincidence there is currently a major lack of worthwhile buildings to build early game so there is room for some useful economy b

[quote who="Henry_Morgan" reply="31" id="3098278"]Speaking of which, you made a recent post suggesting that the enemy AI wasn't properly taking advantage of monster lairs and so forth. If and when corrected won't this settle some of the balance? If there are fewer things to sell because the enemy AI has gobbled up the loot, then part of the above problem may take care of itself, right?[/quote] Possibly true but it wouldn't change the fact that finding items and

Or just make the second weapon only do half damage. The concept is cool and I'm positive there would be a way of balancing it such that it was strong (because it is a rare trait after all and it would need to be better than an average trait in order to make it worth picking) but not overpowered.

Yeah first enemy sovereign I saw had 4 paths! He was still a bit of a wimp (underlevelled and no decent items) but geez his stats were nice!

Thanks for the reply. My capital was busy for a while, say the first 30-40 turns doing just as you say. However once I added a few more settlements and had two monster hunting groups I realised there was little more to build unless I wanted to launch an invasion against a neighbour (ie go heavy military). At that point one also realises that those workshops, lumbermills and barracks are just holding you back so I sold them in all but a single military production city. And then my cities sat t

You, sir, win the forums! Bravo! [e digicons]k1[/e] You have described my biggest problems with the game in a single very well written and argued post. Particularly on the strategic side which to me are much bigger problems than the various tactical issues. I hope your post remains high up on these boards for many days to come, if I had my way it would be stickied until the developers said they were working on solutions to these problems. One area which I think should be elab

Oh, I should add that I also think ranged weapons should have limited ammo. All units would pretty much have to have a melee attack to fall back on (albeit potentially a weak one) if that was implemented.

Fair points. I don't know for sure if ranged works exactly the same when you are standing beside the enemy but my impression was that it did. In any case I guess you can usually step back. Ideally units holding ranged weapons should be more vulnerable to melee than if they had a melee weapon out. Shields partially implement this but holding a two handed weapon is no better than holding a bow which seems a bit wrong. Anyway back to my suggestion. There are two reasons I mad

Originally I had two doubts about FE: would it get enough fun stuff packed into it and would it be a good strategy game. Looking at 0.86 I'm becoming quite confidant that the former is not going to be a problem. As the Fall From Heavan mod demonstrated Derek specialises in adding good crunch and differentiation between factions. However I still have some big doubts about the strategy side. A key element of good strategy games like Civilization 4 (which I believe is close t

I know others have mentioned this but I wanted to add my voice. I believe a hero should be able to put away their bow or other ranged weapon in exchange for a melee weapon and shield (if 1 handed weapon). However if a design goal is for there to be a penalty for starting with a bow then how about Stardock make it that changing weapons in combat ends the hero's turn, just like attacking or casting a spell does?

[quote who="DarkGaldred" reply="60" id="3096359"]I agree : I usually like tech trees, but this one is awfully boring, and it results in we not having anything to do with our cities 75% of the time. [/quote] I agree entirely with this. Playing strategy games is about making choices and there are no choices involved in having nothing to build (or at least nothing which it makes sense to build) in any of your settlements most of the time early-mid game.

[quote who="DarkGaldred" reply="24" id="3095042"]I agree with both of these issues : First strike is too powerful, so we need either counter attack, either base HP being much higher compared to damage than they are now to mitigate this, or anything else to stop the tactical battles from being a boring exercise of counting spaces. Archers being able to kite from melee without penalty, and having endless amunition is a problem too. It allows a singl

Oh, one more fairly serious bug/feature. Loading an Autosaved game seems to start the game in a state which never *actually* happened. To explain, several times bad things happened such as a monster deciding to attack my adjacent sovereign and kill them (well, send them back to home etc). I then reloaded the autosave and found that in this alternative reality my sovereign was now two squares away from the monster. It seems like loading an autosave processes an extra turn for the playe

Having a single queue is critical to having a balanced game IMO. As Sarudak said it makes the user choose between building their economy or building their military. If you give the player two queues they will do both simultaneously which removes one of the main strategic choices in a good strategy game.

Mmm. Sounds like a very sensible idea to me. I presume the goal of the 8 square limit is to avoid having too many cities but basing it off the outer built limits of the cities makes it an 8+ square limit, potentially 10 or 11 squares if you have built a bit. If they make it based purely off the initial square then it becomes more predictable and you won't accidentally screw yourself over. Of course the 8 square limit could also be to reduce snaking in which case this change would

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="8" id="3092023"]I don't think its bad that a high level caster can melt mobs with AOE ... but I think we should consider what said caster is levelling in. Is it spell power? Intelligence? Evokation? No, not necessarily. It is initiative. The highest initiative caster usually does the most damage. And its not even all that hard to get to either. Just select impulsive in Sovereign creation, wear a dagger, and get

Food is one of my two big problems with the current FE game mechanics (the other being gold production, see https://forums.elementalgame.com/418589 ) Grain/food is one of the things the game indicates you should take into account when settling your cities and is a key bonus of a number of early techs too. So early on the game makes it seem like food is something you should be paying close attention to. And yet food makes no

I've started a few games of 0.86 FE and played one of them a moderate way through. I was very critical of WoM, both as released and the final version. However FE is a different beast. I think a lot of work is still needed on all aspects of the game (AI, GUI, resource mechanics, unit/item balance, tactical combat, etc) but all these aspects are already much better than WoM and I think it is fair to say that with a few more bug fixes FE could be released now and scrape in as a B grade game.

All stats need to be useful and I agree intelligence is currently less use than it should be in a lot of cases. I like the MoM mechanics where physical attack is countered by defence and magical attacks are countered by resistance. All 4 of these (physical attack, defences, magical attack, resistance) should scale appropriately with stats. Some of these mechanics appear to be in FE but they I don't see magical damage scaling with intelligence as I would expect and similarly resist

Good comments!

But space bar is already the key in strategic map for ending *units* turns. If you make it also the key for ending your whole *sides* turn then it would be very easy to hit it once too often and thereby end your turn before you organised your build queues etc. I'm against the idea.

Yep, noticed this too. Definite bug.

Some good ideas here. Some (many?) staffs definitely should give at least a weak ranged attack. Weapon initiative bonuses should be revamped as suggested so that the fastest weapons are 0 and anything slower is a negative. Some magical weapons/items could possibly have + initiative boosts.