I would pay at least one karma for instructions on how to do this, if you get it to work. Obviously, I agree completely.

Because specialists are used for soldiers (which are not tied to a city and attaching them would impose overhead), at best you could create a local resource that is done like specialists and is used by buildings (thus limiting the number than can be used in a given city). That is assuming the creation of such a resource is possible.

magic is still extremely weak compared to combat. i made a custom sovereign with mostly combat traits bought him a spear in the beginning and only build food + houses + technology buildings went for warfare bought him the best equipment conquered the whole map without any trouble.

-magic seems to do less damage then is shown in combat, i.e. i cast a fireball and it shows a -7 over the head of the enemy but he looses only 4 hit points

-research is a bit strange now it seems you get nearly every technology to choose from, in previous iteration it took me quite a while to tech the 'other side' (demons) now i can get a demon pretty fast with the gold from my rampaging sovereign

-some faction traits seem to be not working (death worship for example)

-magic is way too weak and it takes too long to get even basic spells, imho each sovereign should start with a basic combat spell

-the popups for idle cities appear multiple times in one turn if you have some cities idle at the same turn, making it worthless since if you click on construct something the next popup appears immediately.

it is really sad to see the most broken strategies do still work and are even more powerful this time. just try the following:

-make an all combat sovereign

-buy a weapon from your city in first turn

-go out and kill stuff, while your cities build population

-research either warfare or better magic for weapons and armor

==> you sovereign is a god in the early game that can conquer the whole map

-even if their is some enemy that is resisting just research diplomacy and get dragons/demons in the midgame

just tried to 1.1 beta patch

its alot better i think the game goes now in the right directio

I too wanted to post my first impressions/ bugs/ thoughts, and here was a convenient thread for it.  Sorry if its a bit of a wall.  I played for an hour or two, more of a casual game (custom sov/ normal difficulties/ Tarth kingdom) to look around more than trying to power game or really test the AI . .that comes later.  I didn't play much of the previous patch so I might mention 1 or 2 things that were more from a previous patch, but there shouldn't be too much.

I did want to say lots of props though to Stardock for the changes.  The base game felt like it had more strategic depth to it, and while the game has run pretty smooth since the pre-release versions, the game play was smooth and I didn't feel distracted often by the technical aspects like the UI and could enjoy aspects of the art and such a bit more while playing.  It definitely doesn't feel totally balanced yet (of course), but it makes a good game a lot better IMO.  I probably would have gave the original Elemental (after the first stability patches) about a 65-70, this beta patch feels more like an 80-85.

Things I noticed I really liked:

UI is much improved - especially the build menu.  Still some improvement possible, but it felt a lot easier to get along with.

I enjoyed some of the art enhancements.  New magic spell art, the slightly richer color palate, some of the elegant dresses I noticed.  The ability to change my unit card.  The widened variety of tactical maps, etc.

Is there a bit more music and ambient sound now or am I just noticing it more?  Either way I found myself enjoying what I heard a bit more than before.

Again, felt more strategic, especially the mana upkeep I think was done well.  The question of enchant vs imbue vs summon seems a much more in depth decision, esp with latter spells costing hundreds of mana so a high regen is likewise desirable.  If anything I almost think that summons are now the worst choice, with some of the balance issues, and instant recruit spells.

I tried to focus on magic, and it did feel more . .magical.  It may not be the strongest most power game-y path yet, but I liked unlocking books, locking down shards, casting in combat, deciding how many imbue / enchants I wanted vs how many heals I wanted to cast.  It was a big focus for my admittedly short test so far, but again, big step in right direction IMO.

On the first 30 turns:

I know it was a big focus, so my thoughts on it I thought were important to say early on.  A bit of a mixed bag for me, and I'm sure some is luck of the draw on starts.  I did get two quests (kill rat, find horse) early on, which were nice right off the bat, I also had an air shard and a farm, and that was it.  In a way it almost seemed a bit slower just in the sense that I had to build the beacon to get pop faster to build the workshop, then build the farm with the mats, then build the hut before I could branch out - which is about 15 turns or so of set in stone building that unless I found mats in a caravan drop that I really can't skip.  And all that before I can build a study or lab to get some tech going (didn't pick meditative or anything this game since I wanted a weapon and all the spell books).  There were also far far fewer roaming monsters than the last few builds.  Perhaps 2 wolves in the first 50 turns.  I thought maybe a guaranteed caravan drop for mats and maybe instead of the beacon of hope (or in addition) a starter enchant on the base city for added pop that wore off after 10 turns, just to let the player branch out a bit faster.  Maybe just a couple more start quests nearby, but again, I know some of it is luck of the draw.  I found it fun, just not especially faster or more dangerous.

Things I thought were bugs / oversights (as in yes actually bugs not just "I want it balanced please"):

One crash, which was about the same as before, took about an hour.

When hiring a champ with escorts, they say you're hiring them and the escort, but the escorts remain neutral as "Solider - NPC" or the like, and wander off as neutrals forever.

I was attacked by a NPC Champ without provocation, won, then had the "you murdered some poor innocent" screen come up.  He attacked me magistrate, I swear!

"City not building" popups sometimes occur multiple times within the same turn, but don't let you build something before the next one comes up.  In all I might like this toggle able by city, as I found myself doing many more outposts and few main cities.

In one battle I had a spider with 0/11 hp (after a counterattack) and it still lived until I smacked it again to kill it on my turn.

Slight land tearing (faint enough I hesitate to call it tearing, more like grooving) on closest zoom, noticed on leveled land in kingdom area near shores and up against one high mountain.

When I reloaded from my crash I noticed that both my and the AI's cities influence was messed up.  We both had outpost cities with nothing but the town center, with radius 2 influence to grab resources that were 2 tiles away from the center.  When reloading, the city influence on both was down to 1 tile, so resources were out of bounds.  I had to rebuild the upgrades on both tiles, though it may be the crash took me to right before they were fully build (not 100% sure).

Ambient music plays with game minimized (very minor)

A few thoughts for balance:

I did like the influence spread a bit more, felt good to have my capital spread a ton of influence pretty fast, and my outposts stay small.  Good stuff, though city spam to build more units at once is still sort of possible, though only with weak 1 unit squads, its more of a resource lockdown thing.

World did feel more barren but in a good way- the resources felt much more important.

Balance on mana seemed good, and food seemed the other big limiting resource, but the other aspects seemed a bit out of whack.  The only civic tech I learned was the first harvesting, only researched 1 tech of the resource discovery.  Ultimately, I only had one gold mine, but felt super rich, and never once thought about costs of building anything, or needing more merchants or tech.  I felt like I could easily spam 50x studies + 50x labs in my capitol if I wanted - way more mats than needed, way more gold, even with just 1 mine, tons of pop with a level 3/4 city, as I didn't have to raise an army because of the next issue . . .

Champions.  I picked bard as my start background, and I had and army of Champions in the first 100 turns.  Probably 25-30 of them.  This was without researching any recruitment adventuring techs.  I had a ton of gold, so suited them all up whenever I wanted, hardly ever felt like building a normal unit.  Perhaps this is a valid gameplay style and I was focused enough to being champ friendly that its actually good, but I did want to mention it seemed a bit over the top.  Also Champions run away from sov/ other champs, making it a bit hard to recruit them sometimes (really just a sidenote)

Again, gear costs seemed low now, think taxes are worth too much offhand.  I'm sure it'll all be worked out, but definitely felt like most of my planning was how to get food, which shards to take, and do I want to level a city vs build a new one with my food, but I never once outside the first 20 turns looked at my pop limit or my gold/ mats.  It may be more of an issue endgame but at least arcane wise I felt I was almost already there within 2 hours.

Because I could spam a ton of labs and studies my tech and arcane research went fast as I wanted it to, grabbing level 7 spells way way before I could ever hope to case due to mana costs.  Seemed a bit out of balance.

A few other tweaks/ wonderment:

I noticed the spell Storm has no mana cost associated with it.  I decided this was intentional since its relatively low powered, but at first I was sure it had to be a bug. Just wanted to be sure as I don't think the description mentioned it being free to cast, which is a rather important distinction from other combat spells. (Though I did have fun casting it about 5x a turn, esp with a dagger equipped so I got more actions)

Thinking of recasting spells, any chance to have a quick one click to ready the last cast spell?  Either quick key or radial menu /right click caster/ something?  Its a bit of a pain to click 5-6 x just to cast another storm or heal in a row.

Salted Pork.  Everyone has it, it must be like the jack links beef jerkey.  Even bears have it.  And spiders.  I liked the idea of drops a lot.  But too much pork.

Anyways, I'm sure there will be more, and other things of note, but just my first impressions.  Again, liking the direction of the game.  It still is the same Elemental I bought some months ago, but its come a long way.  Again, props to all involved, looking forwards to more, and I'm sure giving more feedback on this beta patch to help continue to polish it all up.

generally great; i'm not gonna dwell on the good because most has already been mentioned. the clear forest option deserves a shout out as well though. and thankyou very muchly for stealing my spellbook idea.

first though; for some reason it keeps registering my clicks as being on the tile below the one i intended. what happened there? i also encountered a bug where i was allowed to attempt to place buildings i did not have the resources to build, resulting in me clicking on green squares endlessly wondering what was wrong.

the specialist requirement for building things seems to work for now, but tbh right now the gold requirement (absolutely everything has a 1g/turn maintenance now) seems to be a stronger limiting factor than pop requirements. having started a game where neither of my first two towns were near either a gold resource or second food resource has lead to the same old paralysis problem i always seem to get in elemental, without the food resources to expand population and increase tax revenue, nor the income to expand and aquire more farmland. once again my natural instinct to develop my settlements as much as possible (which serves me so well in other games) brings me low in a stardock title. i dislike having to calculate whether another workshop or two will cripple my economy before i build it. i like the idle city prompt, but the fact that the game implies you should be constantly building when to do so is often suicidal is really irresponsible. if i hadn't known better (about the unintuitive building maintenance stardock loves) i could have really messed up my game there.

i remain highly doubtful of the idea of having to build another lore shop every 5 guys i get. both because of the micromanagement in the end game (when pop growth is much faster) and because of the obscene urban sprawl it is causing already. but as you will see later, i will not get far enough to test this hypothesis.

this input/output attitude now pervades even into enchanting, where the reduction in mana income caused by long term enchanting or summoning looks set to cripple any long term magic strategy. i haven't played long enough with the beta to tell yet (and to be frank it's rare that i ever get past the opening stages of this game before i give up in frustration), but i'm very sceptical about the idea of linear mana generation with no limit. see the second posts in both these threads for more thoughts:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/400368/page/8/#replies

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397730

i also remain highly sceptical about the decision to scrap essense. i think INT is now massively overloaded, and preferred having a reduction in the sovereigns personal power as the penalty for imbuing, rather than mana maint (and it seems like there is far too much mana maint around now; the system in the second link would be a better way of doing this)

playing the beta generally brings to mind the following things (which are not particularly beta specific, just the same old lame)

- monsters should not attack cities on easy difficulty. they should be a hinderance to expansion, not a threat to survival. building a peasant in every new town immediately can really slow down your expansion early game (there's maint as well don't forget), and i usually end up scraping by without for long term reasons (because you ultimately end up disbanding them anyway). unfortunately this means a lot of reloading. i can't imagine what it's like for new players. i am playing easy mode, it is currently 169AC and there is a spider stack with a combat rating of 85 next to my main city. how? there's no way i could possibly have developed forces enough to defeat that by this stage of the game. fortunately whenever they attack and i click auto-resolve, nothing happens. is this a bug? if not, it's the only reason i haven't dispaired of the game. (EDIT: turn 170 and darklings take my capital in easy mode despite me having two peasants there. fail.)

- it seems i can no longer attack monsters without a weapon. neither do i start with an offensive spell. this is massively lame. i don't think it's too much to expect that a sovereign should be able to defeat basic level 1 bandits from the get go in easy mode. you could at least give people a free basic weapon.

- really wish resources would spawn better. that is to say, i have no idea why there is not a standard formula for a reasonable range of starting resources. what is the sense in one game starting me with a shard and fertile land, when another starts me with both that, and two temples, a gold mine and wolves? wouldn't it be easier to say everyone gets 1 land, 1 gold/materials resource/lost library and 1 shard/mounts/scenic view? i get people like having to adapt, but adapting to different resources and adapting to non-existant resources are too very different things. if i want to up the difficulty, i will do that on the main menu, not have it randomly determined for me. this is not like gal civ bonus tiles, food and gildar are the life blood of this game. if you want to link starting resources to difficulty, then do that. it would be a far better way of providing/reducing challenge than however it is the game currently does this.

- similarly, resources elsewhere on the map need to cluster MUCH better. i'm still in the situation of either putting my settlements right on food/gold resources so i can use them right away (often in atrocious locations) or trying to straddle two resources in the hope that my influence will one day allow me to get both (of course, if i never get the gold or food to expand, this may never happen).

i still think the fundamental problem at the heart of the game is food. you either have enough of it to expand (and if you have too much you gain no advantage in comparison to having just enough) or you don't have enough to expand (and get more food), which can result in paralysis. getting the balance between these scenarios will always be impossible so long as the system remains such a crude win/loose model. for a long time we were on the oversupply side of the equation, but the beta has brought us back in the other direction, and the paralysis it can cause is imho even worse than the city spam of the food-resources-are-redundant era. i hate to sound like a broken recond, but look at "buildings don't eat food, people do" for more.

Just as a short update on my huge wall o' post, I did try a few more starts just since the first 30 was a bit awkward the first time through on the beta, and as I somewhat suspected it was luck of the draw.   Had several abandoned caravans + the farm / shard nearby my second start and it sped things up considerably, let me pick what I wanted to expand to building wise before about 15-20 turns in.  I also hit a lot more monsters this seed, about average for the last few builds, so that made things a bit faster feeling as well.

I also ran into an interesting Magnar aggression in this game, was battling them out for first place score wise, maybe 75 turns in, they pulled ahead by a couple points and demanded gold.  I laughed, only to notice they had 9 city guards right outside one of my cities.  Hadn't seen that before, so was fun.  I guess there is a bit of AI tweaking in there after all, though I have noticed its still a bit bad on city placement for resources.  Also had a fun culture war on the other side of my capital as I leveled my cap to 4 pretty fast and stole the other nation (Kraxis I think) libaray with the huge influence sphere.  Interesting and fun.

So two starts, two different results and I did end up tweaking my strategies quite a bit more that start.  Again, finding it fun, just thought I'd update since my first game seed was so slow by comparison.

I have two questions for the beta players (i would like to try the beta myself, but im not at home this week):

Is population a local resource or a global resource? I think a local resource would be better, because it would encourage the player to build cities.

Is the mana resource divided into earth, air, water and fire, as in Disciples 2, or is there only an universal mana resource? I think earth, air, water and fire mana would be better, because it would encourage the player to build cities at different locations and it would make the shards unique. 

I did the same thing thinking it would benefit me early with a cedar bow. Against Umber soldiers with 10def I didn't get a miss but rather a "resist" I wonder--is that a result of intelligence? Doesn't make sense that a soldier would have it. I used the same bow against a pioneer from the same faction with the same result. I wound up using a peasant to kill him. How does a pioneer with no def resist? Also, when I hit enemy for all or more total hit points, they hang around for another shot with 1-2 HP left....

No big really...I'm sure there are a lot of tweaks ahead

The game do look improved, but there is still no challenge in game.
So much talk about spell book, tec tree etc, I still think that you can improve that for ages, but as long as I can beat the game with a minimum of tactic, the game will never last unless played multiplayer.

I did play 2 games, and could conquer the other nations with a minimum of effort, in no time.
So I pray for that Brad's AI optimization will make the game a challenge or there will be no point in playing it for me.

I have played a few hours. Some random thoughts and bugs, not all 1.09n specific:

* Where's the AI? He builds a town right next to me and I just waltz in and grab it as it is undefended... Then a few turns later it happens again. I need to play more maybe to see some aggression but so far, nothing.

* TC: Hit points are removed before the actual strike. Makes TC less exciting.
* TC: Extremely slow battles with some spiders, and they get gradually slower and eventually unplayable. Some sort of leak?
* TC: Defenders should not have to move first. Simple fix: AI stands still until player is in range to be attacked.

* Spellcasting: When I cast a global spell on a stack, how do I choose who to cast it on?
* Spellcasting: The global city improvement spells, why can I only cast say Fertility on the city my sov is in? I should be able to cast it on any city.
* Spellcasting: I can farm Familiars since they now can cast global spells. Just have the familiars summon eachother for the cost of 1 mana each and you have a Familiar army that takes out everything.

* Spellbook: New spells are good, but the interface is awful. Just because it is called "spellbook", does it have to look like a book? Can it be called "Spell scroll" or "Spell Ipad" so that we can get a proper interface without pages and huge icons?

* Items: Salted pork and Healing nectar have the same stat but different price?

* I had two cities and tried to move a peasant between them. Usually, you can select the peasant icon and right click the other city to set the path and have him move automatically, but it didn't work. Perhaps because there was a gap in my area of influence between the cities?

* Shop: Items bought should be auto equipped if possible, and you should be able to sell items you have equipped already.

* Quest: If you get gildar or something else from a quest, I want to know how much. "A pouch" is not very specific.

* Idea: The beginning of the game is very boring. Perhaps some initial quests to kick it off? Find your first items, help some stranger and learn a spell etc. Elemental: Origins?

* Idea: You should be able to build maps whith already developed cities, already researched spells, techs etc so that you can get right into battle/questing or whatever it is you want to do. To always have to go through the slow start makes me not want to start a new game...

More to come.

Exactly what I'm doing.

For you guys that are playing the 1.1 beta, how has the tactical combat system improved?

Nobody has said anything about this

The animations are faster in tactical battles...which makes it a bit better.