Olikut

Join Date 04/2008

[1.09n] barren Orchards, Metropolis de-housing, costly Blink, Charisma prestige, slow yet daring Offspring, and Mobility^n!

A couple bugs I've noticed in the latest build:

1. In my three games of 1.09n so far, Orchards consistently do not provide any food. They also seem to be pretty plentiful, the damn taunting things. Haven't seen any winter wheat or pumpkin patch yet in 3 games on medium maps.

2. Once my cities reach lvl 5, I just destroy all the houses/apartments. Frees up lots of food and city tiles to build on, with no harmful repercussions. I imagine that cities full of homeless study faculty aren't exactly what you had in mind for this mechanic. It is useful though, seeing as the empire (playing as kingdom) cities I occupy retain their empire population leveling mechanics, but with kingdom housing mechanics. It takes a lot of houses to get that captured city to a metropolis.

2b. You city tile limits can be surpassed - I can build infinite buildings in a city. The easiest way to do it, capture at least one special resource tile with your city (so that it become incorporated into the city walls), build to the city tile limit (50), destroy the captured resource tile building (now at 46/50 city tiles), build 4 more city tiles worth of stuff, re-build the resource, viola! you now have negative city tiles, which you can theoretically build to -infinity. Personally I chose lots of studies. I wonder if this is why my game refuses to end turn for me now, except for after a relaunch/reload.

3. Blink works... for everyone but my sovereign. For the sovereign it tells me I don't have enough mana to cast, even when I have orders of magnitude more many that Blink costs.

4. Charisma prestige isn't working as advertised [prestige bonus = charisma/5]. It appears to be working more along the lines of [prestige bonus = (charisma - 10)/5].

5. After my first heir (which started with 3 attack speed), all follow on children had 1 attack speed. They will also use up to 4 attack speed/move points to move a single tile in tactical battle (as opposed to the 2 everyone else uses). Doesn't seem to be a problem for the AI offspring, as they all tend to be fine (and start with interesting swords of wrath, whereas my offspring start with nothing but clothes). This is somewhat offset by all my offspring's ubermenschen Daring Attacks. It doesn't show up as an ability, just as floating text during combat every time they strike. It appears to multiply their normal attack by 3x for the first attack, +x for each additional attack. So far my single biggest attack for one of my children was over 180, I'm so proud. This happens for both my bloodline and their spouses. Unfortunately none of my children inherited my channeling ability - all the AI ones do though.

6. By happenstance, I found that 1, mobility doesn't cost upkeep, and 2 mobility can be stacked ad infinitum as long as you have the mana to cast it. This really helps my late game transportation for my sovereign and his family squad. Between Teleport and moving 10+ tiles in a turn, I have no problem snagging every quest/goody hut on the map. I haven't bothered with Greater Mobility since my discovery.

As for general comments:

a. tactical spells do garbage damage. Just like archery, displayed damage numbers are right about as often as a stopped clock. Direct damage spells are worthless against mid to late game creeps. Against early game creeps they still aren't worth the mana cost. Perhaps Intelligence needs to help with resistance penetration as well as beef up damage more significantly for all spells?

b. tech research is the bottle neck in the game right now. It is too stretched out, especially for the civics and warfare tree. For instance, rather than having a single weapon for a tech, compress multiple weapons into the same tech - just differentiate their damage, abilities, and costs more for balance. As it stands, I only make 2 types of infantry units - glass cannons with no armor and max weapon damage I have, and a defense unit with the most armor and most attacks I can get. I've only seen 1 horse and 1 warg resource in my 3 medium sized games, but those bloody spider resources are everywhere.

c. what is up with resource finding techs? Do they spawn new resources when they are researched, rather than uncovering hidden resources? Every now and then resources just appear on my map in places they weren't before, even after I've maxed that tech out. I can only assume an AI made them spawn. If it is spawning resources, may I suggest you change it to uncover hidden ones instead? Having to rely on AI characters to help fill out the map with resources is lame, and it should give me an advantage over the other players rather than providing resources for all (if that is what it is doing) the mechanics of this need to be more explicit.

d. some jerk AI built a Great Mill improvement after I had built one myself. I thought this was supposed to be unique? Damn cheater.

e. An interface to see all current enchantments for my faction would be nice. Searching through all my channelers to see who cast imbue on that farmer that no longer needs it is tedious (imbue-return-unimbue, yay!), and what happens if the original caster dies?

f. why can't my sov wear traveling boots and a journeyman cloak? What determines who can wear the damn things? Can we put something in item descriptions to show what 'classes' of champions can use them? Also, I can't use the resource, and I can't train troops to ride wargs, but damned if I can't ride one myself - shouldn't stuff like this be faction/race linked?

In all, you guys are doing a good job. I had to walk away from Elemental for a couple months because the builds were pissing me off and I was having less fun with it than I did in Beta 2 back when I saw all its potential but hadn't yet seen it go in the pooper. That said I think Elemental is back on track now. There is still a lot of work to do, but I think the foundation is in place on which to build a really engaging, detailed, immersive game and I see hints that you are moving in that direction. Of course you could also unpleasantly surprise me and dump a shithole shanty on top of that great foundation. But I don't suspect you'd do that to your baby.

elemental

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Once my cities reach lvl 5, I just destroy all the houses/apartments. Frees up lots of food and city tiles to build on, with no harmful repercussions. I imagine that cities full of homeless study faculty aren't exactly what you had in mind for this mechanic. It is useful though, seeing as the empire (playing as kingdom) cities I occupy retain their empire population leveling mechanics, but with kingdom housing mechanics. It takes a lot of houses to get that captured city to a metropolis.

In someone ways, I agree with this point. At every city level above the first, the city hub provides more than enough population storage to meet the housing needs for the particular level. This means that at any city level, all housing built to reach that level becomes unnecessary to sustain the city level. So on this point, you are absolutely correct to point out that a level 5 city no longer needs housing as you have 1500 pop limit with the city hub alone. Since the idea here is to never let cities lose enough storage to legitimate them losing a level, there seems to be two distinct solutions. The first would be to have houses be indestructable, which would be a very bad idea. The second would be to set city hubs to provide some storage based on the amount to the next level and require that you can only destroy houses to the lower limit of the level up storage requirement. So a level 5 city might provide 600 storage and you can only destroy down to some amount just above 650 storage. I personally think that cities should be allow to level and de-level, which would give the cities a more natural feel. In reality, giant cities have risen and fallen and risen again many times. Consider Rome for example. The city of Rome has risen and fallen many times since the height of the Roman empire.

Charisma prestige isn't working as advertised [prestige bonus = charisma/5]. It appears to be working more along the lines of [prestige bonus = (charisma - 10)/5].

I am fairly certain that your second equation is the correct equation. In general 10 seems to be the lower limit for all stat bonuses.

tactical spells do garbage damage. Just like archery, displayed damage numbers are right about as often as a stopped clock. Direct damage spells are worthless against mid to late game creeps. Against early game creeps they still aren't worth the mana cost. Perhaps Intelligence needs to help with resistance penetration as well as beef up damage more significantly for all spells?

I could not agree more with this. Since most direct damage spells were removed in the beta, the remaining spells just do not scale very well. Having a spell that does 5-10 damage is ok nice in the early game, but fails to be very powerful against 12 troop units with around 100 hp.

some jerk AI built a Great Mill improvement after I had built one myself. I thought this was supposed to be unique? Damn cheater.

This improvement is actually 1 per faction, not one per game. Honestly though, too many of the high level buildings are one per faction, which makes having a bunch of high level cities moderately meaningless.

why can't my sov wear traveling boots and a journeyman cloak? What determines who can wear the damn things? Can we put something in item descriptions to show what 'classes' of champions can use them? Also, I can't use the resource, and I can't train troops to ride wargs, but damned if I can't ride one myself - shouldn't stuff like this be faction/race linked?

Race play a role in who can use these items. Only the kingdommale and kingdomfemale types can use these items.

tech research is the bottle neck in the game right now. It is too stretched out, especially for the civics and warfare tree. For instance, rather than having a single weapon for a tech, compress multiple weapons into the same tech - just differentiate their damage, abilities, and costs more for balance. As it stands, I only make 2 types of infantry units - glass cannons with no armor and max weapon damage I have, and a defense unit with the most armor and most attacks I can get. I've only seen 1 horse and 1 warg resource in my 3 medium sized games, but those bloody spider resources are everywhere.

This is a fairly common problem among the community. Though it is not a problem of techs but a problem with combat and weapons. Right now, all tactical units fall into three basic roles, Glass Cannon, Super Defender, and Specialty. The two you mentions, glass cannon and super defender, tend to force the player to simply bash at each other until one is victorious. The last unit role, Specialty, are your darkling, spiders, Sions, etc. which have a bit more flavor, but are extremely expensive. In my opinion, the solutions is fairly simple, and I spent a lot of time making a mod to prove a point. The idea is to simply give units special abilities based up the weapon they are using. This way, the unit gains a distinct combat role based upon his choice of weapons. So, to give an example, Hammers give defense debuffs and do knockback attacks, which the spears give defensive and counterstike buffs. This way, the player who combines arms gains a very real advantage to the player who simply fields a bunch of glass cannons. If you want to check out the mod, it can be found here.

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A quick idea to add character to the elemental spells. Have a theme (or two) for each of the elements, and have the number of shards you control of that type affect the strength of that theme for the spells. Whereas intelligence would just boost/scale the damage and/or resistance penetration.

For instance for Fire spells the theme could be damage efficiency:

Flame Dart, each shard adds another Dart to the casting, each point of intelligence over 10 adds half a point of damage to each dart.

Fireball, each shard expands explosive radius, int adds damage.

Curgen's Inferno: maybe more shards decreases the casting cost or int requirement to cast the spell, or increases the destructive area?.

Water/Ice spells theme, slowing enemy movement:

Grip of Winter, each shard increases number of turns the effect lasts. int increases effect chance % (speaking of which the effect appears to be 100% turn loss).

Blizzard, shards add duration after which the affected units can't move (but can attack/defend). int boosts damage/chance of effect.

Air theme, defense busting

Bottled Gale, each shard allows you to affect another adjacent tile, int adds to moderate base damage.

Storm, damage = modest base + unit defense * #shards * (int/10), radius 1, persists #shard rounds.

I think thats enough to get the idea. I'd also like to say I also like the idea of hybrid spells (like spell of making uses more than 1 element). For instance if you've researched both the Water and Earth spellbooks, you'd get access to, say:

Frigid Quagmire, which requires both water and earth elements. radius = 1+#earth shards, action cost = base*(#earth+#water shards), persists #water shards rounds, int adds to damage.

or for Air and Water:

Thundersnow, damage = base + unit defense * #air shards * (int/10), radius 2, %25*#water shard chance to lose turn, persists #air+#water shard rounds.

just some food for thought. There is all kinds of fun stuff you could do here.

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i thought someone said city hub should give 0 pop capacity. was wondering why they are adding 10 to starting outpost in that change log because ai is having problems (eh?)

all they have to do is add more types of housing. did they change their mind again?

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Playing as empire...

#1) Settlements cost 1 food and have a pop cap of 0. They should be at least 10. Frogboy knows about this.

#2) Same CHA issue - but looks to be working fine. On the flipside, Prestige [Royalty] ability seems to still be global.

#3) Warfare tech tree feels incredibly bloated compared to other trees.

#4) I can imbue champions from anywhere on the map, is that by design? Soverign halfway around the world grants champion spellcasting, then champion teleports his team home, then soverign removes imbue champion. Seems a little OP...

#5) Global mana good, uncapped global mana ... bad? I think you should have a pool cap. 100 for your sov, 50 per shard, 100 per greater shard, 50 per some building, 100 per greater some building, etc.

#6) I know its a long way till balance and stuff but ... offensive magic should be potent stuff. Not a total joke.

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BTW, memory leak still evident in the icons used for units - they rotate over time. Somewhere there's an uncapped array.

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