Das123

Join Date 05/2003

+82

[1.0.9p] 'Runaway Train' Strategy

Been playing the latest version and while I've been enjoying it I'm now starting to follow the same proven strategy (which I'll detail below).

One of the big issues with Elemental 1.0+ has been the 'Runaway Train' syndrome where once you get a small lead you can quickly gain momentum with it and become unstoppable. The challenge for Stardock is in how they cater for this. I've also added a few suggestions at the end of this post. Rather than tweaking the AI to make use of what is currently in the game I think that the mechanics may need some changes first.

So, my 'Runaway Train' strategy basically is...

EARLY GAME:

1. Explore only within two or three seasons distance of your home city (to protect it) but try to pick up any and all champions that come your way.Gain experience by killing off the wandering monsters nearby. Don't take quests that will take you too far away.

2. Don't spend too much yet developing your city but make sure you have some tech production, workshop (or two) and enough huts to get it to level 3. Don't build peasant troops. Build another town or two but make sure your sovereign stack can protect them. As they level up get guardians.

3. Research Warfare first and get Equipment asap. Afterwards switch to Magic and get the Shards.

4. When you have Equipment design a new unit with an oak spear and padded cuirass. This will provide 10 attack and 3 defence. Enough to beat all but developed sovereigns and champions. Start spamming these units from your towns. Build more workshops etc if you are running out of materials as you build them.

5. Study the following spells: a. Familiar. b. Heal. c. Level 2. d. Arcane Arrow (or whatever it is called).

6. When ready to go on the attack, imbue a champion (or two if you have mana to burn). Cast Familiars, and create a 12 unit stack consisting at least 6 soldiers, your familiars, and the rest made up of your champions (bring as many along as possible to have them level up).

7. The strategy is to use your spearmen as a meat shield. Initially your casters blast away at the high-armour/high-damage units with Arcane Arrows. Then as your spearmen/familiars and champions take damage heal them up. If you lose ANY units you're not doing it right.

8. Repeat and repeat. You should be able to roll up all the close factions and get benefit from their developed capitols.

9. In the meantime research Weaponry and upgrade the oak spear to a war staff.

MID GAME:

10. Try to get an Earth Shard or two. Keep on studying until you can get the Earth Giants. Now imbue a few more champions and have them summon these giants.

11. A handful of giants can use their rock slide command to obliterate armies before the opposing army can even get close - usually in the first round.

12. And just keep the juggernaut rolling along. The more you take - the stronger you get - the more unstoppable you become.

So obviously, game-wise, this is not an ideal situation because it just becomes a process game rather than a strategy game. And once you take the first enemy city the game is basically over.

The issues are:

A. Weapon Balance

The weapons are not currently balanced (although much better than they were) and items such as oak spears and war staffs are over-powered. These need nerfing. Weapons and armour need to give more subtle bonuses because even though my 10/3 spearmen are going up against 6/2 soldiers, the battles are not even close - yet they should be.

B. Spamming Soldiers

There is no cost of having spammed soldiers. Most strategy games start to penalise you once you build beyond a certain limit to keep spamming in check. Elemental needs this sort of limit.

Limits, as an example, could be based on city sizes times 2 divided by .25 the number of cities - otherwise they cost heaps more to build and maintain. So if you have 5 cities with a combined size of 14 your recruiitable limit would be ((14 * 2) / (5 * .25)) = 22 units. If another player has only 2 cities with a combined size of 7 they could maintain ((7 * 2) / (2 * .25)) = 28 units. This is poorly thought out but you see where I'm heading.

Or if you spam soldiers early in the game it impacts your ability to build later in the game. Anyhow, this needs some sort of addressing. It may be as simple as tweaking the current population mechanic.

C. Earth Giant Spells

Way way overpowered. They should either do much less damage or only be able to target a single enemy unit. By the time you get these you no longer need traditional troops.

D. Enemy Spell Casters

They seem reluctant to cast damage spells. They tend to just cast 'Pull of Earth' over and over against the same unit.

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joasoze

Join Date 02/2006

+39

Good post this

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You can get a run away train faster than that. Customize soveign to start with war staff, and annex all neighbours using soveign. I consider this slightly gamey as the sov. design is fundamentally unbalanced, so alternatively: Start with a standard sov, research equipment and arcane weapons. Equip heroes with spears and cast arcane weapons -> instant attack 14. This is slighly harder in 1.09p, so you need a small modification. So far adding enough cannon-fodder to exhaust counter-attacks has done it. Even peasant (or especially peasants) are excellent cannonfodder, but you may need armored cannonfodder later

I would suggest making sure the players are better balanced across the map would solve the problem. The current setup where AIs are spawned right next to you, makes for silly rush strategies like this.

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i like to tech to spear and nice leather armor, spam full leather troops with big spear and set them to auto explore. They will actually solo counquer entire civs because the AI dosen't belive in heavy armor.

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Healing 10HP with this early healing spell is too much imho. I would reduce the healed HP and int. should have an effect. (more int. = more healing power)

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Warstaff has been removed from sovereign creation as of 1.09p. Yay! It should also appear much later on the tech tree, or not have the 15 attack strength (and introduce greater warstaff at 15 for the late game)

Spears should be reduced slightly. 9 is too high I think. 8 might be OK. 7 versus a 6 attack with a shield seems too watered down.

Perhaps Oak Spears have 8 attack, and Boar Spears appear a little later in the tech tree with a 9 attack? Boar Spears also take 1 more material to build currently, so this would justify the difference in attack value. Otherwise, I'd suggest that Oak spears use materials, boar spears use metal, to make them sufficiently different in unit design.

I'm finding that two heroes in full leather (breastplate, armlets, helmet) and a spear can take on a fair number of monsters at once successfully. Especially once they pick up a few levels (assuming you focus on Str, with some addition to Dex). Con isn't a big deal if you can avoid damage in the first place.

I'm sure Brad will continue to tweak the enemy AI so cities are harder to push over as we go along. The main thing I'm seeing at the moment is that Enemy AI players are having problems expanding, due to the monsters and perhaps lack of materials onhand. Once Brad gets some better logic in place so the AI players can protect their pioneers and new cities, plus make sure they have plenty of materials onhand, I expect that to change.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but in my current game monster killing has become a bit of a chore, since the AI players aren't wiping them out, leaving them for my heroes to deal with. I will say that my heroes feel quite heroic at the moment, but I'd still like our 'old' customization' options back (speed, move, dodge, accuracy, etc.). I am beginning to see the slightly tougher monsters finally, as of winter 174... I'd say the monster frequency is fine AS LONG AS the enemy AI is dealing with them as well.

Simultaneous combat will of course change battle tactics. I look forward to it. In the meantime, my '3 attacks, kill front line, fall back one square so enemy can't counterattack' strategy seems to be working nicely...

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Monster bashing _is_ a chore. Especially when I still dont feel I can rely on auto-resolve.

For weapon-balance: Someone else suggested raising the attack of all other weapons instead. I think I agree with that. There are some general problems with the way armor works, but if we can make sure available attack is better than available armor, it will sort-of work. Here is a simple suggestion: Add +2 attack to all initial weapons except spears and war staff. Club to attack 5, dagger to attack 6, short sword to attack 9, mace to attack 12. That should fix it. Spears will no longer be an automatic shoice, other weapons will be better, but note the better ones also require iron, and are much more expensive for heroes. Spears will only be a good cheap starting weapon, or the fallback for players with no iron.

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Damnit, all I can hear in my head when I see this post is that Soul Asylum song.

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Well, I like long term gameplay since I'm more a "citybuilder" type. For me, I focus merely on tech research and when the enemy want to attack me, I reasearch warfare and boost my training. Normaly, since I dont build strong army at first, I have a lot of ressource to spend later game. But, on the other hand, the AI is getting better and the monster too so it's kinda cool for me.

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Spears also have high damage due to being two handed.

Shields need to be more effective. A Sword and Shield wielder should be> Spear wielder since swords are infact, more expensive. A unit with a shield should at least be able to greatly nullify the added damage from two handed weapons. I'd say make shields have the equivalant armor as the appropriate chest-piece. IE, light shields should have armor 3, maybe heavy shields armor 4 or 5.

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

Quoting tjashen,

reply 5

Spears should be reduced slightly. 9 is too high I think. 8 might be OK. 7 versus a 6 attack with a shield seems too watered down.

Perhaps Oak Spears have 8 attack, and Boar Spears appear a little later in the tech tree with a 9 attack? Boar Spears also take 1 more material to build currently, so this would justify the difference in attack value. Otherwise, I'd suggest that Oak spears use materials, boar spears use metal, to make them sufficiently different in unit design.

With the current armor values... that would make spears ridiculously useless. They wouldn't be able to hit armor made of cardboard. I think spears should stay useful (although somewhat weak) at the light plate armor age.

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Quoting Werewindlefr,

reply 10

Quoting tjashen, reply 5

Spears should be reduced slightly. 9 is too high I think. 8 might be OK. 7 versus a 6 attack with a shield seems too watered down.

Perhaps Oak Spears have 8 attack, and Boar Spears appear a little later in the tech tree with a 9 attack? Boar Spears also take 1 more material to build currently, so this would justify the difference in attack value. Otherwise, I'd suggest that Oak spears use materials, boar spears use metal, to make them sufficiently different in unit design.
With the current armor values... that would make spears ridiculously useless. They wouldn't be able to hit armor made of cardboard. I think spears should stay useful (although somewhat weak) at the light plate armor age.

Just sayin! Having a 9 attack in the early game (plus str bonuses) makes spider/bear/bandit hunting easier than it should be. Plus, you can't just compare light plate to something that is available earlier much earlier in the tech tree. Spears become available in one jump. Light plate takes two or three techs to get to...

Spears are available at the same time as padded armor, wooden shield, greaves and leather cap (so total 6 def). A 9 attack, even with no STR bonus, has no problem versus a 6 defense... not to mention it costs about 126 gildar currently to buy said armor and shield, versus the 25 for the spear.

Introducing a tougher spear down the road to 'combat' the light plate makes more sense to me.

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"A. Weapon Balance

I made a very good rebalance mod for the 1.08 days where any staff would give a low attack compared to a knife or sword, but it would also give a little defense. This worked very well as you could make simple peasants that were good in large packs, but not invincible like the warstaff and spear units we see now. As you get better techs, the incentive to use staves should decrease due to the better use of swords in combination with shields, and the prevalence of other two handed weapons.

Staves should be the mainstay of a magically based strategy that doesn't focus on warfare, but uses these pions as a basic defense.

When the game is more balanced this idea will seem more necessary of course.

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What we need is a new stat for weapons - armour piercing. Bring on the whole slashing/blunt/piercing debate!

Blunt weapons would damage armour (and yes cause armour to disintegrate over time), slashing weapons would do the most damage to unarmoured, piercing would be good for breaking through tough armour.

So a spear could have 2 armour piercing. This effectively reduces an opponents armour rating by 2 while you are attacking with a spear.

Later on you could have iron-tipped spear which requires metal. This could obviously have a higher, say 4? armour piercing stat.

Anyhow, obviously those numbers would need to be balanced, but you get my point. Lets diversify weaponry so that its not all just bigger number=better. Instead allow tactics where iron swords are less useful against plate mail, but highly effective against leather or unarmoured. Spears are awesome for breaking through plate, but maybe have a lower accuracy to balance it? Whatever.

Suddenly, combat requires tactics and good weapon selection. As it should.

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While I do not disagree, ths is beyond the scope of possible as we look at rebalancing for 1.1.

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Doesn't the weapon mod also rebalance the weapon besides making them more interesting with different abilities. I haven't tried it myself, but perhaps that is a usefull way forward.

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