JonSarik

Join Date 01/2006

[v1.1] My initial exhaustive thoughts on Elemental

Great strides made so far, but some more to go

Before I begin, kudos to Stardock for taking a game that was relatively not fun to play upon release and improving it to what we have today. Truly cannot repeat what has already been said by my fellows here as adoration for a developer who listens to their customers, and refuses to abandon a product as-is.

That said, I realize some of this may have already been said/posted, and some may be new. Forgive a guy who is relatively inactive with Elemental since its release. Part of it was because it was unplayable (CTDs), but mostly I had to set it aside because life got in the way. So without further adieu, my thoughts on playing Elemental v1.1:

Fix the fact that my female heroes cannot adorn the Journeyman's Cloak. I know, it has been said before, but should be mentioned again. Basically, you're saying women can't keep up in speed with men? Really?
Assassin trait only work with the Sovereign it seems. The text specifically mentions Champions, but who/what are they? I'm assuming heroes enchanted with Imbue Champion. Otherwise, what is the difference between a Hero and a Champion? Let's fix this.
Need to implement a central list of heroes just like city ledger so we can view them and find them anytime.
Playing as Men, Huts from conquered Kingdom cities don't seem to upgrade to houses. Only seems to happen randomly long after without rhyme or reason, forcing me to tear them down and replace with my own huts/houses. Time consuming and annoying.
Can't see city stats when they're leveling up, so have to guess which bonus I should get. Mentioned elsewhere, but needs fixed ASAP.
Shouldn't be able to view reports on competing factions if I haven't met them yet. In fact, I shouldn't see them at all unless I spend some gildar on spying. Minor, but I liked that from GC2.
Getting occasional false clicks on maps, especially in tactical battles, when selecting destinations for units or having them attack what was not my intention (mostly missing my target by going into the square next to it instead WASTING a move/attack). Please implement an "undo move" button!
Same goes for world map, but to prevent cheating I would not allow revealing of the FOW until you click elsewhere (or whatever makes sense).
Still using squares? Really? Just seems unforgivable for tactical battles. My opinion, but just makes battles feel like an afterthought and moving large amounts of units on the map is a pain.
Are caravans bugged for conquered cities? Getting "Settlement cannot support any more caravans (research diplomacy)" on one or more conquered Kingdom cities even though the city screen shows 5.0 caravans available. I need those roads!
I want to see large progress charts and graphs like the ones in GC2. Call it vanity, but I can barely make out the small one, especially hard for someone who's a tad colorblind.
Once I trade resources with a faction (only tried once), like metal, they no longer value it when you try to trade again another time.
Make it easier to trade among heroes loot I find. Easiest way I can think of is let us sell to The Store and have it remain in inventory to be bought by another unit elsewhere with obvious bid/ask penalties. Didn't seem to work with potion of intelligence or midnight stones.
Allow us to see a hero's existing inventory when making purchases! Annoying to find you bought something they already have because you couldn't see it on their inventory at The Store because they just happen to be wearing it. Huh?
And speaking of visiting The Store, don't get me started. Fallout 3 and New Vegas have a better store inventory management implementation, and that's just insulting. I don't know where to begin to improve things, but what you have now is a UI nightmare.
Again with stores, allow us to upgrade military units as well as heroes so they remain useful over the long run.
I think we should be able to cast more than one tactical spell per hero per turn if it isn't game breaking, just like we can in the world map. Example: I want to design a sovereign who does damage via flame touch vs with weapons, but with weapons I get multiple attacks but not when casting spells. A good way to implement this without becoming overpowering is perhaps allow lower spells to be cast more often than higher level spells, and the higher your intelligence the more often you can cast spells per turn.
Still experiencing memory leak crashes with the .exe getting up to 1.5 GB of RAM before crashing and getting out of memory errors. At least it's not like GC2 where saves were corrupted, but still annoying and loses the game immersion experience.
[Edit] I want to see a sortable list of cities by resources. I want to see which cities are producing what resources and be able to sort them, all in one screen. Gildar, prestige, metal, materials, crystals, horses, darklings, etc. It's inefficient to go through my cities individually to find out where to send heroes with production bonuses, like farming. The ledger can be this screen if it lists all.
[Edit] Fix ledger so we can make adjustments directly to the cities (like training and building queues) and then have it return back to the ledger. As it is now, too many clicks having to reopen the ledger every time.
[Edit] Show a dotted-line plot of the route a unit we select is taking (like in GC2!). Often, when clicking on a caravan in a large map, I can't find its destination marker among the clutter, zoomed out or not. That's frustrating because with so many, I sometimes forget whereabouts I was sending it or why. I plotted path when a unit is selected will go a long way to help.
[Edit] When stacking different units together (or moving them to a city), they tend to lose their remaining moves as they drop to the lowest available in the group (usually two). So that round or the next, my sovereign (or others) can only move two squares should it leave the city or stack.

Okay, that's as exhaustive a list I can think of in one go. I apologize to all who have brought this to fore already, but like I said I'm relatively new to the game after all the changes implemented since release.

Cheers!

elemental

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Cool thoughts; have fun reading everyone elses..

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ON number you cn equip the cloak...scroll down a bit and you will see it listed again...this is the one they can use. Why its down there? I have no idea but its is. Unless a mod im using is giving it to me...hmmm

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You can see how the gear will affect stats. Click an item in the store, look down at the hero panel. If no green or red arrows appear, they're already wearing it. If they aren't, arrows will appear and numbers to indicate how your hero will change. Irritatingly, I don't think this works with +move items, or anything that only impacts the campaign map.

Still, it's a pretty good system that just needs to be made more visible.

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Fix the fact that my female heroes cannot adorn the Journeyman's Cloak.

Yes very annoying

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Assassin trait only work with the Sovereign it seems.

I think this one is only for the person that has the trait. If you hire anaba or whatever her name is she has the trait and works for her only, just like your Sov or your Sov's children if they inherit the trait.

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Playing as Men, Huts from conquered Kingdom cities don't seem to upgrade to houses. Only seems to happen randomly long after without rhyme or reason, forcing me to tear them down and replace with my own huts/houses. Time consuming and annoying.

I hate this bug it really pisses me off.

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Getting A LOT OF FALSE CLICKS on maps, especially in tactical battles, moving my units or having them attack what was not my intention. Please implement an "undo move" button!!!
Same goes for world map, but to prevent cheating I would not allow revealing of the FOW until you click elsewhere (or whatever makes sense).

This is really random for me, on the world map it happens usually around hills and mountains, but what is really wierd it seems to happen in some worlds more than others. On the tatical map I really do not have a problem with it no more because I will do one space at a time to avoid it.

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Are caravans bugged for conquered cities? Getting "Settlement cannot support any more caravans (research diplomacy)" on one or more conquered Kingdom cities even though the city screen shows 5.0 caravans available. I need those roads!

Yes this is another annoying one for me also.

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Once I trade resources with a faction (only tried once), like metal, they no longer value it when you try to trade again another time.

I have never seen this one, but I really never have traded before either.

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Again with stores, allow us to upgrade military units as well as heroes so they remain useful over the long run.

This is a very good idea and would be nice that way weaker units can be upgraded instead of just disbanding them. The two issues that would become an a issue with this idea and both would become exploits are:

You can just train peasants and upgrade them to your best unit and this would take much less time to do which would be wrong.
Once again by doing this you would be avoiding the need of the global materials required to make that troop. Like if you dont have the iron, horse/warg or elementum required for that you would be able to bypass this with the store, which is another exploit.

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I think we should be able to cast more than one tactical spell per hero per turn if it isn't game breaking, just like we can in the world map. Example: I want to design a sovereign who does damage via flame touch vs with weapons, but with weapons I get multiple attacks but not when casting spells. A good way to implement this without becoming overpowering is perhaps allow lower spells to be cast more often than higher level spells, and the higher your intelligence the more often you can cast spells per turn.

I agree and disagree with this statement. Yes we should be able to cast more spells per round and no we should not lower damage of the spells. As it is right now I can make a warrior type Sov and attack 3 to 5 times with a weapon for 60+ damage with each attack a turn, but casting arcane arrow with a 50 intelligence only allows me to do 25 damage once a turn. So warriors can do 180+ to 300+ damage a turn while a mage class can only do 25 damage a turn. Which one do you think is overpowered now? Magic took a nerf because of people exploiting the AoE spells. If this is the case than AoE spells should be reduced to once a turn and not the direct damage spells. As it is now the only good damage spells are the combat spells you start with and the books are a waste of time to learn once in game. Have you ever tried to play ridiculous difficulty as a mage. If not dont even try it because you will get your ass handed to you because using magic is like a bee stinging an elephant in battles.

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Still experiencing memory leak crashes with the .exe getting up to 1.5 GB of RAM before crashing and getting out of memory errors.

Yep I am still getting this also and I posted somewhere else the only time I did not see this happen since the release of the game was when we were testing 1.09v

Overall this was a very good post and I am glad I took the time to read it. Here are a couple of other things that are still happening:

Auto explore causing us not to be able to end the current turn which means game is over. I dont know if this happens with troops, but it does happen with transports.
City tag above your city changing to another city name. Only way to fix it is to save and reload or have a unit enter or exit the city.
Hitting the end turn button to fast will either lock up the game or crash it.

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first time quoting someone multiple times in one post and I do not understand why my replies were tied into each box even though I enter each line a a new quote. A little help from someone on that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

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Yes, training peasants and upgrading them can potentially be an exploit, but I don't think it will happen. I'm guessing you're thinking of GC2 where you can build a stripped transport and then fast upgrade to a transport by paying cash upfront. Well, since there are material requirements for armor and weapons, the AI can just require you to have the additional material on hand for the difference. But they would have to train at a city (with say a barrack) and will be out of commission for also the difference in time it would have taken to train them. You should also have the option to upgrade their veteran status too, ideally. Now, when out of commission, they can still defend the city they're in in their former capacity. But once "training" is done, viola! New and improved soldiers/militia.

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17. I think we should be able to cast more than one tactical spell per hero per turn if it isn't game breaking, just like we can in the world map. Example: I want to design a sovereign who does damage via flame touch vs with weapons, but with weapons I get multiple attacks but not when casting spells. A good way to implement this without becoming overpowering is perhaps allow lower spells to be cast more often than higher level spells, and the higher your intelligence the more often you can cast spells per turn.

You could on 1.09e - it is just that you have to have the combat movement points to be able to afford to do so. Attacks use one point, moving 1 square uses 2 points and I think Casting uses 3 points (not positive, might be 2 points. If your hero has 3 points in combat then it can move 2 squares, second move only uses one point in this case. At least these have been my obvservations.

Not sure if it is possible on v 1.1 since the most action points I have is 4 all 4 get siphoned off from any cast. This seems different from 1.09e. although now I can cast with only 1 action point remaining. Agreed this change is a bit disturbing for caster types.

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One more suggestion I want to add to the list:

I want to see a sortable list of cities by resources. That is, I want to see which cities are producing what resources and be able to sort them, all in one screen. Gildar, prestige, metal, materials, crystals, horses, darklings, etc. It's inefficient to go through my cities individually to find out where to send heroes with production bonuses, like farming.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

This is the kind of post that makes me excited to work on the game during the holidays. Kudos to you Jon.

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I think I have a solution for casting spells multiple times in combat. I'm not sure if this has been suggested before, but here goes. I think a spell's level should be converted to a corresponding number; so level 1 spells = "1", level 2 spells = "2," and so on. These will be your tactical combat spell casting points. In combat, your spell casters (all of them; this will be a global number for all of your spell casters, maybe) can only cast as many spells as the spell casting points. So if you have 3 spell casting points, casting a level 3 spell will lower your points to 0, so you're done for the turn. So this would allow you to cast 3 level 1 spells, IF AND ONLY IF, you also have the speed points to do those many actions (to balance it out; otherwise you'd cast seven level 1 spells per turn = bad idea).

So you and your spell casters gain a point per level of spell research. At level 0 research, they maybe have 1 spell casting point, for the beginning spells. So when you get to level 5, you have 6 spell casting points, so each caster can cast, say, a level 4 and a level 2 spell in combat before they're out of spell casting points (and possibly out of movement points as well).

Then you could go even further if you want to make it more epic: long, complicated quests and accomplishments that can raise the number by 1 per quest, maybe? This might give your spell casters some more power to them and make the actual combat casting a bit more fun.

If this has already been suggested, please disregard.

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Excellent UI suggestions. Would definitely make constant use of those.

As for #7 I'm not sure if it's related or not but I've noticed that if you minimize the game then bring it back up the mouse picking is off by a bit. I believe the cursor graphic gets offset so that you have to target with the middle of the cursor rather than the point.

I've lost so many moves to clicking the tile next to a quest by mistake it's maddening.

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I'm glad you approve, Brad. I wish I had answers for how to address the issues I bring up, but alas I'll leave it to you experts.

So these are things I notice on the fly during a game, so again I apologize if these points have been brought up before often. Anyway, it's good to keep in in a single repository, I guess.

So one more thing:

Show a dotted-line plot of the route a unit we select is taking (like in GC2!). Often, when clicking on a caravan in a large map, I can't find its destination marker among the clutter, zoomed out or not. That's frustrating because with so many, I sometimes forget whereabouts I was sending it or why. I plotted path when a unit is selected will go a long way to help.

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As to the above post, I should say that maybe show the path of the unit only in the parts that were already explored to prevent cheating.

Quoting JonSarik,

reply 12

I'm glad you approve, Brad. I wish I had answers for how to address the issues I bring up, but alas I'll leave it to you experts.

So these are things I notice on the fly during a game, so again I apologize if these points have been brought up before often. Anyway, it's good to keep in in a single repository, I guess.

So one more thing:

Show a dotted-line plot of the route a unit we select is taking (like in GC2!). Often, when clicking on a caravan in a large map, I can't find its destination marker among the clutter, zoomed out or not. That's frustrating because with so many, I sometimes forget whereabouts I was sending it or why. I plotted path when a unit is selected will go a long way to help.

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Thanks for the input. It's comments like these that help me weigh a purchase decision. Been wondering what Elemental was all about. I can definitely wait longer for improvements.

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This list has most of my gripes listed neatly and politely on it.

Can't think of any I outright "disagree" with - all good suggestions made after some in depth play.

Well done OP - great post, and a virtual "hit list" of what needs doing next.

Nice if they could fix trhe crash issues as well though

Scritty

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Kilo, please don't let my airing of dirty laundry be mistaken as this game as not being fun now. I'm enjoying it immensely. I remember during the beta and when I first got the game, I couldn't tell what the f**k was going on and put the game aside. I know Stardock was working on improving the game, reading Brad's posts. I finally gave it a shot after version 1.1 came out.

I can honestly say I am now having fun playing the game. If you enjoy 4X games, I would recommend this. And I know it will continue getting better. I'm just listing my issues to keep them on the path of continuing making this game even better, now that it has at least reached "fun." I don't want this list to be used as a reason not to buy this game. There will always be something to gripe about with any game. Most of these are minor in the scheme of things. The game mechanic is solid.

[Edit] I'm changing #7 from a lot to occasional now that I know what I'm being more careful. Most of these thoughts were based on my first playthough with v1.1 which was also my first full play since release.

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I don't see that upgrading units would be an exploit provided the amount of time/materials needed was tied to the significance of the upgrade itself.

I, too, am still having click/tile selection problems.

Really like the dotted line for the path of a unit, especially for caravans. And how about the ability to modify that path.

I would also really like to be able to assign units to guard a caravan. It is a pain to have to do this manually.

I never noticed the changing color arrows while in the store. I will definitely have to look for that!

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So it seems the Assassin trait is working fine. So I shall remove that from the lists, just poor choice in wording.

Another issue to report: when stacking different units together (or moving them to a city), they tend to lose their remaining moves as they drop to the lowest available in the group (usually two). So that round or the next, my sovereign (or others) can only move two squares should it leave the city or stack.

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