It's too difficult on easy

I know that some people play on the hardest level and win. Fine for them. But there are not only hardcore strategy gamers (which happen to be vastly overrepresented on forums like this), but also casual gamers like myself. FE in the current beta is simply too frustrating for me. Monsters keep razing my towns and if a expand slowly (to be able to defend myself properly), once I meet my neighbors, their empires are twice as big as myself or even bigger, they start demanding tribute and declare war soon. On easy. Three games, all lost. And no, I am not a total beginner, I have been playing strategy games since the old time of Civilization I.

To to game designers: Please make lower difficulties more fun, and most importantly: give us a way to protect our cities from being razed by monsters permanently. And I quick reload hotkey because I need it very often.

FE is no fun anymore.

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This is not a problem of balance, but a bug. The monster/AI interaction is completely broken, and it is only recently the developers have began to admit it to themselves.

What you are experiencing is this:

You cannot expand because monsters destroy you if you disturb them.

AIs expand without regard for monsters. If the monster is disturbed it either does nothing, letting the AIs grow too strong, or goes after the player.

Your cities are destroyed either by monsters you have disturbed, or by monsters the AI has disturbed, or by AIs that have grown too strong.

The developers have finally (about last Saturday) started admitting there is a problem. Trust them to fix it.

The game will not be delayed. There is a good chance that they will at least mask the problem by release date.

Thus spoke Oracle Ceresa (I've been channeling her tonight, it must be my pain medication)

By the way, I am one of the people who win on highest difficulties. I do so by having a plan to deal with tough monsters as early as I can, but as the developers are removing strategies that are too effective, I'm having a harder time. But as Ceresa said, they are working on it.

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Agreed. It's infuriating to discover a single Ignys has laid waste to your city because you didn't notice it slithering towards you. Monster AI needs to be worked on, and the scorched earth of a destroyed city should go away.

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Quoting Emperorjarin,

reply 2

. . . Monster AI needs to be worked on, and the scorched earth of a destroyed city should go away.

There is some good news in this regard. As Tuidjy properly notes, it really seems as if the Development Team has been slow to acknowledge that there is a problem with Monster behavior, and slow to try to address it. However, Frogboy himself has recently (tonight) made some commitments in this regard. If you look in the Discussion Thread entitled: "Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Release Date Set for October 23rd", Frogboy says in his Reply #63: "Regarding the monster AI, this is something I have been addressing ... "

https://forums.elementalgame.com/433555/page/3/#replies

He goes on to imply that a simple fix is not so easy; but that at least a partial fix revolves around: "greater use of the world difficulty." Presumably he means that at lower levels of difficulty, the monsters will be less aggressive in general -- or perhaps just towards the human player -- he is not quite explicit about that.

On a more positive note, his concluding sentence explicitly states: "Regarding the raze, this was addressed in 983 already. Monsters may destroy towns, but they won't salt the earth anymore."

In any event, I think the FE Development Team has finally gotten serious about this issue. We may see some addtional treatments of this issue ("fixes"), by the time of the official release date.

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