Pox Nora : A game the devs should look at.

from Elemental Forums

One of the things I'm eagerly awaiting in the Elemental beta (which is, sadly, extremely far off) is the fully-fleshed out combat system. But, before we get there, I hope that the developers give Pox Nora a quick look - because the turn-based combat for Pox Nora is something that I think would work beautifully in a game like Elemental.

Put simply, Pox Nora stresses making intelligent, strategic decisions in combat. And, more than that, every unit is distinct, and serves a very specific purpose (even though there are something like half a thousand total units). In addition to this, it's also possible to craft your army exactly how you want it, and play exceedingly well under a plethora of different play-styles, rather than being pidgeonholed into the boring "balanced" groups that we see in most strategy games today (in games like Total War, Civilizations, Warcraft 3, etc).

While I understand that Elemental's combat isn't going to be strictly turn based (but more like a Baldur's Gate sort of Real-Time / Turn-based hybrid), I do think that the developers could gain a great deal of inspiration for what they want to do with their combat from Pox Nora.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The essense of your post sounds good. I myself have not played Pox Nora, so I cannot formulate an opinion on the game itself.

However, half a thousand different unit options, spefic purposes for units, crafting an army exactly how you want it, and not being pidgeonholed into a specific strat (although steel weaponed cav should *always* win the charge :P ) ... sounds very good.

And by that, I mean many different tactical strategies for the tactical maps, makes tactical combat more fun. Its also challenging to the AI creators, and also makes auto-combat less reliable (somewhat) .... as in their will always be a player situation where autocombat seems to do better than he, and always the player situation dependent where autocombat does far, far worse than anticipated. This is usually due to the AI auto-battles using a different set of rules than the tactical battles, although its feasable that the Auto-Battle could be using your units in a way not intended.

all that aside, its obvious that there will always be some inherent weaknesses to Auto-Resolve, and having a more fun and varied Tactical Battle, with more valid choices, will lead to replayability success at least from the level of wanting to play out different kinds of Tactical Battles against different kinds of enemy armies.