[v1.09n] Some thoughts on early fun + a threat to game immersion

from Elemental Forums

There is much I like about v1.09n, and I am generally liking the direction we are headed with this game.  However, I think the early game has been made exceedingly dull with v1.09n.  The world is painfully barren.  For the most part, the only suitable city sites I am finding, are those claimed by my opponents capitals.  To expand... my choice becomes extermination.  With v1.09e I enjoyed the early game.  With a little scouting I'd find a few sites having a small grouping of resources.  I'd tame the region of monsters and then begin some initial empire building.  Now with v1.09n, I am only finding the rare lone resource, often too far from my starting city to feasibly defend.  And too few food resources to afford settling anyhow.  I'm not finding the barren world of v1.09n to be much fun.  Whats the point of having pioneers if not to settle the oasis.  A few days ago, for the first time since playing this game, I began losing the will to play.  I wanted to keep playing, but every time I rolled a map I found the same dead world.  The inspiration and purpose of exploration and expansion was absent.  My motivation to play was nulled.

So I tried a few user made maps and found one that thoroughly demonstrated what it was I was missing in v1.09n.  The map is called The Forge of Souls.  In it there are clusters of resources fit for settlement.  Between these clusters exist the barren lands.  The player has motivation to explore the world and grow their empire.  You scout for expansion and build.  All in balance to what you can afford.  In addition to the scattered oasis, there are monster dens located throughout the world.  These dens contain a monster stack that requires a small group to take down.  Victory results in an item reward.  Fun stuff.  I would hope that the monster den concept would be expanded such that the threat these monsters pose increases as time goes on.  Player has a choice to organize for early extermination or focus on matters of empire and deal with the stronger beasts later.  There's more but I digress off the main point.  Another point of interest for me on this map, is that the food resources are more varied.  Some resources I had never seen in some 20 days worth of playing.  It was interesting to find Pumpkin Patches, Wild Game. Orchards + in addition to the same ole Fertile Land and Wild Wheats.  Even if they do the same things, it would be nice to see variance in resources.  I would hope that you guys check out this map and consider how the game plays out on this map vs the sandbox 1.09n map.  For me there is all the difference in the world.  The difference between a fun and living world vs a dead and dull world.

 

The threat to game immersion comes in the form of Shard encapsulation and building hordes.  Building 20+ of the same building in a city hampers my immersion.  As a fan of SciFi and Fantasy novels, I am versed to suspend my disbelief for some things.  But the building of dozens of the same building pulls me right out of the world I'm RP'ing, and puts me onto a gameboard.  I'd want my townspeople to build as I think they would (houses here, industry there, and whatnot).  Not to build hordes of identical studies because they need the tech points.  And not to build a string of misc buildings to encapsulate a Shard within the city walls because that makes the difference between 1 mana regen/turn vs 6!  That stuffs not part of their world.  All the work that has gone into the buildings to show the people going about their daily lives, seems to be lost when you've got 20+ identical buildings, with identical people, all doing the same identical thing.  It's not RP'able.  Immersion is an important thing as I try and RP a story to go along with my game.  I can think of a couple ways to attempt city specialization without immersion busting repetition.  The mechanics are for other threads.  This thread is to see if others agree with a need to address the dead world, shard ecapsulation and building hordes of v1.09n.  ?  

elemental
4,891 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The map absolutely needs goals for exploration and expansion. Otherwise you're missing 2 x's from the 4x.

Now that we can place resources on maps without the randomization, I can address many of these issues with Elementerra. I'm done with the initial version of PerfectWorld3 for Civ5, so now I can come back to work with Elemental for a while. The only problem is that we are having a baby in a couple of weeks, which probably means that my free time is shot... I'll see what I can do.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Great post. I can't think of anything here that I disagree with, to be honest. I know the devs have mentioned that bringing flavor into the game is one of their goals. Finding a way to fix these things would get them part of the way there.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Fully agree that the barrenness (sp?, if it is even a word) of the world is a serious turn off and one that I find to be a complete interest breaker. I actually thought pumpkin patches were a myth, or left out by 1.09 (even 1.09e was barely stable for me; before that the game was unplayable). I understand that this is a post apocalytic world and resources are supposed to be scarce. However, the surgical removal of fun to remain true to a vision strikes me as a very poor decision by any game designer. I don't want the only viable strategy to be 'go out and take over all the other civilizations'. If that is going to be the only viable strategy, then at least Stardock can save themselves some time by not having to fix the badly broken diplomacy model. I will have a look at that mod, so thanks for the heads up.

Monster guarded dens plus rewards was one of the key elements in MoM. And one of the most fun/rewarding. That it did not make an apppearance in EWoM was surprising and disappointing.

I don't actually have much of a problem with specialist cities; to a significant extent, it mirrors our world.

I agree with the direction of the game changes in the 1.1 beta. The game is better; sadly, it is still a long way from being really good and even further from reaching the full potential that it has. If it wasn't for that potential, I would have long since given up on it as another $50 worth of wasted software expense.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

this highlights the problem with the food system: either you have enough food to expand almost all the time and food becomes redundant (and indeed, if you have more food than you need at any one time then you gain no benefit vis a vis having just enough), or you don't have enough to expand which leads to a catch-22 where you don't have the food to expand your population so that you can afford to grab more food (or solve the problem in other ways). before the beta the former happened more often and we got city spam. now the latter happens and we get paralysis. neither is fun. the system is far too rigid and the only real solution is to move to a more gradual, food based population growth system as i have argued repeatedly

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397376

it wouldn't be so bad if they removed the food maintenance for outposts with no housing. this would actually make a hell of a lot of sense, because towns with no peole shouldn't consume food. this would allow people to grab resources in the early game without massive penalties. while on the surface this might appear to encourage settlement spam, settlement spam is not actually the problem: the problem is that all settlements end up exanding to similar sizes. any potential "resource rush" could be fixed by giving these 0-pop outposts 0 influence and the ability to only develop adjacent resources; then if they're swallowed by another faction's influence, destroy the outpost and give the resources to the new owners. this way instead of penalising people for expanding you're encouraging them to develop their settlements. building a settlement should just be the equivalent of placing a flag; it's the people that should matter. it's not like you can do anything with a settlement with 0-pop anyway.

if we still had essense, i would argue that sacrificing essense to create food resources would also be a great way of making the system more flexible. however, we don't, so.....

but yes, i would agree with the general idea that early game elemental is simply no fun. to be at a stage where i can train units i actually want to build, harvest shards and generate enough food and gold to do anything interesting usually requires me to be about 30 techs into the game. that's notwithstanding the requirements to get my cities to the level where they can build the troop training buildings to build any of these things i have researched (level 3 is too long a wait to be able to put 3 guys together, though i'd argue that barracks units would be better focused on reducing training times (increase base training time if need be) than being required for groups: there are too many individuals running round tactical maps as is). usually my sov's children are coming of age by this point.

similarly, i do not enjoy watching my supposedly powerful and infuential sovereign failing to defeat level 1 bandits in easy mode, nor having to wait round until he can even afford a weapon to attack with (i'll be damned if i waste valuable char creation points on equipment; these two systems should have been separated from the get go). nor do i enjoy monster armies with 85CR attacking my settlements on easy mode, when all i could possibly train at that point is a couple of peasants. this is effectively the game randomly decided to nuke my settlements (again on easy mode).

but the saddest thing is, that once i finally feel like i can train both militia quality groups of 3 (and maybe some archers for support) and enough mana for one or two summons, i find i can roll into enemy towns virtually unapposed: not only does the early game feel incredibly dull, it also seems to be most of the game :(

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

or you don't have enough to expand which leads to a catch-22 where you don't have the food to expand your population so that you can afford to grab more food

There is no such thing; if there is another food resource somewhere, there is nothing preventing you from creating a pioneer and taking it (well, you need 1 free food resource to create the town, so yes, you need to plan ahead for that eventuality). You might have to *fight* for it, which is a good thing.

I never had a problem with food. I think it's one of those few well-balanced areas which offer challenge without becoming frustrating. It's not so trivial that everyone has it in abundance, which leads to conflict. But it's not so rare that it favors some opponents in an unfair fashion.

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

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Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Werewindlefr, reply 5

or you don't have enough to expand which leads to a catch-22 where you don't have the food to expand your population so that you can afford to grab more food
There is no such thing; if there is another food resource somewhere, there is nothing preventing you from creating a pioneer and taking it (well, you need 1 free food resource to create the town, so yes, you need to plan ahead for that eventuality). You might have to *fight* for it, which is a good thing.

it's happened to me. what happens when every food resource nearby is taken? it's easy to say "take it," but this can happen even in the early game when you have neither the tech (or city size) to train decent troops in a reasonable time frame. often i don't have the food to feed the population to generate the money i need for decent wages. really, if you've founded two settlements and have just your starting fertile land, that leaves you with enough food for, what, 1 house in each? it doesn't even leave enough to get your capital to level 3. you can get a food production bonus from a granary type building fairly early on, but otherwise your only option is holding out for the adventuring tech that spawns more food (which will take a long time). as for enchanting: 1 mana maint for 1 food is nowhere near a good deal. in my experience food supply does not seem to increase nearly quickly enough in the endgame; most of my conquered food goes on maintaining the towns i have conquered. prestige seems to be largely redundant; it's food that's determinging population growth. so why not just go the full distance and switch to food based pop growth and remove the maint for housing (as linked in the earlier post)

i'm not saying we need more food though necesarrily, just that it's a completely unflexible system when it goes wrong. removing the food cost for 0-pop outposts would be a good start though, because that way you would always be able to grab food. it just makes sense.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

I've enjoyed v1.09e and am overall satisfied with my purchase of EWoM.  In part due to Stardocks commitment and sustained progress towards refinement, and in part because I have already gotten near 30 days of enjoyment out of the product.  I foresee much more enjoyment in the short term, and a great deal more in the long term.   I am impressed and satisfied with Stardocks continuing efforts.  That said, I wanted to give my input on a couple aspects of v1.09n which I think took some fun out of the game.  With my OP, I wanted to share my input and to learn the thoughts of others.  At the very least, I know that through the efforts of modders like cephalo, I will have options to find a game more tailored to my specific tastes.  I intend to do some modding myself.  But I am thinking that the items I speak of in the opening post, may be shared by the majority and so may be addressed in the vanilla game rather than in user mods.  ?