Thoughts on the 1.3 beta series so far

I have a couple of suggestions for this.

1. Have a separate champion attack value on weapons representing their extra "honing" of the weapon. Obviously a scimitar is more potent in the hands of a champion than a normal warrior.
2. Give Champions a base of 20 hp and a squad a base of 20 hp. I'd imagine that a hero first starting out should be equal to about 4 soldiers (5 hp each).
3. Either increase the amount of attribute points per level or increase their effect so champions become more powerful quicker.
4. Possibly lower the amount of exp required for champion levels. 

I know Serathi has a good suggestion on cities. Here is the link https://forums.elementalgame.com/409198. (read last 2 paragraphs)

To Expand upon his idea, maybe add in a requirement for the level 2 research buildings for a city level (level 4 maybe) so that a player can't spam a bajillion cities. Also maybe sprinkle in a few more specializing buildings (% bonus for research, arcane etc) so that the player has more options in using thier building slots. Feel free to use the same art as another building as a place holder for testing .

Don't lose faith frogboy. I am getting the "one more turn" compulsion in 1.2c.

Been arguing that for so long..., but how can you do that within the current resource context where cities generate resources based on tech?

The simultaneous combat is a lot of fun, I think. An easy fix to improve the suicidal AI and put every unit in danger of dying. Can't ride in on my shining horse and take out 50 men any longer.

The 4man sized squads really improve the game because, just as you say, it gives more room for champions to be great. A champion taking out a squad of men is pretty awesome, a champion taking out a single enemy man is not. However, the massive time it takes to train units is really sucking the fun out of the system. Coupled with simultaneous damage and each unit having so little health, it just seems silly all put together. Why does it take a giant city 20 years to train a group of swordsmen, and then they get cut down in one attack?

Units need more health overall, so we can get some real good slogs going. Glasscannons are zzz.

For events, I've already done 2 you can find in the modding section. One is an undead dragon, another is a "bloodsmith", a sort of blacksmith making you an offer you should probably resist. If you are alone working on events, then I think your time would be better spent opening up some mod support for the events so that the modders can add some new stuff. In that regard, I have a couple of requests that may or may not sound logical to you.

First, an option to flag an event as "undeclinable", ie the user can only accept it. To represent that some events are "shit that just happens, deal with it".

Second, more eventtypes. We have CityPopulation and TotalPopulation and also UnitLevel. How about an eventtype for research finished, or for spells researched, or for an improvement built? How about one that just selects a random tile on the world map? So we can spawn volcanoes and oceans.

Third, as the list of events grow, we badly need a way to limit them. The <PostTriggerChance> tag only accepts real numbers, we can't use decimal points. That means that if I have 10 events with 1 PostTriggerChance, there's a 10% of an event happening EVERY TURN. Now imagine if there's a 100 events. The system is simply not built to accommodate a high amount of events. The only reason this isn't obvious is because there are so few events in the vanilla game.

this.

Frogboy, if there is a way to shift the training time back to what is was for single models, that would go a long way. I normally have to just sit in my first city for 10 turns while my peasants are training to avoid a wolf from rampaging my town.

Yes.  So very close.

On #2

I think the best solution would be to make more buildings that have higher level requirements.   The City level mechanic would be a more elegant solution, and creating new building shouldn't be too hard, just art assets+ xml I think.   That does move it to spam at higher levels though, so it's not a perfect solution.  Have these buildings require some higher level Civ tech.

Another thing is some of the really good buildings at higher levels have huge construction times like the Town Hall

Alternative/additional idea: create an efficiency penalty for having too many of the same building in a city.  The efficiency penalty reduces by level.  Would only apply to libraries/arcane labs/workshops.

The glass cannon problem can only be solved by some sort of heavy wpn/armor rebalancing.  Maybe something along the lines of Dungeon Crawl Stone soup style weapon/armor damage, keep the numbers small.

Also, I'd reduce the exploding cost of tech some, as if this is successful tech rates will be lower and people might diversify more.

Just coming back after a few months away from computer games.   I really like the changes in this beta series.    The game get more and more compelling.   I really like the change to larger initial units, but it does take forever to get them.  I actually chose to get a guardian unit in my first city at level up because I needed the protection.  I ended up with a squad of spiders, which I used to scout and protect, so that was cool.

I'd love to see the champions become more of a reward for quests, and to have more restrictions on getting them in your retinue.   Right now I just hire everyone, I would like to have to make a choice on who to hire.

Of course getting the tactical AI up to snuff would be awesome.  

If nothing else, I appreciate the time and effort spent on the game.   This, more than anything, is what keeps me buying stardock titles, and keeps me active in the forum.

Now, to look back into modding...Random events you say:   My favorite.

Agreed with the above comments about the training time. If 4 is the new default you should adjust training times accordingly.

After all, why does it cost 4x as long to build a unit of 4 men than it does to train 1 man when we don't even have the option to train one man?

Also, kind of sad to see the population thing go. I liked it, I just hated that it kept bugging out on me, not letting me finish my games.

Agree with everything in the OP (I pretty much have to lol). I realise that my whining must be getting to some people, and I apologise if it has lead to hair pulling. I have little enough of the stuff myself these days and can sympathise. I really think I'm right to oppose the citizen system though, and i will be the first to apologise if this comes back to bite me in the ass. But I'm glad I've stuck to my guns because citizen (especially as they are now) were effectively creating a separate "level" system running in paralell to the normal one, and that just seems like pointless redundancy.

Having also argued for the 4 man basic unit size I do feel it has improved the game. If nothing else, as well as helping visually and helping distinguish champions, it smooths out the huge jumps in power received from the logistics techs. When I originally argued for it, I envisaged the 4 man units would be as powerful as they were before, but cost the same and take as long as the 1 man units did before: ie, the heroes and the monsters would be beefed to keep up, rather than nerfing the squads. This is still the way I imagine it best working (because i think larger numbers usually make things easier and more finely grained), but i realise that this would lead to floods of units in the late game with the current economics. Perhaps the solution would be more and better training and other unit upgrades to be added to space out the logistics techs (maybe even increase the number of those, so each one only added one guy), so that the end game ceiling for "perfect" troops simply came much later.

I just got another idea that might help with champions and combat. I think we can all agree that int and cha are mostly dump stats. While they do have a place in the game, other stats like strength and con overshadow them. So here is a way to potentially spice up these two attributes.

Int: In addition to its current effects (spells), this would determine how many soldiers could be led in an army (units not counting individual models). Without a hero, I would make the limit something like 4 units. For every 4 points of int, another unit could be led. In addition, if a character is stationed in a city, for every 3 points of int, a 1% increase in arcane/tech research is given to the stationed city. This bonus would be cumulative with multiple heroes where as the unit limit increase is based entirely upon the highest int.

Charisma: In addition to its current effects (prestige boost, lowered recruitment costs?), this would determine the number of champions allowed in your character's court. Starting at a base of 2, every 4 points of charisma increases this value by 1. This would make each champion you hire feel more special as they are taking up a slot rather than being a no upkeep warrior.

Just some thoughts.

The big problem with having multiple units stack is balance.  Simple solution a stack of 4, 8, or 12 should have the same attack score and armor score as a champion with the same armor and weapon with 10 stats.  The only thing that should change is HP.  And they need to be trained much, much faster.  Do this and you can balance the game so much easier. 

I am especially enjoying the new loot from the goody huts, it is much more useful.

I was thinking of starting a thread decrying the lack of decent one-handed weapons, when I found a scimitar!

Glad to see that more thought/work is still being put into WoM.

More variation of loot is always appreciated. I used to hate getting padded greaves as loot late in the game.

Is there any mechanism to scale the loot to the age of the game?

This summarises the problems with trying balance tactical combat using units that scale as they currently do. Balance becomes very complex unless this sort of suggestion is followed. Perhaps a better way would be to have a base stat for the first unit then +10% in both attack and defence for each person in the party. Gives a bit of a bonus other than HP for large stacks.

Agree with both Murteas and jecjackal, forcing us to make choices about which champions to keep instead of just hiring everyone that comes along because I've got too much money & nothing to spend it on sounds like a good thing strategy wise.

Also want to add my vote to fixing training time.  Question: Are you using the player lag as a way to make the AI tougher, i.e. they get training time reduced?  Seems the AI gets bigger groups faster.    

Maybe have int be a cap on the amount of MP a unit can spend in tactical spellcasting again, and make tactical spellcasting free.

I prefer the pre 1.10 system of magic for tactical, and post 1.10 for strategic.  (1.10 was when it was changed I think)  That would also massively help the AI , as they'd be able to  use tactical spells again.

This may sound like a huge revolution, but I always thought it would make more sense for groups to simply have more attacks rather than higher base attack strength or defense values. Ie, you'd make multiple rolls to damage at the same time and add the damage of each of them together.

ie:

attack = base weapon damage (doesn't vary much) * (experience + weapon enchantment + str)

defense = armour * experience factor * dex

hp = base * squad size * con (the base would increase slowly with levels for heroes)

attack rolls = 1 per squad member, or gained by traits for heroes

So you'd multiply the damage for groups, but only after the rolls were made individually. 10 x 1hp of damage still isn't a lot. That way, it doesn't matter if you have 1000 spearmen if none of them are individually strong enough to penetrate the dragon's hide.

Multiple attacks could only be made against other groups or large monsters however, so you'd gain a lot less from your group size when they attacked individuals. Perhaps the max number of attacks = (your unit size + enemy unit size +1)/2

Heroes would get their value in having much higher experience and attribute values. 1 Defence isn't a lot when the whole unit makes one big roll with 80 attack against you, but it IS a lot when 10 guys with 8 attacks each have 1hp removed from their rolls, for a total of -10 damage.

This is how stuff like warhammer works. You get 20 dice to roll if you have 20 guys, which means 20 x teh damage against other troops. But because they're rolled individually then it's possible for numbers to become pretty useless in certain circumstances.

The value of weapon TYPE should be in determining the units role in combat rather than attack strength. Ie, spears should get first strike because of their superior range, but unable to counter attack against attackers from the flanks.

I haven't got a chance to mess with the AI yet. 

The main design objective here for helping the AI is getting rid of all the building requirements.  Not much of a war when everyone is running around with individuals.

Eventually, someday, in some future sequel in the Elemental universe it'll be 64-bit only (personally, I think think FE may be one of our last 32-bit games, after that, 64-bit only so I can have my freaking huge armies of individuals charging a dragon).

A game is a game. It is supposed to be fun. Challenging, yes -- difficult, yes -- but it should remain fun. The new population use system sucks virtually all the fun out of the game as you progress, both in terms of building cities and training units, as do the increasingly long lead times in the tech tree. I'm not looking to play a social modeling system -- I want to play a heroic thud-and-blunder 4x game.

Yes, we need more types of quests, goodie huts, etc. Lots more . I've been encountering the same dozen or so quests and rewards (rats! rings! blacksmith! compass!) ever since I first bought EWOM many months ago. At the same time, it might help not to have so many (numerically speaking) quests, huts, etc.

Much of the (non-monetary, non-resource) loot I get is useless except to sell for a few coins at the shop. In many cases, especially later in the game, I already have better weapons, shields, etc. researched. I want some seriously unbalancing rewards -- like a staff that boosts the bearer's INT by 10 points, but has a 10% chance of bursting asunder and stunning for some number of tactical rounds, or even seriously injuring, the bearer each time it is used. Or a war hammer that acts like Mjolner (e.g, makes a ranged attack) but runs a risk of not returning and might even be recovered by a champion on the other side (if there is one). Or a ring that renders the champion invisible, but which may suddenly fall off the ring-bearer's finger in the heat of battle. Of course, my party should have to slay some rather nasty creatures to get these, etc.

On that subject -- and I say this knowing full well the UI complications involved -- it would be nice to have champions be able to mount/unmount gear (weapons, shields, magical items, etc.) during tactical combat, at the cost of not attacking during that round.

It would be even nicer to be able to somehow get rid of useless starting items (e.g., those 3-point clubs that many champions start with) that the shop won't take and that can't be traded away.

I think I'd like much faster unit-training times and fewer champions (or, as noted above, constraints -- based on INT and/or CHA -- on how many champions will follow you). My general tactical approach tends to be Spell Blast + champions with bows, which tends to wipe out all opposition until late in the game when I face armies with serious armor and honking big hammers. Instead, I should be able/forced to build armies comprising one or two champions and a lot of units.

I'd also like units to be upgradable.

I do like the 4-man units, but they strike me as unbalanced. I had a squad of archers take on a small pack of wolves. The unit attacked one wolf and wiped it out with an overwhelming group attack. The remaining three wolves wiped out the unit, which was unable to respond or divide its attack ability among the various targets.

FWIW.  ..bruce..

Too bad about the pop system overall.  It did make swords vs econ choices interesting to start, but after conquering a few cities or getting 4-5 of my own up I always seemed to be about 100-300 pop needed before I could build a unit to defend a city, which wasn't fun, and it was very hard to plan.

Few thoughts on point 1/2 and throwing out ideas.

-Decouple unit training slots from # of cities.  That is a big reason for early city spam for me, since training units in only my capital would take forever (unless I rushed call to arms and mana production techs).  Perhaps a pull up kingdom page for how many slots you have kingdom wide, you can build in any city, even multiple units simultaneously in a city, but military improvements in the city would help training times.  Maybe tech specialized cities reduce overall slots a bit, while cities with lots of military barracks etc give more, as would large cities or population or whatever mechanic.

-Perhaps something as mundane as having a city popup where you select the city specialization would help?  This is almost already in place with the city leveling screens.  But maybe you pick Jack of all trades, military outpost, Science, Arcane, etc, have to stick with it for at least x turns so you don't switch too often.  The choice would limit certain building types, and give *Large* bonuses to what you are specialized in and similarly large penalties to other areas.  Could even have little quests based on cities or special events to add more special bonuses based on the city type to make certain cities feel like they had some history, but that would start being a lot of work.  Also more work, but perhaps better than bonuses might be some sort of cap to the amount of tech (or whatever aspect) that could be produced per turn by city.  Let city size and specialization raise those caps up so more studies (in the case of tech) would be available/ worthwhile.  That way you don't get some sort of ridiculous tech production amount because of study spam in a specialized city.

-Make city leveling harder overall.  Dropping 2 huts or so to get a level 3 city fairly fast feels a bit weak.  Having it be hard to get big cities would make it easier to balance.  Give big hard to get cities big bonuses, and small little outposts small ones.

On other things

Yup, new tactical combat is better.  Having to use more spells to avoid counterattacks, and kiting a bit adds fun.  Like the groups for stock units, I like champions feeling rarer and more special.  Spouses are really hard to find.  Random events = good.

If you do make champions part of quests, might be hard later on to get them since I don't know if I'd want to task my sov / champs from conquering to farming more low level champs.  Some wandering groups might be nice (and rare).  On the flipside, champs via dynasties might make questing for champs obsolete since last game my champ had about 9 kids by the time the first came to age.

I would fully support the 2nd elemental XP being 64-bit only if FE is a success.  I really want the move to 64-bit to start soon, there's little reason to stay with 32-bit now.

Hi Froggie,

Regarding #1 and #2 consider the following:

• Increase the zoc for level 4 and 5 cities - rewards the player for investing the huts required to level the city AND extends the reach of city to "grab" nearby resources. Eliminates the need to spam additional settlements to grab resources
• For each additional study (or spammable building) built in a city increase the build time by 1 turn but also increase the base tech research by 0.50. For example, building 10 studies:
• Study 1 - 4 turns, 1.0 tech (first one is "normal")
• Study 2 - 5 turns, 1.5 tech (2nd study takes 25% longer to build than previous but provides 50% more tech research)
• Study 3 - 6.0 turns, 2.0 tech (3rd study takes 20% longer to build than previous but provides 33% more tech research)
• Study 4 - 7 turns, 2.5 tech
• Study 5 - 8 turns, 3.0 tech
• Study 6 - 9 turns, 3.5 tech
• Study 7 - 10 turns, 4.0 tech
• Study 8 - 11 turns, 4.5 tech
• Study 9 - 12 turns, 5.0 tech
• Study 10 - 13 turns, 5.5 tech
• And so on...
• Ok so in the legacy rules it would take 40 turns to create 10 tech per turn. Over that 40 turn period there would be a total of 55 research completed or 1.375 average tech per turn.
• In this scenario it would take 85 turns (212.5% increase in build time) to create 32.5 tech per turn (325% increase in tech). 137.5 tech completed or 1.62 average tech per turn.
• Larger cities get the turn reducing improvements which would help offset the increase to build times.
• Larger cities can build the tech % improvements.
• In short, create a situation where: 1. spamming "spammable" buildings has diminishing returns, not via the citizen option but by the improvement queue build time increase 2. despite the time it takes to build new spammable buildings, reward the player by a more efficient building. Yes it takes more time to build them but they become more efficient as well. The % increase to build time is less than the % increase to tech research, thus it's still in the player's best interest to build more - it just takes longer.
• Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked or this is just a horrible idea, dunno. I think this would work for workshops and arcane labs too.

More thoughts later on the other points.

[Edit] Another thing you could do to eliminate the need to spam is give each city to do something instead of build an improvement or sit idle - i.e., focus on gildar, materials, etc. Some kind of buff that helps boost something the player might be in short supply of. Gives more options.

[Editx2] After rereading my original post I decided I wasn't keeping with the spirit of KISS (keeping it simple stupid). Thus, why not try something easier like:

• Eliminate the existing city level up bonuses (see below for why)
• Expand ZOC for higher-level cities (allow bigger cities to grab more resources thus reducing the need to spam additional settlements)
• Create options in the improvement queue for a city to focus on specific resources (in lieu of building an improvement):
• Focus On Tech
• Focus on Arcane
• Focus on Materials
• Focus on Gildar
• Focus on Mana
• Focus on Metal
• Focus on <Resource> (excluding Food)
• Focus on Prestige, etc.
• Focus on Unit queue (help reduce the time to create next unit)?
• The modifier of the focus would be based on city level:
• Level 1 = 10% bonus
• Level 2 = 20% bonus
• Level 3 = 30% bonus
• Level 4 = 40% bonus
• Level 5 = 50% bonus
• The modifier would apply to the local production of the city. For example:
• A level 4 city producing 5 base prestige would produce 7 (40% of 5 or +2) when the improvement queue is focused on prestige
• A level 5 city producing 50 base research would produce 75 (50% of 50 or +25) when the improvement queue is focused on research
• A level 3 city producing 3 metal would produce 4 (30% of 3 or +1)
• Etc.
• Obviously the player is not spamming improvements if focused on a resource - player decision trade-off of long-term investment vs. short-term resource buff
• In the end this gives the players a choice and allows buffing a required resource as needed
• The bonus increases based on size of city - rewards the player for investing in higher cities and gives choice at the same time
• Not too difficult to code maybe?

I imagine this would require balancing but would open up options for the player which is a good thing.

[Editx3] The more I think about it the more I feel you need to increase the ZOC of larger cities (to grab map resources that otherwise are only attainable by making additional settlements) and give the player the option to focus their fewer large cities on specific needs - such as helping train a much needed unit, making some extra gildar, focusing on the long population haul to get to level 5 from level 4, rushing for that next key spell, etc.

I'm all excited, now no one go rain on my parade please! 

I'm sooo glad to see   is on top of the situation. Changes coming in are great, willingness to drop ideas that didn't work is great, having read and understood feedback is great.

Thank you 

Dropping the pop system seems fine to me, it increased complexity but not entertainment. Some questions arise though... Without a population we no longer have a connection between building structures and training units... Do we need this?

About glass canons. Increasing HP is complicated as you run into several other things that need to be adjusted, like spell damage, moster hp, quality modifiers etc... So I understand that it is not an easy thing to change. But still, an increase in HP overall would do the game good.

I think Champions should be "a big deal" because they have cool special abilities, not because they have the same amount of HP as a four man squad.

That's a neat idea, maybe the very first quests should be champion quests? We need theses champs early on...

Why do you spend time on War of Magic still? Don't you want to make absolutely perfectest game with Fallen Enchantres? I'd rather wait for couple of month more and get OMG TEH BEST GAEM EVA then get slightly better War of Magic... Which I hadn't played since 1.1.

The game mechanic I am interested in seeing is one that rewards the player for intelligently planning out their cities. I.e. better to have fewer, better cities than more, wimpier cities.

 

Why? Why specify that a city state based kingdom/empire is the one optimum strategy? Why not instead consider different types of structures, and try and fit pros and cons to each one. So you could have the Greek inspired city state nation that you seem to favour. But you could also have a feudal system consisting of a strong capital and lots of under-developed settlements who pay tribute and supply men for your army (that's probably a closer fit to historical and fantastical empires anyway.)

Can anybody think of good examples from history or literature where a country is made up of a small number of very specialised cities? I'm not saying the game shouldn't reward a city-state strategy, but it seems odd to single it out as the best strategy, when I can't think of many good reasons why it should be? Maybe the USA would be an example, but it's not really a good example given medieval/fantasy setting of Ele. Most European countries are dominated by their capitals, with a few cities growing into industrial powerhouses due to geography. Similarly, most nations in Middle Earth had just the one city (well the dwarves and elves had several, but they were isolated and can't really be counted as a coherent country)

I know it's not the most pressing problem with Ele, but thinking about what type of world you want the rules to encourage is important. Perhaps more important than balance?