Sovereign/Champion Developement

v914

from Elemental Forums

In general hero development is fun, I wandering around the world smashing monsters and enemy cities with my sovereign. I also like picking new traits and decking him out with cool loot. I think there is room for improvement though.

 

* When selecting a trait, trait-trees should be accessible. The tree should at least be in the doc. For instance for a while I ignored the quick until I figured out it was actually a tree. Also it should show all the spells you get from selecting a magic skill, e.g. muti-domain spells. File this under informed decision making. All information relevant to a decision should be accessible at the point in time of the decision.

* I like the rare, common/uncommon flags by the way. It seems that 4th level class specialization should have different flags though, maybe 4th level option only, something to let noobs know they won’t see another class option later.

* The administrator path needs to be rethought a little, it is no fun for me to plant heroes in cities and not have them off fighting and adventuring. Even ignoring the fun factor it isn’t profitable either since they won’t level.. yeah, there is the adventurers guild, but that is too late in the game and expensive to be much use… I’ve beaten games before I’ve got one of those things built before…. hopefully AI improvements will make for longer games but still. I like the idea of rare* dedicated city administrators, which do various cool thins. By rare I mean not enough even for all your important cities to have one. But I feel these should be completely separate from regular champions. Then they are pure cool factor, rather than hrm seems kindof a waste to plant this guy in a city the whole game.

* The defender option seems underpowered to me, but maybe I just haven’t see their cool powers. Anyone a fan of going this route?

 

* In general hero development seems too weighted towards making melee fighters, the only effective pure mage build I’m aware of is the fire mage, which seems a little counter intuitive given the lore of the sovereign being a powerful mage.

When building a fire mage a pet peeve often having them know more than 1 school of magic is counter productive even when they come for free e.g. finding /buying a book that teaches you a basic level of a school… let me explain:

1. It is better to get a few skills at high levels vs lots of low level skills

2. The options you get are random, but not completely random

3. There appears to be at least some bias towards improving skills you have already learned.

* The only school of magic that gets any real & reliable benefit from the more damage traits is fire, maybe death(haven’t played much with them)

 

* In general I think magic school upgrades should improve existing spells not just give you access to new spells.

* There just don't seem like enough summon spells for a pure summoner mage to be a viable option.

13,946 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


* There just don't seem like enough summon spells for a pure summoner mage to be a viable option.

There aren't.  I've been mulling this over in my head for a while now, and with the upcoming nerf to summoning (can't have tactical and strategic summons of the same unit), I'll have to make a post addressing this.  In the meantime, the Summoner profession is useful in the very early game, but that's about it.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top


There are suppose to be some new special summons in the upcoming patch.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree whole heartedly with all of the above.

 

In particular, the Path of the Governor is something I would like to explore, but don't for two reasons.

  • As stated above, Governors don't level. Ever. Considering the speed at which Characters out in the wild level up, I don't think it is unreasonable for characters posted in cities to get 1 xp every turn regardless, and for the adventurer's guild to up that to 3 per turn (considering how freakishly difficult it is to get and build, and how late in the game it happens). Cities with governors should essentially have a second set of specializations based upon the governor.
  • By the time you have a character up running around and leveled to 4th, they are geared and trained for combat. Then selecting the Path of Governor for them wastes all their first levels of Traits, unless they are spells, which you probably won't get as choices.

I like the Defender skills, but they are indeed under-powered in that their abilities either impact globally at a low rate (which is fine), on a specific target at a low rate (+1 Counter Strike for one unit), or for themselves at a low rate. Because in games like these, the total removal of one enemy unit is almost always a superior tactical choice to increasing the defense of one of your units (as a spent action), Path of Assassin and Warrior characters are inherently better in terms of actions to payoff.

  • The Defender should have access to good Tactical Global abilities that either flush debuffs from all friendlies, do a burst heal, increase the defense of all allies (as they can), and strip offensive buffs from enemies (as examples).

Finally, the levelling up acquiring magic mechanic is boring and predictable. We need to be able to choose our spells and specialize our casters. We need to be able to level our characters up in magic EVERY TIME if we want them to be a caster.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting OMG_Shiro, reply 2

There are suppose to be some new special summons in the upcoming patch.

I wish.  They're going to be buildable units, like more powerful and useful Mercenaries.

+ Added the Binding faction ability (assigned to resoln, their shard shrines summon special elementals like camps)