Redaxe

Join Date 06/2005

Beta Review

Economy, Quests, Terrain, Scouting, lairs & Combat Ratings

Elemental Beta

Economy

- Need a more dynamic interactive economy i.e. have buildings consume one resource to produce another i.e. studies, gardens, farms etc should actively consume materials. Have a gold upkeep of state buildings like workshops, Town halls, schools etc

- Balance the cost of buildings, income from quests/treasure and city income. I think generally the income that can be found from exploring is too high relative to building costs and income from merchant shops. I think having low income from cities is about right for early game but once my sovereign starts exploring on a large map I am getting 1000s gold from easy quests & finding treasure. It’s ok to find treasure but early game it should still be a struggle to make ends meet. The 600 start gold is probably too high as well.

- The cost of administrative buildings such as town halls, palaces etc is too low and should be increased a lot. A palace should probably cost at least 1000 gold rather than 100. Material costs should be increased accordingly as well. I’m not sure if this is in but perhaps the palace can be upgraded into a castle with walls and towers as another layer of city defense with a higher tech

- I like the city building design where this no separate screen for cities – that helps keep micromanagement down. When cities expand there definitely needs to be some roads/lanes/streets etc between different improvements. If you build 4 gardens in a square this obviously isn’t necessary. Right now cities just look like a messy heap of buildings tightly packed together.

Quests

- Too much gold from clearing rat reward? I’m not sure about this but I saw my gold go up a lot after I got the reward for this.

- Too many escort quests

Terrain & world geography

- Swamp terrain could have more pools of stagnant water and also fallen trees & logs.

- I think there needs to be more terrain types. So far I’ve seen 3 types of forest (I’m not sure if there’s more). I like how mountains have coniferous forests. However I think tropical/temperate rainforest would be good in the warmer parts of the world.

- It would be nice to see a montane cloud forest on equatorial mountains and snow on temperate mountains of the same size. Open marsh wetlands would be nice too especially for river deltas

- More variation in topography. Ridges, escarpments and plateaus would be nice (if possible)

- Swamps don’t really seem to fit in with the surrounding terrain. I see them close to mountains (which is good) but the water doesn’t flow out anywhere from there.

Map Scouting

- I think the scout distance to locate lairs, wild monsters, armies and especially treasure is too far & thus too easy. Perhaps reduce units to a base 3 square sight range (increased heaps with watch towers) but at 2 tiles for treasure, resources & for lairs. Adventurer sovereigns & trained/equipped skirmishers etc would have more sight range

Lairs, nodes & goody huts

- Too many inns currently

- You could put in more monster lairs to contain the nasty high level creatures to stop them eating the sovereigns in the early game. Later on in the game monsters could spawn in lairs and go looking for trouble as MoM did. Good work on making monsters specific to their terrain though – I liked that

- I think magic sources could have some sort of neutral guard as they did in MoM which need to be removed before the resource can be harvested

Combat ratings and units

- I strongly recommend removing combat ratings from all units. I don’t think it adds to the experience. I find it more exciting & interesting having to estimate the strength of a unit and take a risk in initiating combat. However I think its fine for unit size & the main attributes to be left in for players to see.

- I recommend making lairs not show the inhabiting monsters from the map. This way a player has no detailed information on the attributes or numbers of the unit inside. I think having a scout report similar to that in MoM where you get informed of the strongest unit in the lair and perhaps also how numerous that unit is will work fine. That way it feels like a real danger in clearing lairs (which it should be).

Memory & Other Bugs

- These have been reported heaps but I’ve also experienced random crashes particularly with multitasking back into the game from windows

- Sometimes when I bring up a second menu (i.e. load game) I can see the main options menu through the load menu

- Noted a vertical white streak about 1 inch wide through the screen that was unrelated to terrain

All in all it’s looking good so far. I have high expectations.

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Nehanski

I agree with all of your points. The low income generated by cities & no maintenance costs is what bug me the most in Beta2.

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Totally disagree with this one.

Since there's no way to know how a unit was designed, whether they wear spears, bows, armors, etc., particularly in a stack, hiding the combat ratings would turn the game into a guess-fest, as there is no way the information about an enemy army can be obtained.

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Combat ratings aren't 100% accurate. There are a few things that might make them obsolete. My cr17 sovereign beat a cr25 troll becasue the troll had 1hp(dunno why) since my sovereign had higher attack speed.

And the rat quest is definitely overrated. You get roughly 250 gold (give or take a hundred) which is several years of commerce for a city of 400 people. Pretty valuable rats eh?

And yes there are many escort quests but they haven't added all the quests yet, so we will probably see more variation further down the road.

Otherwise I agree.

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"My cr17 sovereign beat a cr25 troll becasue the troll had 1hp(dunno why)"

The reason is because your not the only enemy on the Map as far as the Troll is concerned. They roam and fight all comers. I took out a Sand Golem last night, something I would not even attempt, but it was down to 1/2 HP's. Now that gets you Gold...

Lets us not forget that we are still in, what I like to call, the "Gold Alpha" stage (beta 2). There are many things that are done to allow testing to proceed better. Many are noted in the OP. We shoudl see some major movement in the next 3-4 weeks, as indicated by that Frog fellow...

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Quoting LDiCesare,

reply 2

I strongly recommend removing combat ratings from all units. I don’t think it adds to the experience. I find it more exciting & interesting having to estimate the strength of a unit and take a risk in initiating combat. However I think its fine for unit size & the main attributes to be left in for players to see.
Totally disagree with this one.

Since there's no way to know how a unit was designed, whether they wear spears, bows, armors, etc., particularly in a stack, hiding the combat ratings would turn the game into a guess-fest, as there is no way the information about an enemy army can be obtained.

If you are able to inspect an enemy stack & see, even not in detail, if it has shiny heavy armor or bare oiled torsos, and their stats, ratings should be removed. It's just dumbing the game down. The whole point is to compare forces not basing on some abstract numbers, but on stats and previous experience.

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I don't think that having LESS information would enhance the game for me, personally. Having to manually examine each unity in the stack to estimate its strength sounds time-consuming, not interesting. Now, that said, I think 'Hide Combat Ratings' as an optional setting makes fine sense. Then people who enjoy that can squint all they like

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A fixed combat rating will in my opinion be almost pointless once the tactical combat & magic system is implemented. As Frogboy said somewhere an army of cavalry would beat an equivalent army of archers. So if your combat rated archer army of 100 is beaten by a cavalry army of 60 that means the entire rating system is worthless and would probably frustrate new players to no end.

Add on top of that a complex spell school system and various spell casting units and very quickly its going to be impossible to produce some arbitrary number that can tell you if your army is stronger than your opponent. For instance, a player who invests all their talent in powerful magic but has puny armies with low combat ratings is a strategy that is supposed to be a valid strategy in beating higher combat rated armies through spells.

War is supposed to be tactical and strategic. In Gal Civ 1 war was not. You simply built bigger and more powerful ships with very few attributes. In that game a fixed combat rating is fine but it won't work for a complex combat system that we are expecting to see in Elemental.

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I would prefer to have the combat rating there, knowing full well that there are many circumstances that might render it useless. I don't want to have to go look at each unit to see what it's got and spend 5 minutes thinking aobut whether to attack it or not in a turn. Of course, if i ignore the spell caster/channeler in the army that i'm about to fight in my own internal calculation the i deserve to loose.

More information is better than less, if someone feels that it makes the game worse then they could ignore it, or petition the dev's to make showing the rating a toggle-able option in the game:P

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Regarding combat ratings, I think it is a decent idea.

I think it is a general indicator on how strong a monster but that doesn't means they are the end of all combat. When the tactical combat kicks in, I thin combat rating would make more sense where based on your tactics you may be able to defeat higher ranked enemies.

The only other alternative to combat rating i see is that instead of rating we see relative power of monster i.e. owerpowering , weak etc

Personally I think the opposite should we done i.e. show the combat rating of the monsters but hide stuff like HP , attack etc. To me it makes sense as in Elemental world people would generally know how strong a monster is but will have no idea of the exact stats etc

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