Yeah, you're right.  Maybe Stardock should just have a button that displays "Play Game" and then it just returns a "You won" or "You lost" and tells you if you enjoyed the game or not.

ANY amount of management is micromanagement.  The degree of such micromanagement is completely subjective to one's opinion.  So you can "hurp-durp" all you like, but doing so is really nothing more than micromanaging your response.  You essentially want to force me to waste my time reading your response as fact, when in actuality it's only your opinion.

FYI, I have seen Raven's input and contributions to this game for the better part of a year now.  If I had to choose where to place my "fandom" in, I'll gladly choose his constructive input over your destructive flaming of his constructive input.

Now, personally, I think things like "Moving Metal" and "supplies" SHOULD be Handled Automatically, BUT, you should NEED caravans to do it. You should NEED roads built. You should NEED a "Network" to do all these things for you. I don't want to load metal on a cart and make sure it gets where it's going. That's why I have Subjects in my Empire. To do the small mundane things for me.

What I DON'T WANT is for it to all be "MAGICALLY" sent to where it needs to go with some invisible "Global" system when I don't even have any roads linking one city to another.

Far Too Many things with Elemental have gone Against Standard Convention in what's normally done with these kinds of games. For the last two years I've seen aspects of this game get "Purposefully" dumbed down. That's right, I said PURPOSEFULLY. Why? Because it was easier to balance....SCREW THAT. Make it Hard to Balance, that's what the Devs Jobs Are for. Not to make it easier on themselves by keeping numbers small so they can be added and subtracted easily. Not so they can leave out finer points like damage types and resistances and so many other things that were dropped I couldn't even begin to name them all, all because people didn't want any micro, and now we're ALL paying the price of those decisions, including Stardock.

This system needs to be Completely Revamped with Strategy AND Logistics in mind. You can't have Military Strategy WITHOUT some Logistics, Period. If you do, you end up with what we have here....a Shit Load of UNHAPPY people, namely Most Of Us.

We should probably stop bickering like children and MAKE IT CLEAR to the Devs What We Want, which is a Deeper System that Works. I like putting thought and planning into my games. That's how I have fun and Why I bought a Strategy Game. I don't want to play "Risk" where everything happens behind the scenes and is taken out of my hands by "Global" automated systems.

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Well, sorry for that....but I feel a Lot Better Now

Edit: damage types and stuff Are being taken into account, that was a Bad Example on my part. See what happens when you get all "Ranty"...lol. 

I think we're butting heads for no reason.

I completely agree that roads should be an integral part of the game. As of now, it takes way too long to build them which makes them useless. If anything, global resources should be maintained, but only if the city has a direct route to the capital by way of a road or harbor. The amount of resources you receive should just go to a global pool. Roads should take a shorter time to build, and the amount of resources you get from a particular field is directly related to the infrastructure of the mine and of the road transporting the materials.

The thing is, the transportation and the upgrade of the road should be automated. Unlike in Civ, I should not have to sit there and get my workers to upgrade all of my roads to railroads (that's what automate work was for, which was very useful and a nice feature). The only things that should be manually upgraded/controlled by the player should be: upgrading the mine/lumber camp to increase its capacity for resources and defending it from attack.

I'm sorry but it's neither intelligent nor unnecessary. It's a core of strategy gaming. And other strategy games do it without tedious micromanagement. The point of localised resources is to prevent you from spamming cities or plopping them down in the middle of nowhere and having them running a full throttle right away. This doesn't mean you shuttle resources around yourself - you create a road network and much of the rest can be abstracted.

The point is this supply chain requires investment and it can be disrupted by enemy armies. If you want to expand, you do it in a way that you can afford to supply and you must be able to protect the routes. Cutting off supply routes is a major part of strategy game warfare, just as it has been in real warfare.

Edit: I see your last post is more in line with how I feel. I left this edit window open for too long to see it.

Ahh, see, with that comment there I wasn't "Flaming" you. It wasn't even aimed at you really, it was aimed at the frustration many of us are having with simplified mechanics that cause detrimental issues to the game. I do have one other account on the forums here which is my Yahoo account, SeerusStoryteller.

I do appreciate what Jharii said, but, now that we're all past that, lets All of us concentrate on what matters here, the game, and fixing it.

All of us care about the future of the game and as such all of us are attached to it. Either by being here and helping in it's development for the last two years like many of us have, or those of us who are more recent to the forums and are trying to help "fix" the game because of our recent $50 investment. I'm sorry if my reply came off as a flame towards you Seraph, it wasn't meant to be aimed at you.

I think all of us are on more or less the same page though now, so at least it got us somewhere. I think we can all agree the game needs more detailed mechanics to help with both Strategy AND logistics...But...Not Too Much Detail, because it is a game after all and shouldn't feel like work. In a way though, to me, that "Work" is what gives me such a sense of Accomplishment when I win a hard campaign or crush a particularly tough opponent. If the game doesn't take any effort or thought to win then it's not worth playing to me. In any game such as this there needs to be a certain level of depth and I think that's what most of us expect in a modern game.

In it's day MoM was a Masterpiece of Strategy Gaming. However, it was very limited by the technology of the computers back then. It literally Couldn't have mechanics that were overly complicated because the computers it ran on didn't have the memory required to keep track of all the intricacies of modern games, but for it's day, it was the best of the best in fantasy strategy gaming. Today's strategy gamers expect a lot more depth and re-playability in their games.

For Elemental this means they need to find a "Happy Medium" between complexity and eliminating un-needed micro. I agree that "Some" resources should be global, and under the right "conditions" such as having a reliable road network, or even magical gates to send things from one city to another, many other resources could be made to be "global", but, I think we've all seen the drawbacks of having everything be handled globally now and I think it's safe to say most of us now think it's a Bad Idea. The thing is getting the DEVS to see that it's a Bad Idea and trim down some of the global options, or at least tweak them so the player needs to put a little effort into getting them to a "global" level, like by building roads or the aforementioned "Magic Gates". Once the Chief has his mind set on liking a certain mechanic though it takes TREMENDOUS amounts of posting and vocalization from the community to change his mind and show him it isn't want his customer base wants. Those of us who have been here for the long haul have seen this first hand.

Sadly, it's taken all the mess that's happened to show them where they should have listened a little closer to the community. Honestly, there's been more then a few occasions in the last few weeks since launch where I've felt like yelling out "Told you so"...but I really don't want to be "that guy", especially since I greatly value my involvement with Elemental, the Dev Team, and the community. No matter how the "official mechanics" turn out I'm still not going anywhere and I'm still going to be here. The Dragonlance Team and myself have put in far too much work already to stop now. This is how a lot of us modders feel and I know that by talking to many of the major modders in the community. That's why we're pushing SD so hard to get us the tools we need to do things like alter the core mechanics (which we need access to those Python API's to do), or to add our own models to the game (which we're also making great leaps towards but we need plugins from Stardock). Over the last two years a lot of us have heard the fall-back excuse of "If you don't like it, mod it" and now we're trying to do just that and in order to do it the right way we need those mod tools. Of course right now there's far more pressing problems that Stardock should be worrying about aside from getting us the mod tools, like fixing balance and fleshing out the mechanics that are there already and of course, fixing the "Global mess" which hopefully won't get Any Worse when Frogboy brings in the global mana pools. I'm hoping those are handled a lot better than some of the other global resources because if they aren't it could be the final nail in the coffin for Elemental. MoM had global mana though and it handled it quite well, so if they follow that model we shouldn't have anything to worry about. If on the other hand this upcoming Global Mana turns all casters into clones which are all the same I think Many of us are going to be too disappointed to keep on trudging through the development process (is it just me or does it feel wrong to say "development process" when talking about a game that's already released?).

Count me in the 'not liking global resources' group. It really saddened me when they made the decision to go with that instead of a more local approach. I'm a fan of city-building games, especially the (semi)historic kind like the Ceasar-, Anno-, and Settler-series. I enjoy setting up a resource chain, and the planning involved when you want to expand. I had hoped some parts of this would be in Elemental, maybe not a long chain with several production steps, but at the very least the necessityto move a resource from its production site to where it is consumed. Still, I was keeping an open mind, if Stardock found a way to abstract this while still keeping the game fun, I wouldn't complain.

Unfortunately I have to agree that it has dumbed the game down to the point that it is just not fun. Anything can be produced anywhere, and caravans only give (some rather none-sensical) bonuses. This kind of mechanics might be okay for a your average RTS, but for a world/continent spanning empire building TBS it just doesn't work. But I'm preaching to the choir here

Anyway, I hope Elementals economy becomes a bit more complex. On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being arcade games, 2 your average RTS, 3 CivIV, and games like Anno and the Settlers being in the 7-9 range, I'd rate Elemental the same as CivIV, a 3. I'd like to see Elemental move into the 5-6 range. Like Tormy above I doubt the system will change significantly, but we can hope. Adding some building requirements for training troops would be a step in the right direction.

Just a quick idea here...  I'm a big player of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, and, to be kind, it is all about micromanagement.  It's luck enough to have a simple economic model (most versions only have two goods: food and gold), so that helps out some, but then you add in the various things you can make with gold, food and people (troops, weapons, etc.) and it can get pretty complex.  Most versions of the game have somewhere around 30 static cities total, and as you get to the later stages with 10 or more of them, it can get pretty overwhelming with the amount of micromanagement.

Since early iterations of the game though, they have recognized this issue and allowed you to delegate operational control of cities to officers.  You put a few officers to work on a city or region and they do the rudimentary things for you... hire troops, keep the people happy, collect taxes, etc. and send reinforcements to where you tell them to (usually the front line where you are micromanaging a couple of cities actively). 

It has its flaws, but there are good things about it too.  You can make a more complex system at the city level because you as a player only concentrate on a couple/three cities at a time, and you have something to do in those cities almost every turn.

In the most recent version (11), the biggest drawback of the system is that the AI governors are horrid at their jobs and will slowly let your territory rot from within.  But that's an AI problem, and one of the nice things about Stardock is that they seem committed to making the AI better in EWOM. 

So I guess that's what I might propose here, in addition to the already mentioned things like making buildings as prerequisites for unit creation, etc. or roads prerequisites for global distribution: allowing us to delegate authority to officers in cities so that they can make productive micromanagement choices for us.  If we want to control a city and do lots of little things ourselves, that's available too, but if not, the officers can take care of it.

The sort of little things I'm thinking of:

-Troop production and movement to the front line.

-Building housing if food is available and the city is near population cap.

-Building roads to connect to other cities in the kingdom/empire.

-Alerting the Sov if there are hostiles in the territory.

-Building upgraded buildings if they are in a selected specialization area for the city (you get a series of checkboxes when you delegate control with gold, tech, arcane, food, materials, crystals, ore, etc. and you get to choose which building types should be built in this city). 

For me, this accomplishes two items:

1) it gives me a way to not have to do so much micromanagement that I already have to do when my empire grows past the first few cities.  When I get up to around 20 cities, it is just a pain in the arse to keep managing it all.

2) it allows for a good use of all these production champions I hire that end up doing nothing but sitting in a city and producing 1 tech a turn or a 20% ag bonus for the whole game.  At least they won't get bored. 

Beyond that, it allows me to concentrate on what I want to do!  I want to make war, set broad strategic directions for the country, and remake the world in my image.  At the beginning, I have to do some of the management work solo, and I think that's totally cool, but by the time I am becoming a demigod who rules half of the world, I think I should be allowed to delegate a little.

I think the system could still be made deeper and more complex without resorting to local resources.

For one, have some buildings cost maintenance in gold ... have more ways to get gold/tax populace.

Honestly ... I think POPULATION HAPPINESS would be a strong way to create a deep and fun game with the global system. Sure, its been done a zillion times before, but its *almost* necessary to balance a proper taxation system.

That way you have two sources of iincome ... gold (lots of gold) and people (far less at first).

I'd propose that Taxation be divisable between Gold and Science/Studies ... and that Science can be split into Knowledge and Magic.

(although I guess it'd just turn into a 3-way split anyways ... Gold, Knowledge, and Arcane)

... At first your forced to have no more than 10% magic (per population). You can still build magical buildings through studying the magic tree in "Knowledge" and they will give a few Arcane points ... but they also have nice Percentage boosters that will only be possible once you get Government Civics that increase the percentage of Magic you can gain per population. With the *Best* being maybe 40% max. (but having some penalties, like less gold or pop growth or happiness or something)

Equally, you start with a maximum of 30% science (population based) ... but of course buildings that give Percentages increase not only lost libraries but also the knowledge points gained through population. High end techs allow a Government Civic that allows for maybe 90% tech.

From the beginning you can get 100% gold.

Obviously materials gathered from "resource sites" like a Gold Mine cannot be converted into another resource ... its only the Population Taxes that can be distributed between these three basic "intangibles." Different civics have different effects on not only Taxation maximums, but also various Public Happiness modifiers, overall production modifiers, and troop training speed modifiers (and there can be other benefits and penalties).

So those world resources are quite important at the beginning (and always truly, since *extra* food might be hard to come by).

Also, captured cities should probably have extra unhappiness (and start with 0 influence). Culture/Influence should be handled by faction (similar to civ), so that an occupied city starts out with 99% foreign influence, and slowly reduces foreign influence over time ... meanwhile, the Percentage that is your culture, is the Percentage of Max-Radius that your "conquering influence" controls. Also, your Percentage of Culture/Influence determines how much Unhappiness is in the Conquered City.

You won't be able to capture enemy cities through this Culture/Influence, but such cities will convert more easily after capture.

Certain Military Resources should be blocked from a City until it has a proper building and a trade route with at least one friendly city that produces the resource.

These military resources may be as simple as Metal (requires Smelter and trade-route w/ metal), or equipment/ weapons like  Swords (requires Blacksmith and access to metal)

I think such a Building requirement (and trade-route requirement) for basic military resources and certain military equipment ... would make the Global System a lot more doable.

//

In this model, your not giving even the slightest order to a minion. Instead you have the City "in need" produce a Smelter and a Blacksmith, and you provide a safe trade-route between the City "in need" and a network with access to metal (meaning directly or indirectly roaded to the Metal producing city).

Obviously, if you don't have any natural sources, and you only got the resource through trade, your city in question will need to be somehow connected to the Capital city (just part of the same "network")

Also, I feel that all factions should at least be able to get 2 caravans per city ... while the special few can get 3 or maybe as much as 4 per city. // In late game only of course ... 1 caravan per Faction is fine in early and mid game, at least for those factions not caravan oriented. Also, they need to share the same "caravan techs" so that savvy trading doesn't allow someone to wield more than the "max" caravans per city (like 6 caravans for instance, by having the 4 empire techs and 2 kingdom techs) ... such things that overlap somewhat may be shared (might as well).

It wasn't even an option on the poll Frogboy posted today so it appears they still have their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand about how lame and boring their game economy is.

Combat Mechanics, Magic, and Tactical Battles are definitely the Top 3 ( and AI well ... yea that's there too, but you can only see how to make a good AI in reaction to the core mechanics ... therefore these battle/ magic mechanics need to be changed first, so that the AI can adapt and evolve to a "good" game)

yea ... it needs to be a "good game" first, and then have "good AI" later.

Edit: This relates to the thread because ... I believe that the Combat features of the game need to be focused on first and foremost (combat, magic, battles), THEN the economy and the AI.

Sure, but how would you know since they're not even willing to make it a poll option?

To me this just shows that despite what Brad/Frogboy has said they are still not listening to the EWOM beta testers.

Personally for me all 3 are a toss-up and need fixing badly for the game to go forward and be fun. But they've never been interested in feedback on the global economy and it appears that the community this forum community is still being selectively listened to the same way as it was leading up the disastrous launch.

Not to jump on the negative bandwagon, but I agree that the economy seems to be way down on the list of things that need changes, if it is on there at all. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that they'll leave this for the mods.