Removal of Overlord and Teleportation modification:

WOW, I never thought about how big a change in play that those two things in tandum would create.  I have to 're-learn' my early game.  And, it worries me about how I will defend my empire effectively when it gets really big. 

I have yet to see mana totals beyond 24ish, and it takes me a while to get to 24 mana with the approach I use. 

It's going to take me a few games to get a feel for this.

Just some thoughts.

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Just noticed the altered time for troop training.  All these things say to me that you are striving for a slower expansion in the early game. I can see where this fits in with the struggle of a society clawing its way out of a catacysmic event.  I am definitely going to have to change my approach to the early game though.

What I would like to see are a few more customization options.  Some things like, easier way to create races of my own liking.  Not sure where in the A,B,C thing this will fit in, but I really like the direction this game is taking and IF I could have what I wanted in it, then I would chose more diversity in the race designs ... I am guessing this is a C type project becaue I picture race creation as something like your ship creation in GALCIV2. 

If you guys can do it with ships, I know you can do it with races and the race structures.  You have all the peices/parts for the structures we just need a tool that lets us make sure we are creating all the right structures and of course, a new tool for building the races themselves.

That would be fricking awesome for me.

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Another note, I really want a crack at modding the AI through python scripting or whatever other method come up with.  You mentuioned this before but I am not sure if you are still planning something like allowing us to alter the AI.

THere is no discrepancy. 1.1 is scheduled to come out on Sept 30th.

If they miss that target date, I'm sure they will honour the promise of everyone who bought before version 1.1, whenever it does end up coming out instead, getting the free expansions.

An addendum to my earlier post concerning the "lair / dungeon" idea.  I have no idea if you ever played the old games Breach2 and Rules of Engagement but, those were two seperate games that had an interlocking aspect to them in that during the games of Rules of Engagement it was possible to have your ships get close enough to engage the opposing ship via boarding parties.  This portion of the game was normally played out in a purely strategic setting within Rules of Engagement but, if you had the other games Breach2 then when you got in close enough to do thisyou could instead launch the Breach2 game where it would switch over to a tactical battle involving the take over of the enemy ship this was entirely optional and was not required in order to complete the action.  For those of us who wanted the additional level of tactical management that was offered by this it was a great added feature.  A system similar to this could be used in developing this as an expansion if it is not currently in live with your vision for the game.

Another thing which needs improvement is pathing, there have been a number of times that I have watched my own units make foolish moves with regards to pathing, If intelligent pathing is planned for implementation even better, this could include designating units non-combatants so they avoid enemies altering paths to move away from them if visible on the map, normal pathing and guardian units which would have pathing take them to engage any units that are visible within a range of 2 squares on their normal patrol route.

Rules of Engagement..  kind of off subject but I haven't thought about that game in YEARS.  What a great game, and one that needs a remake.  Good to see someone out there who actually remembers it.

Ok, I'm going to try to calm down and be civil here.

I'm not going to play a fantasy game where I can't create artifacts for my heros and I'm not going to play a fantasy game where I can't cast big time overworld spells (from Master of Magic, think Armegeddon, Meteor Storm, Time Stop, Suppress Magic, Nature's Wrath)

Those are the bare minimum requirements.  Heros need to play a much bigger role, partly through the creation of artifacts.  And Magic needs to play a bigger role in the game.  Period.  These things are currently not in the game.

The second one (overworld spells) is precisely why we have to change to a global mana storage system rather than per unit so that we can have, big, powerful spells like that.

These suggestions are pretty trivial compared to the magic overhaul which reportedly is in the works and artifact creation, but something that I found myself annoyed with.

When your empire starts to get a little larger, its often difficult to locate resources within your own territory.  I had a shard extractor destroyed by roaming monsters.  I wanted to go and rebuild it but I couldn't find the fire shard anywhere.  I looked for an hour before giving up and I lost access to that fire shard for the remainder of the game.  Extremely aggravating.  What if my ogre village or dragon brood, or whatever got destroyed and I couldn't remember which of my 20 cities it was in.  Being able to locate things in game is necessary on larger maps.  In Civ 4 there was a resource option available that would make resource icons pop up which made them easier to see (and find on large maps).  Extremely handy.

It would be nice if you could turn on filters while scrolled out to help you locate various items.  I just couldn't find resources within my empire.  What if one of the 20 gold mines got destroyed.  How would I go about finding that on a large map where I control half of the world?

It would also be nice if you could label places on your map in game that you could see easily.  If there aren't filters, having words showing where something is in game would be sweet.  A player could scroll out and see on the overworld map (ogre village) in text that I added to the map.

Again, this is just a nice little addition that would take away some minor frustration, and doesn't compare to not having artifact creation and magic system overhaul.  Fix those things first.

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Try turning on cloth map only when you have throuble with such things; it makes things less cluttered and easy to identify for me.

Brad, I think the lack of spells is a problem - can we have a thread where users suggest spells they would like to see, this way we'll get many different ideas for different elemental spells, different books, far more than you could generate at Stardock alone. Then I'm sure balancing them wouldn't be too much extra overhead if all the spells are balanced in one go - especially compared to the benefits.

This would definitely add to the epicness and with so many spells for you guys to choose from you could keep everything in keeping with the lore and pick and choose spells that you think fit.

Yeah, I did this, and it helped a little.  But still, there are hundreds of blue icons on the cloth map.  It would be nice if I could hit a "resource" button from the cloth map and have only resources pop up.  And then maybe have a check box where I could go down the list and uncheck things I didn't care about.  This would really speed up the search for destroyed resources within an extremely large empire.

A fireshard is hard to find on the cloth map? Something can't be right... it's a red crystal, should pop out like an eyesore among all that blue icons.

This is an awesome idea.  I have many ideas for spells.  You could tie in the largest most powerful world altering spells into shard control.  For example, a spell called "Ice Age" where all competing empires experience a drop in food production.  This spell could require control of 2 water shards, or 1 water and 1 air shard.  This is the kind of thing wars can be started for or something that would help someone speed up the demise of his enemies.  Spells don't necessarily have to require 1 type of shard, if it seems obvious to require 2 different ones, program that in.  A spell "Hurricane Season" which could destroy buildings could require an air and a water shard, or 2 water shards.  There could be spells that reduced the movement of all competitors by 1 in the overworld map.  Spells like this would prompt you to do something about it. 

Yeah, you'd think it would have stuck out.  It didn't.  what do the shards look like after the improvement has been broken? It had to have been inside one of the enemy capitals that I captured, cluttered by other building.

The only thing that really stands out on the cloth maps are the golden quest markers.  Other than that, trying to find 1 specific thing on the cloth map is not easy if you're playing a large map and are well into the game.

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The cloth map doesn't need to be cluttered with obtrusive icons, there just needs to be an option to flip on "obtrusive icons" of a paticular type of resource that you are looking for while on the cloth map.

On that note, when is the new mana system going in; 1.1? I must admit I was disappointed not to see it in 1.08, but given the other problems I can see the wisdom in not bringing it in yet.

Thanks

Ok...standing on the balcony and smoking a cigarette i had an idea. I try to explain.

For C:

At the moment we can marry and have children. These children can be powerful champions or we can marry them to other factions. But they are "useless" until they are grown up. 

Give us another diplomacy option: let us give our underaged children as wards to other factions. These alliances are not as strong as alliances originated by marriage. We can still declare war, but in this case these children are killed. Equally the other way round.

When these children become adults there are 2 possibilities:

- child comes back with a random ability or spell, normally used only by the other faction (chance of 75%)

or

- the child doesn´t come back because his/her link between his/her new "parents" and "siblings" is too strong (chance of 25%)

Here, the percentage could be flexible, because it might be more likely that younger wards stay with their foster parents.

(I was thinking of Theon Greyjoy :D)

I would really like to see a toggle to show numerical values over buildings in your cities that whows their production and cost.  Any chance of this?

Ok, I'm going to list a few points  (they've probably already been mentioned but hey, at least you know more than 1 person wants these fixed). I hope this doesn't come across as a wall of text because I want this to be easy to read. But these points are from a person kinda losing patience with the game, and fixing these would be a sure fire way of getting me and others like me to keep playing (and buying expansions). I know a lot of this will sound harsh, but it's completely constructive in intent.

EVERYTHING I'm going to list in this section, hopefully, is able to be done in the vanilla game. Nothing here should require an expansion.

1. Make defenders attack first. Everywhere, cities, overland map, everywhere. Why? If I have a "super stack" of units, I've won the game. I just finish everyone off on the first tactical combat turn, and it's over. If defenders attack first, especially against sovereigns and strong units, you will DEFINITELY have to think before attacking.This will also get rid of super stacks and spread units around the map more. As a byproduct: combat difficulty will increase (good thing).

2. A Big One: MORE UNIQUE SPELLS!

I'll be honest, the game is called War of Magic, and there's like 30 spells to learn, maybe. Look, make a thread in the forums if you want, call it "spell ideas for the next patch," I don't care (heck, I'll start if off if you want me to) just get some new spell ideas. Jeez, there would be like 10 pages of new ideas for spells in a few days, just pick your and the dev teams favorite 100 and add them to the game and rebalance the existing.This should not be a hard thing to do, they're all xml anyway; once you have the ideas for them, you can just copy and paste them in the game. But you NEED to add some more and more variety (and not just low level crappy spells, I'm talking about global enchantments, high level spells, etc (costing 20, 30+ mana, etc)). If you're worried about getting ideas from forum members like this ... who cares. It will make the game better; just think of it as "magic beta" and we'll come up with ideas for you.

3. Fix movement speeds. if organized is gone, make some heroes have it (even low level heroes) like in MoM "path-finding" so that it's easier to get around the map. Right now, without organized, to be honest, I fell asleep playing last night. If organized can be removed in a patch that easy, then you can add some things like this just as easy, I hope.

   -organized is too tough? Limit pathfinding (organized) so the party size is smaller (4 or 8, not the 15 or whatever it is right now).

4. Resources: there need to be more of them. I saw in the patch notes that you decreased them, which is the wrong way to go (if you can lower them, then you can raise the number in a patch, but tweak them too). If you want, you can lower the benefit of each resource square on the map, but the world is WAY too bland as it is. You need more resources on the map, and different varieties. Think MoM, where each square would have some small benefit, then you would have the big ones like food, mana, adamantium, mithril, etc.

5. More abilities for heroes/sovereigns. I don't want a hero who's only unique ability is that he/she provides 1 gold a turn. Whoop de doo. I want a hero who can cast his/her own magic, has a spell I don't have, and will never get, and even has some abilities that are passive, and some that are "1 use" per battle.

6. Fix the name generator in the game. Seriously, c'mon? I usually don't care at all about the names that games generate, but Pottlyfingledor or some such is not what I would name my kid.

7. Heroes and sovereigns need to level up faster. They need passive experience gains (again, ala MoM) because otherwise they are worthless and only provide the 1 ability on their card. I WANT the enemy sovereign to be insanely tough, no matter what difficulty I'm playing on (relative, of course; ridiculous difficulty will make him harder of course). I don't want to be able to one shot instant kill him, I want his to pose a challenge and threaten my entire army (this is where point number 1 will help, making defenders attack first will help make the enemy sovereigns much tougher).

8. Release the mod tools. I know the game has some, I talking the good stuff, including the code. People need to get their hands on this sooner rather than later because if people lose interest, the mod community will be kaput.

FOR LATER EXPANSIONS

1. Resistance: this needs to be a stat in the game. Change the name if you want, dress it up however it needs to be done, but all units need this. Heroes and sovereigns need a HIGH innate magic resistance (i.e. 1-shot killing an enemy sovereign with a magic spell: not fun).

2. Make factions more unique. If not, then at least make kingdom/empire more different so they're that much more unique. I'm talking Protoss/Zerg different.

That's all I can think of right now, but I hope the above points help. Thanks for listening to our ideas.

Ohh please don't lock this for the rest of us civilzed to understand that forum titles are there for a reason.  Ohh and by the way I'm very upset that my copy of the game had a dented corner on the box.. Ohh wait that's not what this thread is about.

This has been the single most enjoyable read yet on these forums. There are some very creative gamers out there with some spectacular ideas and the fact that we even have this forum to express our ideas is wonderful enough but then someone from Stardock actually READS them. Wow.

A random  "A"-type change that might be useful for 1.1, as it doesn't involve totally overhauling things, is a slight modification to the Adventuring tree.   I think it'd be a fair idea to make quest destinations at least, as well as quests, appear after researching them in the deadzones away from resources--perhaps making them spawn a minimum distance away from any cities or areas of control.

With the restructuring of the game so that wasteland areas typically exist here and there, that'd give reason to actually send your heroes and your sovereign out TO these dead spaces.  They'd become a place of wealth for powerful relics, if one's willing to not only face the monsters waiting out there, but stand away from your kingdom to do so.

Furthermore, it significantly curtails the strange surreality of ancient ruins suddenly being discovered in the center of your empire, or even directly adjacent to cities (which also has the effect of sometimes stifling city growth) and as a whole is more flavorful and reasonable without completely re-conceptualizing how quests are handled. 

brAD Already did so. one of the dev journals where he admitted spells in beta was not up to scratch and asked for ideas, pages and pages of ideas was posted , totally ignored.

Sigh. SD is really good at seeming to care about what gamers want. They post a lot, constantly ask for feedback etc. Sadly one thing they don't seem to be good at is actually acting on them. That would be okay if they know better, but it seems when it comes to EWOM they don't know better..

The problem here is that I can't say more, or be accused of drama.

Here's a thought for A that should be easy to implement: Quest story in window.

Currently, when the player gets a quest, the game displays a separate screen with one huge picture and text below, which you have to scroll through. Instead, make a window appear at the center of the screen while still on the world map, with a small picture to the left and the text to the right, buttons underneath to accept or withdraw. This would be much more esthetic and would not disrupt the gameplay like the current solution does.