2761

Arg, yes. And the dragging is still sticky to the last unit selected. I suspect some persistent “snap to” is fighting the user’s command to drag the viewport away, in both cases. This is probably my #1 annoyance right now.

I also have to agree with Strider that most of the UI I figured out by er, reading the tooltips and clicking on things. There’s not really that many things you can do per unit selected (city or unit), and they’re all quite familiar TBS/RPG territory. Things like having buildings greyed out, clicking on them, and seeing a resource in red seems a pretty straightforward explanation.

On the assumption that I was some sort of UI savant, I fired up Achtung Panzer that I got ages ago and got horribly frightened of. Nope, the sequence of moves from strategic to tactical to ??? is still utterly opaque, and all the buttons still uninformative despite having copious tooltips. So there you have it - compared to a niche wargame of the type this forum devours, Elemental is dead simple!

2762

I was told they started shipping yesterday.

2763

That feels contradictory to me. Whether other games do it also or not, it’s a wonky mechanic as Ben says. It’s better to have actions have fixed costs, where their order doesn’t matter unless there’s some clearly defined reason.

For example, one way for it to make sense or balance out is having a 3 point fireball do more damage than a two or one point fireball. But even then, you should be able to set the strength so you can cast the 1 point fireball first if you want and do your other moves.

Another hypothetical example would be a spell that reduces action costs, or increases AP or perhaps if you move behind something that blocks your line of sight you might not be able to cast. But as it stands, even clearly communicated, the mechanic is confusing, unintuitive, and needlessly complicated.

When Ben first described it, it was immediately clear to me that what was described felt like a bug because it’s so internally inconsistent.

2764

Right. So for the same amount of AP, you could cast one spell, or you could attack three times. I’d consider that to be “widely varying AP costs.”

BTW, having to move first and shoot after is not that new of a system. An archer in HoMM could move 4 hexes and then shoot or could shoot immidiately and have all 4 moves “used up” by the shooting. You guys are seriously reaching trying to find a flaw here.

HoMM doesn’t have an action point system. A unit always gets one action. One of the available actions happens to be “move and attack”… or you can just attack without moving, if an enemy is in range. Or you can move without attacking, if you want to. But either way, you only ever get to make one attack in a turn–there are also no alternate attacks in HoMM that are more or less powerful, with greater or lesser associated costs for use. You don’t get to trade movement for extra attacks, or get extra movement because you opt not to attack.

The reason for using an AP system in combat–or more specifically, Elemental’s reason–is that it’s a balancing agent. Elemental’s combat involves taking multiple actions in one combat round, and some actions are better than others. So the strategy in in deciding how you are going to allocate your APs in a given round. Casting a spell is a more powerful action than making a melee attack–it generally causes more damage, you can make it at range, and enemies don’t get a counterattack. All of that is balanced (in part) by the fact that you could make three melee attacks for each spell that you cast. But if you can actually change reduce the cost of the spell just by changing the sequencing of your turn, AP becomes sort of pointless as a balancing agent.

Imagine if shopping worked this way. A dagger costs 80 gold… or however much gold you happen to have, if you don’t have that much. So if you have 80 gold, you could either buy a dagger, or you could spend 70 gold on other things, and then use the remaining 10 to buy a dagger. Balanced?

2765

. . . and senseless.

Cost, whether money or AP, is an indication of relative worth. A fireball is 3 AP because a game designer decides it is “worth” three sword swings. That’s fine. Allowing cast on a fraction throws that all off to merely min-maxing the order of operations.

I have 10 dollars. I walk into a 7-11. If I’m lazy, I buy 10 bucks of beer and I’m out of cash. But wait-- min-max mode ON! 2 Slurpees, some hot dogs, and a lotto ticket later, I have a penny. Beer for me baby.

So with this fractional system, what is the designer telling you about worth of the fireball vs. a sword swing?

Note that this is very different than the type of attack-ends-action decision of HOMM (and D&D IIRC), where movement and action aren’t costs on the same scale.

EDIT: beat out by Ben Sones. But I still like my Slurpee example more.

2766

I agree with most of your points, but I am not wholly on-board with this one. The sequencing of your actions can be regarded as a tactical choice. It may be a counter-intuitive choice (and one without sufficient explanation to the player), but does it render AP ‘meaningless,’ or make the sequence meaningful?

2767

It absolutely does not make the sequence meaningful.

2768

It certainly makes it more meaningful in the context of being an artficial construct with a crazy loophole. It’s not really a tactical choice. It’s not a choice at all once you figure out how it works. Why would you ever not exploit the mechanic?

2769

Given how the old tactical battle system was thrown out and a new one quickly cobbled together, I’m not surprised if it’s a bit off. Brad himself stated he’s not happy with tactical battles as they currently stand. He also took the blame for it, saying it was his fault that they had to throw out the old system which he designed, since it just didn’t work.

I expect it to get some love in the upcoming weeks. They’re okay right now, but they could be a lot more fun.

Now if they can just fix that damn “snap-to-unit” camera thing, I’d be happy. That is so obnoxious to me!

2770

Hmmm, saw on the Day-0 update that Multiplayer won’t be enabled until next week. While it’s understandable that the team is in pretty dire need of rest, I wonder if that’s a wise move. I know MP in TBS games is played by a minority of players, but to those who do play it, it’s a pretty critical feature to have missing for the first week / weekend of a game’s release.

I’m not too upset myself, but for people who haven’t been following Elemental that closely, they may have a rude surprise when they try to play it with their buddies this weekend.

2771

Hrmm. You’re right. Never mind :)

2772

The sequence doesn’t seem particularly meaningful to me, no. All it means is that there is one optimum sequence for actions: highest cost actions go last. I can’t think of any reason why you’d ever not try to squeeze extra actions in before you cast your spell, much in the same way that I can’t imagine a shopper in my example above not spending as much of their gold as possible before buying the dagger. And it does render AP sort of meaningless, or at least less meaningful, if the game provides an always-available avenue for subverting the cost structure for actions. The obvious purpose for making Fireball cast 3 AP instead of 1 is so that players have to sacrifice other actions in order to cast it. But in this system, they don’t. Now, there will be situations in which there aren’t any other actions that you want to take before casting Fireball, and it will end up costing you 3 AP because you just go ahead and cast it. But even in those situations, you aren’t really sacrificing anything by taking a high-AP action, because there weren’t any other actions you wanted to take, anyway.

As a game mechanic, it just makes zero sense to me.

2773

Did they give a reason for this?

It doesn’t exactly run contrary to Ben’s suggestion that this is still a beta when features as important as that aren’t going to be in till a week after release.

2774

It has to do with the way they have MP set up. MP games are set up and played on Stardock’s servers, ostensibly to avoid the MP issues which plagued Demigod’s release. The problem is, that means that those servers have to be set up and configured… work that was supposed to be done this weekend/today. With the retailers breaking the release date, they spent that time working on getting the game live over the weekend instead.

I don’t doubt that the team needs a couple days off, I’m sure the hours have been horrendous. But again, I wonder if it is wise.

2775

Some random thoughts.

The mini map is pretty much worthless and I couldn’t figure out how to get a larger map.

I am getting some serious degrading in my performance after like turn 75 or so and stuff just starts bouncing all over the map. This was on a small map with 3 other races.

I’ve figured things out while playing but some of the stuff just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Oh yeah and I haven’t even figured out how to cast spells. I am guessing that you do it during the tactical game play but who knows I just keep researching them.

2776

OK, so it’s nothing client side. Fair enough. Strikes me as a little last-minute though!

2777

Press the “Mana” button. Yes, that’s really dumb.

2778

Marcus, the patch they released last night was supposed to help with the slowdown later in the game. Is this playing with or without the patch?

Regarding the larger map, you get it by zooming out. It’s a very effective display and largely makes the minimap obsolete. I agree it’s not very useful, but with the strategic zoom I don’t think it was too much of a concern.

For spells, you can cast Strategic ones out of combat, and Tactical ones in combat. When you select your sovereign, there’s a magic-book icon in the lower right, by your mana bar. Click that to cast spells.

2779

OK… I’ll try that stuff. I am playing with the new patch but it didn’t seem to resolve the slow down that I was having even last night. No CTD’s though so thats always a plus.

I guess I never thought about using the mouse wheel to zoom all the way out but I guess that works.

2780

Me too. I don’t know if there were technical reasons why they had to wait for the last minute, but I thought getting the servers set up early would have been another lesson learned from Demigod. :)

Not to go all tinfoil hat or anything, but it could also be that multiplayer is just not quite ready and they expected to be spending the past couple days finishing that up rather than getting a pre-release version out.

Either way, I agree. Very last minute-ish.