3541

I too like the way the game handles its tech tree. The techs themselves, though… not so much.

3542

Same here. I’m quite happy to have noticed the 1.06 update, that just means I am closer to my goal of sitting down and playing. Until then, I have a backlog of stuff that I’m still working through.

3543

I feel so alone.
Most of the things people complain about are so inane and meaningless to me, yet the things I really dislike about Elemental, like the terrible tech system, get praised.

3544

Could you explain why you feel it is a terrible system? Sincerely curious. If you’ve gone into it somewhere else in the thread, point me in the right direction. I bought the game, but haven’t had much time with it, but I like how research works. So far my biggest complaint is I can steamroll the AI if I really want to.

3545

Gladly.

A small discussion about it managed to sprout in the following posts, but it was quickly drowned in the drama.
Bullet points: Exploding, illogical costs, extreme linearity encouragin optimized research order (a few techs randomly appearing a bit earlier don’t cut it) and complete independence from the actual situation in the game.

3546

Now that I have some play time in elemental, there is some feedback Id like to give on some changes, if this is even possible at this point.

The “magic” in elemental seems almost useless. The key problems are that mana regens so slowly along with the spells available are currently “meh”. The game is more like civ-lite with a dash of fantasy thrown in for flavor.

I do realize there is also a fundamental difference between here and MOM, and that is that the “Big wizard” never left his capitol city unlike Elemental. This way you could balance a spell a bit by saying, to summon a creature it not only cost X mana, but it took Y turns to do so. I know you can’t leverage that mechanic in elemental easily.

Having said that I would like:

  1. Mana to be a global resource, like it was in MOM. In MOM you had mana crystals in a global pool. You also had a fair number of buildings, not to mention ‘nodes’ to increase your mana income.

  2. The essence stat, simply limits you to how much of the global pool you can tap at any one time, be it a battle or a strategic spell. Perhaps if you did somehow enable a multi-turn cast, it would be how much mana per turn you could push toward some spell that might cost 500 mana to cast.

An example: You have 30 essence and 100 mana in the global mana pool. You go into a tactical battle, and cast 30 mana worth of spells. You immediately go into another tactical battle, and now have another 30 mana to spend (global pool is down to 70 now).

The reason I feel that this is important is because if you end of making a lot if interesting spells that you want to cast frequently, with the current mana mechanics, you will be severely limited due to the fact you will nearly always be OOM.

  1. The spells them selves are dull. This is not news. You are also missing the realm spells ( all your cities / lands ) and world spells. Maybe you do not want this kind of stuff in your game, but I do.

Strategic spells should also be unlimited range. For example if I want to cast brilliance on a city, I should not have to run withing a few tiles of it to cast the spell.

  1. There is no artifact creation system, which was definitely a part of MoM I loved. Yes we can create magic items, but they are pre-created. We can’t deck out our hero in custom made phat-lewtz.

Maybe I just want a more MoM like game. I was thinking elemental was supposed to be a spiritual successor to MoM. Maybe it is not supposed to be. Anyway, these are just some of my desires for the future of Elemental.

3547

I agree with a lot of your feedback, DeepT. I do know they’re going to re-work spell mechanics (I posted the details in the single-purpose thread), but if Stardock doesn’t add in their own interesting spells, I’m going to mod them in myself asI’ve had many of the same thoughts as you about what spells are missing.

Part of the reason I was (am) so interested in Elemental is because of the modding capabilities, I see it almost as a TBS construction kit, and I intend to exploit it once the game settles down a bit.

3548

Magic needs to be more varied and capable:

  • Mana regen must increase. I suggest 15% of the caster’s essence value/ turn

  • The spell schools need more individual flavor and variety

  • Shards must be either generic (work with any school) or convertible from one type to another. Casters should not be heavily incented to take every school in order to take advantage of capturing shards

Mages are more interesting, in any game, when their individual powers can be vastly different. EWoM currently makes them all a bit same-y. And with the mana regen issues, they’re a bit too much like a low-level D&D wizard, who casts his two sleep spells and then calls it a day.

3549

I can’t wait to start seeing MoM mods. All the items and hero names would be the most straight forward to implement, then the races. I wonder if the Elemental engine will allow for the unique racial units that MoM had.

I guess its just a matter of time before I start a new game and see Brax the dwarf wandering around my starting city. :)

3550

didnt earlier builds have elves and dwarves and the like in them? I seem to recall so. Undeads should be pretty easy to mod in, though

3551

I don’t recall elves or dwarves, unless you’re talking pre-Beta1.

3552

not a public beta, but an internal one - I could have sword Brad said they removed them under the whole “Only human factions” debacle, and said they would come back after release

edit, yeah - here it is: http://forums.elementalgame.com/383676

Non-Canon custom races are not enabled (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Goblins, Drengin, Drath, etc.)

3553

Oh, in that case it’s new info to me, thanks!

I know each race is set up to be able to easily have it’s own tech tree… but I’ll have to look into units.

3554

I’ve played every build, and no elves or dwarves. Brad said pretty early on SD were never going to add them, but that it would be pretty easy to do as a mod.

3555

look up - they were there

3556

Are you sure that’s what that means? Were there Drengin as well? I just took that to mean that you couldn’t add custom, non-canon races.

To be forthright, I played VERY little of the beta versions so I wouldn’t trust my memory one bit on the matter.

3557

I don’t think that quote means what you think it means. IIRC Early on they referred to factions as races and that note was just to indicate custom ones were turned off. There have never been stock fantasy races in Elemental, nor plans for them beyond mods.

3558

I could have misunderstood that - hazy memory myself, but I do seem to rememeber them saying that they were there, but they redesigned races and we ended up with the stuff we have.

I could be wrong, of course

3559

Ok, I was thinking of downloading this to the work computer also to play durng my lunch break. I have bought very few games by download, so I don’t know the norm but I get the EULA pop up and feel the following part is really pretty ambigious:

“2. Install a second copy of the SOFTWARE on a
second computer only if you are the main user of
this computer (home computer or laptop for
example).
3. Install the SOFTWARE on another computer only
if you change your main workstation. In such a case
you must uninstall the software from the old
computer.”

I really don’t want to do legal research for a hobby, so I figure I will throw out the interpetation to the group…

3560

Okay, as far as I can tell here is the list of released games developed by Stardock (from Allgame.com, M$'s source list for their games explorer thingy):

2010 Elemental --------------------------- no metacritic score
2008 Political Machine 2008 ---------------- 73 on Metacritic
2006 - 2009 GalCiv II and expansions ------- 86 to 92 on Metacritic
2004 Political Machine --------------------- 72 on Metacritic
2003 GalCiv I & expansion (modern) -------- 83 & 77 on Metacritic
2001 Corporate Machine ------------------- 80 on Metacritic

older games not in Metacritic, I’ll use the star system on allgame:

2000 Business Tycoon --------------------- 3/5
1999 Starcraft Expansion: Retribution ------ 4.5/5
1995 Entrepenuer ------------------------- 2.5/5
1995 GalCiv: Shipyards -------------------- 3.5/5
1995 GalCiv 2 ----------------------------- 3.5/5
1995 Star Emperor Advanced -------------- 3.5/5
1994 GalCiv ------------------------------- 3.5/5

Overall, that doesn’t look too bad and especially in the last decade.

Now don’t get me wrong - if Elemental sucks, it sucks. I can’t argue on that, because I still haven’t put much time in on the game due to waiting for all the patches to settle in. If you don’t like the style of game that Stardock has put out, then of course that’s fine. But simply stating that Stardock can’t make good games seems to fly in the face of other professional opinions.

edit - to clarify, Naeblis wasn’t the one making that particular claim