Elemental single-purpose gameplay thread

Yeah, assuming it was a minor faction the bugger just sat there (same issue with their sovereign being 1 square away and never doing anything, as well). Later in the same game I found another nation with more developed cities. Not that they had any real defences either, but at least they’d done something.

Something I haven’t found out yet, only played a little bit of the pre-release version. Do units have different resistances/etc?

Would go a long way towards making the different spells feel different if a fire giant took extra damage from an ice spell for example.

I think I saw something about the Ice Stab spell also stunning a unit for a turn as well as the damage, that seems like a good move.

If there’s resistances, they’re completely hidden from the player. Defence is currently the only thing I know of that reduces/avoids damage.

There are defenses but they were never very well shown.

IIRC theres like piercing, blunt, slashing, fire, ice, electrical and other damage types and resistances. But all you ever saw was defense. I was always under the impression that was one of those things they were going add in some way, but I stopped paying attention during beta4.

Silly me, i forgot about that! Yeah, they confirmed they were introducing types of damage/resistances in one of the journals, but now i think of it, i didn’t saw any of it, for now. Any clue about that? Is there but hidden, or is just not there?

There’s also a Dodge rating that shows up on some of the larger shields.

I just picked up this game today, played it for a bit.

first time playing, the biggest issue I had so far.

-direction key/mouse wheel shouldn’t be use to move your units, direction key should move your camera instead of the unit you control, click and drag is just overall extremely annoying to move camera with.

-when you are moving an unit, one click should show the planned path, and then double click to confirm the path, right now it shows nothing other than just the destination.

Apparently they put the cursor key movement in at the request of testers. Which is a little surprising to say the least.

mouse wheel apparently also used for unit moving which is even more surprising consider you can rotate camera in the game, and most of the game use mouse wheel for that.

how do I equip items on my character in the campaign? The game tells me to buy equipment after founding my first city, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to actually equip the boots and wooden club on any of the characters.

Make sure the character is selected. On the portrait is a tiny little button. That’s the inventory.

Are you sure you’ve not got something in Windows overriding the mouse wheel? I’m sure it’s just zooming in and out for me, not moving any units.

I think he means pressing it in.

So… “button 3” on the mouse?

Had this one on preorder for a long time and just got to look through it. Talk about needing a UI/manual fix-er-up.

Has anyone else run into Pioneers who show “Build Settlement” available, but when you try to build the town, nothing happens? I suspect this may be something to do with the city distance for the button being calculated from the city center, while the actual game counts from the nearest building (this seems to occur when I try to build a city close to a built up resource from another city).

Got stuck in the Campaign 10+ turns away from my nearest town with the entire army at low hitpoints. Couldn’t get the army to teleport (and no explanation as to why not, though I suppose lack of mana or something). Anyone know how to fix that? If I have to spend 10+ turns walking back to town, another 10 turns resting, and 10 turns more just to get back, I really don’t think I will bother to finish this…

I haven’t been able to get teleport to work well since I switched from full-screen to windowed mode. It worked fine in full-screen. However, IIRC you can’t teleport directly into a city, you need to mouse click in your territory near, but not in a city tile. Can’t remember if it’s a right or left-click.

As far as I can tell, left-clicking to scroll the map interferes with the teleport ability, so if you’re not running full screen it will only work if the place you are teleporting to and the place you are teleporting from show up all in the window at once. I also couldn’t get it to work in the fully zoomed out map-view.

Teleport is a left click into a tile without buildings on it, and the highlight should go green. I must admit I edge-scrolled when using the Teleport without even thinking about it, assuming I’d probably mess up and port to the wrong place otherwise.

Incidentally I seem to be one of the few here not to have bothered with the campaign at all. I just delved straight into medium map game and started from there. I’m almost tempted to start again, as I really ran short of gilders for a while there, but I figure I may as well continue learning with my first game and then start a second later in the week.

Maybe they meant the Numpad? That I can see…

Anyway, back to scroll wheel. Scrolling does indeed change the view “distance/height” but never seemed to pull back to isometric (a la Civ 4) once I got stuck in that direct top-down 2D viewpoint. Will try the number keys, as suggested, when I get home tonight. thanks for the tips

A few gameplay pointers:

Make sure your first city is within 1 or 2 spaces of a fertile land square (or equivalent food producing square). Without food you can’t build houses to expand your city level which expands the city radius.

Some of the initial summon spells are very powerful (the bear) and a good way to get your initial stack rolling.

The Confusion spell is tremendously effective when you’re facing a strong opponent (reduces str by half - appears bugged as sometimes makes enemies have negative attack)

Teleport can be tremendously effective since the range is unlimited - you can explore to your hearts content and return to any city influence space for 5 mana.

The Sovereign ability that makes your stack move as fast as him/her seems to be a no brainer.

Questions:

How is the max number of buildings in a city determined? Is there any indication of how many you have left other than trial and error?

What is the max number of enchantments I can run? Says it’s tied to essence but is that base essence or do modifiers help?

I got a diplomacy tech that supposedly allows me to recruit spiders (and later other creatures) but I can’t see where/how to do the actual recruiting (even after building the spider lair).

I’m having fun so far and hopefully the bugs/interface issues get ironed out over time along with some tweaking of the core mechanics to balance things out.

For me, when I researched a Diplomacy tech that gives me access to a unit, a “resource” for that unit shows up on the map. Once I get a city nearby and build a structure on it, I can then train that unit in the associated city in the same manner as I would other troops.