Where is it $2.50?
I do think part of the reason it’s been quiet is folks are ready for GalCiv 3 now.
It was at GreenManGaming, but now it is $5. I guess it was a mistake.
Ahh, good to know. Thanks.
The main LH forum is still fairly quiet though. There used to be all kinds of discussions about new patches that came out, the AI, etc.
I probably did more coding on 1.5 than on any particular build since 1.0. It’s mostly diplomacy coding though.
The other less sexy thing being worked on is late-game performance. Statistically, most people don’t finish their games. I’d love to hear what could be done to make the games more fun to finish.
Personally, I find that too many games are just military. I feel like there needs to be…I dunno, something to make it possible to win by that isn’t just marching stacks of doom around.
In GalCiv, there’s the cultural influence mechanic – cultural conquest. I wish the Elemental games had that. I had intended that for War of Magic but then again, I had a lot of intentions for WOM.
At this stage, I don’t think FE is going to get something that radical. But I would like to see the late game progression get better. Derek is making changes so that the game progresses more evenly. I find the game bogs down late game sometimes and that is a major hindrance to the players.
There’s still a lot of area for the AI to improve too. This is particularly the case in terms of planning strategy. The magic stuff really makes this a lot harder to do right as my well planned armies can get wiped out with a blast of mana.
I figured out the point of the undead faction, btw.
The point is to make armored tank units that are ladies (so 50% physical damage reduction) with the trait that gives them an additional figure every time they kill an enemy unit. When everyone else has 3-4 figures per unit, your fed tankstrosities are stomping around with six figures each. Double the army, double the fun. And by fun I mean murder.
Well, I will remind you that in theory, there are already other goals in the game to win than pure extermination with doom stacks. The magical research goal, spell of making, and the Master quest. Maybe you should see if you can get the AI to aim aggressively for these alternative ways of winning.
Well, as a general rule across GalCiv2/FE, the mop-up phase of Stardock games is pretty dull and takes a good long time.
One of the issues is comeback mechanics, the TBS genre doesn’t lend well to them, and when you put in stuff, folks tend to complain about it.
Clearing wildlands should have been the comeback mechanic- send your sovereign and an elite band out, clear the wildland, get something big that puts you right back in the game (maybe if you clear a wildland, you get two elite settlers who could pop up anywhere in the wildland, form a city, and get 10 free rush builds of production, the city hits level 2 on the next turn.) This would be in addition to other bonuses (or it could be part of those bonuses) , maybe the bonuses would only happen if you weren’t “winning”- or would scale to inverse relative faction power.
Curious to see what you come up with for GalCiv3 to handle this- the late game is not just a problem for Stardock TBS’es, I think every TBS has this problem. The downside is, you make the comeback mechanic too good, you get the blue shell problem.
Yea, it’s just that I find those other means boring. Those other paths are little better than filling up a progress bar.
For example (and I’m just brainstorming here), what about a spell that changes the land to YOUR environment and that if you cover X% of the land with your environment you win. Other players can do the same.
One of the missed opportunities of the series is that the game world’s terrain is totally deformable. We gave up having cool looking mountains so that we could have deformable terrain and I don’t feel like we use it enough. :(
Disciples-style influence mechanic. That said, I don’t think your suggestion would work- all it would do is give another vector to the person with the most power. From my experience with fighting games, it really would need to be a legitimate comeback mechanic. I just don’t know what that is.
This is why I suggested the wildlands- the strongest player isn’t going to go dinking around in there most likely, too much risk- a weak player can somehow manage to kill the boss, and then get a “crusade” like army. (I think some free champions would help as well)
Alstein, do you recall a game where you thought it had a good comeback mechanic? One that let a player comeback if they made some smart choices, felt fair and not gimmicky?
It’s a hard thing to do.
Many fighting games did it with meter gain, but that wouldn’t apply here.
I know Jon Shafer is thinking about this with At the Gates.
One game I can think of- Kohan. Raiding was a comeback mechanic- sacrifice all your buildings for gold , try to take out the enemy with raids and kill his armies before he kills yours.
Worked rarely but awesome when it did. You really felt your inner cavalry commander come out when you did it right.
Yup, I figured this out pretty early on, too. Even using the male figures it works pretty well. For a while I was churning them out and sending them to the front, and for each unit there would be a break point where it would either lose a couple figures and be unable to recover, or gain a figure and then go on killing until it was maxed out at six. Kind of a cool situation, actually.
There’s another neat confluence of events in my current undead game, which is that I got the Ascian’s collar quest, and it said that I’d need to go find Ascian to tame it, or that I could use it on any twisted. Well, guess what’s a twisted: the evil sorceror dude that appears as one of the random “I will beware this creature’s passing” events. So in the first move of the battle, Morrigan the Risen (isn’t Morrigan a female name, btw?) rides up and slaps the collar on without so much as a by-your-leave, and now I’ve got a counterspelling, imprisoning, assassin-demon-summoning, horrific-wailing sidekick.
From one of the other random-event-monsters I got a horn that gives the maul ability, and I found a token-ring-thing that gives splash damage. Put that together with the Heartseeker sword on my only non-undead non-mage hero, give him the collared sidekick for spell support, throw in the dragon I got from the dragon cave in the wildlands for good measure, and I’m guessing this game will be over as soon as they can make the grand tour to all the remaining cities on the map. (Alas, only Gilden is putting up any fight now in any event, and it’s mostly that it takes forever to get through their armor.)
Oh my. That is the ultimate setup. :D
OK friends, if you are into checking out betas the v1.5 update is live on Steam.
The changelog can be found here.
Let me know if you try it. :)
That’s one of the really great things about this game for me–putting together really awesome armies from the various game systems (heroes, units, items, spells, etc). Unfortunately there’s not a lot the AI can really do in many cases. Not always because of “bad AI”, sometimes the required counter would just be far too complex for any realistic AI to be able to put together. That said, it still would be nice if the late-game AI could put on a better show. I’ve never once seen the AI bring a dragon at me, for example.
Does having more than one Hero in an Army still murder your XP gain during battles or was that changed in one of the patches?
Heroes split XP gain evenly, as always.
Does anyone ever really use more than one hero? Basically my starting hero, which is my sovereign clears out all the monster nests and by the time I get additional heroes most, if not all the easy monsters are dead. Those usually require my sovereign to clear and as it goes he sucks up all the xp. From that point on it is very hard to level up other heroes. Now if attacking the AI armies gave full xp, that might change things, but as it stands you get very little xp from attacking AI units.
I usually have 3-4 heroes running around with full armies by midgame. My sov is almost always the strongest, yes, but there’s little point in not sticking a hero in every army you have – and I usually have a lot of armies.
You need a hero and army to respond to each crisis that might appear. If you get attacked from multiple sides, relying on only your main hero won’t work no matter how powerful. I try to level up at least 1 or 2 extra heroes with their own stacks. Any additional heroes I normally turn into Commanders and dump in my main cities as I can’t be bothered with the additional micro-management.