1761

Sweet! I haven’t had any random events yet but these sound like a lot of fun!! I love a but of non-linearity as long as it’s not one sided.

Dunqan

1762

The Empire is the faction composed of people with dark skin, and is therefore evil. The kingdoms are composed of people with light skins, who are therefore good. The faction you choose at the beginning is composed of one of these two groups. Factions tend to like members of the same faction, and dislike opposing members. With the exception of Kraxis, who’ll put out for pretty much anybody, you can only get with heroes aligned with your faction. Opposing heroes will still be seen patiently waiting to be recruited on the map, though, and you can murder them so as to prevent the enemy from ever getting a chance to play with them.

1763

That’s a champion. Each of the factions is of good or evil (Kingdom or Empire in game terms) alignment. In general, they are only allowed to recruit champions that are aligned with them, hence the “Allied with Empire”. If you play an Imperial faction you would see some champions marked as “Allied with Kingdom” which just means they are of an opposing alignment to you.

1764

I like my explanation better.

1765

Flamethrowers, damn.

1766

It took an extraordinary effort, but I got by. It didn’t help that I forgot you could design your own units. Also, I had completely missedd a tech on warfair to up the size of units.

My problem was no iron, and my lone crystal mine kept getting eaten by bloack widows. As such, I was having a hard time cranking out decent mid-game units. So I had s teady trickly of Redarms or whatever they’re called coming out, and between them and my 3 heroes (my fourth hero kept dying and acquring bad conditions, so I ditched him) I was finally able to start attacking spider groups.

That’s when another random event triggererd Lord Bolrorg Von Smackenthusen and his merry pillaging men. No, not his actual name but it may as well have been. Anyway, I would get just enough crystal for another unit only to have the mine get eaten, and then I was always a unit short for my army because I couldn’t replace losses fast enough. But eventually I beat them all, got a third city up and running and secured a supply of metal (and built the metal wonder). Then it was all [SomethingSomething] Blademasters, all the time, with love.

Playing on easy (with easy npc empire ai), I was definitely fortunate the the default behavior of all the monsters was “meander around”. Sometimes they’d attack my stack, and sometimes they’d raze. they razed often enough that it was a struggled getting through it. B uit they could have been more aggressive. At which point iw ould have been game over.

Anyway, I think I could have done some slick unit design work to make something better than spearmen, though not fully bladermasters or the other dudes, but I forgot I could. I couldn’t have made something equal, because again no metal or crystal.

Still, it was fun getting out from under it.

1767

We posted a spellbook today, it’s some nice old school kitsch: http://stardock.cachefly.net/FE_Spellbook.pdf

1768

After two failed and fumbling attempts on normal, I just won my first game on easy.

Took a bee line down the combat tree to unlock bows. Got lucky with a random quest that awarded me as badass demon as a reward. At the start of ever combat he cast fear on everyone and was practically unkillable. Finished with 4 heroes, the highest being level 14. Each hero was backed up by 5 bow maidens(custom unit), 1 catapult, and 1 meat shield. The final war was a bit of a faceroll. I definitely could have won with 2 killer stacks rather than the 4 I had.

1769

Right now I’m playing a game on easy. I’m the guy, in this game, that is steamrolling the world. It’s such a pleasure. Yeah I know, fun is when the game is hard. But sometimes you just want to be the top dog. I’m expanding and conquering. I have one stack with Lady Irane and Lisbeth in it, along with some archers. My other armies are all flamethrowers. There is nothing that I can’t kill. That includes dragons. I have yet to find another champion. But it really doesn’t matter.

Yeah. I’m going to take over the whole world on easy. But you know what? I love it!

1770

Sorry for double post. This is an open letter to Brad, Kael and all of the FE team.

You bastards. I have been neglecting my other games. And it’s all your fault. I have not played MechWarrior Online or World of tanks in months. Sure some of that was the move. But even since I’ve been here I can’t help but play turn after turn of FE. I tried to play GW2 but I seem to have forgotten the control scheme.

I am not a sycophant or stupid. I wanted Elemental: WoM to be great. But I held back. And I was right to do so. The reviews proved me right. It made me sad that the game I wanted to be so good, sucked so much. It made me sad that the creators of Gal Civ 2 screwed up so bad. But I still had hope.

And so, when I had a chance to preorder FE I did. Because I read the articles and I believed that Stardock would make things right. And they did, many times over.

Thanks Brad, Kael and everyone involved. You made the game that I wanted in the first place. Bingo.

-Rich

1771

Just won my first challenging/challenging game as Yithril. It turns out that Resoln’s one weakness is two feet of steel buried in her abdomen. Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the belly of a Slorr that day, I can tell you! After that, I turned on Tarth with my “Sexy Beast” class elite infantry. Surprisingly enough, her special ability to avoid dangerous wildlife proved less than helpful against endless phalanxes of Yithril might.

I ignored the magic tree entirely, and focused on 1) Getting the bare amount of necessary infrastructure needed to 2) Start cranking out hurt machines. The takeaway from all this? Magic is for nerds.

1772

Wow, I retired after saving to get some idea other than Power ranking how I was doing…

I’m getting killed.

1773

awwww, thanks for the kind words :) you guys make it all worth it

1774

Three important aspects of the AI I can see holes in already that will hopefully be addressed by a patch:

  1. Early game raiding. The AI is way too passive even when at war, let alone letting you boom way to hard without doing anything to your progression. Outposts should be raided and destroyed. Habitable land should be guarded or patrolled and settled as soon as possible. Wildland xp farming should be exploited as soon as possible. The AI does none of this and simply sits in it’s cities waiting. If it is not in an economic position to challenge you (I.E you have 1 more city than it or better resources) it will simply sit waiting to be taken over by your superstack. Also when the Sovereign and champions are defeated once it simply parks in town leaving them way behind in the XP dept which makes that superstack that will outclass it come all the more quickly.

  2. I wish the Wild Nations (like earth (etc) elemental lords had more variety than 2 types of stacks which are positioned exactly the same and fight exactly in the same movements. I literally killed all the “armies” of the elemental lords with the exact same stack with the exact same movements for each of my turns. I even switched up my opening movement squares and it did nothing, beat for beat the exact same.

  3. The AI has no concept of the lategame and no way to handle you. It doesn’t diversify it’s units or create synergistic armies to cope with your attack strategies (which is usually have your 1 powerful fortress with 2 good essences win by attrition). It builds the exact same units in the exact same ratios with the exact same results. Also it is clear that the lategame is simply a matter of tech. There is no way any reasonable amount of units on a previous tier can handle a new tier. There is not significant enough modifiers that can be provided to create the equilibrium. This is of course where you would think the high powered magic would do so, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Where are the flanking bonuses? Where are the terrain modifiers? Where is the doomsday clock? How can the I (or more appropriately the AI) level the playing field more significantly?

1775

I’ve had some serious troubles staying alive with my games, but I found that the dog collar is awesome, taming the biggest monster you can find, is just priceless…just make sure its a BIG one, and you survive the meeting…

Jack Black, I’ve had the AI shove pretty large armies at me, and take all my outposts…and sometimes it even bypasses some of my heavier fortified cities to take the juicy undefended ones…

Its heartwarming to not having to sit and play with stupid.

1776

In the tactical combat, the last “info card” that appeared in the right corner should stay even after the cursor is out of the enemy, so you can put the mouse over it and see the different status effects. Right now there are some effects that you can apply but you can’t see what are they doing, and they don’t appear in the detail view.

1777

Heh, other people think the AI is too aggressive / hard.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/435038

1778

Hmm, what intelligence of the AI are you playing on? FWIW I’m playing on Challenging and Hard which is if the tooltips are correct is full AI and full AI with slight econ bonuses.

By early game I mean the 1-3 cities mark. I have in the last 4 games been able to cripple a nearby ally that I can kill at my leisure (until I have enough units to take the city defenders) by simply killing the sovereign stack and keeping a scout near their border city (typically you you can plop it by their capital since you’re waiting to see where their sovereign/champ moves that is always their primary stack). If they venture out you just go kill it again and get up on xp again and wait for them to rebuild their stack.

1779

Hmm. I see the monster not attacking the AI thing which is a bit cheesy but as far as the gangbang thing it’s the same as any Stardock game I’ve ever played. The AI diplomacy cares about your military strength and bribes. As long as you keep them off your back until you can create a superstack (again long enough to tech up a decent fortress with some Aura’s on it) for where you need to hold/line of attack you will just out experience them and then they have no chance, especially if you are using the “Upgrade when I tech” design parameter on equipment on your units.

Edit: Also I don’t know if this is a bug or already reported since Stardock forums are the pits of despair but Life Mages have a problem with the sand elemental. They just constantly shrink him over and over when he is in a battle against them. TBO though this is the only time I see them use shrink at all, so maybe there is something wrong with the AI there.

1780

Anyone else having issues with the game just hanging a lot, and then after a minute or two continuing? I’m having windows telling me often that the game isn’t responsive and CPU usage is around 20 percent, memory usage is about 70 percent, so its pretty strange what is happening.

I really did not have those issues in beta.