Pre-beta wishes, if devs can read it in one go...

oh?   no "wizard pact"

RST compatibility should be able to be increased by perks/merits or whichever the name you prefer. What if my human tribe is also adept to forests because of my Channeler's bond to nature magic? (just an example) That would mean that with the use of magic, a race could use other different terrains as their own. In any case, I find strange that humans cannot live in mountains. Surely they wouldn't be so suited as other races but it's not like they would be trying to live underwater. I would like more for humans (and fallen?) being able to colonice anywhere in the surface (or mostly) and give the non-human races another advantages (be it greater numbers, greater strength... whatever suits them better and is balanced in the end).

To give % at this moment is pointless, really. They need some number that may not exist yet (or not be like we could expect).

• I like the shades of diplomacy. That conflict seems really nice and not the usual full wars you must have in order to just harass the enemy.
• The quest generator... nothing to say until we see what's going on. Stardock must have something already after all.
• VC only announced when they are at 75% of progress? Doesn't sound fine to me. If I'm to have an artifact for 20 turns, my enemies will only know when they have 5 turns to destroy me. Not too much time to react unless they are overlords of vast armies and able to use magic to grant them supreme mobility. (pure speculation here)
• Global Quests: same as quest generator comment...
• About the settlement thing I already posted something and I'm too lazy to search for it or repeat it now.
• Hopefully Devs will implement whatever they decide they already don't have and they find interesting, adpating it to their needs and the dreadfull balance.
• Where is E.?

I disagree with your diplomacy settings.

I have a big huge army, but I can't attack the small town because I'm only in 'conflict' and can't get a 'war' yet... That sounds reasoonable to you? My suggestion is as follows:

Conflict - what you have before official diplomacy starts.

All shades of diplomatic options - negotiable through diplomacy. The toll idea is an interesting element to add, to use your example

War - you can 'delare war' anytime you want, which is a purely diplomatic action. On the other hand, capturing a town while not in a war is considered as a declaration of such, only with harsher negative diplomatic effects (for other factions as well). Note that this system DOES allow backstabbing. Keep a damn eye on who you lend the keys to your house dude .

 

Another subject, vicory conditions. Having different, and maybe hidden victory conditions is an awesome idea. Having the AI play differently for each objective is a must. On the other hand, I think it's a *very* bad idea to enforce those tactics like you described. Example: a faction with peaceful objectives. Yes, it would be preffered for them to befriend everyone, but they should still be able to just eliminate (or try to, at least) opposing factions.

This is a very good point.  Maybe they can live in forest only they learn the “lumber mill” technology, or some Nature magic as u suggested.


True, there should tiles a race can settle, yet their productivity/power is decreased, because that place is marginal for them; say what will happen when Eskimos just migrated to Sahara.

The question is how to implement that elegantly? For all these races we’ll expect to see in future (mod or bestiary)?   I’ll love if SD will sort this race related issue for us even we’ll only hv only Human/Fallen when EWOM is released. 

Player expects Fallen/Human can settle mostly anywhere, but there are many custom races that should not be.  How this should be elegantly handled?


Numbers, percentages are all subject to change due to future playtest, balancing etc.  However, it is my way to express how often things should happen.  


For this ‘particular’ VC, all players have to take a very close look on the ultimate artifact once discovered.   All players should constantly think about it once it is discovered, before even that 20 turns start.

The point is VCs should be hidden to everyone else until it is almost done.  Others should then be given some reasonable time to spoil it.


IF they have a quest generator, my wishes here is just some modification of what they have in mind.  I’ll like the RPG aspect & how a Sovereign can influence the world indirectly via quest.

E. is about trading.  Don’t have time to talk about that yet, NTJedi & PigeonX2’s post is long.


This is exactly the backstabbing I don’t want to see.  When you are having Friendly/Peaceful/Neutral status with player B, you can declare your “Conflict” by attacking B’s unit or the Diplomatic screen, anytime you want.

This will give player B, 5 to 10 turns to prevent his towns from being captured.  Whether 5-10 turn is enough or too long is debatable or subject to play testing, but it represent B has some time to defend.

In my suggestion, heroes are expected to roam to other Friendly/Peaceful/Neutral player’s country for quests, or other RPG reasons.  


Thanks, I have played too many kill them all games.  CIV4 is great, one of the reasons is their VCs; but I feel that even that can be further enhanced.

The crux of varied VCs is how to let AI Player aim for the goal smartly.


Those “Stay Peaceful”, “Stay Neutral” are meant for AI players.  Say when a Mapmaker want to make a map that a “Stay Neutral” AI player guards a certain dungeon in the middle of the map.  The mapmaker will need this AI player not to initiate any war to the surrounding players.  This AI reserve its resources to defend the human players.

"Forget it" is one of the option.

I respectfully disagree

Just beacuae you don't wanna see it doesn't mean that the majority want it the same way*, the world is a big bad mean place

* same is true of my post

Well, what is the reason you’ll enjoy the backstabbing then?  One point of a forum like this is to discuss.

Pearl Harbor (& other sneak attack) happens in History; but it is a tactical event that hardly affects the final outcome of a war. The result of a war bases on factors on the strategic level.

Ideally, if there is a simple & elegant way to represent BOTH the strategic value of honoring border AND allowing sneak attack in EWOM, I will love that.  If I’ve to choose one of them only, I’ll say sneak attack aren’t that useful/interesting, compared to providing utility of a border.

Usually, it takes some time (maybe a few weeks) for a nation/kingdom to capture the first city.  The “Conflict” diplomacy status represents that few weeks when the army is approaching the city thorough a buffer zone (usually the rural area).

 

Well, to start with a semi-useless quibble (Elemental apparently will not include naval combat), I'd say that Pearl Harbor had massive, if perhaps unintended, strategic consequences--it enabled FDR to get the U.S. into WW II despite the then-strong public opinion that we should not get involved. Some folks talk now as if the US was always the leader against the Axis powers, but in fact an awful lot of horrible war went on before we finally started spending blood and major treasure on stopping Hitler, Mussolini, and the Nipponese elites who hijacked their emporer. (I don't expect to see TBS games emulate this complexity well for a long while.)

Quibble aside, I think you're sort of onto something about land-basd sneak attacks needing to be hard to pull off even in a fantasy setting, at least when they are full-scale invasion forces aimed at seizing control of population centers. Massive troop movements inevitably send out all manner of strong signals, even when they traverse wilderness areas. It's messy and loud to mount a real invasion.

However, I don't think the game should try too hard to work with modern 'border' ideas, not least because modern borders are far less cut and dried than many people might like, but mostly because it seems more reasonable to work with fog-of-war mechanics in a fantasy setting. If you've drawn a line in the sand somewhere and called it your border, you'd better be able to keep a direct eye on it or the word 'border' is just posturing.

Let me sidetrack a bit first.  GW Swicord, does SD explicitly there is no naval combat?  I personally don’t need those TW:Empire style vessel combat.  All I want is something like Kraken attacking a transport full of Knights.  Some units that can swim, some units can fight on the sea. Nothing complicated here.  I’ll be very disappointed that, if the map has ocean/lake & yet all units are off limit.

Oh, Pearl Harbor (PH) definitely has strategic value, but what I say is that 1 or 2 cities lost usually do not affect the main strategic outcome in longer run.  One of the reasons Japan initiate PH is they want to stall US Pacific navy.  Japan well knew it lacks the ability to touch US ground be4 attacking PH.   Under the suggestion I’ve, it’ll give US 5-10 turns to prepare defending PH only if US guess right that PH will be attacked. 

Border, I enjoy a lot in TBS game.  Border represents a soft geographical chokepoint.  Soft in a sense that gamer are required to affect how permeable it is (caravan only? troops also?) for a neighbor, via diplomatic means.   I don’t necessary want the one like Civ4 which is driven by a complex cultural model.  Something simple is fine for EWOM.

A minor fine-tuning on my simplified border idea, so a continuous block of country will be formed. 

Border is a circular 20/15/10 hexes surrounding a settlement (map size depending)
-    When two player borders overlap, the game determines the exact border location, it is somewhere close to their midpoint.
-    Border expands slowly but indefinitely towards its closest city the same player owns, even if the closest city is located beyond its default 20/15/10 hexes limit.
-    Border expands on any terrain, including the sea.

I have not asked SD to try hard to create a fancy or accurate “border” idea (like Civ4).  I have asked to give us a crude one.  A crude one still serve a lot of purpose, in terms of gamers’ enjoyment.

Re naval stuff, forum posts are not contracts or promises, but in his recent modding thread, Brad said "...the game will, over time, become flexible enough so that players can mod it into all kinds of different land-based, turn-based games."

I've been brandishing that term here and there in hopes of getting some confirmation or correction from the devs. I'd also like to see naval stuff at least roughly equivalent to early Civ. I'd even like to see some basic aerial transport and combat options--can't expect a Sinbad mod without the ability to at least mod in flying carpets.

I humbly submit my added voice for more races, please.  Reasons:

1) One of the most fun things about MOM was that you had a different game every time right from the start by choosing a different race and a different magic.  Example: 5 races, 5 magic genres=25 theoretical unique starting perspectives.  Plus, since you could conquer other races early, you rapidly developed a unique army every game.  I loved combining the good from each into a squad/army.  With only 2 races, and 5 magic genres, you only have 10 unique combos from the start. And, you can't grow your options by conquering numerous other race's cities--which leads to point 2.

2) One of the very fun things about the map was exploration. You just never knew where you would find an underdefended 'new race city' that allowed you to tap into their abilities.  Here, it will always be a Fallen or a Man.

 

I know it would be a lot of work, and I'm grateful you're making Elemental. Here's one gamer who would pay more to get the extra races....I'd even champion waiting longer.  While graphics are important these days, I'd sacrifice some of those if necessary, to add races.  MOM was awesome because it was unique each time, unpredictable, and exciting even with awful graphics--I think the races were a huge part of that.

If it can't be done in the initial release, could you add the hooks to make it moddable?

Thanks for listening...

I'm in the wait-and-see camp on the 'races' talk, not least because that word is such a sloppy, baggage-laden mess. I started out hoping to see Elemental include Stardock's take on traditional fantasy figures for playable factions and/or some all-new nonhuman stuff of their own. But Stardock has become the TBS analog to a restaurant I trust, so I'm willing to try the new special even if the ingredient list isn't what I expected.

That aside, on point 1, Tim4fun's math is off for two major reasons. First, we know almost *nothing* about how magic is going to work other than that there will be 5 elemental themes, some possible good-evil differentiation, and 12 unique 'spell book' thingies, one for each faction. Second, that's twelve factions, not two. Sure, morphological variation won't be as broad as if we had elves, orcs, faeries, and ents, but it is just silly to assume in advance that Stardock can't establish twelve distinctive perspectives for the playable factions. They've done alright with GC2 and they seem like good students of their own work, so I expect it to be at least a bit better for Elemental.

The first two bits aside, the devs seem almost frighteningly focused on modding and I'd be very surprised if they're building a game that cannot support player-created, non-human factions. And, if I end up liking Elemental as much as I hope I will, I'd most definitely join Tim4fun and others in paying for an expansion that included playable non-human factions that fit with the game canon.

I'm with GWSwicord on this.  just because the different factions are in theory the same 'race' doesn't mean they are poor compared to those who would be the different race.

Warcraft 1 had 2 races... but they were pretty much 1 race in that everything was mirrored pretty exactly (except the spell casters, which is where the game was broken).  

Warcraft 2 had 8 races (9 if you count "demon" as a neutral race) but only 2 factions.  is this an improvement?  For the most part they are still two sides of the same coin (though orcs/trolls/ogres/goblins were made a bit tougher and more expensive.   They were much more different than in warcraft 1 in my opinion)

Red alert 2 had 1 race... humans... Ther was democratic humans, and socialist humans (expansion added more humans that are clones of the 2nd group of humans), but the diversity between them is much greater than warcraft 1 or 2. 

the original release of Dawn of war only had 3 races, humans, eldar, orks.  The 1st expansion didn't add another race either (imperial guard are still just human).   I didn't hear anybody cry about it (well, tyranid fans did, but that isn't the point)

 

I'm just being a troll, but the point is people need to stop talking about "two races" and making it sound like that is not enough or something.  Because this game has 12 factions.    Call them 12 'races' if you want.  That would be more accurate than complaining that there is only 2.  The "two races" part is only fluff side of things.  In theory you shouldn't be able to tell except their models look the same

 

Updated OP, added point E.  Hopefully devs will find the OP & this discussion useful.

Variable mounts.

Semi off-topic but i'd like to correct this thought here.  The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with the intention of catching the Pacific fleet in port and wiping it out.  According to all their intel the fleet should have been there.  What actually happened is that with a dose of forethought and a lot of good luck the carriers had been deployed on maneuvers and what was actually caught were mostly the battleships. The true might of the US navy was actually the carriers as was later proved at midway (also why we don't build battleships anymore).  Had the Japanese actually caught the carriers in port they would seriously have delayed the US entry into the European land war, and would have put us at a significant disadvantage to the Japanese fleet.  I don't think it would have changed the outcome in the long run, given the industrial power that the US had the potential to crank out at the time.

Point being that if the sneak attack had been carried out and had the desired effect it WOULD have majorly changed the course of the war.

seconded  (how could there not be?  Age of Empires, Total war, HoMM, warhammer, warcraft, and pretty much every other fantasy game that comes to mind has at least 1 mounted unit/character that has a different mount from the standard mount [horse].  The only exception I can find being Final Fantasy, but they don't use horses at all.  They use a series-specific bird, and often in is a variable based on color (black colored ones can fly and/or run on water, for example) )

Old thread, old post, but still relevant.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/328989/page/4/#1939498

I considered the replies here carefully and have been watching the beta.  I'm trying to simplify the issue why I find value in multiple races; haven't been able to find lots of posts championing multiple races, so though this thread is old, I'll add two reasons:

1) Faction background/technology trees

2) Role-playing feel

 

1) Arriving at distinct descriptions for the Factions seem to be challenging in the beta. I suggest it could be because they are all human.  If they were multiple races, their backgrounds are easily distinct.  It also allows the tech trees to be radically different without much explanation.

2) Role-playing feel.  An early ad/post/interview discussed how SD wanted this game to almost feel like a role-playing game.  Well, I liked playing non-humans in role-playing games. It made it feel like I was in a different world, aka fantasy.  The escapism was more believable when you're playing a troll. Without other races, it feels like you're playing D&D with just one option for character class-human.

 

There is a richness that is lost without other races, IMHO.

 

Thanks for listening.

 

 

 

There was huge thread about trying to persuade getting more Races in April 2009 or earlier. 

"Arriving at distinct descriptions for the Factions seem to be challenging in the beta."

I do not have the beta, how do you know it is challenging?