being king, making decisions and earning experience.

Well ... if events are tied to experience, there is the dilemma of either memorizing the correct answer to each event, or it being completely random (King's Pass).

Personally I prefer the random approach to events, however having Experience tied to either approach would be tricky.

Lol .... maybe running your empire w/o fighting could be represented by a Bejeweled mini-game. Maximum of one round of Bejeweled per turn

THAT being said ... I really do like the idea of making choices in this way. Perhaps it could be "interesting choices" where there is a give and take for each decision you make, and there is no correct answer.

Therefore, by extension, you could have some choices which lead to better diplomatic relations, gold reward, experience reward, but your own cities suffer ... or you could take diplomatic penalties, pay a fee, get less experience, and your own cities are happier/ more productive.

In addition, you could choose between a Large bonus for City A + Medium bonus for City B; the opposite; or a minimal bonus for both cities.

Either extreme choice would give your a Medium-Large experience depending on how extreme your choice was, while an equal choice would give you a small amount of experience.

Additionally there could be a generic Fueding Lords event, where each time the Lords' talents/personalities are subtly different, and choosing who to jail (or assasinate) gives different results (based upon the subtle differences)

Same technique could be used for a "Who killed X?" trial, with the suspects each time being subtly different, with the actual murderer being different. (and can choose to jail, or execute)

As with most of these, the most extreme option should have potential for most experience/ and the alternative for large penalty and minimal experience ... while the safe choice always gives average experience.

Another example would be after you have built a magic school school or tower or whatnot.

The dean from the school of magic rushes into the throne room and in a hurried voice tells you(the sovereign) that one of his brightest pupils during a routine minor summoning exercise has accidentally summoned the greater demon baalzar! and the sovereign being the most powerful is the only one that can save the day. 

well upon doing the quest you have 2 choices.  1. is to send him back where he came from. 2.  try to tame him yourself and make him your servant.  obviously 1 is the easiest.  answer a few simple easy questions and poof he is gone and you get minor exp.  the second one has harder questions such as certain reagents, or incantations, etc, but once completed not only do you get extra exp but you gain a powerful demon servant for so many turns.  however if you fail at the harder one then he is set loose and will attack randomly on the map until either time runs out or some other condition is met.

the way i envision these faction quests are similar to the choose your own adventure books from years back.

well Tasunke actually the way i was thinking was if maybe instead of having to guess the right answer i would make the answers related to your skills or attributes.  if you have ever played any of the neverwinter nights series of games you'll know where i am going with this.

like for instance

round 1:

"the demon squirms under your scrutiny, what will you do?"

"try to bend his will to yours"  - wisdom

"try to persuade him to tell you his true name" - Charisma

"force his servitude" - expend 5 essence

round 2:

"grab him and try to pull him into this plane forcefully" - strength

"use lore to try to find out his true name" - intellegence

"Bind his body to this plane" - expend 5 essence

Round 3:

"try to quickly place a rune of power on his forehead" - Dexterity

"try to hold him with your power until the portal closes" - constitution

"close the portal behind him" - expend 5 essence.

since this example would be in the 2nd category then it would be difficult to pull this off. so what you would need to pass each check would be higher than choosing the 1st choice to just send him back. this way you have something you can do early game and late game.  the player wouldn't know what is required to pass, that's the gamble.

and there isn't just a pass or fail number, it would be a kind of dice roll.  if your ability scores are high then you have more of a chance.  beside each choice would be a descriptor, very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard, and impossible(even impossible has a very slime chance) to kinda give you a clue as to what range your looking at.

edit: not sure why that top part of my post is blue... hmmm

well its blue because its a "link" but obv an empty one. Either remove the link, or use the web-adress of something that helps your argument.

Mass Effect also had this (primarily in conversations) and depending on your skill you could go about it in different ways.

I suppose in your examples there was a % chance of success given the level of each stat, while using essence was a way to ensure it to work (although I think 5 essence is too much unless this was a Giant Demon or in some other way incredibly powerful).

So, you could either have it that the stat-based choices gave a % based on that stat ... OR that you had to have X level of a certain stat (say 20 strength) in order to use that option.

Alternatively, if the guarantee only cost 1 essence, you might only need 12 strength to use the Strength option (depends on the power level of the demon/ difficulty level of the Conversation/Quest)

I'd rather gain experience for making real decisions, like what to build, where to deploy my forces, etcetera.  I'm running an empire, not a mental health hot line.

yeah but your also running a MAGICAL empire, so stuff like this is pretty important.  and what kinds of examples could you give in game mechanics wise on what you should build, or where should you deploy your forces.  how does the game know how to reward you for these things?

What to build and how to deploy forces should have an economical and militaristic benefit respectively, not in experience.

Of course, running a consistently successful Nation (in terms of Military Campaigns) might lead you to gain levels ... if you concede that each battle should imbue the Sovereign with ... say 5-10% of total experience gained by your forces.

However, completing QUESTS and choosing which troublemaker to assassinate ... those are interesting decisions with no little benefit other than the experience it provides for correct decisions.

However, such decisions will only have a chance of appearing (as random events) if your Sovereign is actually INSIDE a city. Otherwise he has more important things to worry about (Exploration, Questing, Military Campaigns)

Right, the point i am trying to get across here i suppose is that experience is just that, experience, and that's just doing stuff.  being the sovereign means running a kingdom as well.  i think that he should get experience for running that kingdom if he decides to stay at home and make sure that everything is running smoothly.  because the world is a magical place, he may be getting experience in using his magic in other places besides throwing fire balls in people's faces(that's fun to of course!). like trying to keep a powerful demon from rampaging through his territory.

In my own little world, which only exists in my head, the sovereign gets experience from everything he does.  The only exception I'd allow, and it's a very grudging exception, is researching a spell.  The spell is the "real world" fruit of your labor, so I wont get hung up over not gaining experience to put towards levels from it.  Even there, if you think about it, how could you not get better at magic in general while creating a new spell?

When you place a building, you'd get experience, enough so that a guy that blows his essence on building a large empire will be able to(assuming risk isn't returned to the feat) keep up with a guy that spends all of his efforts on becoming an avatar of death.  If your sovereign is providing some sort of boost for being physically present, he should get added experience relative to that boost indicating his activity towards those increases.  The same thing that applies to infrastructure should apply to troops.  Managing an army is a fiscal skill that is honed with time and provides much experience to the people that do such things.  Low level grunts that go into logistics in the military can come out with a six figure salary easy by performing well and showing aptitude for the task.

A steady gain from the size of the population, and the size of the military, would also be good ideas.  Make that tank with one city and a handful of troops work his ass off to keep up with the guy running an empire spanning an entire continent.  He's not even doing half the work unless he's killing things eight hours a day.

You can only choose what kind of character you create, if you gain experience from every kind of path you can take.  To play an adventurer, you need to gain experience from adventuring.  To build a grand empire, you have to gain experience from creating it.  If you only get experience from combat, you can only play combat centric characters.  If you get your non-combat experience from some silly event system, it's entirely irrelevant how badly you're fucking up the job you've done.  Experience should be from accomplishment.

I kinda like the idea of random administrative quests popping up while your in the city. Especially if the quests are interesting with good consequences. I'd especially like it if you had some kind of quest synergy between combat related quests and administrative quests.

Hi there, everyone.

So I got myself to sign in here so I can comment on some of this.
First I gotta say that I´m no beta-tester, so I just have a pretty basic idea of what the game will actually be like.

But that said, I like the idea of quests for the regent.
I wouldn´t want the outcome to be too dependent on luck though.
I know stuff like that from civ4 and it always makes me uncomfortable - mostly it´s either a awesome win or a devastating loss. But even if you could not lose very much through a backfired quest, you still would have lost an opportunity.

So I would rather give the possibility to compensate failed "dice-rolls" through essence, gold or other things - other than just giving the opportunity to simply use essence for automatic success.
Taking the example of the summonde demon - having tried to bind him to your will through a failed wisdom-check, you could be offered the possibility to e.g. sacrifice population, a unit or a building, meaning that the demon is either appeased with a sacrifice, met with force or lured into a building for him to rampage, giving your sovereign some time to rethink.

Quests could indeed offer some nice possibilities of events that really affect your game.
What popped into my mind when I read about a quest of two feuding landlords was an additional choice - if you could choose to banish one lord from your land, this "quest-fluff" could actually become a new ingame sovereign, heading into the wilderness to found a new people and/or to plot his return.
If the game-engine would set up two different characters for the two lords, complete with stats and not just as an anonymus mentioning in a "fluff-text", then the outcome of the situation could depend on the attributes of the banished lord.

Another example would be a quest where you had the possibility to outlaw someone, who then would perhaps flee into the woods, starting a career as either a Robin Hood or a cruel bandit, harassing you with occasional unit-spawns and/or loss of income/ressources on nearby fields.

Apart from this I second the notion that a sovereign should gain experience through other things than just battles or occasional quest-events; Psychoak has offered some nice ideas.
I mean, maybe I think to much "master of magic" here, but for me the warlord-style sovereign on the road is just one of a few types of sovereigns, in reality as well as in fantasy fiction, and not the one I would have thought of first, when I learned about the sovereign concept in Elemental.

There should be sovereigns who mostly sit in their ivorytower, studying magic, ones who travel about their country to ensure their people of their presence, ones who practice and further art and culture, ones who practice and further artisanry, ones who teach and let others teach science, etc..
All based either on the respective sovereigns attributes or on the players explicit decisions.
And either one should gain experience doing so.
Making a sovereign profit from every building built, for example, should even be quite simple to implement.

Heh, reminds me of Morrowind ... maybe we could simply get better at certain stats by doing activities tied to those stats?

(like casting spells could slowly increase either Wisdom or Intelligence, while hacking at enemies could slowly increase strength (and Dexterity) ... and being hacked at (attacked) could increase Constitution and Dexterity.

Meanwhile, sucessful diplomatic maneuvers (or wielding diplomatic pressure) could increase your Charisma (as well as Successful recruitment, and dealing with Random events)

Then, on experience gained level ups (experience being from winning battles and completing quests) you can increase HP/Essence and buy skillz.

While more realistic, such training systems lead to grinding.

It's sort of like our fucked up tax code.  Companies often do stupid things for the purposes of maximizing the tax code instead of productivity.  When what you do with your characters is based on something other than your strategic and tactical goals, you're making bad decisions to get a gain.  The good decisions for building your sovereign and the good decisions for building your empire will often be in conflict, like grinding the neutrals at the start.

Agreed. This is a system for [MMO]RPG games, and not for strategy games.

well psychoak, would you have to be inside the city while doing these things to get experience?  like if your building a city or training an army would you have to be stationed in the city that's doing this stuff?  because if so then thats not a bad idea, but if you just get it anyways, then the guy who is out killing and fighting is gonna get combat XP as well as administrative XP. which puts you back to being at a disadvantage with the combat player if you decide to stay at home.

As currently designed, not a problem.

The guy whoring the field of battle is getting xp fighting, and xp from administration.  The guy that has five times as many cities because he burned essence like a madman early on and is a limp dicked sissy boy by comparison, is getting five times as much xp from administration.

Now if you can manage to be just as powerful in one aspect while being better in another, you're either playing better, or the game has a broken mechanic that allows the exploit.

Having to be somewhere to get the experience is like combat.  You have to be there to kill things, so you need to be there to get experience killing things.  If the sovereign gives a boost to the place he's at, there should be some added experience gain to the workings taking place.  That logic wouldn't apply for empire administration as a whole though.

Perhaps a system where if you "enhance" your champion with some of your essence that links you to that champion allowing you to get xp from his exploits.  So for instance you enhance the champion once, thus you get 5% of his xp.  Doing it a second time will get you 10%, and so on, until you hit a soft cap of say 25%...then each time you do it would allow for diminishing returns until you reach a hard cap of some value.

yeah but he can only get experience from one city at a time right? other wise having all those cities at once won't mean much.  on the other hand if he gets experience from all of them while he isn't there then he can just drop a city then go quest until he gets enough essence for another and drop another.  so really he still will have the advantage over a none combat sov. 

If he spends essence dropping all those cities, he doesn't have the essence anymore.

What do you figure the guy focused on combat is going to be doing with all those points he hasn't dumped directly into dropping cities?  He's going to be a godlike tank, massively powerful spell caster, or some combination in between the two.  You're going to be a little nerf shooter of a Sovereign running around killing things at a fraction of the speed the tank can.

Essence being spent makes all these "what if he does both" scenarios moot.  It's irrelevant, you can't simply do both when you have to expend non negotiable resources to do it.  Inequalities in power between different paths taken will be a matter for balance testing, not cause to restrict the features themselves.

yeah but if he drops a city then goes fighting, he's gonna get exp from both the city and the fighting so he gains levels at twice the rate at which a stay at home sovereign is gonna be getting.

he gains a level adds another 5 or or so essence points then drops another city.  now he gets exp from 2 cities and continues fighting.

stay at home sov drops a city at first then stays there gain exp from just the city.  he is building stuff and getting a trickle of exp until he gains a level, at which point he adds another 5 or so essence.  finally goes and builds another city, and starts getting exp from that one.

by the time the second guy is level 2 the first guy is level 3. then when the second guy is level 3 the first is level 5.

to me that's not fair to the stay at home sovs.  however i may just be missing your point here lol.

Yes, you are.  To drop a city requires going somewhere.  You'll have to clear out any neutrals in your way.  You'll have to gain levels to produce the essence requires to drop a bunch of cities at the start.  The stay at home sovereign can't just sit on his ass and never do anything.  He still has to build an empire up before he can sit around jacking off.  If he can do something beyond the normal by sitting there in his capital, then he should get experience beyond the normal for sitting there.  In such a case then you can at least sit on your ass till you're ready to put down a new city.  In such a case, doing so wouldn't short change you either.

The difference between the two is going to be that when he levels up the first few times, his points are going into essence so he can spawn more cities.  When the tank levels up, he's going to be beefing himself up.  He wont be getting essence to drop cities so he can go and kill things and become a tank.  If you're going to do both, you'll have less strength in either category.  If you're spending your leveling points on essence for cities, it's not going into increasing your combat stats.  You're leveling up the same way a dedicated spell caster would, but you're gaining none of the benefit from having a large supply of essence after you spend it.  Even if you run out and fight things all the time, you're going to be a dinky little guy with 30 hit points and 3 attack, and the tank is going to be massively stronger after a very short period of time.  You'll need an equally large army to kill an army, the tank wont.  You'll have to go home and heal after getting rid of a minor nuisance, the tank wont.  You will never gain as much experience from fighting just by trying to play it the same way the tank does.

i suppose i see where you coming from on this.  if your gonna stay at home you are never gonna put any stat points in combat related fields, instead you might drop some on mana regen, intel, or wisdom.  for the most part you will put it all on essence.

the crusading sov will put more points on stats and less for essence.

what about if you create a sov and send him with an army and when he gains a level he just puts most points in essence say 7 and 3 in HP each time.  his army does most of the fighting, but he still has plenty of essence to create cities and gain from them as well.  he won't become a tank, but he will still level much faster this way. xp from battle, and xp from cities.

If all of your units gain experience, and they do, there are two ways to handle it.  Either it's a simple division, or you get xp for direct kills.  In either case, having a large army wont be the same as being a force unto yourself.  There's no substitute for being your own personal nuke arsenal under any logical method of compensation.

This is all working under the assumption you wont have anything you can physically do and gain experience from staying at home.  In such a case, it could be the opposite, your character is so weak that he gains less experience through his exploits than he would have overseeing the construction of his new moat.

In Age of Wonders, I usually played a caster-type. And you only got XP from landing the killing blow. So generally, I was using spells and energy for the sake of my budding 'empire' instead of battle. However, what that game did was, at the end of each turn, I would get 1 XP. Mind you, it's about 5 xp from levels one to two, and ten after that, then fifteen, etc. But since it was a strategy game, well it worked. Usually as the end of the map neared, I had hit the max level for that map (3 levels/map/alignment. 30 levels total).

If Elemental had some form of gain-xp-at-the-end-of-turn thing, I'm sure it'd work out nicely. Only problem is to make sure it balances, because that warrior god out there, I feel, should get XP that is just slightly higher than the Sovereign who sits in his tower - because the warrior god is actually working, whilst the Sovereign that sits around does nothing. That's how it was in AoW, too - killing 3 enemies in one turn, and ending that turn, netted you 4 XP total. Simply sitting around got you one XP total.

I really like the ideas in the first two posts.

If you're playing warlord style your sovereign is going around gaining XP from battles.

If you're playing domestic style your sovereign sits in his cities making decisions and helping to better run the empire.

I think the way to distinguish them is to have different rewards for level ups. If your guy's XP is from battles, he only receives rewards/level up choices which would help him win battles. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution. 

If your guy's XP is from running his empire, he only receives rewards/level up choices which would help him run his empire - Wisdom, Charisma, Intelligence. It makes no sense that you can be out fighting a war and improve your statesmanship for it.

I think the best solution would be that there's random events with a fair number of solutions. For a few, there's a solution which involves using the sovereign's own military might - but for the majority there's an option for the sovereign to employ his peaceful skills which give a better reward/less of a penalty, but to use it he has to be in the capitol/a city with a palace-type building [i.e. he's not riding around with his army]. 

Here's an example:

Sire, a large group of peasants angry about the level of taxation in the empire have armed themselves and formed an mob outside the palace! What is your will?

- Promise to lower taxes [forces the tax slider down to Y for X turns]
- Send in the troops [-X population, -Y happiness for X turns]

Only available if sovereign is in capitol
- Give a rousing speech explaining that taxes are for the greatness of the empire [Charisma check, no penalties if successful, if not successful take another option] + 250XP
- Have the ringleaders assassinated. Make sure they get the message. [-Y happiness for X turns, requires assassin] +50XP
- Cast a spell to pacify them [costs X essence, wisdom/int check, if not successful take another option] +100XP

 

That way a stay at home sovereign is balanced out from a warlord by having a wider variety of better options, and you could balance out the two by keeping him at home some of the time and taking options which don't necessarily mean he has to be a bard-like master persuader.