Some problems with Beta 3B

from Elemental Forums

1.) Early goodie huts are difficult to spot. Some sort of highlighting mechanism would be very appreciated.

2.) Quests many times don't clearly indicate where to go. With only five possible quests at the same time, this can lead to problems. A quest-log with the option to abandon a quest would help, too.

3.) It's possible to get very quickly a gigantic red dragon as companion via questing. First off, that beast obscures several squares and the only way around that is to zoom out to the cloth map. Secondly, the dragon is way too powerful, since he has 8 moves and 950 attack power. It just squashes every opponent.

4.) Maybe it's just me, but opponent kingdoms ( which seem to always be quite nearby to your kingdom ) expand their zone of control very rapidly, which I haven't managed yet to copy.

5.) Tactical combat is too simplistic. Enemy units need to have some sort of retaliatory strike, or one can simply hit them with the sovereign and run away, ad infinitum. This makes the sovereign the only unit needed for much of the game, especially once he is outfitted with some weaponry and armor.

6.) Some sort of "where am I going" lines on the map would be nice, not only a cross on the map for the destination.

7.) The visibility range is minimal. Some sort of improvement to expand it would be very helpful.

All in all the maps seem a bit... small, even on large maps. Or maybe its that the game still crashes very often, other kingdoms are always nearby and the fog of war makes it difficult to see how big the map really is.

elemental
5,855 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Agree with 3) on that Red Dragon. Too good too early.  Destroys everything in its way.

Also

1) Came accross another empire city which had been destroyed - Monsters? - the emperor was still around as was other pioneers.  They did not rebuild

2) both a mine and Library were situated nearby and had not become neutral once city destroyed ie still had his empire control around.

3) even when I build a city and destroyed the empire it was still impossible to build on these tiles.

4) Still crashing alot - especially common if I build granneries for some reason.

5) I sent some troops to kill a thug sitting on my trade route.  They kept going over him without fighting for several turns.  He moved they were able to kill him.

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

I'll throw mine in:

 

1. It was pretty easy to get the red dragon to join up and it is immensely powerful. Because of the way combat works currently he can destroy entire armies by himself with relative ease. Combine this with the spell "freeze enemy" and you can pretty much do the entire master quest with your dragon and your sov. The final battle with the hermit in my last game he never even got to fight back as he was always frozen, so despite having 500 hp the dragon still killed his entire army and him without getting hurt at all.

2. Many of the dungeons stopped working after I did the dragon quest, I think it may be because those were all dragon quest dungeons as well? Either way if it's inaccesible now it'd be nice if the dungeons disappeared off the map so we don't waste time running around to nonfunctional places.

3. Master quest line seems far too easy to be a game ender. Spell mastery requires control of all the elemental shard types and is a lot harder to accomplish. The master questline might have had some challenging battles if units had abilities and the combat wasn't so very simplistic but the locations were all very close together and all within my territory.

4. Making units seems rather pointless when compared to summoning instead. I made a company of 20 units in masterwork full plate with claymores and horses. They were lesser in every category to summoned units I'd had since the beginning of the game. To top it off it took a ridiculous amount of resources to create this company of units AND 58 turns to train them.

5. I like the idea of research to increase essence so when you imbue a hero they can at least have a small mana pool to start with. However I only ran into one champion In my game, married her but never produced any children (are dynasties disabled now?)

6. The warfare tree seems bloated with technology compared to the others. Diplomacy has a very small list of techs as does adventuring, it's quite easy to get to the master questline in adventuring before you get anywhere near the repeatable techs in warfare. Ideally I'd like to see all the other trees expand to the level warfare is now, if not further.

7. Tactical combat is very bland and simplistic. I didn't even bother worrying about terrain bonuses because it really didn't seem to matter all that much. Unit speed is ridiculously important in comparison to other stats, especially as a casting sov. With the unit HP levels where they are now, (my 58 turn build time company had like 30 hp) I could wipe out thousands of gold in units in my first turn just by casting two aoes back to back. Also a way to set up formations before the battle would be great, I don't want my caster sov to be standing in the front line while all my infantry and giants are standing behind him.

8. I love the new city building mechanics and resource control setup, much better than the original methods imo.

 

Suggestions for tactical combat:

Larger maps so there is actually a decent amount of terrain to fight over. Requiring some actual tactics

Ability to move and attack in the same click (minor but annoying just the same)

The team that goes first has a tremendous advantage if they've got a spellcaster, you can cause a large amount of destruction or disable key units very easily if your team goes first. Unfortunately I don't really know how to deal with this I just felt the need to point it out.

I think unit abilities are on the table for the combat to make it more engaging but I'm not positive if that was a dev post I read or a suggestion post haha. In any case there really should be varying attacks for the units.

Please add an option to speed up the movement of units in tactical combat.

Counterattacks, this goes in line with the first turn advantage issue, at least allow the units being attacked to fight back, even at a reduced rate, something to even the scales a bit.

The scale of all the units in the tactical combat seems a bit wonky, while it's cool to see the dragon towering over everything it also makes it difficult to see the battlefield and quickly becomes annoying. My company of 20 cavalry looked like a big messy blob of horses and swords on the field as well, and they were disturbingly slow for mounted units. Don't think horses are working right just yet.

The potential for great combat is there, and if your changes to the city/empire building section of the game are any indication they will end up being great as well. That's all I've got for now, getting ready to start a new map

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Well for one they intend to have ALOT more troops meaning that later on we'll be able to have thousands of soldiers so..your summons would be swamped by immense numbers.

 

*Just stating that as it is the ultimate counterbalance between the two* and the dragon and master quest i'm sure they will balance the dragon is intended to be uber powerful but much harder to get ahold of.

 

and finally I'm pretty sure they intend to make all research as indepth as warfare just give them some time they have to make a tech tree for several races and then a second one for every race as empire *one for kingdom+ race and one for empire+race

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Sethfc, reply 3
Well for one they intend to have ALOT more troops meaning that later on we'll be able to have thousands of soldiers so..your summons would be swamped by immense numbers.

 

*Just stating that as it is the ultimate counterbalance between the two* and the dragon and master quest i'm sure they will balance the dragon is intended to be uber powerful but much harder to get ahold of.

 

and finally I'm pretty sure they intend to make all research as indepth as warfare just give them some time they have to make a tech tree for several races and then a second one for every race as empire *one for kingdom+ race and one for empire+race
End of Sethfc's quote

 

They don't intend to have thousands of soldiers anymore, unit sizes are capped at 20 soldiers and armies at 10 units. So the largest army you encounter will be 200 soldiers tops. Frogboy said balancing unit sizes of thousands vs the smaller groups was too difficult, they may increase it later but for the time being 20 is the cap.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

crashing often.. like the changes so far to the city building.. as said above I think the crashing may be related to graneries.. seems most times its not long after i put one in the build queue that i crash.. one of my crashes was a complete freeze up.. couldnt even ctrl alt del had to do a manual reboot

sorry i cant seem to get the dropbox working ill be happy to mail the err file and my dxdiag if wanted to someone tho just let me know.. pretty sure its not my system nor drivers as i downloaded the newest drivers from nvidia today.