First strike way too important?

That's pretty much how it worked in real life back in the day. Then it was all about skirmishers until they ran out of ammo. That said, yes, it could be rebalanced a little bit to make it a little more fair and fun.

Probably not possible - or maybe it is - but it would be good if Morale was somehow affected by not moving (or moving first). As in if you have no ranged/casters, and you just sit there and watch the enemy army march towards you, your morale drops - but if you're willing to meet tham half way it goes up (or doesn't change, actually) or some such thing. Just a thought.

Course - that'd also require morale to be... useful.

A good change would be that attacks are mutual, unless a unit has the "first strike" ability.

Then they need another round or re-balancing, or the monsters will wipe us out.

Yes, simultaneous, sorry.

Better change would be alternating turns for each unit based on speed. Both sides going simultaneously. Kinda like things like Final Fantasy Tactics.  One of the only things I never liked in some tactical combat games is the your turn my turn approach. 

They should just make it the way master of magic does. No need to reinvent the wheel

Archers in general were not as effective as it would seem from video games. Archery worked by release as many arrows towards the enemy and hope for hits. Archers could have damage reduction based on their range. Or they could have a reload time between shooting. If they wanted to get really fancy they could make it based on experience. What does unit experience do anyway?

If I understand it correctly, the attackers have less morale then the defenders, so the defenders are allowed to wait and the attackers must attack unless they want mass panic and retreat.  Unfortunately, the AI is an idiot so it attacks towards me even if it's defending.

Pump defence and take the vengeance ability. You can wander into strike range, let them swing and miss and then counter attack for triple damage.

You know I agree with you on this about first strike is an advantage and what they should do is if the character or unit is going to die on the strike that it gets last strike before the final blow. So as each unit gets the same amount of attacks as the other. The kind of combat they use now is too much like sudden death NFL football which I hate and the one that scores first wins. But if they programmed it like COLLEGE footbal everyone gets the same amount of chances. This way both units could actually die in the last attack of each.

Indeed!

Someone shoudl make an AMMO mod! At least for MP...

Also another nice feature would be the ability to switch between weapons... at least two.

Like the Roman legion - Throw Jevelin ---> Stab stab stab stab... Win. ---> Rape ---> Pillage.

Maybe also make dex the multyplyer for archery.

And shield much more defensive.

Only yhese fatures will add a ton of debth to MP games...

I agree, it's quite awful that my units always have the first strike. It should be like in King's Bounty or Heroes Of Might & Magic, where a high or low "initiative" decides whether you strike first or later.

Maybe they could make the shortbow available at the first army tech? That way both armies have to move forward or they're sitting ducks for arrows. It's not as if the bow was invented later then the sword anyway, historically it's right up there with the club and long pointy stick.

Ah so basically indeed then the AI should wait when defending, good point. Never watched morale as it seems to NEVER be an issue. Make morale loss twice as high?

even in KB it was easy to "cheat" this mechanic

there is no solution, a good ai should place itself at moves+1 tiles and wait the opponent to move first

the real difference between elemental and KB is that in KB 90% of units have cooler skill very funcional

so wolves can sprint and get you, snakes have a small ranged attack, flying units have a lot more moves than you, some humanoids have sprint, drakes have break, there are many nore magical units and many ranged like archers catapults, imp goblin etc etc

This applies to many aspects of EWOM.  Why did they try and reinvent so much?  No one particularly cares of creative genious.  We just want a modern day copy of MOM.

this my friend is the truest truth out there

unfortunately, most companies want to do sth "original" and "unique" and that's why things like unfinished and buggy EWOM happen.

truthfully, the same is with homm series. part III was the best imo, and they should have sticked to that, just improving it graphcally, improving ai and maybe making it a bit more challenging and complicated.  

anyways we will see how patches and mods change the current gameplay, whic is just too easy. getting over 100 def on my soverein, and 90% creatures (apart from those huge trolls with 150+ attack) just miss when attacking me. and having 60+ attack myself, i 1-hit them. this is wrong, as with 5 heroes, each having a mount and a couple bands granting +1 move (having ~15 moves  turn), it's just too easy :/

We need new games. I totally do not endorse the idea that EWOM has to copy MOM. However, we still need to fix these gameplay problems. The problem is not that it's different than MoM, The problem is that it is not well thought out. They pretty much threw this in within the last couple of weeks. Now we need something that works.

I agree, but the IP police might not.  Sigh.

Well, if it was possible, the solution would be to have a bunch of "front line" troops with high defense to absorb the inevitable initial attack, then have them trade places with more agile units to pick off the wounded.  Or wear down the opposition with ranged attacks before you send in the melee fighters.  Or have high movement speed, so you can close to attack before they can hit you, or just go around the front line to kill the squishier units in back.  Or if you had some cheap (=expendable) but fast units, you could clog up their front lines for a turn or two while your heavy hitters got into position.

I don't think these are possible right now due to the way tactical battles and unit building work in Elemental, but if we had options like that it might make tactical battles feel a little more ... tactical.  I would be happy with a game that had no tactical battles at all, actually, but right now we seem to have the worst of both worlds -- it's not practical to skip them, but they just feel like busywork.

100% agree.

If we had simultaneous attacks, a squad of peasants with Lord hammers but no armor would take the damage they got coming to em. It's the only way that makes sense; 8 guys with hammers managing to continuously 1-shot 8 other guys wearing plate mail and carrying shields, all without taking any damage themselves just doesn't make sense, and not making sense really hurts strategy, gameplay, and immersion.   

Don't you dare recomend a simultaneous attack system!

The real issue here is that the first attack usually kills the attacked. What we need is more hp to make it so that one hit will damage but not totally kill an opponent. This solves the issue with weakly armored units killing heavy knights and it makes the first hit matter less without erradicating its strategic usefulness from the game.

The AI will function better with more hp, as I have noticed against high level monsters, because most of its actions assumes that it will get at least one strike. The other problem with AI is that its armies are normally very small and not well organized. The solution has to do with waiting for frogsy to finish his much deserved vacation and get back to tuning a good AI to carry tactical battles past our expectations.

Everyone talks about MoM needing to be added to this game to make it better. I want EWoM to surpass such talk. It needs to be better than MoM, better than D&D, and better than KB2. Hell it shoul be better than RL.

So true!

I admit I too love MoM and it's combat system. But it had some major flaws as it was very easy to make an unbeatable army. Heck some units with various immunities could simply walk over whole cities by themselves. There were more then a few rush tactics based off of these units. In fact I recall one of them basically taking advantage of a unit that had "first strike" ability. The problem was the AI often had no way to counter these rushes and thus wouldn't put up much of a challenge.

I do think units need more HP in general though. It's way to easy to get enough attack to one shot quys really early. The first thing I always research in Military is Party so I get units of 4. This means I can field a peasent party with 12 ATK and 20 HP. Next I got for basic weapons so I can get the axe and now I got a unit with 4x6 ATK = 24 Attack and 20 HP and the game hasn't been going for that long. These fairly cheap units are easy to produce in mass and easily own anything I encounter early on. They put my SOV to shame and I only keep the SOV in the group to leech XP. 

When a lot of early monsters have 2-8 HP but have 3-6 ATK it only takes 1-2 hits to take out an unarmed unit with 5 HP. And as for as your SOV and heroes they only have 10 HP and can go down in 2-3 hits vs those early monsters unless you bought armor. But even with armor when units start showing up with 9-24 ATK a little into the game that 10 HP means your got be real careful cause getting high defense is EXPENSIVE.

So far I've learned caster heroes ROCK, while all others are just XP leeches unless you get a couple levels increase their HP and spend several hundred gildar on equipment. Basically the price to field a large army for a single unit that's not that great when the army you bought for equal cost would own that units.

And the talk of heroes that use the clearly broken system of unlimited magical item equip to get uber high defenses is kind of a pointless arguement. I garrentee you that for the thousands they spend to make that ONE unit I can build an army of Company units (12 guys) with at least 72 ATK fairly easily because that's the basic attack of ones that simply have an 6 ATK Axe. There are better weapons and their total HP of 60 for basic troops (90 HP Vets, 120 HP Elites) means they could easily stand up to that single uber unit. Plus just add some basic armor and they can have better damage resistance thus greatly increasing survivability. Since they also cost a fraction of the price you can field several of them and easily take on that one unit.

If swords would let you strike first while defending, there might be some reason to choose them over hammers.

Its seems that the problem is that we are ironically playing a fantasy game that is too realistic. An army should be able to wipe the floor with a "hero" in all logical worlds. The issue seems to be how much fantasy we are allowing into the game. I leave it to the devs to balance.