Epic Battles

To be honest - under the present system - I believe - which is to say I'm not 100% sure - that there is a limit to how many units can be stacked into one stack and therefore one fight. with a max of 12 actual figures per unit there would, to me, seem way way too many figures in that picture to be an actual combat from the game as it now is.  Maybe if there was no hero in the army and  144 on each side or something...

Maybe someone has gotten further in in than me?  anyone?

Elemental 2: Frogboy's Revenge

If you zoom in closely at the guys getting fried, you'll see names of forum members above each one of the soldiers getting torched by Frogboy's pet dragon.

Well I just went through and counted all of the living soldiers in that picture.  I came up with around 162 (give or take a few).  So there's not really THAT many there (maybe another 50-60 dead soldiers).  So if the maximum was 144 per side, that picture could have been possible.

I'd like some real proof though, it would awesome if someone could provide it from their own game.  At least, that would give me some hope that it's possible.  Even if the AI is not smart enough to muster such a force, we could see such things happen in multi-player.

I would assume it's possible....there definately is enough room, but I have never seen it.

Guys, its a promotional mockup, like most of the early screenshots.  This is bog standard in the industry.

It's an old work on the tactical battles. So it's no longer up to date.

Really?  I kinda wish they didn't use that image on the retail box art (cardboard sleeve) then.  The caption next to this image says "Wage War  Create custom soldiers, engage in tactical battles and conquer your foes"... sort of implying that the tactical battles would look something like this.  If battles that look like this don't actually occur in-game then the box art is very misleading.

Marketing, the ban of game developers everywhere.

Agreed. But that screen-shot wouldn't really be possible in a world of Tile-based combat anyways. Not that I'm complaining about having tile-based combat (my current goals for advanced combat are rightfully abstracted because if it) ... its just that you don't get the "feel good" battles the picture may lead you to assume are in-game.

Instead, you get something akin to Fire Emblem or Advanced Wars ... only take out all predictability and painfully insert complete randomness in its place. Painfully. Surgically.

Hmm, but yea ... I'd rather have 1 random roll and two constants. (a constant + roll for attack and a constant for defense).

and then another roll (or gaussian) for damage.

..

as opposed to well ... 2 random rolls and NO constants.

Yeah, that screenshot is an old one. [...it was taken before they've changed the tactical battle system to "real" turn based, which was a good decision imo, but this is a matter of subjective opinion. :)] Also, the "scale"/epicness of the game has been changed as well because of balancing issues. [So the number of units / army is capped in the vanilla game, which means you won't have 2k units in a battle, but you can change everything via modding.]

I'm not asking for battles with thousands of soldiers, I'm just asking for battles that look somewhat like the picture on the box with a couple hundred troops or so.  "LOTR The Battle For Middle Earth" only had maybe a couple hundred soldiers on screen at once, but it still felt pretty epic.  See, you don't actually have to have thousands upon thousands of soldiers on-screen for a battle to look epic, you just need enough so it feels epic.

Most battles I see in Elemental average around 4 - 8 soldiers...that's just simply too little for a game that that has "War" in it's title.  Even Master of Magic had battles that felt bigger.  Maybe it should be called, "Elemental: Brawls of Magic" instead.  

I like the small groups in the beginning, it really feels like you're a D&D party trying to make your way in the world, but this really should increase as time passes in the game.  Heck, I'd be happy to average just 50 soldiers at once in the late game, just so things feel a little more realistic.

well, I'm trying a more "fair" (from my POV) approach to squads  .... and in my vision squad sizes are 1, 4, 10, 20, 40, and 80 soldiers in number.

Obviously there are advantages to having 80 soldiers, but its not an all-powerful choice either. Sometimes having Faster, Stronger, and more Heavily armored small squads is the better choice.

And ... Heroes .... even an unarmored, poorly armed high level/ high stat Hero should be able to do some damage while being killed by a regiment of 80 grunts with hammers. Meanwhile a well equipped high level/ high stat Hero should be able to really do some damage.

And as far as magic ... having more "protection spells" and "dispel magic" would be nice. For instance, with high-level magic maybe things like "protect army"-wizard A, "dispel protection ALL"-Wizard B, Wizard A- "Reflect Magic all", Wizard B-"Dispel Reflect" ... Wizard A casts "Reveal" and sees that Wizard B's army all has reflect magic already cast on them. Wizard B casts "Fireball" onto a squad of swordsmen. Wizard A casts "(Hidden)", Wizard B gets cocky and casts "Fireball" on a party of DeathKnights. Fireball gets caught in a "Magic Trap" (lets assume Fireball cost 10 mana to cast), and Wizard B gets drained for 20 mana!.

Wizard A then casts "Double Cast", Wizard B casts Fireball on the squad of swordsmen. Wizard A casts "Dispel Reflect ALL", Wizard A casts "FireStorm!"

Wizard B has run out of mana .... Wizard A casts "FireStorm!" ... Wizard A is out of mana ... Wizard A's Army continues to fight Wizard B's army, eventually emerging victorious.

To answer the question, yes, sort of. The Dragon can be had as a quest reward, and he is awesome (does 96 points of damage against everything he breathes on). Anyway I hit a capital city, in which there were 35 units, plus my 12. It was seriously crowded. Didn't look like the pic exactly, but the numbers are possible.

Unfortunately while us gamers want large battlefields, with lots of *different* units, heavy strategy and multiple players on the same battlefield....  what we get is small battlefields, very similiar units which are limited in number on the battlefield, weak strategy and only two players on the same battlefield.   Why would this happen when this game had more developers than any previous Stardock games??  Well my theory is because too much effort was placed into graphics so all the other components suffer.  This isn't the first game we've seen which had developer journals glorifying its graphics yet the gameplay is shallow.  The community has provided many great ideas for the game, but honestly it's quite difficult finding any ideas which were posted that made it into the game. 

from my POV, it is the unfortunate byproduct of going to TB battles

As it stands you can have 8x12 per side, so 96 soldiers on each side (are there bigger groupings then 8?).  With tile based you could have 96 on one side, vs the dragon on the other...surround the dragon - and then you'd have 8 conga lines of 8 soldiers surrounding the dragon with 4 groups of 8 outside the circle.  I personally like the tactical rather than the strategic battles, but could see the desire. 

How about as a future upgrade you have your tactical stack vs stack battles, but if multiple stacks it zooms out a level to a strategic map where each stack is a unit on a larger field.   So if I bring my 4 stacks vs your 3 stacks I have 4 "units" on my side, and you have 3 "units" on yours.   Aggregate the stats, allow 1 spell per caster (in a "unit") per turn, and let them duke it out.  Then you're talking 12x12x8 = 1152 units per side.  Then you can have creature sizes, i.e. sm, med, large (human/small critter, troll, dragon) take up varying slot sizes, i.e. small = 1 slot in a stack, medium = 4 slots in a stack, massive = 12 slots in a stack.   You could then have your 1152 units attacking 12 dragons.

edit:  I'd also have strategic battles take longer than 1 turn, then allow other stacks to join as well as other factions.   Takes X (1+(total stacks/3) turns to initiate battle. So on the cloth map you'd have a symbol for an upcoming battle and be able to teleport into it, or bring in nearby reinforcements/allies.  Ally moves a stack into the scrum, gets a window asking who he's fighting for, or neither and then joins the battle.

May need to introduce a trait "army general" or something so you can move with multiple stacks.  Leadership stat..how many stacks you can move in a group.

that would only be possible in look if you didn't have a tile setup.  however you can mod the game to have bigger tactical maps, and mod the game to have larger tactical units.  you could prob mod the game to have 100 unit stacks if you wanted, of course it would prob look ridiculous in a small tactical square.

Yes, biggest is 12

The problem here is in two parts really. One is the change from Real Time to TBS battles. The other is when they made the announcement (months back) that they were changing the unit counts to much lower numbers....because it was easier to balance...

The numbers could have been adjusted across the board for higher unit counts to Still be possible. I think the game lost a lot when those decisions were made honestly. I expected Epic Sized Battles with Thousands of units, or at the very least, Hundreds. With the numbers changed on Food production and the costs to train and keep units much larger numbers can Still be achieved in the game. This is going to be one of the features for the Dragonlance Mod whether it ever ends up in the base game or not. Though I'd really like to see things like this possible in the base game.

I've got the LE Edition and that pic isn't on the outside of the box. If they put that pic on the box of the normal version....I don't know, but that kinda seems wrong to me to do that because no matter how hard you try I don't think you could get that view in game right now. Seems a little too much like false advertising to me.

It seems like false advertising cause it is false advertising. I'm not saying "remove it from the box" ... but instead of the caption being "command awesome battles" the caption should be "if your good at modding you might be able to make an RTS version of battles that might look something like this" ... or if your in marketing "Elemental is a platform where you can make all sorts of fantasy games: like this one battle that used to be Elemental, but is no longer anything like it. You too can make a picture like this happen."

Agreed, and yeah....gotta love modding. [...but what about the AI - will you see hundreds or thousands of units in an AI controlled army if you make drastic changes like those?]

Yeap.

I notice in the screenshot corpses stay. In the game they fade about half a second after getting killed.

Just changing that would be a great thing.

+1. [Should be optional of course...]

Why? Other tile based games have managed to scale to massive unit counts and include stuff like facing, flanking, formations, reach, different shapes of AoEs, routs and.. Well, I think that just about covers the stuff in the pic. Is there any particular reason Elemental can't (except for not being designed to be capable of any of those things, because that's no explanation, as that's more of a "it can't because we don't want it to because we say so because stop asking and go to your room").

As long as the machine is rolling the dice, I'd rather have piles of d2 rolls. It's simpler to display, intuitive and highly predictable.