Serious request to pull 1.08b or fix asap...made Elemental worse

I have one. Uncheck optoon in impulse that says: "Show Pre-relase version".

Then remove elemental and then reinstall.

I Havent tried it yet, but should work

I forgot to mention that this thread was inspired by this one:  https://forums.elementalgame.com/396977 ...about the stagnant first 25 turns...

...archiving the app and will try your suggestion, thx bsaksida.

Not to mention, at least for me, this patch has made sure that the game crashes every 10 to 20 turns.... 

The barbarians certainly need to be nerfed and spawn less. Even on "Easy" difficulties this is a problem.

You just answered why Organized was removed: it was so powerful you HAD to take this "optional" trait. Now they only have to make movement a little more easier.

Strongly disagree. On level up, you can gain 3 essence, so gain 1 level and you can imbue and still cast teleport. Plus you want to have 16 mana at least once in your life to summon a fire elemental, so that's not an issue.

Additionally, cities aren't that useful, nor are they threatened in any way so you don't need to teleport back home in the current state of the game.

Just use units with move of 2. For instance, all the summons. you don't need anything else in your sovereign's stack. Organised didn't make your other armies move faster in the first place and just about everyone complained it was overpowered (which means they actually staled long enough to have to use units instead of summons).

What about defending your cities if you want to keep them? If you rely only on your sovereign to teleport and do everything by himself, why even bother to build cities in the first place? They won't provide much for the sovereign to make use of.

Why is it 1 square movement? I thought you got 2 movement by default. You can add 2 more movement to your sovereign when you create him and another 1 move if able to wear boots. 

Having to defend your cities with troops you build slows expansion. This is the result of city spamming complaints. 

You can fix the archery thing with the bug fix mod 3.1

For the CTDs alone this patch is very very bad. Before it was playable now I can't even run the game.

i agree with teleport spell having 5 mana cost

I just cannot imagine transportation of a fresh recruits on a huge map with teleport spell that expensive ... On huge maps you are either condemned to wait 20 turns for them to cross map, or you need 30 mana to teleport back and forth ...

game should be slowed down by intelligent ai, not by taking away movement of army ... what about making sov move one tile in 5 turns? then ai has a time to be dangerous for sure .... 

in general, i like my sov to be melee hero - right now is impossible. since teleport is so expensive and no other imbued champion can cast it to move entire army (has to be a leading character, and sov is by default) i need lots of mana on sov ...

Yes, I agree something had to be done when in earlier games we could leave mostly undefended cities and just zoom around with our "zooming Sov stack of doom" that could return cheaply anywhere.


I still stand by my OP comments but I will give 108b a few more games.  I appreciate that this community can disagree and be mature about it as well.  Huzzah!

1.  archery broken by a patch?  that alone is reason enough for pulling it or issuing emergency patch.  Thx for info on bug fix mod for archery tho Delmoroth.

2.  Let me add a new "bug" to this list:  Overpowered magic attacks that don't seem to ever miss.  With my 15-wisdom, 15-intelligence "Summoning" Sovereign...all of the units magic attacks seemed to almost NEVER miss and deal ridiculous damage for the early game.  Just as an example:  A rookie earth elemental magic attack doing 17dm to every square, every time?  Early fire attacks by my Sov doing double-digit damage?  etc.

3.  bandit attack stack:  my early recruits (or free random units I could choose when cities expand) had *no* chance to defend cities on their own when that programmed bandit attack stack showed up (after I had @ five cities).  a) they are sitting around in garrison and not gaining experience.  In 1.08 they could join the Sov and start becoming effective.  the attack stack must be met by a stack...otherwise they destroy completely the 1st city, then the 2nd, etc.  No pillaging...completely razing it to the ground.  These were five strength 18-30...a challenge even for my summoning Sov, Janacek, and two Familiars.  c) those early recruits have move=1...slow to coalesce into a stack of their own before half the kingdom was destroyed.  My recruit stack was forced into fighting at the third city..and got their arses handed to them.  Sov returned to find no cities left...then lost to the bandit stack who lost no units to my kingdom units.

One or two animals or bandits?  no problemo.

I am now going back down from Hard difficulty to Challenging to see if such a bandit stack will occur again in the early game.

(James009d were you referring to just the bandit/animal spawning...or this "city attack stack by bandits that I got to experience?)  One/two bandits/animals that want to for some strange reason to come knocking on a city garrison (with the defense bonuses) would be a nice way to level them up.  Reminiscent of Master of Magic and those one unit rampaging monsters that would always attack every N turns...

4.  On the "just use move 2 units" suggestion...I don't see how to create new recruits with higher movement...  am I missing something obvious?  oh.  add the "boots with extra movement bonus" equipment like Syneris said.  Doh!  That will help a bit and I will try this out.

edit...another oops, with my new human kingdom...the new melee recruits have movement=2 by default.  So I think I wasn't observant enough and must have had one move=1 random spawn unit in my Sov stack that I didn't notice.

5.  Melee Sov without 5 mana teleport?  I agree with bpalczewski about melee Sov...because Teleport was there and useful, but now so expensive, this weighs heavily in favor of creating a Sov with high starting wisdom (and/or is it intelligence stats setting towards that magic 15 mana?)...but I would want to knock those stats down to add to Str Dex Con instead for creating a classical melee Sov.  Well anyway the melee Sov is still hindered somewhat by needing to buy Essence when they level up as well in order to imbue new champions....instead of ramping up the Sov's fighting skills.

A cool-down for teleport or some other means to throttle it's use?  It should only be to phone home to forestall a deadly invasion IMHO...not to allow for that unbalanced "zooming stack".  Well wait a minute...that zooming stack that could level up recruits was damned fun to play.  Sigh.


Other notes:  I find 1.08/1.08b is about 50% more stable than before...could get @30 turns of play.  Still doing exit/reload just to keep long games going.  fyi I'm also using the XP /3gb /userva switches to get the Civ4 Wildmana modmod to be stable on huge maps so maybe that extra user memory is delaying the memory leak.  Warning...need to know what you are doing before messing with those params.  I googled carefully and backed up my boot.ini beforehand.

I think in hindsight I really wanted to focus this little thread on the "1.08b bugs and game killing balance issues for developer action"...not really the game balancing itself...which is hotly/endless debated elsewhere.  Too late, my fault!

For whatever reason tonight Elemental suggested that I update the game again...but simply installed 1.08b...again.

Going to stick with 1.08b and no archery...and do the turtling/stay near home mode and see how it feels.

The 1.08 beta patch is problematic.

Unfortunately, right now, what you'll want to do is go to plain v1.08. To that, turn off "show pre releases" and reinstall plain v1.08.

thx very much for the quick response!

This is strange:  I already had the Impulse option "show pre-release (alpha/beta) versions disabled (unchecked)

...are we SURE that 1.08b is a pre-release version?

So what I'm going to do:

1.  toggle the "show pre-release (alpha/beta) versions on/off

2.  Uninstall Elemental.

3.  Hope/pray I can get to 1.08 with Impulse auto-update.

actually scratch that...I had an archive version of Elemental 1.08...so uninstalled and restored the archive version.  phew!

Even though I have "show pre-release (alpha/beta) versions" disabled...I am still seeing 1.08b.

I have chosen "ignore update" to avoid 1.08b.  Hopefully future updates such as the juicy 1.09+ will prompt/update fine.

Recreating factions/sovereigns and starting anew with 1.08.

Got to agree, 1.08 amping of the game is a bit too step.

Teleport cost 15 - only if you create full wisdom sov, for everyone else, its just unusable. For melee sov starting with default 10 wisdom - best case scenario you get 16 essence at level 3, by when you already have some other heroes you probably want to imbue...

Maybe leave the 5 mana cost but set number of units in the stack that can be teleported? Especially given higher level spell "teleport friend" or something like that (which honestly i still have no idea how it should work).

I do understand reasoning behind increased cost of bows/archers, but this is a bit too much, default forward observer ~16 gold and some metal, default archer ~40 gold

And about "organized" removed, I'm still not sure... On one hand it was a bit too efficient, especially in the early stages of the game, but turning elemental into checkers? As someone stated above, I'd rather play checkers then, I'd at least have a life person in front of me. 

^it's not increased cost. it's rolling back to old cost before 1.07.

Although I would agree that shortbows are waaaay overpriced. Twice weaker then longbows and yet only 25% cheaper.

instead of something like organized where the whole stack moves at sovereign speed, what about something called pathfinding/terrain navigation where the stack gets just +1 move. 

Also, there's a new patch/hotfix that fixes bows.

You're just frustrating yourself, and the devs who are trying to balance the game.

If you enjoy this whole process (the joy of the FOTM balances the 'unjoy' of losing your FOTM) that's great.  But complaining suggests the 'unjoy' > joy. 

If so, then may I suggest realizing that when something is over-powered it will eventually be balanced (not nerfed -- balanced), and either not use it (so as to not experience the 'unjoy' of balancing), or just enjoy it for now with the understanding it'll soon be 'fixed'.

Games need to be balanced, over-powered features need to be balanced, and complaining when they are helps no one.

No need for a lecture about "complaints about lack of beloved feature" because this post is not really about that.  As stated in the OP, we're talking about a combination of bugs/changes that negatively affected the early game and not just a focused complaint about teleport or whatever feature.  For myself I didn't use teleport in my last game and only had one Sov build with Organized in the previous versions.  Now..Organized, plus Adventurer and I was zooming around a bit too fast in a previous game... so for balance purposes, so I could agree on that combo. 

Get rid of that "bandit stack of doom" that crunched my little kingdom at the start and I wouldn't even need to teleport home at all...and my recruit defenders could perform their mission of minding the store while the Sovereign is away training up their stack and adventuring.  Or other changes to keep the Sov from just hovering around the starting cities.  Yes, there should be danger for those early cities except for a rare spawn.

Kind of like:  four Phantom Warriors in Master of Magic?  My guys could handle that.  Throw in an Air Elemental?  That early garrison is toast.

Easy to mod teleport to make it of limited use:  cool-down timer, component (gold/material) cost to cast, "3 uses max" etc that can used by EITHER a melee or magic-centric Sov.  Din's Curse has "level gates" that are free to use to return home to fight invading monsters, Diablo had Town Portal that could be spammed to return/heal/return.  I recall dying plenty in Diablo 2 even with that Town Portal spell.  Duriel stop smacking me...i need to cast this Town P...

but Frogboy pretty much capped this thread:  "The 1.08 beta patch is problematic."  ...which I guess means "fix asap" is the plan, vs. pulling the 108b patch? I am assuming so since I see no way to remove a patch other than re-install.

Your action -- complaining about 2 of the most overpowered features being balanced -- belies your words that the 'lecture' was unneeded.

The game needs balancing.  Overpowered (and underpowered) traits/features/etc. will be balanced.

Complain if you like, it's your dime.  It's pretty much ubiquitous in games today.

Heck, you can even complain that you're being 'lectured' about complaining

And as far as your post being "not really about that", you raised 3 points (archery, organized, and teleport in regards to bandits hitting your cities).  Two of your 3 points were "really about that".

I still don't see, how could teleporting single sovereign, without army. back to his kingdom for 5 mana be considered overpowering.

Instead nerfing down teleport they should've reinstated teleport army spells (that already cost 15mana), and change basic teleport to teleport only caster.

Is there any way for me to patch my EWOM without using impulse?  (ver 1.0x is really buggy crashy city)

OR, could i just put the whole game on a portable hard drive, update it via impulse, at a public web accessing PC, and take it home, and move the updated game to my PC hard drive? anyone ,please?

I suggest one addendum: allow the self teleport to allow, say thoree or four individuals to poer with the caster.

I think Brad and the developers need to play Civ 5 for a day, then go back and play Elemental because, right now Elemental is still three cans short of a six pack!

While we're at it lets bump the budget to be comparable and allow two decades of feedback/enhancements. The actually game design and mechanics have not changed extensively.

It's kind of like comparing a new paper and pen rpg to the latest edition of DND or the newest ccg to Magic the Gathering.