Should there be a ring/amulet limit?

It's called bling dude

should be a limit of 10 rings, 2amulets, one necklace .. but I don't think there are that many designs in the game at this point, so it doesn't really matter, you'll end up paying an arm and a leg to equip one guy anyway which isn't worth it.

I suppose you can physically fit up to five average rings on each finger (3 on the little finger) without them getting in the way of movement. Lets say 16 rings all up on each hand - probably 4 rings per hand would be best for the game.

Neck ornaments, well in reality you could fit hundreds i suppose, it would just end up looking like a piece of armor limited primarily by weight? so probaly a limit of 1 neck ornament for the game would be best?

There should be a two ring limit, one on each hand.  and one amulet.

2 rings? nah, the number 2 goes much better with gloves or gauntlets. So you get 2 gauntlets and 8 rings - feels much more balanced to me.

Edit: and a rule that two or more rings of the same kind on the one hand do not multiply the effect.

2 rings is a common number in games.

Really what is needed is to not have the adventure tech spawn a crystal mine, but rather require the upgrade to find them at all. The a crystal cost would really reduce the quantity you can have per unit (which is supirior to an artificial limit).

Until Champions don't NEED every single ring and amulet to not suck I am opposed to any further limitations on gear for champions.  Otherwise the 2 ring thing has always bugged me.  I have 10 fingers and can wear 10 rings easy.  But if champions didn't need the gear to be good for anything except scouting I would encourage a limit to force choices about what 'type' of hero you want to make.

If you want to force 'choices' on what type of hero you want to make, then have 'sets' - specific rings, armor, helmet etc that go together to make a  set that has special benefits the more of the set you can complete.

I would like to the ability to make magical items.  That being said, I agree with most everybody else.  Two rings and 1 amulet.

Why limit a unit (champions) that are already pussies?  I can put every ring, amulet magic item on a champion, raise him to level 10 and a unit of 12 soldiers would dry-rape him unless I abuse some cheap spell. 

They may want to consider level caps for non-heroes (but it would be unit specific, so dragons and other creatures go higher than the normal units). Say like level five for the average soldier and change the training levels like elite to just start with more XP.

Actually, this is one of the things that I feel strongly should be set, as each player desires, via customization page.

I agree, I've been wanting a cap on soldier levels for a long time.

I agree.  In general there needs to be way, way more customization options.

I don't feel there should be an experience cap on troops any more than champions. The game should allow a champion leader the capability to join a squad and become part of it, instead of having to fight alone against an entire group. He should take damage as the group takes damage & have the potential to die as individual members die.

This is a kind of limitation which seems to emulate reality, but what if you are Mr. T? Hell, most married women have two rings on a single finger. For those who have not followed since day 0, there used to be no limits at all and heroes could put on like 40 move rings and and get like 42 move with organized so entire armies could fly around the game world. In some ways this was definitely not desired, so they made the one per type limit, which is fairly balanced, especially now without organized. In my opinion, beyond a single item limitation, any limitation on the amount of enchanted items usable by a single unit serves only to arbitrarily cap that units ultimate power level. I do however think that adding limitations on a units ability to acquire these items can add to the rpg aspects of the game. Really I think that enchanted item should probably be a lot rarer and units should drop them after being killed in battle. This would ultimately promote the idea of champions competing for rare and powerful tools of war, like that seen in most fantasy fiction.

In the realistic view, it should be a very loose limitation or no limitation at all. I see no reason why someone wouldn't be able to wear 50 rings and 20 amulets.

In fantasy-realism view, the question is actually "how many rings can you wear and still be able to use the magic in them?". Obviously there is no clear answer for that.

But the most important is the gameplay view. How many should the heroes be able to wear without somehow breaking the game.

I agree that with the current rules, there is no special reason to place a limit beyond "one of each type of ring".

With better champion's development, it will probably be better to place a limitation for the number of rings and amulets, even if only for a better UI, but the number itself should be decided according to the game balance needs.

switch most hero special abilities to local instead of global and make them improvable + allow exp gain whilst sitting/working in a city and you'll get a lot more weedy type heroes doing what they should be doing instead of wandering around imbued.

that leaves room for improving the more outdoors type to be killing machines. eg embedding a hero gives a squad better morale, better defence, different abilities, etc. obviously need to be a way of switching them out.

or for that matter, different abilities instead of just stat gain at level up. should be an hp gain on lvl up in any case.

in fantasy terms.. common excuse for magic item limit is that they interfere with each other and may blow up or some such.

what about the six fingered man ? How many rings does he get ? serioulsy though, you can't balance out the items into the basic hero and its core abilities have a more solid foundation, and i am seriously looking forward to version 1.1 to see what happens.

I'm all for realism & reality, humans have 10 fingers hence 10 ring limit. So what if some people wear more or less? If we were talking about dinosurs who have 3 fingers, then dinousaurs should be limited to 6 rings for two claws. Limits which have some basis in reality are reasonable & good. This also enables us to make races distinct (hobbits, elves, lizardmen), and it avoids "gaminess" and .

It doesn't make much of a difference anyway, because what tends to happen in RPG games (at least in theory) is that as you find more valuable treasures during the game, that +1 ring gets replaced with a +4 ring, hence you pull off the +1 ring (or sell it) and replace it with the +4 ring. The monsters are supposed to get proportionally stronger (in theory), so the monsters at level 4 appear roughly the same as the level one monsters (to characters starting out) since the characters have leveled up & gotten stronger items. It's only the weaker monsters which seem really weak now.

Things get broken, or appear broken, when the suspension of reality is removed (i.e. buildings don't eat food, people do). Even spells have some logic associated to them, higher level spells & stronger spells should have increased mana costs, when this "logic" is broken, players revolt (increasing the teleport cost to 15 from 5).

Capping a military unit' experience, but not champions would be incredibly hokey, single guys that could level an entire. I don't find that enjoyable. After all, what's a military unit if not a bunch of guys organized together that can all increase in experience. If anything, military units should increase faster in experience because they are composed of more individual guys who are each gaining experience, multiplying that experience by the number of men.

I think heroes should be able to be imbedded in squads, as a leader normally does.

Immersion is a key factor in every entertainment medium. When done right, suspension of disbelief happens naturally and the medium draws you in without fail. In books, movies, and TV, the process of creating immersion is fairly straight forward, as sections, which fail to draw in the audience or break their suspension of disbelief, can simply be removed or modified to lessen the issue. However, in video games, a developer must make carefully weighted decisions to maintain not only immersion but the fun level. It is easy to say that logic dictates this or that, but this "logic" is merely a predefined rule set one has brought with them to this game medium from those previously experienced. Players did get upset with the teleport change because logic was broken, it was the hardship added to balance out the effectiveness of teleport, which negatively shifted the pace of the game play for many players.

In its current state, Elemental is an interesting sandbox, but lacks the immersion one expects from either a straight 4x game or an rpg. What ultimately differentiates one town from another or one champion from another? To cite a good example, we should look at galciv 2 and consider why one planet is better or worse than another. When one colonizes a planet in galciv2, a couple of things can occur in the game which changes how you consider a given planet's role in your civilization. The first are random events which force the player to make choices about the future of his planet and his civ. The second is the existence of special upgrade spaces which add some bonus to improvements built upon them. Elemental, much like in civ, uses the idea that the surrounding area of a city determines much of the future of your cities, and due to this, the good player preplans his expansion and is rewarded for optimizing space between cities and the resource collection of each city. It is this kind of static experience that drives players to use well defined strategies of optimization, since ultimately a faction taking care to optimize map utility will only improve.

The same is true for the sov and his champions. Since the special abilities of these units is ultimately static, the only method of change is leveling the static stats and purchasing the static equipment. This ultimately leads to no champion feeling meaningful and the player is again left to simply optimize his fortunes. If we look at the Total War games as an example, not for size of battles but for their handling of champion units, those games have each hero unit change over time, sometimes for their better and sometimes for the worse, based upon both randomness and how the game is progressing. Anyone who has played those games long enough knows the dread of finding out your new grandson is a Hooter or that great general you have has become an incompetent city manager. It is these unknowns or random chances that push the player to form new and varied strategies for his play.

That's actually a good argument, Kenata.  I think you've changed my mind.

Excellent post, and I agree perfectly. I love 4x space games. The analogy to alien planets ( and indirectly races) is perfect. The faction differences in EWOM should be as different as "arachnid" vs "terran," but right now there's no observable differences between the factions: either how they move, interract, diplomacy, etc, thus reducing "suspension of belief," "logic," "immersion,"or "realism," however you want to phrase it.

I don't really agree with this as being as significant issue. Currently, the different factions are fairly different in several key factors, available weapons, improvements, bonus recruitable units, techs, and faction bonuses. While these may not feel observable, they do have significant effect on the employed strategies of the player.  While different races can add a type of vibrance to a game world, it does not need to add anything beyond a distinct set of graphical skins. If you look at galciv 2, the various races were only distinct in so much as they had different racial abilities, which were not distinct to particular race, and they had different graphics. In general, combat was the same, diplomacy was the same, and before the last expansion, techs and improvements were identical. So what was it that gave one race a distinction from another? The answer is fairly clear, competition of equivalent strategies. That is, on each level - diplomatic, social, military, research - multiple strategies existed which were equivalent in their ability to achieve victory. Combat had 3 distinct weapon types, A Society could be one of three distinct moral types, A planet could focus on purchasing units or producing them. Since these were distinct avenues of strategic play, the various races could mix and match them to deploy varied strategies. In Elemental, the player and the AI do not have this kind of strategic choice, but are only given choices which are almost predetermined based up strategies of optimization. Consider leveling a town which has 1 lost library. It is a no brainer to give this city a tech boost at level time. Whereas a city with no resources will get a gildar boost, this is the optimal choice. Since the player never has to worry that his lost library will burn down or his gold mine will run dry, he merely has to optimize for these resources or the future resource he will gain with tech development.