Oh, in all that I gorgot add some good stuff...

The game engine is great... It did feel like playing Master of Magic, or Galactic Civilizations - in other words, like good old days... All the issies I see are not with the idea of the game, but rather with math - stats balancing...

Some may need extra code: like algorithmic, progressively more difficult and rewarding quests... You know: Now I really want my adventuring to get to level 20 so I can go into this dangeon and get this 28 + 8 attach sword with + 2 to mobility...

Other than that all the elements are there, just need to get finished and re-balanced...

Yeah, now I truly know why people say that the game has a lot of potential... It is a good game, with just some things to change in the stat XML files...

Also I think they need a WAY better manual and less starting difficulty options. It is kind of hard to figure out what you gonna get from what option... Too many choices... And the "world difficulty" is misleading. It should be more "world boredom level" from easy = nothing happens to hard = some cool monsters to kill....

For some unknown share of us who are still hoping to love this game, stripping setup options would hurt seriously. I still feel teased by some early dev banter about setup options being very numerous. Can't quickly recall who, but someone recently suggested a toggle between basic and advanced setup options, which in theory could help satisfy a very broad ranger of player tastes.

The difficulty setting is much simpler thing to me, boiling down to how and how much do computer players get to 'cheat.' I like the implementation in GC2 very much, and from what I gather the Elemental approach is much the same--limit computer player bonuses to modifiers on a few major variables and provide AI code that can play the game pretty decently without gimmicks like free units and whatnot.

"This is certainly a consequence of listening to player feedback! But you know, the fact is, crushing exploits and worshiping game balance to such a degree results in a brilliant game being far more bland, weak and boring than it should be!"

I personally don't mind being able to develop to a level when one of my units can wipe out the entire kingdom of an enemy - the thing is you should have to work hard for such achievement - well maybe not hard-hard, but at least for a long time... That was my issue with Civilization V - it was too limited and too balanced so you could not have a larger-than-life empire...

The thing with Elemental is that some of the balancing issues are not those little scale tipping tricks for Casparov-level chess players, but major problems, that invalidate the game very early on... Meaning you cannot lose even if you wanted to...

I just started my next game with world on Difficult and all players on Normal. Well, I have 6 towns now, I am early enough in the game so even the first of my towns is level 4 and I am already indestructable. I don't have to continue the game, I can just go forth and wipe out all my enemies with my sovereign...

Why?

Because the most powerful magical weapons are very easy to research... It takes only 5 levels of Magic research with 0 arcane labs present to be completelly and utterly undefeatable. I have a Sovereign with that 800 gildar magical sword, I need to wait only another 20 turns to get 1200 gildar for the armor and even 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 enemy soldiers would not be able to stop me as is the current tech level of my enemies... My armor would be 20 and their best attack is 18...

So why even have any soldiers at all???

I think what I really meant was for the difficulty settings to be more clear as to what they really do... And some master options would not hurt... With my first game the world was barren and utterly uninteresting but I did not know that the world difficulty level is something different form the game difficulty. And that is really not a difficulty level but rather a "richness" level.

Also I do not know whe is a faction difficulty - are they smarter that way, or just more hostile towards you? Both? Also, in all of my 2 games so far Gildar seems to wipe out all other factions and come on top as my main enemy... Is it just my luck or their combination of abilities makes them better?

Not even sure i follow too well? I think it is true for most games that an experienced player can smash an AI if that is what the player chooses to do. But that doesn't bother me at all, I'm the kind of player who is happy to 'nurture' AI opponents until they are worthy of a good fight. However, i have not yet managed to set up a good battle with an AI in Elemental so far, mainly because i haven't got around to it yet. Typically when my games get that advanced, the out of memory error intensifies to such a degree that i simply give up and start again.

Another issue is that the less complex the game, the easier it is to tweak the AI! But this is all part of game balance too.... as such your not going to like things that the player can do but the AI cannot. This also contributes allot to the game becoming too bland and boring.

Yes, you are right. And there should be a 0 damage available as well - that being blocked... That way for my example possible damages would be 0, 1, 2 - that meaning that about 1/3 of all attacks would be blocked. Of course with a unit with smaller defense - let's say 14 - the max damage would be 7 and the chance of block would be 1/8 or 12.5%...

The formula is a classic weight where the coefficient = 0 cause the value to stay the same (so Defense = 0 -> max Damage = Attack), but at the same time with coefficient going to infinity the result never drops below 0. I think that when max damage drops below 1 it should stay at 1 and then you get 50% chance of block and 50% of 1 point damage.

Again, that would help make the game more reasonable in the "1 unit with modest stats defeats all 4 enemy factions" department. And that would mean that having life points is also important - not just defense higher than attack of all other units in the game... 

Not to put words into the OP's mouth, but the point I think he's bringing up isn't about the AI - it's about having balanced choices for the player, different but viable ways you can play the game. If 5 techs into magic research your sovereign is suddenly all but invincible to normal units and can smash nearly limitless armies single-handedly, it means there's no point in researching or training anything else, it effectively limits your options. Sure there are other ways you could play the game, but why would you? There's only one good way to play, unless you're going for some kind of self-imposed hardmode where you deliberately avoid the overpowered strategy (and even then, there's probably a second-most-overpowered strategy that makes everything else look bad, are you going to ignore that too? pretty soon you run out of strategies..). This is equally true whether you're trying to conquer a human or an AI, or just slaying monsters and questing and ignoring other players - certain options available to you are just way too powerful compared to everything else.

I should note that, in general, balance problems aren't just problems for min/maxing metagamers trying to win as quickly as possible (though I realize the above paragraph may make it sound that way). Even if you're not aware of the one true strategy that beats all others, even if you're (for example) treating the game more like an RPG and doing whatever makes sense to you in-character, the moment you stumble across that one true strategy by chance the game suddenly becomes trivially easy - and if your opponents are balanced with that strategy in mind and actually challenging for a guy using it, the game is unreasonably difficult if you're playing some other way. Better balance is good for everyone, it's just that people playing to win notice the problems with it faster.

Well gawwwwlee. I've been a 'balance-schmalance' person for ages, and here you go offering a very good explanation of why I shouldn't automatically ignore balance talk. Balance stuff done right should actually support the variety of viable play styles I want in a TBS.

From my experience, focusing on good game balance always seems to make games less fun? Civ4 is a prime example of this, because you can tell they have put allot of focus on game balance and they even had to pretend artillery/battleships are not a ranged units!! Obviously in reality they are, but apparently game balance trumps basic combat realism.

Anyhow, i cannot really say civ4 is not a good game, all i can say is that it is not one of those games i ever go back and play every so often like galciv, alpha Centauri, civ2, or Total anihilation. I would even play civ3 before playing civ4..... and i can definitely feel in my bones that what is stopping me from dusting off the disk for civ4 is due mostly to it's overindulgence on game balance. Also just knowing the priority given to game balance has stopped me from even bothering to buy civ5 at all! I am tired of game balance, i really am!

As for a game like civ2, well, you could not say it is so well balanced! But somehow it is addictive, it just has 'IT' and i am not even sure what 'IT' is? But any games that focus too much on game balance, always loose their 'IT' without fail! I dunno if this makes any sense to anyone??

OK, from what I was able to find on this forum Stardock have already addressed the indestructable soldier problem with 1.19 version. The impact of that will be HUGE - it suddenly matters to have armies.

In fact until this point it was all about who has the best defence: if it was the AI who managed to have a best unit - you were dead no matter what. There was not a single brilliant thing you could do in the game to survive. If you were the one who get the best shield, or armor, or whatever - you could mop up the entire game with your Sov without loosing a single life point.

I know I repeat myself again, but I got a sence that not everybody fully understood how one-dimensional the game was because of this. I am not some hard-core strategy gamer. I love games but I have a total of about two weeks time per year to play games. It took me 7 months to finish Dragon Age and I really commited myslef to it. I am playing Fallout 3 for 2 years now...

The bottom line is if the gameplay forced me into finding a game-braking exploit in the game mechanics half-way through my very first game of Elemental - that was bad.

I am glad they will fix this. Sometimes it is cool to have an indestructible unit in the game - but it is fun only if you had to work long and hard for it - not 50 game turns / 1 hour. Otherwise the Laser Man from Age of Empires thing gets old very fast...

Big thank you for Brad and his team for fixing this!!! Love you guys! In the manly best-buddy-let's-go-and-have-a-beer-way-that-is...