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Citizens

from Elemental Forums

Do you think citizens should be more than eye candy on the "zoomed in" map? I loved how in Warcraft 3 you could turn your peasants into a militia. I think it would be cool if Elemental adapted a similar feature with its citizens. Also, how about being able to move your citizens from one location to another? They could turn into caravan icons on the map. If a city capture is invetiable, you could possibly move them to a safer location (ala helms deep). Just a couple of random thoughts I had. What do you all think?

elemental
21,947 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

It's not "a single archer" conquering a city of 5000. That archer represents a unit with lots of men. It doesn't take a lot of armed soldiers to occupy or take over a fairly large population.

I don't like conscription idea for various reasons.

  • It's biased towards helping those that leave defenses thin or non-existant.
  • It's a game mechanic that can easily be replaced by always having an ultra-cheap 1-turn unit that can be produced.
  • Or, perhaps better, replaced with a mechanism like Kohan where cities and forts have an inherent defense force so it's automated.
  • It's only value would be in the early game when unit strength differentials are low, unless you plan to have conscripts get better over time.
I just don't see what value quick conscripts are going to add to the game.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

It's biased towards helping those that leave defenses thin or non-existant.

Except for the facts that 1) conscripted units are really lousy and probably wouldn't make much difference, and 2) even if you have a strong defense, you can still conscript people.

It's a game mechanic that can easily be replaced by always having an ultra-cheap 1-turn unit that can be produced.
That forgets that units will be designed, not premade, and completely removes the population angle.

Or, perhaps better, replaced with a mechanism like Kohan where cities and forts have an inherent defense force so it's automated.
Well, automation is good, but AIs are often inferior to what a human(oid?) player can do.
It's only value would be in the early game when unit strength differentials are low, unless you plan to have conscripts get better over time.
That is what training is for..... plus, the editor means that the more powerful your items are, the more powerful your conscripts are.

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Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ckessel, reply 1
It's not "a single archer" conquering a city of 5000. That archer represents a unit with lots of men. It doesn't take a lot of armed soldiers to occupy or take over a fairly large population.

Since all your units are coming by taking population and training them, it may actually be one archer. We don't know what the minimum numbers are right now.

It's biased towards helping those that leave defenses thin or non-existant.

It's really not, since you're talking about something pretty bad and  expensive to do.


It's a game mechanic that can easily be replaced by always having an ultra-cheap 1-turn unit that can be produced.

As Scoutdog said, not with the mechanics of training units in Elemental. What we're talking about is taking whatever weapon stockpile you have access to in the town and using it all to immediately make whatever you can.


Or, perhaps better, replaced with a mechanism like Kohan where cities and forts have an inherent defense force so it's automated.

That might work too.


It's only value would be in the early game when unit strength differentials are low, unless you plan to have conscripts get better over time.

The equipment you're making improves as you get more resources/research/production/whatever. So naturally the militia you make with that equipment is also going to improve. The only difference between normal troops and militia is that one of them has training, and the other doesn't.

 

edit - It's probably worth mentioning that a "cheap unit you can produce near instantly" is exactly what we're talking about here. If you make a unit with no training, it should take as long as it takes to hand them a sword and say "pointy end goes that way".