I would love that.

Yeah, I think that this is what Froggie meant. If this is correct, I am disappointed as well. 200v200 max? That is far from being an "epic battle". Oh well, if we can change the cap from 20 -> 100 for example via modding...well, I am not really worried in that case.

Agreed. 400 vs 400 doesn't sound like it would feel that "Epic" to me. As long as we can Mod that though I don't see a problem.

And yes, before anyone goes on and on about it, I agree that the word "Epic" is open to interpretation. Sometimes 1 on 1 can be Epic, like Gandalf vs the Balrog, but usually, when I think of "Epic", I think thousands of men vs thousands of men, like the battle of the 5 armies.

When it comes to balance though, if everything is balanced correctly, I don't see why it wouldn't be scalable and still maintain balance whether it's 400 vs 400 or 10,000 vs 10,000.

If we're going to be limited to 400 vs 400, I can tell you the first thing I'm modding....LoL

Note: That screen shot with the two armies (one with a Dragon) does seem to look like it has more then 800 units on screen. I didn't count them all to make sure though, someone else can count all those troops if they want though. I won't argue that the screen shot doesn't look cool, it does.

I still think it's going to have something to do with how champion units act within the army itself. If they take an entire slot you'll be hard pressed to find a champion that will be worth 100 soldiers, much less 1,000. It kind of diminishes the RPG side of the equation a bit when you do something like that. It applies to things like mythical creatures that won't necessarily come in groups large enough to contend with 1,000 units without having them be massively overpowering against smaller grouping.

If you want to scale up those units as well then you might have a lorebreaking situation, it's highly unlikely that a nation will be able to field 100 dragon units. while 10,000 vs 10,000 may be balanced. Somebody using say, the adventure path and is using champions instead with a mix of recruited mythical units and summons might field an army largely made of champions with lots of experience and great gear. They'll be limited to 10 "units" as well and end up 10,000 vs 10 or 10,000 vs 50. While it makes sense that the 10 would not be able to defeat 10,000 the fact that those 10 champions can't actually be in an army of thousands because they take up the same space as 1,000 soldier legions makes it imbalanced. Not to mention since every unit takes a tile and the calculations for battle are likely to be unit vs unit, there is no way a champion would survive an "attack" from a 1,000 strong unit.

Take for example heroes from any of the battles we are mentioning, helms deep, battle of five armies, minas tirith. Heroes have an effect on the battlefield but in no way could they hold off thousands alone, they lead armies. While a normal soldier might kill 5 or 6 enemies before biting it, a hero could kill 50 or 60. The only way to keep heroes as separate units in a battle is to keep the numbers smaller, something a hero could feasibly fight.

Options?

Ability to attach champions or other special recruited units to a unit as a "leader" of sorts. This way they cant be singled out in 1,000 vs 1 fights if the warfare has scaled to that level. This will diminish the effect of heroes on a battle since they'll just be a small boost to a legion with 1,000 soldiers in it, combat heroes would be especially diminished here and would need to provide a nice bonus to the group as a whole to make it worthwhile.

Magic would also be a concern here because the power required to kill 20 soldiers is vastly inferior to the power required to kill 1,000. I'm not really sure what kind of solution we could have for this. Do you have magic powerful enough to wipe out or significantly damage a legion? How does this balance out against the other paths you can take for your kingdom? Basically what can you do as somebody who didn't take the warfare large army path that will give you a chance, thus creating viability for all paths, that wouldn't make you exceptionally powerful against others who took a non warfare path. If you've got an aoe that can damage a group of legions decently, it would absolutely annihilate anything smaller.

Edit:

Maybe a scaling damage/mana cost based on the size of the unit? Perhaps with increased casting requirements as well int/wis?

Yep...just 2 examples from LotR with regard to epic battles: Battle of Helm's Deep & Battle of the Pelennor Fields

I remember a while back someone had counted each individual solider (plus ogres and dragon) and it came out to be somewhere around 450 total in the screenshot. So roughly a 225 v 225 battle. Maybe 250 v 250 to account the soldiers not on screen.

EDIT: I see a high res pic of it was posted.

Excellent.

I was thinking that 20-50 sized unit would be the upward limiting factor. Good to know I wasn't alone.

i found a large size screenshot of the battle if anyone feels like counting them :

I like this.

Does this mean that any later increases to Intelligence will *not* increase your Essence? If so, this would seem to give a strong incentive to "front-load" your Int assignment. i.e. if you were planning to add 4 more points of Int at level ups, you'd benefit (in the long run at least) if you increase your Int by another 4 at the start instead of increasing other attributes, and then you increase those other attributes at later level ups instead.

Does "based on" mean that it will be equal to your Essence, a multiple of your Essence, or based on some other formula involving your Essence?

If the effective maximum number of enchantments ends up being "low", that would seem to benefit Sovereigns with a few stronger units more than Sovereigns with a larger number of weaker units. For instance, say that you have 4 cities with 4 enchantments each, and 10 units with 4 enchantment each. That seems fairly conservative, and yet you're already using 56 enchantment slots at that point.

I take it that the enchantment cap will be per "player", meaning that enchantments cast by your Champions will count against the same enchantment cap as your own enchantments?

Becase there's also a stack limit of 10 "units" in the army. A champion is 1. Just how powerful would a champion have to be in order to be worth 1000 troops that also count as 1?

Of course that's really just another problem with stack/army size limits.

If you want 1 model = 1 soldier scale, then it's going to be graphically difficult to have a 10k battle, no matter how you do it.

At some point, one has to use abstraction. That is, just like a single chit in a wargame can represent a division, I'd have to have 1 model = 1,000 soldiers in my own mind. With a flexible mod, it would probably be possible to recruit and label that unit as 1,000 soldiers, all outfitted the same. At that point, you could have 20,000 soldiers in one grid, but it would look like 20.

I'm used to this sort of thing, so don't mind.

Helm's deep could be done like that, or it could be done in sections... think about it, Helm's deep is one city, right? How big are cities in Elemental? Maybe 10 grids across. To do Helm's deep, you'd if you had 200 orcs all along the city wall, and those 3 deep, that's 200x10x3 = 6,000 Orcs... And if they were 6 deep (which is what it looks like in the movie), that's 21,000 Orcs. It would take a lot of battles to fight that out, but it could be done. Not all of the Orcs were able to attack in the movie... not even close. Only the front 10% about was able to get to a given section of the wall at once.

This is pretty close to how it seems Elemental will work.

...for my preferece, I'd be glad to fight Helm's deep over about 5 battles of 200 v 200... I'd just imagine it times 100. 5 fairly long battles is plenty epic for me

Which is why a separate limit should be used for champions, researchable in the adventure tree.

That wouldn't fix the way it plays on the battlefield. A champion would stand no chance against 1,000 soldiers. Even if they didn't take a slot in the actual army, anything but a powerful mage would be largely useless.

I honestly Don't See a Problem with having a Super Powerful Champion by End Game. Remember back in MoM by End Game when you could make Super Powerful weapons and Armor for your Champions that made them Invincible and Unstoppable? That was fun as hell.

Although I do understand that's completely UN-Balanced, but how "Fun" game-play is should be More Important then Balance. In a game where "Magic" is a strong deciding factor, things Are going to be Un-Balanced sometimes. By End Game should a Super-Powerful Champion be able to take on 1,000 men and survive? Sure. I would expect a End Game Level Sovereign to be able to kill Hundreds of Men at a Time, whether it be by Spell or Big Ass Mace like Sauron in the beginning of LotR where he's swatting away 10 guys at a time like flies.

Eventually I'd like to see Champions so Powerful that only another Champion or Sovereign would have a chance of taking them out even if it Does Un-Balance things. That just sounds cool to me.

This is so awesome . I love reading these things when I get the chance to. So happy that all this stuff has progressed. Definitely looking forward to messing with tactical battles in the late game. Kind of sad though that the sovereign will be restricted to only being able to found the first city. Either ways, though, this is awesome

edit:

Man I'd totally love to have that kind of game play mechanic, I can see this idea being expanded into mod territory where depending on the race of the sovereign (there's been discussions of dragons and what not in the forums) you'd have various statistics which change, very drastically. This also reminds me of the "Pretenders" from the game "Dominions 3". All in all this would be good fun, at least to me it would .

Not really. When I play Med2 TW I often play 4 players against each other each with Maxed Out armies. I have 20K to 30K units on screen during battles like those and each man represents one man. Elemental was designed from conception to have 1 man be 1 man on screen. Those of us who have been on these forums for the last year and a half know this from talking about with the Devs and following what they say here on the forums.

What it comes down too for the bottom line to me is that Elemental as a game feel "Epic" to me when it comes to the End Game. That's how Good Strategy Games play out. When I think about all my favorite strategy games of all time, each one at some point or another had that "Epic" feel. MoM had that "Epic" feel by me being able to create unstoppable heroes by End Game that were more or less invincible. Yes, they were Un-Balanced, but it was Fun, and that's what mattered and felt "Epic" to me.

The Total War Games feel "Epic" to me because of the Amount of Units shown on screen at one time. It does indeed show Thousands of Units moving and interacting at once unless you scale it down On Purpose not too. If you have the Powerhouse PC to run it, you can have each man represent 1 man and it works out fine and feels "Epic".

The Best ways that Elemental can feel Epic is by having Massively Awesome Spells (Volcano), Thousands of Units in Battles, and Champions and Sovereigns that are Super-Powered when compared to other units or monsters. That's just my feelings on the matter. I'd like to see Elemental be the Most Epic Game on the Market.

Note: Sorry for the over-usage of the word Epic.

You don't see a problem with a unit so powerful that if it shows up, the guy on the other side should just surrender unless his own super unit happens to be nearby?

I see a huge problem with that. It's not fun when you're on the wrong side of it.

Or in HoMM. Take HoMM III, where the hero doesn't participate directly in combat except via spells, or HoMM V where heroes also have an attack (but are still sort of outside the battlefield). In the beginning of a game, with a few exceptions, your heroes didn't do diddly. Their stats were so low that they really didn't change much, their mana was hardly there and their spells generally didn't do all that much (Solmyr and his Chain Lightning, though, rocked). But by the end of the game, your hero, either indirectly through boosting the stats of your army to ridiculous heights or through sheer magical terror, was often at least as important as the units under his command!

Or HoMM IV, where it's even more obvious. Again, in HoMM IV most heroes are borderline liabilities. They die fast, have few helpful spells, and don't do much damage. But again, by late game? You've got warrior heroes that can single-handedly take on whole stacks of black dragons, mages that can deal tremendous damage, send your enemies into complete disarray, summon powerful expendable stacks (nature magic ftw) to fight for you, and boost your own troops to huge extents. On big enough maps, all-hero armies can be essentially unstoppable.

And it is fun! Some people didn't like HoMM IV, and a lot of aspects of it such as heroes being units on the battlefield were significant departures, but it was nonetheless fun. Personally I'm conflicted about which method I prefer - I have very fond memories of my ridiculously overpowered heroes laying waste to everything in their path, weather Heroes III style or IV-style.

Overpowered champions and sovereigns that can take on huge numbers of regular troops sounds perfect to me.

As long as the game's AI is horrible, yea.

But it's not so fun when it happens to you.

I mean, good grief guys, we had people screaming because there were tough creatures spawning in their starting locations and those creatures don't even target anyone in particular yet.  It would be a riot if a player's 10 hour long game ends because the AI somehow managed to build up to a single mega unit that teleported itself to your capital, dispelled your protection enchantments and then volcano'd it.

Wow.  That would be pretty crazy. And AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

That would be...amazing.

Double-Post Forum Hiccup

If I lose, I want to know why I lost, I want to know how to prevent it in the future, and I want to see it coming.

Unexpected defeat is not taken very well in general.  I suggest the AI be prone to monologuing at the very least if it's capable of such things.