Realistic?! Man, have you ever read a fantasy novel in your life? The ability of a hero, or anti-hero, or antagonist, to defeat large number of inferior foes is a central aspect of much of the fantasy genre. Have you ever read or seen Lord of the Rings? Aragorn wasn't magical. Neither was Gimli, or Boromir. Or really even Legolas (besides a few bits and pieces of magic here and there, but largely his strength came from his training and his elven heritage). The carnage those characters inflict in the movies is not really a departure from the books. Their training, the status as the heroes of the story enabled them to face and defeat overwhelming numbers over and over. Brad keeps telling us that the adventurers that we can recruit as our heroes are the pesky adventurers you play in D&D like games, the characters in fantasy novels that stir things up in the kingdoms, while we are the sovereigns governing those kingdoms.

Realistic in this world? No. Realistic in the vast majority of fantasy worlds? Hell yes.

Couldn't have said it better myself. And like I said before, how can Dragons be the overwhelming powerhouses that he wants them to be if we can't actually swarm them with huge numbers? Without the ability to pit quantity vs. someone else's quality, quality will always win and the person with the Dragon will be undefeatable unless by someone else with a Dragon.

Edit: OMG_BlackHatHedgehog:

Very good post, there isn't a single thing in there that I don't agree with wholeheartedly!

Other thoughts: 

Essence is useless now and that makes me sad :-( 

20 Essence is all you need to win the game now, after all! I wish it would ebb and flob a bit more rather than it being a special mana bar.

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Random Maps:

I also read a post where Frogboy said it took about 5 minutes for "random" map to be generated that they liked. So, they ended up creating a bunch of custom maps by hand.

Why don't you guys get a machine, and have it build maps all day for a week? I'm not sure how many maps you would want to ship on a DVD (for space concerns) but if your random-map generator is as awesome as you make it out to be (with a few tweaks here and there so that you can randomly place goody huts or resources or starting locations or monsters for different games) then you really shouldn't have to really sanity check it very much. 

You could probably sanity-check and improve 10 maps in this fashion in the time it would take to craft another map purely by hand. 

Also, including the Random Map generator in a post-release patch would be great, even if it did take awhile to run. On the other hand, "Custom" premade maps are better for more competitive play so I'm kinda happy in some ways that there will be a finite set of maps. 

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu?from=Main.ConservationOfNinjitsu

I understand. and the stories that do make fun of this trope are few and far between. Wheel of Time's Lan is one of the best swordsman you meet for the first half of the series or so. He gets faced with 7 ordinary thugs and he thinks to himself he will probably die and looks for a way out of there. 

And I'm perfectly okay with Champions destroying legions of men over the course of a game and coming out fine. It fits the genre. I'm just saying it's not realistic in the real world :3 I'm just saying it's silly in some ways. 

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Also, XP needs to be split! Holy crap I didn't know it wasn't. 

Can't argue with that And I really enjoyed the Wheel of Time books, although there were a few in there that got really boring. The guy finishing the series did a great job with the latest book though, I think. It was a real page turner, and I loved every chapter with Egwene in it!

To be honest, I think stories with plain old heroes, magicless and without all sorts of fancy magical swords or equipment are much more interesting if they err towards realism. For example, A Song of Ice and Fire. The characters there are pretty much regular people, and they don't go around destroying dozens of men single-handedly and it's great. It would suffer if he made the main characters or antagonists capable of fending of huge numbers of troops just with their swords and shields and armor and whatnot.

But in a game, I like my heroes to really, really stand out. In a book, the main characters already stand out because they are the focus of the story. You get to know them, you get to appreciate (or fume about) all of their deeds and actions and decisions. In games like this we don't really have that luxury. The game is not centered around them, they do not come with 200+ pages of story, and so the only real way for them to stand out as special and fun is for them to be over the top.

You should buy Doms3. It's amongst the top3 TBS fantasy strategies, but it's not the best game for singeplayer fans, because the AI is bad. That is the only problem with the game.

Yeah he really did. Can't wait for the next one!

To be fair, Lan likely would have won against those seven thugs. He's just smart enough to realize that it's a pointless risk to fight them and he's needed to do something more important. But the very fact that it's not assured is what makes it interesting.

That kind of encounter would be a waste of ink if it was Rand instead, simply because Rand would wave his hand and erase them all from the timeline. (I mean he one shotted Graendal, her entourage, and her bloody castle before they realized he was there. I guess that's the equivalent to volcano? )

Dom3 has just a few spells more, a few factions more, a few UI improvements and a random map generator; everything else (95%) is the same. I don't know if it's enough to buy it (I did because I lost my Dom2 CD).

Best thing would be for him to try the demo.

The spellbook that was given in another Dev Journal thread describes Imbue Champion as "Allows a Champion to cast spells. Initial Essence = Caster's INT/2". So, if it'll end up working as described, it won't be as simple as a one-to-one transfer of Essence. The wording also makes me doubt that we'll be able to (meaningfully) use it more than once on the same Champion (unless it works differently on Champions that already have Essence).

Agreed.

Well, like I've been saying since the beginning, I have no problem with powerful champions, but how powerful they are has to be balanced against how many of them you can have, as well as the (admittedly dreaded) army limits. You can't just say "Imbued champions should be Sauron-like!" with no consideration for the fact that if you can get a bunch of those into the same army, no limited mundane army can ever kill them and if the other player doesn't have his own army of super-champions then he just flat out loses. The game mechanics have to be considered when talking about how powerful something should be, and for the most part people haven't been doing much of that when pushing for super-champions.

There are a bunch of factors to consider:

- Game length (map size)
- Number of imbued champions easily attainable
- Mundane army limitations
- Whether or not Champions are part of army "stack" limits
- Whether or not you can have more than one champion accompanying an army

In short, there's nothing wrong with having powerful imbued Champions, as long as the game mechanics don't allow them to be horribly abused (like sticking 10 along with a conventional army and laughing as your opponent can't do anything). The mechanics have to guarantee that their number is both more limited and more irreplaceable as you make them increasingly more powerful.

As for xp, I would definitely support an XP split so it wasn't so easy to level up a bunch of Champions really quickly. There should be a trade-off between having few and many, such as if you have few they're generally higher level due to less xp split.

Isn't the land completely barren in the first place? So therefore you would have to use essence for that essential first city.

Other than that it looks amazing.

Well I applaud you for not making the Tactical Battles RTS there are too many RTS games in the market as is.

I do have a question, Can we set the Tactical combat to always start no matter how many units are particapating. For me one of the funnest elements of the game is the tactical combat as it was for all the AOW and MOM. Without this I would probably just stick to CIV.  And please allows us to scale the lenth of the tactical combat (put a setting that says 'It's over when it is over') I perfer no time limits on tactical combat

Kings Bounty was good but AOW did this even better (Had a lot of special abilities that could be added to Units, Heros, and Magic items. And you could EASLY edit/create them with the game editor.

3 minutes is a bit too short for the tactical combats. You can't get anything done in 3 minutes. Well hopefully they will allow us to set the time on the combats

Personally I don't want 'City Spam' as you and others call it to go away. I want to be able to build many cities and create vast empires.  I like the change keep up the good work DEVs

Well, as long as they are well planned, well resourced and have a good risk/reward ratio.  I don't think creating a large empire has ever been simple.

Best regards,
Steven.

Just for the record I agree with the Single player comment you made but I also want the option to have longer tactical battles in Multiplay as well.  I will sometimes play hotseat (or if no Hot seat then have my second PC play other empires) and would not want the Tactical battles gimped. Also when I play my friends we will all want long tactical combats.  So there really needs to be an option that says "Tactical Combat always" Then if you want to auto resolved a particular combat there should be a button you hit during the combat that allows this not that I will ever use it mind you.

Don't confuse "City Spam" for expansion. I have no problem with a measured and gradual expansion of your empire, allowing for lots of cities and vast empires on the really big maps. "City Spam" refers to just placing a lot of cities very quickly. It's kind of meaningless to have a vast empire if you had it only a couple hundred turns into a game, right?

I would have to disagree with you on this. AOW:SM did infact capture the Magical feeling and was better than the other games you named. At least for my frineds and I. We still play it today.

I agree...in fact AoW2-SM was much better than MoM...this is my subjective opinion of course.

I have a question about "Unit" caps?

I assume we will be able to grow a "Unit" to its Max size right? So if start off with 5 single men, then research and start to build Platoons, Company sized groups, can I then combine some combo of each to reach the max. "Unit" size of 20?

The question is. Once I combine 5 groups of 4 to max a "Unit" cap, and then having reached my max allowed "Unit" #, will it be impossible to break down a "Unit", back into it component parts, in essence creating more, but smaller "Unit", or will the max. cap # eventually come down to 400 guys configured into any # of "Unit" groups, never to exceed 400 (or 20x20)

P.S. And has it been determined yet if a SoV and or Imbued Champion will be considered as 1 FULL "Unit".

So then play out the whole battle. I'm not sure what your trying to say here. Either you Auto resolve the battle (Which I will never do because it is not fun.) or you fight the battle there is no other choice.

Now That I completely Agree with.

That's what I was getting at, Bellack. You'd have to go back and read all the posts to see the whole arguement and what I was trying to get across. I'm like you and would tend to Never use auto-resolve anyway.

Just to be clear on this, 3 minutes is a target for how long they want a typical fight to last. It's NOT a hard timer (or a timer at all). If you want to spend 30 minutes in battle, the game will not stop you.

The goal is that combat should move at a pace that for a typical player, a typical engagement mid game will take 3 minutes.

huh why is the whole post just gone?

All I see is Greetings!

Just got back form the hospital and was catching up but then hit that thing.. oh well moving on.

That is odd. It must be a Conspiracy!!! sssshhhhh, don't tell anyone or they'll call you crazy

On a side note, I hope all went well at the Hospital.