EWOM Beta 4 vs MOM

I strongly disagree that EWOM tactical battles are anywhere near as good as MoM were, mostly due to the various imbalances in the beta.

I do not understand how EWOM battles can feel less constrained, when you start at point blank range, and when many squads kill each other in a single hit.

And when the AI doesn't understand this, so it willingly marches its troops into adjacent tiles of units who will one-shot them easily.

That's what is nice about games like this - everyone will have something they like that others don't.   What do you like about EWOM Beta 4 that I didn't mention?

The abilty to talter the game pacing, Epic is the best.

So far though, it deffently dosnet feal like a game, nore one about magic, or even a war.

Trying the differnt difiuctlies, leads to etiher stomping over everyone, or geting stomped on.

I know this is still in beta, saying that i do like MoM more.

More options, and i think the pacing/movement is better. Animations seem too slow in Elemental.

Maybe because units move have to walk across their current square to get to the next?Screen panning is still slow, and combat is boring.

Ahh im sure it will feel better once its near final.

Well said. Elemental's tactical battles in Beta 4 are nowhere near the level of polish needed to compete with MoM. I don't know how different they will be in the release version, but I'm beginning to wish that tactical battles were unlocked earlier in the beta process to allow more community feedback on the topic.

Crafty - how much beta testing of MOM's tactical battles did you do?  Did they implement your ideas?

Thanx for the thread, that's the info I was looking for

It'll be interesting to see how the comparisons evolve in future versions.

Definitly not, I remember in MOM when we asked for stuff, it went on death ears. I love where this game is going and as the devs said before, the system is pretty much where it's going to be like it or don't. In time thou as they said, things will change and improve on the ideas and suggestions of the community and themselves. No other company out there ever asks so much of a community on their opinions good or bad and actually does something to fix them. When something is really bad, they say "ya, we should re-look at that" when someone says "well the combat just sucks I don't like it, it needs a total re-run" then it's more like "well not everyone will like our game and we are fine with that, we love it as it is so there it will stay".

It's give and take with these guys but they are definitly listening to us about our thoughts and ideas and implmenting them constantly. It might not be "your" perfect game, but it's a dam good one overall.

Real interesting reading. Thx :-)

If I remember correctly, you don't equip your Faction leader with magical items.. your Master of Magic is sitting in the tower in one of your cities!

The Sov. remembers more to the Birthright gameplay

Frogboy,

Obviously we recognize that the current form will not be final, and we're looking forward to improvements.

Having said that, it would be great if there was a quick comment that combat mechanics are going to change a great deal.

The biggest improvements would be:

a) Changing party/squad mechanics so that 3 guys with 5 attack are 5 attack that attacks three times vs the defense, rather than a single strength 15 attack.  And in general tone attack down vs defense/health to make units more survivable

b. Changing party/squad mechanics so that the damage output of squads falls as they take damage (and as individual models "die")

c) Move the starting positions slightly further apart.

d) Tone down ranged units and rebalance magic.

Moving towards the MoM style in this manner would be a big improvement.

Thanks for listening.

Certainly not. I hope I didn't come across as slamming Stardock or the beta process in any way. I realize the unique depth of Stardock's beta system. I just had to disagree with the notion that Elemental's beta 4 tactical combat is better than MoM's tactical combat. But I am certain that the release version will be a significant improvement, and I'm sure it will continue to be improved after release.

So, I apologize if my earlier post came across as rude. It's just that tactical combat is, to me, a huge part of the fun of a TBS game, and it would have been fun to see the ideas people came up with if they had as long to discuss tactical combat as they did other portions of the game.

That said, I have a lot of faith that Elemental will turn out to be a great game (clearly -- it's not very often that I bother to pre-order a game!)

Beat me to it.  I believe he is confusing MoM with AoW in regards to faction leaders.  That was one of the few things MoM could've done better.

Apart from features that should get better as Stardock polishes the game (tactical battles, spell variety), I think there are 2 important features that MoM had and which EWOM misses.

The first one and least important is the ability to move from one world to the other. It expanded the exploration phase a lot, and Myrror, sparsely populated, was a great place to adventure in.

The second one and most important is the forging of magic items. Being able to design your own set of armor, weapon, etc. was just awesome. I see nothing in Elemental that comes close to this. ( Sure, you can design units, but that's not a strong selling point to me, as it makes all races/factions similar with the lack of personalised units like slingers or paladins. When you met halflings, you knew what to expect. When you meet Tarth, you'll meet warriors of some kind depending on their tech level. Hopefully each ai/leader will favor some kind of units and there will be more flavor. ) Having self-designed magic items to equip to your heroes was one of the funniest parts of MoM for me.

I think Stardock has already said that crafting/forging will be done in a post release patch or expansion?

As for the two worlds thing, this could be done in a matter of seconds with a mod yes?

I agree that there are many areas where Elemental is simply a better game than MoM and I also agree that Elemental's biggest weakness at this point in time (in general and in comparison to MoM) is the tactical battles and the magic system.

I'm not too worried about this - remember we're seeing a pretty limited version of the tech tree in the beta. Hopefully when we see the much larger tech tree at release, there will be more things to equip soldiers with, and thus more variety between one unit and another. Plus Frogboy said something about questing for magic equipment, i.e. collect a bunch of items from the world and have them forged into the boots of invulnerability or some such. I mean, custom forged magic items would be awesome, a nice addition for a later patch/expansion, but they won't be strictly necessary if the final game has the item variety it should.

That being said, fully agree with everything Scooter said, it's worth repeating (particularly a and b ):

I believe that Krynus is correct.  In my original post I was comparing EWOM Beta 4 to AOW SM rulers in the area of leader equipment.  In MOM the "magician" who lead the faction could not equip items.

Scooter's comments on changes needed from EWOM Beta 4 are very good.   I am making the assumption that these kind of changes are in the works - we'll see.  I still enjoyed the flow of the tactical battles but these changes would fix some significant gaps.

LDiCesare thought of two things (Myrror and forging your own magic items) from MOM that were great and I forgot to mention.   I enjoyed both the most although the cost in initial attribute picks to have a race that started on Myrror was a bit high.

I feel that EWOM is on the way to being great.    The question is will it hit enough of the good things in MOM and add its own to set the new standard for this genre.

Squads already work as people are requesting, even in beta 4. They even lose guys and disappear and reduce their strength.

They graphically lose guys, but the (reported) strength does not change, and it doesn't feel like the damage is reduced; I've seen squads with 1/2 men left still deal out very high amounts of damage quite regularly.

And it does not seem like squads work as discussed here in terms of combining their strength.

If I understand combat correctly (and maybe I don't, but performance seems consistent with this, though I have not labbed anything thoroughly):

Consider 2 solo units.  Each one is strength 4/2.  One attacks the other.  It does Max{ RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] - RAND[0,1,2], 0} where each outcome is equally likely to be selected.  So for example, there are 15 possible "combinations";

0 and 0, 1, 2 => miss

1 and 1,2 -> miss

1 and 0 -> 1 damage

2 and 0 -> 2 damage

2 and 1 -> 1 damage

2 and 2 -> miss

3 and 0 -> 3 damage

3 and 1 -> 2 damage 

... etc

Or something similar.  [Maybe the defense is not RAND[0,1,2] but is instead just 2, if it is of the appropriate type to the attacker's weapon.]

Now suppose that instead of a solo unit, there is a party of three 4/2 units.

My understanding of what happens now, is that this is the same as a 12/6 unit.

If it attacks a unit with 2 defense, then it does RAND[0,1,2,3,....,11,12] - RAND[0,1,2]

Whereas what it *should* be doing in my opinion is something more like Max{ RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] - RAND[0,1,2], 0} + Max{ RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] - RAND[0,1,2], 0} + Max{ RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] - RAND[0,1,2], 0}

Or: Max{ RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] +RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] + RAND[0,1,2,3,4,5] - RAND[0,1,2] - RAND[0,1,2] - RAND[0,1,2], 0}

These have very different probability distributions over outcomes.

Its entirely possible that I'm wrong here - I haven't seen the code.  Maybe the problem is just that attack levels are too high relative to hit points.

But whatever the case, damage levels are incredibly high, and most of the time units are wiped out in a single attack.  So tactical combat is a joke, because the AI advances its units up to mine, and then I attack their unit and kill it in a single blow.  I've often seen squads units that are 90/12 (ie 6x15/2), and I kill them in a single blow with my much less expensive ~60 attack unit, doing ~40+ damage in a single hit.

But in any case, I never take *any* damage from the AI at all unless they have archers.

Great thread.

Spot on.

Possibly the first two elements to list when considering the replay value of the game. For me at least.

They loose guys but they hit just as hard (or nearly as hard).

It looks to me that they make a single combined attack ergo if I had a group of 20 units each which had an attack of 4 I'd be doing on average around 35 damage to a target with 10 defense (average damage *20 - average defense).  instead of having each attacker "roll" 0-4 and the defender "roll" 0-10 for each attack making the average damage for the twenty attacks 8.

That difference, between 8 and 35, is quite noticeable.

edit: or what scooter said

I think your missing the best point..

Progresive workings:

 MOM Finalised, done and dusted, left with lots of bugs and shity AI

E:WoM: Still in Beta, everythign is being improved on, and has 3 weeks of soild polishing to still go, add in the double bonus of player provided feedback.

Advantage E:WoM x 2

upon some more play it seems even worse (and probably not what I thought) my set of three archers with a total attack of 18 I've seen do 51 points of damage.

Yup, my party of archers with longbows regularly clocks 64 damage against most opponents. Alone they're lucky to do more than 3.

From the Beta I think Elemental feels a bit more like Lords of Magic than MoM. Not that that's a bad thing by any means.