Speed Up the Game!

from Elemental Forums

Please this game has to be sped up REALLY bad!

I have tried to play without even having the teleport spells (I presume they are tied to the movement book, but anyway I made a no-book sovreign and finally no teleport spell was available. A cool discovery since if things stay that way I could one day try to play in multiplayer with that as a house rule.

Obviously the overwhelming slowness of the game started to slowly suffocating me, and the boredom of the pace took over very soon.

The following things should be applied in order to make the game pace more bearable:

1 all units should go faster, probably twice as fast would be good (I would suggest an increment of the view range to go with that). That wouldn't reduce the sense of the size of the word, it would just allow to perform more actions during a turn. A game, especially in multiplayer shouldn't be about pushing the end turn button every 2 seconds. Right now the first 100 turns are all about that. (I also disagree that a game should last and average 300 turns, but that's another story).

2 Horses should be available in the shop from the beginning. I like the idea of the horse tech tree, and I would keep developing that, making them cheaper and more available once farms are estabilished, but one cannot have a fantasy_medieval world where horse are completely inexistent (and as things are now when someone researches conquest, the first thing he needs to get is a sword not a horse, then the armor, not the horse, then the team because the AI has teams... meaning you see no horses for 150 turns AT LEAST.

3 Boats should be available MUCH sooner. I still believe that level two cities should be allowed to have a small port. I am all for a sea tech tree, where you can develop boats of different kinds and fishing as a way to produce food... So maybe the first ones should be small and only allow one unit to travel... But they should be available VERY SOON so that things can be sped up a little, and more options could be available from the beginning. Also boats should be much faster that what they are now. In my game I played for 250 turns, just finally got a boat and guess what? I finally realized I could have taken a road and gotten to my destination a fifty turns ago instead than waiting!!! The last versions of the game I also noticed sadly lack shores. How are we supposed to build ports? With a spell?

Let me resume that: boats are slow, takes forever to get a city to build a port (historically and practically absurd since cities are born AROUND ports, they don't just build one when they are big enough), once you have these ports they are practically useless and you don't only have to research the technology to have them, but also a spell to cast if you want to land when you are sailing? Com'on!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

5,547 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The awesome thing is that these points are currently modable, at least the main bits. You can make horses available in the beginning, and the resource itself is just not harvest-able until you research the tech. So mounted heroes, but not soldiers.

 

Same with the boats. You can mod the port to be available for whatever level city you wish.

 

And movement is also modable. Or to save time you could make an extra move civilization trait and add it to the civilizations, since that'd only require eight copy/pastes instead of one for each unit and/or making items that add the additional movements.

 

If you use Elementerra to generate some maps (And the maps generated are pretty good) they tend to have a lot more beaches.

 

And I do agree that these need to be vanilla changes to some degree, but for now the stability and UI polish are being hit first.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

No thanks. A TBS game trying for an epic fantasy feel should be proudly slow for the first 1/3 or even 2/3 of a 'typical' game. Being able to race across the largest map in a few game turns should be at least roughly on a par with being able to raise volcanoes or summon Seriously Scary entities. Having rapid movement to start with will just make late games that much less fun on the larger maps.

If any global movement tweaks happen, they really ought to focus on scalability. Especially if the devs still expect to support larger maps than the game can currently handle. When the smallest map deserves the name Tiny in comparison to a Gigantic or Immense map, the movement metrics probably could benefit from at least a few variations by map size.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Cool, believe me as long as I can mod teleport off and add some speed, I am fine! All I really need to pray for now is just for a Play By Email option. That way I'll manage to finally create some excitement in this game, by making it playable in multiplayer like the last Age of Wonders.

See I don't really care if the AI is useless, I just want to play humans anyway.

I just hope all that stuff stays at least moddable... everything changes so fast around here! :\

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree with GW regarding speed / pacing, but if they gave your champs a base of 2+(1 per 10 dex rounded down) it might help on  the exploration side of things a bit without throwing the balance out much.  

In mid to late game its not too hard to put together a 7 move scout or 3-5 movement troops depending on how you want to tech things.

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Add a spell to summon a magic carpet that grants a move of ?10 but leaves combat speed unaffected

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top


 The last versions of the game I also noticed sadly lack shores.

 

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