Suggestions from a newb
Elemental Forums
So i bought Elemental about 2 weeks ago and have been playing it a fair bit since. The game is about 60% to being awesome, but needs a few tweeks. I know a lot of people have probably suggested these same ideas, but this is just my list.
1. The AI is just atrocious. It constantly declares war on me and then just waits for me to march into their territory with my superheros and just steamroll over. I am almost through my first complete game on the challenging difficulty and pretty much every opponent declared war on me. I just took my time, built up a few heroes with magic weapons and armor, and am about to finish steamrolling the last faction. That leads me to the second issue
2. There is no reason to train units. Researching and buying weapons and heroes only costs gildar and not any other resource, so there is no reason to really focus your economy on anything other than gildar and materials. If some of the more powerful weapons were a little more cost prohibitive it would nerf just fast teching up to epic 60 attack magic swords and winning the game. When you only need one resource and it is pretty easy to get, it really devalues the epic weapons. I didn't have archery researched but i had the epic bow that comes with magic weapons. You have 3 heroes with just the bow you can pretty much pwn any amount of honor guards the AI uses in any city.
3. Limit hero spawning and make them more valuable. Because it is pretty easy to come up with 100 or less gildar to recruit heroes and they are so plentiful there is really no reason to value or protect them. End game you can general find 5 or 6 per turn and they only cost 100ish gildar or less. In my game now i am currently earning around 300 gildar a season so it really devalues spending any time or resources on training troops. If the heroes were a little harder or most cost prohibitive to obtain there would be a lot more value to them.
4. Back to the AI; it doesn't seem to recruit that many heroes or equip them with any non-standard equipment. When I'm towards late game and my king has around 70 attack, 40 dodge, and can lose 0 hit points autofighting 15 honor guards at once the AI needs to step up.
5. More questing and reasons to quest late game.
6. A reason to go to sea.
I bought this game knowing that it is going to take some patches and probably an expansion pack or two to really reach its potential, but I really believe in Stardock and I know you guys can do it!
a declaration of war means something. I would definitely refer to the Civilization series. If an AI declares war on you chances are you are going to have some units on your border. They may be old tech and not a lot of them, but you will need to defend. Saying to buff up the AI and let them tech seems like a weak way to do it. I'm not expecting the same process and thought as with a human player, but Stardock has delivered solid AI in pretty much every game I've ever played that they've released.