Why not? If you are overpowered and can do nothing about it then you have been out played; therefore I see no reason for there to be any way out other than playing even better (individually or in alliance with other powers)... and hoping they screw up (or have over extended themselves, in which case they were not playing better and are not more powerful).

That's fair. Use Alpha Centauri as your comparison, if it makes you feel better. Both are mostly made up, drawing from two different types of fictions, but the research element of AC and that of the WoM series are worlds apart. I also agree that tech can 'do' a lot more things in Civ, but honestly, buildings that do more (and more interesting) things than in WoM isn't out of the realm of possibility, even with the xml tags we have now.

But regardless, fair comparison wasn't my point and I don't want to get into a meaningless debate about what is or isn't a good comparison.

The point is that the tech (and magic system, for that matter) is very bland, the cost-benefit of sprucing it up a bit seems like it would make sense, and sometimes when you're elbows-deep in the code, it's just hard to see the forest for all the trees. It's my honest and constructive criticism for the developers.

What about just including some sort of admin cost for each city? Looking into the ElementaldDefs.xml, it seems like the ability to do this is there (it looks like there are tags for both a linear and exponential component). Combine that with a nominal cost in gold for each research/arcane lab (and any scientist knows that the amount of money provided is directly correlated with the amount of research done) and you have a soft cap that would put empires that expand rapidly without developing their cities at a relative disadvantage in research (and granted, this will largely depend on the unknown way in which population growth and taxation is handled in FE).

I might be in the vast minority here, but I also think that it's worth asking if, historically, large empires lost some amount of effeciency in innovation and wealth generation. The Greek City-States and Venetian Republic jump to mind as examples of cultures that seemed to punch above their weight, population wise (though I'm certainly no historian, so take those specific examples and the larger point with a grain of salt, if you'd like). Call me crazy, but I think that the real world provides tons of fun game mechanics if abstracted properly. Anyway, it's food for thought.

I suppose my original intent was to find a balance between large and small factions so that a large empire will have a technological advantage over a small one, but not to the point where the small faction cannot win any more tactical battles because their troops are hopelessly outmatched. A solution to this could be to ensure that large empires building many tech producing structures (lets call them libraries) provide diminishing returns. For examples, first library produces 4 tech, the second provides three, the third two, and every subsequent library just one tech.Those numbers as just for a numerical example.

Like I said, that was my initial intent. What really irks me though, is that when a faction becomes weak, it becomes like a race horse with a broken leg: it has lost it's usefulness and, so, is shot and killed. Honestly, who wants to be friends with the weak faction? They have nothing to trade, an insignificant military, and since every other faction wants them dead, befriending them could damage your relationship with the others. Essentially, a weak civilization is insignificant in a world of sprawling empires, and it cannot make a comeback. I do not think it should be that way.

Diplomacy

One way to address this is with diplomacy. In a world with a weak faction, everyone just wants to kill it. Although it may be realistic to a gamer's perspective with a goal of winning, I dislike it. Perhaps I should tell you more about myself so you understand my perspective. When I play empire building games with diplomacy (Civilization), I don't play to win; rather, I play to watch civilizations grow and the relationships that develop between them. The immersion breaks, however, when civilizations make diplomatic decisions that just are not human. Well, I'm sure we would mostly be backstabbing SOBs when opportunity presents itself, but I think we would also have friends. What happened to the unbreakable bonds of friendship?

That is the weakness of the + and - system to diplomatic relationships: they give numerical values to various things that result in the AI making odd and aggressive decisions.

Here is an exaggerated example of how a large empire views a small faction:

• +2 : you are very close friends
• +1 : they have placed many gifts at your feet
• +1 : trade agreements have been fair
• -1 : close borders spark tension
• -100 : their military is much weaker

It is even worse when the weak civilization hates the strong one also for their difference in military strength, when instead the weak should be ingratiating the strong.

What I propose is to strengthen bonds of friendship between factions so that A faction will want to go out of his way to help a friend. Even if that friend is the weakest faction. Even if the enemy is the strongest faction. Because friendship is forever, right? As it is now, I have the impression that the only way to get another faction to help you out in a war is to bribe them and they'll accept only if they hate the enemy and have a stronger military than them.

I think this can be made possible in FE by making dynasties matter greatly. I mean, you would help out the faction that your daughter married into, right? You do know that if you let that faction be destroyed, your daughter will die, right?

Also, instead of obeying the + - system to the number, I would also like to see something else governing the decisions of the AI. Yes that other faction is much weaker, but I really want to be friends with him and, in time, I think he'll show his appreciation.

In addition, it would also be nice to give the AI, as well as the player, a reason why they would rather have the weakest faction alive than dead.

Strong Sovereigns

Another way to make a weak faction relevant is to make sovereigns overpowered so that while a weak faction is defending it's last city, the Sovereign can dish out lots of damage to invading armies. I suggest a way to grant sovereigns short-term gains (e.g. in spell power) for long-term sacrifices. E.g.:

• sacrificing a power node
• sacrificing population
• sacrificing essence (or spell power)
• sacrifice mana

To put these examples into practice:

• Sacrificing a power node will grant you an army of elementals of that node type, but long-term you lose the benefits of that node (strengthening spells of that node type, mana production)
• Sacrificing essence or spell power will grant your sovereign a +100% (or more) damage/effectiveness of spells for the next 50 turns, but will detract 30% permanently thereafter.
• Sacrificing mana
• Spend three time the mana cost of a spell to double its effectiveness.
• Spend five times the mana cost to summon a level 10 version of a something.

 I just made those numbers up so let's forget about balance for now. The idea is to give a very desperate Sovereign a means to avoid imminent defeat. It would also be in the well-to-do Sovereign's best interest not to employ these desperate measures because it would weaken him in the long run.

Rare Events and Quests

Should a faction fall in dire need of aid, something unexpected occurring once every few games, could save them. Something like

• a Titan granting aid in exchange for something
• happening upon a large supply of metal
• finding a powerful weapon
• citizens want to defend their homeland. Training soldiers cost 0 gold and halved training time for the next 100 turns.

I am uncertain about a quest with a considerable reward, because quests require an army to travel around the map, where a weak civilization would rather have them defending.

Sorry for taking this thread way off track. Basically my goal was to offer a way for a weak faction, who has no means to compete with large factions at a technological level, to make a comeback, or to have yet an important role to play in the world stage.

Yeah, a few. I'm going to assume that you read my first post and not just re-quote it here.

If the criterion for releasing the game is: "It must be awesome," I don't really understand why the developers would willfully ignore the best aspects of other games in the genre, especially when they are so easy to implement. For example:

1) Multiple food source types (other than fertile land, very fertile land, and bee hives) influencing tech progression. Feeding your new society would seem like the first and most important step in rebuilding it. The tech that you use to feed your people could then affect the techs you pursue in the early game and should have implications beyond just 'I can build this improvement.' Agricultural societies that develop from Fertile Land, Wild Wheat, etc. would then develop somewhat differently than those built around hunting abundant game. Say... a slight leg up on animal domestication vs. bow and arrow and mobility techs.

2) It doesn't make that much sense to me that the ability to use a specific type of spear has been lost after the apocalypse, but written language hasn't, and most of your new citizens are automatically fully literate. Make written language a tech. One advantage might be that it's required for advanced horse-breeding (keeping records of the abilities of stallions and mares). Then you could create a building that had an upkeep of, say, 1 horse every two weeks to produce a purposefully bred charger in four. Or whatever you want to call it and whatever timeframe you want to have it in. This is all codable in about 20 minutes, guys (and gals). The written language tech could also be extended to give a bonus to research, if you'd like.

3) The development of metallurgy and the domestication of animals should be a major advance that spans both civilization and warfare improvements. Have it as a prereq for advanced weapons as well as techs that yield food bonuses. I'm sure that you've heard of or seen a plough before? Digging out roots and stumps really is easier when your plough has a nice sharp edge to it and has some strong beast of burden to pull it.

4) The development of calendars could also provide a slight food bonus. In addition to whatever bonus to this or that type of magic or magic research that seems appropriate and consistent with the game lore.

5) Rhetorics. It's just an example, but have some abstract scholastic thing give a bonus to both diplomacy and domestic education.

6) There are just tons and tons of interesting confluences between the different magic schools and 'mundane' research techs. Why not let factions that have pursued advanced Water magic get access to the same buildings as factions that have spent time developing advanced irrigation techniques. Or factions that have pursued Earth or Life research finding that they can grow slightly faster with limited farming or game resources than factions with the same resources and other magical research programs can't?

6.5) Why not use (6) to make the magic schools 'feel' a little bit different? If you can identify specific advantages for a couple of the non-offensive schools, then you can feel free to make, say, the Fire school a little bit more offensively powerful. Sure, it might be a little unbalanced on the face of it, but if the others are able to carry a higher troop load, isn't that the diversity that we're looking for in a game like this? Advanced Fire research as a pre-req. for advanced Weapon Tempering tequniques accessible only way down the line to other factions (or the most advanced levels not availabe at all to others)?

7) What about engineering, masonry, and mathematics? What about their hypothetical relationship to the study of magic? What about the relationship between mathematics and tax revenue? There could possibly be different paths toward weatlth accumulation. There's also a plausible story to be told about the relationship between them and magic in your game world. An interesting linkage in technology and some flavor text is all you need to tell it. Or maybe magic completely defies logical characterization. Then, no tech linkages, but definitely some flavor text to demonstrate the difference.

8) Better use of World Wonders. I think(?!) that these are in the game already, but I don't really think that they're being used to their fullest potential. For me, they are a way of maintaining distance in a certain aspect of technology that would otherwise naturally shrink as the game progresses. Why not have a wonder for the first faction to discover a critical farming or mining or abstract reasoning or horse-breeding technology? An agricultural/mining/rhetorical/husbandry college- you name it whatever you want. The point is that they are used in fairly arbitrary ways in WoM, and I think that their potential is being wasted.

You see, those are just eight examples off the top of my head. Someone actually getting paid to do this should be able to come up with upwards of 30 of these kinds of technological intersections. That's what I mean by 'nuanced tech function.' And you're right, the other two aspects of my first post would be just refraining from naming the techs as explicit descriptions of the bonus they provide you or mechanic they unlock. This doesn't do any favors for immersion. And flavor text is certainly important. Ambience is possibly the most important thing that separates a good game from a classic. And, luckily, they are low cost additions to the game in terms of man-hours.

If the developers actually consider one thing I've said in the year and a half I've been posting here I would want it to be this:

Please, be brave and have some imagination.

I always thought the intent of Elemental was to have "technology" separate from "magic". Something where your arcane ability would not be tied to how many libraries or cities you have, where you could have a nation of few cities, people and production capability but still rival mighty kingdoms through the force of powerful magic. Battles where armies of mighty soldiers battle against a few but powerful magi, etc.

Don't suppose we could mod in two separate tech trees, where regular "library" tech points are only used in the regular tech tree and mana is used to upgrade the magic tech tree by upgrading nodes and temples or something else that doesn't require a lot of land and don't use traditional resources. Hmmm... having a lot of mana production in the early game but every time you build "tech" buildings it diminishes your mana production? Maybe even a tech slider bar that ranges from technology on one end to arcane studies on the other, lending to the choices of becoming a magic or tech based (or balanced) civilization. 

But anyways, back to the improvements shown: certainly very good. Can't wait to see it in action. I've always been a fan of the random tech tree, especially in SotS. It does have it's problems though, as the "sadorandomizer" can be extremely unkind in every facet of the game from the tech tree to resources and colonizable planets, etc. It makes for great diversity but certain games are just absurd (don't get me started on the one where as a Hiver I only had polysilicate armor and the Liir had adamantite). Not seeing the tech tree would be nice, a toggle would be great. Not a useless feature at all, different people play the game differently. It sounds like Kael has a good bead on the line between players wanting to restart to get that perfect tech and where players adapt to the random things thrown their way.

Keep up the good work guys.

I would agree with making magic a big leveller, and your suggestion sounds like it would be a good start to this end.

Best regards,
Steven.

It should be coming since Derek is still talking about the 5 tech trees and the 5 ways of winning.

When we'll have a journal about Diplomacy, it would be time to bring back the walls of text and the many ideas. I particularly HATED to read that independant city-factions were disliked by the dev team when I see them as major immersion factors and tools for diplomatic strategy and soft (and even hard) power.

Speaking of balance and tech, there is one thing that always nagged me about TBS games: large factions have a large advantage at producing tech, leaving small factions lagging far behind. In Civilization terms, I'm thinking tanks and helicopters vs. musketeers. In FE, how does the little guy remain relevant in a game with large superpowers. Are small factions fighting a lost cause because they cannot build as many... libraries as the larger factions?

I thought that it had been discussed already in this thread, it was concluded that research should not be proportional with empire size to prevent the invincible player syndrome.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/387963

I like these ideas, Gwenio1.

Best regards,
Steven.

I think it is still the misstake to try to balance tech only by one resource, research points. And therefor need to adjust build times, upkeeep and so on to keep large kingdoms in bounds. It would be nice to cure the illness not the symptoms. (see post #60)

WOM already has some built in equalizers, they just were not implemented very well.  The Dynasty system combined with the surrender mechanic (if you get very lucky) can make a small nation into a significantly larger one overnight.  Also the experience based system for sovereigns, heroes and common soldiers provides reward for better micro by making them stronger quality to defeat superior quantity.

Now if only we could get diplomatic acknowledgement from a foreign emissary recognizing great military prowess by defeating a superior army.

-"Your Majesty King RogueCaptain, I Emperor Shito bow to your great military mastery commanding forces to victory over a seemingly inevitable defeat."

+4 point relations prestige due to impressive display of military leadership and strategy. -4 to the arrogant bastard who failed to beat the little guy.

Maybe the World Wonder buildings system is partially broken for most tbs because the vast majority of them are primarily focused in the capital?  There should be significant benefits to spreading the wonders around than anchoring all the eggs into a few basket cities.  Providing the player deep meaningful choices to be made alongside calculated risk could go a long way to improving the genre.

Consider this, let's say this is Civ4 and I created a wonder called The Great Lighthouse.  The description reads it gives you some extra trade routes for all coastal cities but in addition it will provide more bonuses the closer it is located to a foreign nation(s).  You could build it in the safety of your invulnerable capital but then you'd probably miss out on some of the best goodies the wonder provides.  Galactic Civilizations 2 partially addressed this by having class 28 planets with uber tile modifiers located in the middle of the map close to everybody.  I hope FE too will have Eden for factions to fight and squabble over.