Attempted to play 1.3

Yes this sounds about right.  I lasted longer as I got a hero with crushing blow right off the start, but then it took me 100s of turns to find another female hero to marry and I generally found the pace of the game far to drawn out now.  Research and income are snail slow and you can't expand your empire/kingdom too far or your population halts and you end up with no new units even to defend your conquered cities.  I even screwed with the prestige bonus of buildings and this still makes little difference.  Once you have the best armour & weapons you'll never be able to train units to use it as you'd have to save your cash for dozens of turns to afford them, and then wait who knows how long for them to build.

Hope v1.4 improves all these things.  I hate hope... :'(

I disagree, partly.

I think that 1.3 is a big step forward, for me, in terms of stability and playability. I have yet to have a crash, other than maybe an alt-tab once I think, but that is a big improvement in my book.

As far as the pacing issue, that is something common to Stardock games. I often felt the same way about Gal Civ II, although it is more proncounced here. Have you tried playing with the pacing settings? Either way, I agree that it is all a bit slow. I would rather see more options for equipment so that you can make more interesting design and production decisions early on, and make things faster. Research should be faster in general too. It shouldn't take hours of gameplay to get a credible army up and running.

Agreed with the issues with Champions. I used to have little trouble finding several to recruit and marry, but now they are very rare. I really think we need some kind of Inn or Adventurers Guild building that makes finding and recruiting Champions a bit less luck based.

For armor, you can choose some starting equipment for your Sov, at a cost. I personally think this is fine the way it is. Makes it more fun to find and buy useful things.

War of Magic has lots of problems, but Brad is looking to make some improvements, despite FE on the horizon. I'll be interested to see what he does with 1.4. I honestly see War of Magic as little more than a test bed at this point since FE looks to be adding many more, improved features, and will completely supplant WoM when it comes out, as it should.

I have been playing 1.3 this week too.

But i played my own custom map which was loaded with abundant resources goodies and key NPC's at the start, so i avoided several of those problems.

As my game matures and all the goodies have long since run out, i am very surprised to find that my empires progress has basically FLATLINED to nothing! Something seems to have gone seriously wrong with population growth??? Also this has a secondary effect of starving me of gold since i cannot build any economic improvements.... er, um, or any kind of building at all!!! my cities are all just sitting idle with no construction turn after turn after turn, i have never seen anything like this in any previous version, it is totally bizarre!!!

All my nice armor and weapons which i was only able to buy because of massive goodie income have turned into generational hand me down weapons and armor for each new generation of hero's while the trained ones have to be stripped bare and wander around with their original equipment only.... There is stuff all gold income to do any further improvement to my forces.... and needless to say, i have zero soldiers due to the need to avoid wages.

In my investigations to find out what happened to population growth, i noticed each and every city reporting a population growth of 0.1 regardless of what improvements are in the city, hell, even the beacon of hope is unable to budge this godlike figure of 0.1 population growth! And prestige for all cities is the same as well, regardless of improvements. It could simply be the way the game reports the figures? it may have been the same in earlier versions,, i never thought to look?

The 1.39 beta version eliminates the prestige penalty.  If you want to try it, read this thread.

Best regards,
Steven.

The change to tax income is a strange one. I can see the logic in it as gold was basically not a factor in the late game in previous versions. However, going to the current model (where income is not proportionate to population, but steadily flatlines) is questionable. Twice as many people really do pay twice as much tax, and explanations of "beaurocracy" seem pretty hollow to me. If you want to have beaurocracy in the game, then do it in a logical way such as in building maintenance, or display it on the city screen.

The real problem here is that the population base simply goes through too large a change in terms of orders of magnitude. The game literally goes from having an empire wide population of 1 to having many thousands. That doesn't happen in other strategy games. The easiest sustainable way to handle this would be, imo to go back to a fixed gold/person, and then simply increase the population of the first settlement from 1 to maybe 10, and then set the income per head to something lower (maybe half what it is now). That way you can half the amount of gold in the late game whilst giving the player a reasonable income at the start of the game.

It would also make sense from a population growth point of view to start with a bigger number of people, so that you can grow population at a % rate per turn rather than a fixed number of people per turn. It is, after all, rather difficult for one person to "do it."

You’re right; stuff like his isn’t fun. But the game is going through big changes in fundamental systems and it’s important for us to show a little patience.

Good ideas on taxes, Sethai. However, keep in mind that much of the population growth is from being migrating to your new city, not just from internal reproduction. It would be nice if there was a 'migrant' pop growth and a 'breeding; pop growth. The migrant one would be king early on as you are forming your realm and people started to converge on your cities. As you civilize the world, this would become less important as most people will have been absorbed into one or more realms. Instead, most growth would come from reproduction.

Yes, you’re right there is migration as well, especially initially, but actually the distinction between immigration and reproduction is largely unnecessary when you consider a country or town as a closed system. Populations usually expand because they have means to do so. If there is the means to support life (in elemental best measured in terms of food) then people will appear, either because people feel they can have more children and/or fewer people die from famine, or people migrate. In the modern world jobs are the equivalent of food since jobs are the means by which these basic means are acquired. How much of growth is migration depends on how easy it is to travel, which is why migration is a bigger factor nowadays.

WOM kinda gets this right in that your food cap is proportionate to your population cap (through housing, and after efficiency bonuses and infrastructure improvements). Ie you have a number of kids equal to how many you can feed. But what it fails to take into account is how you get there. If you double the food available in the system, then everyone will have twice as many kids. But because that applies to EVERYONE, then it stands to reason that population also grows proportionally to the number of people. Ie, at a +1% a turn rate, rather than an absolute rate of 1 person per turn, which is what happens in elemental through prestige. It’s compound interest.

So if you started off with ten people and enough food for twice as many (20), then population would grow at maybe 5% per turn or something (this is the value that you use to scale the system). So 0.5 people per turn. But because the ratio of food per person gets lower as pop gets higher, the rate gradually levels out (when you have enough food for half as many again as you currently have, it halves to 2.5%. You don’t get the ridiculous exponential growth often the case with compound interest, because though the base number grows, the percentage growth rate decreases. So you can end up in a situation where population grows at an apparently steady rate, but the mechanics beneath it are anything but linear, and that’s where elemental falls down. The rate isn’t going down in the later game because growth is not related to population, so they ended up applying a prestige penalty instead. The prestige penalty is silly. So long as food is evenly distributed then population will grow, whether you’ve taken the largely nominal step of saying that this bunch of houses 10 metres away is a different town is completely irrelevant. City spam is a completely different issue. But this post is long and getting off-topic anyway.