[0.951] Feedback - UI and Polish

from Elemental Forums

All right, we are stable again, I can play for long stretches without crashes, and get to reload save games. Time for testing.

 

This newest version of the game is very VERY close to "Excellent". There is a great deal of good polish in the last few releases which have made the game look, feel, and act like a finished product (something that no Elemental related release has done before, so kudos on that). There are still a few significant things that really impact the feel and playability of the game which have really stood out to me.

 

Cosmetic: Most of these have a pretty significant overall impact on the feel of the game, but are of limited mechanical impact.

  1. Roads are nearly invisible under forest tiles. It would be nice if there was a larger break in the trees around them so they became more visible.
  2. Ranged Champion magic weapons (the Hailstone Staff, in particular) still has a really long (5-10 second) hang after shooting and then deals damage with no animation.
  3. Occasional extreme animation slowness during tactical combat. It seems to be most prevalent with large monsters (trolls, for instance) and/or with lots of particle effects in play.
  4. Overworld Viewport Manipulation causes the screen to spin 360 degrees very quickly after changing the angle or direction of the camera view. It's crazy and annoying.
  5. If playing without auto-turn on, there is no apparent visual indication of which units have yet to act for the turn, and which are out of actions. This leads to confusion about why you can't move forward and frequent missed opportunities to act with units.
  6. Enemy units will animate as though they have moved away after you have selected them for attack.
  7. When engaging in combat, the camera scrolls to another random unit.

 

Mechanical There are LOTS of significant issues with timing that I assume come about due to how the game was multi-threaded, and it makes the game REALLY trip up over itself in a frustrating fashion.

 

  1. If the player has auto-turn turned off, the game will frequently hang if there is a city with an empty queue when you go to change turns and will not move forward until the player has selected something in the city build queue. When they do that, it immediately ejects them from the city and moves forward with the turn.
  2. Some times, when all units have acted, and you are doing city maintenance, when you select something to build, it will boot you out of the city and move to next turn (as above).
  3. Stacked enemy units make it incredibly difficult to choose which army the player intends to engage, and can lead to stupid goose chases tracking down the last of an army stack of 3-4 armies. We need to be able to pointedly select which army from a stack we are attacking, or better yet, not allow armies to stack at all.
  4. Related to the stacked armies, in 0.951 I have a relatively consistent situation where multiple army stacks attack a city I am occupying. After winning the first fight, I am informed of a second which never starts, and then breaks my ability to advance the turn forward. I assume this has again to do with a thread dropping a command somewhere and hanging, since it knows a combat is supposed to start, so I can't skip forward a turn.

 

Balance A lot of this is simply my opinion, but I feel they are worth noting.

  1. Armor is still king, absolute; Getting into an altercation with another faction, if you do not have the weapon to meet their armor, it is a dramatic and serious disadvantage. Not really sure how to address this one well, but it still seems a huge factor.
  2. Trained Units are ridiculously powerful when they level up; 3 units of 5 men in light plate with maces should not be capable of single handedly  destroying an entire faction. Played carefully right now, they are. A unit's accuracy and health go up every level. Their damage does not. What that means is that a level 10 unit of 5 will have many many times more hps than a freshly trained unit, identically equipped. Essentially, if you can get a unit 5 levels, they will be very difficult to stop at all simply due to their ability to outlast opponents. They outclass monsters and champions in almost every case once they hit about level 10. I would seriously consider capping their health growth around level 5 so that trained units aren't nigh-invulnerable after they survive three or four fights. This would also make it easier to gauge an army's strength.
  3. Guilden has an amazing array of tools for getting established and consolidating a kingdom. Don't take this to mean that I would like to see them weakened, as I would prefer all the other factions be as solid as Guilden is all the way up from early to late game. So far, all the other Kingdom empires falter in the midgame by comparison, and really only Magnar seems to hold their own all the way up on the Empire side.
36,204 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree with everything except nr 2 and 3 in the balance section, yes everything, fantastic post.

Trained Units are ridiculously powerful when they level up; 3 units of 5 men in light plate with maces should not be capable of single handedly  destroying an entire faction. Played carefully right now, they are. A unit's accuracy and health go up every level. Their damage does not. What that means is that a level 10 unit of 5 will have many many times more hps than a freshly trained unit, identically equipped. Essentially, if you can get a unit 5 levels, they will be very difficult to stop at all simply due to their ability to outlast opponents. They outclass monsters and champions in almost every case once they hit about level 10. I would seriously consider capping their health growth around level 5 so that trained units aren't nigh-invulnerable after they survive three or four fights. This would also make it easier to gauge an army's strength.

Guilden has an amazing array of tools for getting established and consolidating a kingdom. Don't take this to mean that I would like to see them weakened, as I would prefer all the other factions be as solid as Guilden is all the way up from early to late game. So far, all the other Kingdom empires falter in the midgame by comparison, and really only Magnar seems to hold their own all the way up on the Empire side.

Trained units gain way too much from levelling up, we agree on that much, my biggest peeve is the amount of HP gained from levelling though, its massive, and I would not cap it, instead I would lower the amount of HP gained to 2 HP or so, its still huge, but will require double the amount of levels to get to the same craziness as in the current build.
Of course you would have to rebalance HP per level benefits and penalties from blood abilities.

Gilden... What is the amazing array of tools, I don't understand the issue at hand here, I don't feel Gilden does any better than Tarth, and usually Magnar and Karavoxx is the only real enemy AI's. (Magnar because he is powerful, Karavoxx because he have nice start-up powers and robs YOU of your champions, bloody annoying enemy -.-).
AI strength usually depends on where the AI's start, and who is surrounding them.

That said, everything else in your post is fantastic, k1

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Armor is still king, absolute; Getting into an altercation with another faction, if you do not have the weapon to meet their armor, it is a dramatic and serious disadvantage. Not really sure how to address this one well, but it still seems a huge factor.

The solution to defeating an opponent who's investing heavily in armor, is to go heavy magic.  I don't think they make it clear, but magic damage ignores armor completely.  A heavily armored unit is still vulnerable to mages and magic-weapon wielding units.

Along with the way that armor interacts with the type of weapon is also poorly described.  But my understanding is that blunt attacks always ignore a large percentage of the armor value.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Kongdej, reply 1

Gilden... What is the amazing array of tools, I don't understand the issue at hand here, I don't feel Gilden does any better than Tarth, and usually Magnar and Karavoxx is the only real enemy AI's. (Magnar because he is powerful, Karavoxx because he have nice start-up powers and robs YOU of your champions, bloody annoying enemy -.-).
AI strength usually depends on where the AI's start, and who is surrounding them.

 

Oh, starting position is absolutely king in how successful your game will be. That's why we have a hotkey with no "are you sure" pop-up to start a new game with all the same selections. I would still prefer some tweaks to starting location guidelines, but something is better than nothing.

 

That said, Gilden has:

  1. Turn 1 access to "Enchanted Hammers". If there is a better 20 mana that you spend in the entire game on any turn than this spell on the first turn, I'd like to know what it is. Since most of us look for 2+ Essence starts (I presume), that flat out doubles your production speed on everything from the moment you hit the ground. From there, faster Study, Faster Workshop, Faster Market = more of all output resources in half the time, plus 4 turn Pioneers on turn 1. That is all amazing.
  2. A sovereign who gains 7 Hps per level (4 +1 from trait +2 from blood). Hit 4th level, turn him into a Defender, give him a full suit of Leather and watch him go.
  3. On top of the health, he starts with Regen (gains XP faster from less downtime, and allows earlier safe expansion), Stoneskin ("free" half-suit of leather with no shards, better with) which means less damage from the more fights you are getting into.

 

Altair's real key ability lies in the RNG's decision to give you early quests which is pretty slim. Porcipinee's lies in having access to shards, since her construction penalty is really severe, and she relies upon the magic outposts to buff her relatively fewer cities. Tarth is pretty good overall, but their primary ability is to avoid the means of gaining experience, which can be a disadvantage if the player does so too much.

 

As an aside, I also hate Karavox, but its because he pays everyone else to hate you, which makes diplomacy near impossible while he is on the board.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

It is usually pierce attacks that ignore armor (pikes, bows), although there are some cutting weapons that do too.  But I think pierce attack always ignores armor to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the weapon.  All this means is that a certain percentage of the attack roll is added without being reduced by armor.  So if you had a pike that ignores 66% of armor, that would mean if the attack roll was 15 and defense roll was 10, 10 of the attack roll would be applied plus (one third of attack roll - one third of defense roll) = 5 - 3 (or 4) = 11 or 12 damage done.  At least that's how I think it is calculated - a certain portion of the defense roll does not reduce the damage done at all.

If anyone who knows wants to say more, go ahead, it would be good to have this clarified. =)

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I think too think altar is Meh, and the new porcupine is rubbish ^_^

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

To be clear, Pike vs 15 defense looks like this:

 

13 Attack, 66% armor pierce. 15 Defense against Pierce.

 

15(.66) = 5.

 

Max Attack = 13 * (13/(13+5)) = 13 * .722 = 9.4

Min Attack = 9.4/2 = 4.7

 

So you do 5-9 damage (rounded in the UI, not in actual damage) per soldier in the unit. That can be 45 damage max in a group of soldiers, which is totally devastating. I would like to see bows get something like 10%, 15%, and 30% armor piercing as you make better bows. Right now spears are the only thing that really uses pierce well. That and magic.