I have never considered road placement much of an issue.  It feels like it fits the world.  These are still, essentially, outpost cities out on the current frontier, and I never felt the world's people have the luxury of designing the precise, modern road system that evolves instantly when a new frontier city is built.  That seems artificial to me. 

Derek, PLEASE let us leave the hero level up - skill picking screen without having exhausted all our skill points... this is a relatively small change IMHO but will very positively affect two elements of the game:

1. Will allow people to "hoard" their skill points and save them for higher-level skills (a useful trait), and

2. MOST IMPORTANTLY, it will avoid the "stuck on level up screen" when a hero has exhausted all their skill-picking options and gains one more level. This issue is described in detail here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/443519/page/1/ and is a big problem for those of us who like playing huge maps on epic setting with dense monsters and lots of opponents...

Many thanks, YS

While I agree with this outlook, one additional aspect needs to be considered:

Assuming you are allowed to store a cache of skill points upon a champion, at what time would you be allowed to cash in those points? Is it simply a matter of clicking your hero and adding them (because that may give unfair advantage as you approach a combat)? Or would you only be able to cash them in upon level up screens?

i don't like the idea of hoarding level ups. too "gamey" of my taste. i can live with the abstraction of experience points and levels - that's pretty standard. but let's not forget what those abstractions actually represent: the process of learning. in the real world, you don't sit down and do generic "learning" and spend your accumulated "learning points" on a goal afterwards - that's already pretty gamey, but that's the way video games worked for a long time, so that's ok. but hoarding several level ups is just too much, IMO

@GfireflyE, I would suggest that they only be useable during subsequent "level up" screens, to avoid the obvious cheating you mention, and also to minimize the new functionality needed.

@Azunai_, while I agree with you, there still remains the problem of not being able to leave the skills screen if you've taken all skills - which is a GAMEBREAKING bug for those unfortunate enough to reach that point... perhaps the points hoarding is not the most elegant solution, but the problem needs to be fixed somehow.

Perhaps another idea would be a repeatable "final" skill like the infinite "advanced research" etc. technologies, which can be upgraded continuously...

except that spear units destroy them before you can do anything.  Spears ignore the counter attack and also ignore a decent % of whatever armour you happen to have.  So you might as well not be in plate armour - unless everyone else is using maces/swords.

Spears need to have the armour piercing bonus moved to maces.  Maces are very slow, but a slow armoured target is easier to hit. 

Another option is for Spears to lose the no counter bonus.

I have to agree here but going to take it a little farther;

Spears need to lose armor pierce but gain bonus damage to cavalry.

Axes should gain an armor pierce but lose accuracy.

Blunt should gain a higher armor pierce than axes and also an armor destruct/reduction per hit instead of bash.

Make bash a trainable trait that requires a shield or blunt.

Swords are fine this way without separate damage types.  If separate damage types are re instituted they should have a selectable attack for a stab and a blade flat strike for blunt and lose counter attack.

Make a +1 counter attack a trainable trait called riposte.

That is all.

This is based upon how each weapon works as well as how it was actually used.

Would somebody be so kind as to press the red button?  The one marked with the letters R.E.L.E.A.S.E.D.

Thank you.

No way, you forgeting backswing. Reduced accuracy for axes wont make a difference bacause of backswing. You will have chance to repeat if you missed. So you want armor piercing with nearly guaranteed hit. I think thats to much.

Spears armor piercing could be reduced to 30 - 40 perc. instead of 50 at the moment. If you remove oiercing at all then why to take spear then ? Swords would become better with shield on other hand ant init. bonus.

I think, as petrasvu suggested, the armor piercing effect of spears should be reduced to 35 %.

The bash chance of blunt weapons should be increased to (inflicted damage x 2) %, because it is currently very rare that a target is knocked prone.

The counterattack damage of swords should be increased to 75 %, because the counterattack is currently too weak against armored targets.

Yeah, many warrior and defender abilities (parry, expert swordsman, ...) should be available as abilities for trained units.

The problem lies within the expectations that the way the game portrays most weapons is sort of correct.  I can tell you I have probably spent about 40 hours doing independent research for armors and weapons to figure out how to apply how they actually work for a weapons armor mod that reflects this.  What I listed above is how they were used and how to apply this in game.  If you are making suggestions to my suggestion you are trying to balance what is in game, I am suggesting a different kind of balance, such as how it usually works.  Let me be a little more in depth for each weapon and how they worked in combat.

Blunt -    They started as clubs and cudgels and evolved into hammers and axes and eventually mauls.  This the game does correctly and I applaud it.  However the point of these weapons was simple past a club, to get past armor and bash it in making it harder to move.  Armor crumpling and piercing of armor through the means of spikes or hammers narrow heads allowed these weapons to literally tear armor apart or make it useless in comparison to the weapon.  A maul would crush plate armor like a tin can making moving in it almost impossible then your secondary warriors would come in and stab a heavy plate wearer through his visor with a specialized dagger for going through eye slits.  Brutal warfare but very effective.

Axes -    Started as a tool and rapidly was adapted to warfare.  Started primarily as a thrown axe and then moved to the large two handed axe.  Eventually it moved to a hand axe and shield.  The strength of the axe is its small cross section with high weight allowing a specific area there the force it applies to pierce armors.  It left deep and very horrible wounds that did not heal right back in the days of its use.  So a more accurate secondary effect instead of backswing would be a bleed effect as that was kind of the point of an axe, leave a debilitating wound that eventually kills you even if you live through the first hit.

Spear -   Also started as a tool but mainly for hunting and also adapted for warfare, actually it is the oldest weapon known for warfare.  The main thing for spears is that they were used almost entirely short spear and shield up until the two handed spears were made to which the pike evolved from.  In game this can be reflected with a simple defensive bonus of immune to counterattack as they were a defensive weapon.  The pike however was by far anti cavalry and it was very good at it.  A giant spear with a long spear head almost a shortsword at the end.  Make the pike have anti cavalry bonuses and make it strike up to two squares away not through two squares that becomes gamey and not tactical.  If you want make spear master get the ability to do a strikethrough making it a reward for gaining spear mastery.

Swords -  Alright this one is tricky.  Daggers have been around forever in many different mediums from stone, bronze, iron and eventually steel.  Short swords evolved as basically a longer dagger and eventually the rest of the swords in Europe evolved from there. So the briadsword would be next followed by the longsword.  The longsword was the first sword that could reliably be used with two hands and as such became a fearsome weapon.  From the longsword eventually the greatsword evolved which was considered the pinacle of sword crafting at the time as it was strong enough to do a great deal of damage but still able to maintain the swordmans edge.  Speking of the edge that swords give here it is.  The sword had two main strengths where were weight and versatility.  A sword generally weighed less than five pounds with a great sword never weighing above ten pounds.  The versatility of the weapon comes from the many different attacks that could be made with a sword.  It could thrust and do a piercing attack, it could chop or slash for a cutting attack, or you could use the flat of the blade to bash someone.  The piercing and blunt attacks were weaker but they were there when the swordsman needed them.  Now the downside to the sword was also two-fold; it required much more extensive training and it also required a long manufacture time for even the most basic sword.  So in game terms this means higher training time since we don't have a manufacture timer since its incorporated into training times.

Bows/Crossbows -  This one I have had several talks on this board over and then did more research to look it up after finding several preconceptions from childhood archery wrong.  Bows can shoot really far but that does not mean that they are always effective at that range nor are they accurate.  Bows have an effective range for when they can pierce armor.  Bows take a LOT longer to train than crossbows but are lighter and faster.  Generally bows are cheaper to maintain but are longer to build up so in game this should reflect with a armor piercing attack that has a higher accuracy but the base bow and crossbow should have reduced accuracy to reflect being out of optimal ranges.

Keep in mind this is a VERY generalized post and if you want more information you can learn more by looking it up, thank guys for taking the time to listen to this, I hope.

Thanks. 

Yea I was playing tonight and Skyped Derek "Hey, just saw the AI units, full health, running away.".  That's something new for sure.

The big strategic change, well it should be really noticeable so I won't say other than that it should be significantly harder to walk over the AI on harder levels.

The AI is NOT done by any means. It still has idiotic declare war logic. I fixed a bug that was in there which made it clear where it was but it's going to take a day or two to redo the diplomacy calculations there. 

Getting jealous of the road discussion, are you 

Just finished a game and was having a blast. One thing that struck out that the AI factions were not prioritizing production improvement buildings very high and that caused them to lag. Whenever I play, workshops, lumber mills and bell towers are my first builds. Always. The cities I captured had several buildings, but none of them had any of these improvements. Granaries, studies, merchants and other stuff that would be more useful to build after production efficiency is taken care of.

I've noticed this as well, it's very rare to capture an AI city with a workshop, don't think I've seen but a couple with masons.

I wanted to suggest something like this in my "champion trees are full of filler picks" thread, but forgot.

I do think one should be able to exit the screen without selecting a pick, and I don't see how hoarding is actually a problem as people are suggesting, though.

The only bad thing about these patches is that just when the AI starts getting good because they're using my unit designs, Derek releases a new patch and renders all those designs obsolete.

I know, right! This keeps happening to me as well. I make all these neat units for each faction, and then a patch comes along and is like: "Whoops, sorry, you might want to redo that."

And because you can't design a unit until you have the tech to actually build that unit, I have to play through an entire game with each faction to re-make my unit designs. I swear there should be an external "Faction Unit Creator" where you have access to every item that faction can make available for unit design.

I believe there's a cheat that unlocks all tech, enabling you to design all the units.

Excellent ideas here!  I support all of them.

Was 'Blood Curse' spell fixed?

Brad, Derek & co. are either working really late or we're not going to see .85 tonight.  I can gladly wait a little longer if more fixes are complete!

If they fixed that spell they would have fixed strategic spell calculations.

0.85 is looking awesome. Little worried about the auto charging horses.

Please Please let it be that the AI no longer builds troops out of newly built towns (then build bazaars). The AI will never beat me as long as its not building troops out of its Fortresses and intelligently investing in industry from towns and conclaves.

Hi Derek!  Thanks for taking the time to reply. First, I'd like to say, I actually don't mind the way auto-roads build, most of the time.  And I am delighted to make the tradeoff of the occasional awkward road layout without any of the hassle of having the BYO.  I understand that it irks a lot of people but personally I think this is a minor issue with the game.  I agree with you that this is a perfect example of something that bothers die-hard fans that would never occur to most players.

Road networks grow the way your empire does, that's a good thing.  But your empire often grows in weird ways that ideally would lead to some roads becoming obsolete as other roads are built.  I think a lot of the problem is that "mistakes" made early in the game get compounded as the game slavishly keeps old roads that really don't make sense anymore.  That's why I made my suggestion: to provide a means of automatically removing old roads that no longer make sense.

What I had in mind is something like the following scenarios that are actually things that happened to me in previous games (on the left is the road network the game would generate, on the right is the "optimal" road network)

In this example, a terrain feature makes it impossible to link C directly to the road between A & B, so a road is built from B to C.  But that means that to move from A to C/D I need to travel across my entire empire and moving overland would probably be faster.  If I had settled C first, my road network would be much more effective.

Here my empire has grown in a circle.  The road network is perfect!  Except, again, to get from A to E I need to move through my entire empire.  If I had settled C or D last, my network would be better, but ideally the road network should be a full circle.

Basically the algorithm would try to create the most optimal path to connect all your cities to each other using the least number of roads.  That's the sort of calculation I assume you do when wildlands are cleared, so that's why I suggested recalculating that every time a new city was taken/founded.

It might not be practical to do this given the low-end computers you're targeting as minimum specs.  I gave up thinking about algorithm complexity when I left college.  But IMHO, this is the sort of thing that people want their road networks to do and find frustrating about the automatic roads in FE.  If the road networks adjusted themselves as your empire grew, I think most of the complaints (except the "road through dragon's den") would be solved.

I don't think this would necessarily be an issue, as the re-calculation would only need to take place when a new city is built, and not every turn.