I'm more dissapointed in the game than ever

Ohh and why the hell can't I build a pier or harbour on the damn ocean?!....

And it's more than infurriating to research a tech to unlock a wonder, have a city with INSANE production and by the time you finish the few turns you needed to build some shit the computer has started the wonder in some pathetic city without any production and your 14 turn build time has LONG passed by about 20 turns and still the computer hasn't built the wonder....

Then I think  "Hey I'll just restart this map and rush the tech a little faster and not detour to leather armour" A BIG FAT NOPE. Once you get your good start, if you ever got it. You can't restart the same map and location you're on unless you created a special save called "good start"....

MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Give us the ability to try to race the computer or another player in building the wonders. Have the production wasted if you lose the race, I can rush, I can cast enchanted hammers. etc. Civilization has had this figured out over a DECADE ago. Give the game the ability to restart your map location. What if you wanted to play the same world and location again but with a different strat....


This game has always had such huge promise, but falls so damn short on the most basic of things... It's almost as if the makers of the game want to frustrate customers and apologize later by offering free shit, and yet do nothing to fix or address the most rudimentary aspects.  They keep polishing this turd in all the wrong places. Spend HUGE levels of effort on items, item balance, etc, yet ignore such simple simple  issues that would eliminate so much frustration I'd overlook some of the other issues.

Your Settlement have to be right next to forest/river if you wish to build lumbermills and Piers. Unless you get lucky and the city expand into their direction. I can agree that's kinda stupid but oh well that's life.

1/3/0 What You don't have to settle on it if that's your starting tile well then make your first city a town. You will take heavy causalities cuz weak troops but until you get the fortress built then it will stabilize out fine.

And 1/3/0 as a fortress? Don't bother, better off with a town. But if you really want to, you can do it, just make sure that your 2nd location is a town otherwise you will get choked and die.

So I heard you want good loot and you expect to get it from a "strong" camp. What's rated as strong in turn 10 will be likely rated as weak in turn 100. Also, I'm pretty sure that Ogres isn't known to be carrying awesome loot.

Want incredible loot? Murder elemental gods and wish you didn't kill them because the loot they drop make the game too easy for you. I once picked up a Eclipse sword something.. from asag god, oh god, the rest of the game was a snoozefest cuz the AI didn't stand a chance. But I kicked so much ass it was so damn fun.

About bazaar. . . . i have noticed a bug, if you cannot build it, the AIs cannot either even when they unlocked the tech for it.

When that happens, reload the save then it will be right there in the build queue again for you to queue up and grab the wonder.

Also, there is a benefit in slaying strong camps even when your good men die in the process. They died to make the kingdom/empire's realm safer for people that can't fight. If this isn't enough for you, go play lone wolf in some random FPS. Probably COD could be a good match for u.

You could dow on the AI's units but you didn't cuz you're afraid. They dow'd on you trepassing onto their lands cuz they no afraid of sissy like you duh. They notice you too afraid to murder their units so they keep on trying until you give up and let them walk all over you.

Have a nice evening.

All your responses miss the point about as badly as possible.


when I see a 1/3/0 for a starting location.. CTRL+N. the fact the sovereign chose that area to found his empire on after years of wandering, training, fighting, and studying... pathetically immersion breaking and just frustrating. 

I don't expect a strong camp to drop throwing knives, as I said and last I checked a +5 Armour chain-mail isn't "incredible loot" and getting something from a weak camp or a medium camp that is better than strong camp is just f*cked up. My empire is safe enough, and if I'm going to pick up leather boots from it, may as well give me nothing or more gold I can spend on buying light plate boots from my store.

and nope. I just don't want to go to war over a pioneer wandering across my land, I'm in the must more fun exploration phase, and I know if I go to war at that stage I'll just steamroll the computer until they can build up some more. perhaps replying to forum posts isn't your thing. Perhaps letting someone else do it for you could be a good match for you.

have a nice evening

I'm not sure if 1.6 will address the treasure issue you brought up, but your other points are quite valid.

SOME of us like to build cool cities, with the whole opposing empire thing being a necessary evil in such games.  I can remember many a game of Civ or Alpha Centauri where I was focusing on just how big (in population) I could build a city, while dealing with unrest and pollution.  And in Alpha Centauri specifically reworking the land to maximize said bonuses.

Despite being a powerful practitioner of magic in Elemental, I can't even change those ugly olive drab trees to regular forest... and terrain modification seems like using a sledgehammer to construct a fine chair...

So yeah, I'm guilty of the CTRL+N too.  If I'm going to invest the next handful of hours into a 4x game, damn straight I want a more ideal start location.  Having to wander for multiple turns to find said ideal start site just gives the AI that leg up, if they had the dream location to start with.  Possibly more challenging? Yes, the AI's can use a break, but this doesn't address the OP's point, that being that you should be smart enough to seek out a river beforehand in the first place.

Start points in Civ and Alpha Centauri weren't nearly as make or break in the early game as they can be in Elemental, as far as building effective cities in the early game.  Also, being a powerful practitioner of magic, you'd THINK that you'd be a little more in tune with good sites as far as enchantments.

BTW, in the code (ElementalDefs), the game talks about starting cities having minimums for Food, Materials, and Mana, but I obviously missed something here because those aren't the values that I see at my starting city.

The OP is simply pointing out here why Elemental has frustrated him to the point that he has decided to invest his valuable gaming time and dollars elsewhere.  Other 4x games out at the moment do a much better job in bringing home the wonder of a fantasy world, and stone knives just don't scream wonder out to me.  Elemental has a number of kludges as well that were done in the name of 'game balance' but realistically make no sense.  My fave to call out is the whole spear and shield thing.  Multiple cultures here on earth learned the benefit of the spear and shield (Greek era combat is built around it, and even Shaka's Zulus figured loved using shields with their spears).  Medieval Knights? Lance and Shield.  The Shield has been a staple of combat alongside the pointy stick for many many centuries now (even cops today use them occasionally), and yet most cultures in Elemental seemed to have missed the boat here...

There are other, more interesting ways to balance things than to ignore such obvious things, and I'll throw in my fave here - armor proficiency.  Yes, it should be perfectly obvious that the chain shirt goes over your head, just like the leather jerkin did, but despite legends coming down from pre-cataclysm talking about mighty warriors in suits of armor, well apparently little kids in Elemental don't play warrior, so you have to get special training before you can put the suit on.  I'd buy a penalty without training, but not that you can't use it at all.  Use your head, people!

For all the pomp and circumstance of the Elemental lore, and the promise it implies, the actual game feels waaay too bland by comparison on a lot of points.  Sure, there are some cool elements, but not sweating the small stuff on the designer's part does detract from the overall experience.  The artwork screams powerful magic, but the actual world feels sort of like a lame B Movie, with almost no special effects budget to boot.

Sorry to be so harsh here, but I've been with Elemental almost since the beginning (grabbed it at Best Buy the week it came out).  For some of the advancements in mechanics since the E:WOM days, I've seen the developers retreat from concept after concept, because they didn't want to invest the time to make those concepts work.  Is E:LH a more streamlined game?  Absolutely.  Is it more stable?  Yes.  Does it have some fun new concepts?  Sure.  What it DOESN'T have is ships and dynasties and fun uneven terrain.  E:WOM felt like a vast world.  E:LH feels more like a tabletop game to me, from a world perspective.  I do like the varying 'special realms' that are added (scrapyard, etc.), but the world still feels flat, too small, and even cities seem canned to me.  Oh, and despite having a battlefield mechanic, city walls can't even be adequately represented, along with siege mechanics... apparently walls are just for show.

I mentioned in another thread that terrain seems underutilized in Elemental, and that a 'rescale' may be in order in the next iteration.  It'd be cool if there was enough varied terrain clumped around the map so that Ironeers could have rugged terrain move modifiers, Tarth with wood move modifiers, etc. for more faction differentiation that actually meant something.  Terrain modifiers ALMOST feels like an afterthought in Elemental, and I think that a lot can be done to improve upon it in the next iteration.

Brad, Derek and the team really should to take criticisms like this more seriously before they tackle the next iteration.  Spending some time on the small stuff does matter, and the OP has brought up a lot of 'small stuff' that has plagued Elemental since the beginning, in various iterations.  Not bothering with little minor details like destructable walls on the battlefield, and terrain in general (impassable is a cludge, people do fight in forests, despite the difficulty!) the next time around will mean just one more point where Elemental will continue to fall short.  You can't make everyone happy all the time, but when you don't bother with the (to some) obviously low hanging fruit, well that's your own hard headedness working against you.

The Stardock team has invested a lot of time in the modeling of weapons, armor, peeps, mechanics and such in Elemental.  With that now done, it's time to look at why people give up on/lose interest in Elemental, and beef up the rest of the game.

This is an issue I brought up a long time ago, and it was ignored. I appreciate randomness, but the treasure should be equal to the effort. I once got a "bag of holding" (that now gives +1 initiative) for defeating a dragon. There's got to be a way to change the code so that the random selection has a limited range (based on the monsters difficulty)

For what it's worth, we are reading these posts. They are very helpful.

From a game development point of view, a lot of it comes down to the classic: [ scope / reasonable budget / quality ]  balance (you can have 2).  

In eWOM we picked scope and reasonable budget.  In LH we picked reasonable budget and quality.  

One of my biggest regrets was not pushing back (and in fact letting my own disappointment with the bugginess of WOM affect my own attitude to the game) harder against the original Elemental release.

I still see people act like Elemental was a terrible game. It wasn't. It was buggy and raw at release but it wasn't anything that couldn't have been turned into something really amazing with some months of additional work on balancing/stability/and cohesion.   

Unfortunately, now "Elemental" is market poison. People use it all the time to describe some terrible thing Stardock did which is really a shame since the game really deserved better than it got.

With LH, we're allowing it to evolve.  It started out as a good game with a good reputation and we've built on that.  1.6 will continue to add to it.  Ironically, the biggest problem with it is marketing. That is, the NAME. I wish we'd never called it Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.  I wish we would have stuck with Elemental: Legendary Heroes or Elemental II or SOMETHING.

If I had to do Elemental all over again, I would have eliminated the computer opponents as you know them. I would have made it an asymetrical 4X so that players could go crazy in a huge scope world and have your enemies not trying to build identical/balance empires with the player. 

Well I think FE:LH is a great game, the best in the 4x fantasy strategy genre imo.

Also, just FWIW seeing as you're listening (Frogboy)... personally that's not something I would be looking for (the asymetrical thing).  

I want FE:LH 2 / Elemental 2 / WoM2... call it what you want but i'm just hoping one day in the future we get another iteration of this game (beyond LH 2.0), heading in the direction it's going... i.e. retaining all the great stuff in FE:LH.  Keep the unit design, it's great.  The tech trees.  The questing.  The wildlands.  The unique setting.  There's lots of great stuff in this game that already make it great and unique.  There's some issues (some of which touched on in the OP) but the good vastly outweighs the bad.

Add proper air and naval travel and 64 bit.... clean up some of the rough edges.. gimme the next generation of FE:LH over anything else any day.

I want to follow up with some more thoughts on this thread.  Players like you are a big reason I make games.  The GAME is less interesting to me than the communities around the games so posts like this are what it's all about in terms of making it possible to make a better game.

In no particular order:

• The monsters SHOULD have loot tied to them. Often they don't however and as a result you end up with crappy loot.  This is something we will be revisiting in LH.
• Starting locations are going to get a look at in 2.0. Partially because something...happened that resulted in poorer starting locations.
• Ships. Sigh. Yes.  We have 6 high quality ship models in the game that we don't use.  I think either in LH or in a subsequent iteration we're going to have to just bite the bullet and make ship travel easier.  
• Nerfing.  One of the decisions that was made early in Elemental was that we wanted a non-cheating AI.  Unfortunately, this decision has repeatedly come back to haunt us because we've had to gimp the magic system repeatedly because of all the exploits. I think it was a mistake to design a fantasy game where the AI players are supposed to play by the same rules.  For example, terrain modification was supposed to be a huge part of the game. However, it turned out that it's very CPU intensive and easy to exploit (put all your cities on islands or make everything a choke point). So we ended up gimping the magic system instead of just changing the game rules.  
• Forests do provide materials to nearby cities but it's abstracted. I think we need to bring back "old growth" forests for the reasons you state.
• Restarting on same map. Yea, I agree with this. I'm going to request it.

The future:

I think it's safe to say that Elemental has had a tremendous influence on fantasy 4X (every time I see the zoom out on the map thing I know we did a lot of things right in Elemental).  However, I think that the Civ model that Elemental and the rest have followed (i.e. a bunch of largely balanced, symetrical empires battling it out) robs these games of their potential. 

If you're making a game in a fantasy world that make it a FANTASY WORLD. We all seem to be obsessed with making Civilization with magic when in fact we should be putting the magic and fantasy as the driving game mechanics.  

What I can say is that we will keep iterating on FE:LH for the foreseeable future and at the same time create an Elemental 2015 that takes the lessons we've learned as well as takes into account that there's a lot of traditional style 4X fantasy games in the market right now and thus want to take a very different direction.

I take your point, but I think this depends on whether you're shooting for "high fantasy" where magic and all manner of crazy races are commonplace, or something more akin to LOTR, Game of Thrones or maybe Conan type fantasy that is more dark / subtle magic type fantasy.

Personally I prefer the latter, but I understand that the high fantasy, magic transforming the world type vibe appeals to many.  Each to their own.

yay!

This is great news, Frog. To date, Legendary Heroes has provided me with more fun and more playtime than any other game, save Europa Universalis IV, in the past 5 years. 

It's the best game of its kind and while somewhat buggy and "immature" in some ways, is as deep as they come and provides some truly great gaming moments. 

I think if you're trying to make a game where the magic and fantasy are the driving game mechanics, you're going to need to improve/overhaul the factions of the Universe. The Game-of-Thrones-like factions of the current Elemental universe lend themselves too a "Civilization with Magic" type of game too well, hence the reason it still *kinda* feels that way.

Elemental's influence is most definitely out there. I see things in Age of Wonders 3 AND the upcoming Endless Legend that was definitely found first through the Elemental games (dat cloth map!), so you should be proud of that. 

As for future iterations, applying those "fixes" that you made in your post above and further fleshing out the AI would be your best bet towards stabilizing what you already have. Figuring out ways to further differentiate your factions would do well to change the way the game is played already and make the current LH more asymetrical, as you'd like it (and most of us would, too!)

Faction-specific quests in the future would be rad, too. Flesh those factions out like that!

What's wrong with creating islands and raising mountains to wall off enemies?

I once had an Earth Archmage and used it's raise mountains ability to get Vergas to go stab someone else for once instead of me every single time. But I found out the hard way, vergas was so bent on stabbing me he took the long route just to stab me some more.

If there's a route you want to take.. i would recommend interesting worlds next time, currently as it is the world is basically a rectangle in FE:LH

And what's wrong with ships in FE:LH? You can make warships and transport ships. Just have units move to proper city with a port in it and tell it to embark. Then when it arrive to an beach or other port and you can tell it to disembark.... I remember Civ4 working well in this regard and Civ3. Well.... AI sucked at naval invasions anyways.

Only once I ever see an AI put up an magnificent naval war against me. But that was only because I disabled the bad happiness system in Civ 5 which basically resulted in almost eternal golden ages for powerful civs. It happened during Gods n Kings expansion for me. Was hiawatha vs me. I mentioned it on civfanatics forums.

Hundreds and hundreds of ships was sunk in that single game, all the way from medieval to future era. Hiawatha really hated my guts.

But in the end we basically killed each other and ended up in a stalemate. Then Brave new world came out like few days later and I moved on.

Not ALL the time..

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/showthread.php?13411-So-what-s-the-4X-crowd-playing-these-days&p=464461&viewfull=1#post464461

"There's an interesting comparison to draw between Stardrive and Elemental, actually. Both have released or will release fairly close sequels with fairly similar premises. Both had first versions crippled with problems that were apparently unfixable in their first incarnation.

The difference is that Elemental's standalone sequel, Fallen Enchantress, was free for all War of Magic owners. I think that's the right way to reward your fanbase for their support while still letting you drop the old design or code and start fresh. Patching out a brand new engine isn't easy, so I can understand the dev for wanting to reboot it all. It's asking for the full price for people who've made this sequel possible in the first place that I find is pushing it too far."

...

"No, the key difference, as has been pointed out, is that the lead developer of Elemental owned up to his mistakes and took the blame. And they did their best to make it up to the fans.

Stardock put the fans first"

The thread doesn't really get good until around post 136 though, when the discussion turns to the topics of asymmetry and AI.

Yes!!!

I agree that what hurts FE/LH the most is a culmination of a bunch of minor inconsistencies that results in overall feelings of blandness and incompleteness.  What exactly is my perspective, who or what am I?  Am I the fledgeling sovereign of a budding magical empire, or a semi-omnipotent watcher with a bunch of spread-sheets off to my side?  Too many of the experiences in the game feel much too impersonal and random for me to remain immersed in my role as sovereign.  It is quite obviously a strategy game, but in order to really capture that fantasy feeling, it needs to play more like an RPG: with more connection between my decisions and their subsequent effects.. Less (random) numbers, but each with more weight (on game-play).

Re. the asymmetrical gameplay: there should still be some pressure to complete your objectives in a timely manner and not just turtle until you have a million high tier units. If nothing else, this is what your symmetrical rivals usually provide.

Honestly, I'd be really upset if Stardock switched to cheating AI's.  The AI quality is what keeps me coming back.   This is why I wish Elemental 2015 and LH could be combined in 2019 or so when Stardock's ready to work on the next-gen Elemental.

I can understand it a bit more for fantasy games.  I expect GalCiv 3 continues the tradition of honest AI.

Don't get me wrong I had a lot fun playing Elemental games. It's just the small things occurred to interrupt the fun, or I was forced into a grind of restarts, loads, or confusion on many points, so For every say 5-7 hours of a full game I enjoyed I'd spend about 10-20% of that dealing with wtf moments.

OR watching as terrain I Can't use between my cities being settled by the enemy. So I'd have to SPAM outposts to take as much area of control as possible to prevent being cut in half by the enemy.

If I was playing a mage with the spells to transform the land early on and I had enough mana nodes to spend the 200 to transform it...

Then after turning large swaths of land to lush terrain there were no spots that a city could be built on or the terrain was so terrible I couldn't justify a 1/2/1 into a valuable city where it would increase the unrest in my other cities, or grow so slowly it wouldn't produce. Some of the fun in Civ. was KNOWING the good spots to build cities, and couldn't build them all or had to plan and strategise how you would do it rather then be surprised when terrain changes to your required type later on and you built in the wrong spot, or could have made a better city if you only knew how it would have turned out...

I would almost argue that a terrain's value should be governed by nearby stuff like food resources, industrial and magic resources, rivers, coast, forests, mushrooms, and if knew we used magic we could turn these undesirable items for our race into desirable and improve our city's land. It's less of an issue. I would build a city knowing I could improve it or have an enemy do the opposite to me. then I have to invest say a protection spell on a valuable tile to guard my city's grain level or material level. This requires upkeep in the form of a spell on the terrain and others could see I have a spell on that tile making it favourable or protecting it from becoming unfavourable. 


There is also no penalty to spamming cities or outposts (if you have the chance in the right terrain). As your empire grows you generate lots of research mana and gold and research and power through the tech tree and can cast any spells as often as you want. I like that in Civilization V if you grow too fast you end up hurting yourself in overall production until you can generate through civilization advancement (or a small boost in initial race traits) the necessary abilities and tools to offset, overcome or bypass the inherent inefficiencies of a larger empire. Civ. Did this through 'happiness' and the effects of negative values, as well as generating enough money in each city to offset the costs of additional cities, and while increasing the costs of advancements as you made more cities.

It's not the best way but you could have it when you have multiple cities they cost more to have as you add more. It takes more to govern 10 cities than it does 1. As we tech up we get access to more buildings that generate income.

Small armies are easier to feed and upkeep than larger armies, a scale here that ramps up with number of units would be good as well. As we research improved techs and build buildings or wonders we get bonuses which modifies the values so we can have larger armies. I found that eventually I just put all my cities on produce wealth and created HUGE HUGE HUGE armies that stormed and overwhelmed the map.to the point where it was hilarious!

For Mana this is very important. I have had games where I had like 60,000+ mana built up(not to mention ridiculous sums of metal horses, wards, crystals, etc). I had no limit on what I Could do. I had every global enchantment on and TONS of my troops with enchantments. The upkeep was no issue and I had such huge reserves of everything it didn't matter....

We should have storage limits on our mana (and other things) that we need research/buildings/terrain improvements to raise, as well as some kind of scale to the costs of having so many enchantments active at once. Sure we can have a skill that says 2 enchantments on X unit that doesn't count towards scale total. We have an item on our Sovereign that makes the enchantments mana free. It's an extension of that sort of mechanic.

If I had 20 evade enchantments on my units it shouldn't cost me just 20 mana per turn, Maybe the first 5 unit enchantments cost 1 mana each then the next 5 cost 2, then the next 5 cost 3 etc. (more powerful spells cost more than 1 as a base goes without saying)City enchantments, global enchantments etc should be the same. Then I'm looking at a upkeep of more than I make quite quickly if I don't balance it or have the skills/buildings/specializations that let me have more

I had one army that had something like 10 enchantments per unit, then every city had 2-4 enchantments etc. running with 150+ enchantments should be extremely punitive.

This opens up another way to attack an empire. Mess with their infrastructure that supports their magic-economy and you can quickly turn their own excess into a weakness. If I lost say... some shards, and a spell was cast on one of my cities (I think the cater should be somewhat close to the target city) and lost a key building (or a feedback disruption spell that rendered all mana structures inneffective for 5/10/15/20 turns) then all of a sudden my mana maintenance went from say... 40 per turn to 80, my max capacity went from... 500 to 400 while my income was 60.. I 'm all of a sudden out of mana in 20 turns if I don't have any combat where I had to use mana. I can quickly be hurt if I don't manage and protect my mana economy. I have to cancel enchantments (there should be a cost in this in minor damage to a unit, a feeling of vulnerability for a few turns, increased initial cost to re-do it later, a few turns to unwind a spell or to disenchant it properly etc.) and not use as much in combat, this would give the opponent an advantage.


Magic should be as potential weakness as well as a potential strength.

For other resources we should have in Towns storage vaults for metal etc, in Fortresses stuff to store horses, wargs, and in Conclaves storage for Mana, Crystals etc.

You then have to build cities to what you tend to use more of or require. If you lose a key conclave your magic reserves and ability to use magic will suffer and the enemy may have just stolen some of it... Better intercept that glowing highlighted series of caravans on the map before it makes it back to the enemy capital!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, a use for the spiders silk, scales, etc other than just selling them. Use in potions, research, improving magic accessories, etc. or just selling.

Getting these items is like getting gold atm. might as well just get more gold as it stands. It doesn't have to be toooo valuable, but If I sell them I'd like to give up something, some could be useful only in selling or I can say... hand over a bunch of pelts to a city to make luxurious clothing/rugs/who knows and reduce unrest by 2% or something.

My feelings exactly. Less minor inconsistencies, more RPG!

Although I do understand Frogboy's concerns: a magic system often allows for powerful combo's. Maybe we just have to accept that, as long as obvious 'mistakes' are avoided. By mistakes I mean spells and abilities that should never have survived testing, like the Familiar -it has never worked as described, probably because it would've been too powerful- or the Gallowman's Consume Spirit -basically an 'I win' button-.

and be able to use the spider silk, (etc) and beasty parts (dragon teeth, etc) to research and make special / unique armors that can not be made another way. 

agree

+1

else why am I collecting these stupid things...