I think the different tech trees could be better balanced, too. In my opinion Warfare and Civilization are the most powerful trees, because they give you many different upgrades. Magic, Adventuring and Diplomacy are good at the lower levels, but have not enough interesting upgrades at the higher levels.

- The magic tech tree should unlock magical creatures and the ability to change existing magic items.

- The adventuring tech tree should be the only way to get magic items.

- The diplomacy tech tree should unlock espionage options.

The character stats could be better balanced. In my opinion STR and DEX are the most poerful stats, because they increase the Attack and Defense. CON, INT, WIS and esp. CHA are not as powerful.

- CON: Base Hit Points and CON / 5 Hit Points per level beyond the first

- STR: Is balanced

- DEX: Is balanced

- INT: Spell base true damage x (Intelligence x 10 %) and every shard increases the Intelligence by 5 for that type of spell

- WIS: Base Mana and WIS / 5 Mana Regeneration per turn

- CHA: Should change the gildar cost of all units (100 % +/- 5 % per point CHA below or above 10)

The Weapons could have special abilities as in D&D 4.0:

- Blunt: The targets AP are reduced by 50 % for 1 turn.

- Slashing: The targets HP are reduced in the next turn by 50 % of the damage, that penetrates the Defense.

- Piercing: The Defense of the target is reduced by 50 % for that attack.

- Melee attack from behind: The Defense of the target is reduced by 50 % for that attack.

- Melee attack from a mount: The Defense of the target is reduced by 10 % per square the unit moves before the attack.

But there would be a little side effect.

A 10 units stack vs a 1 unit stack = 10 * (1D10 vs 5)

A 10 units stack vs a 10 units stack = 10 * (1D10 vs 5)

It's the exact same roll ! The only advantage of a stack would then be the number of hit points. You should get an advantage to attack with more people.

A simple solution : an attacker that has more units than the defender would get a bonus in attack, unless the defender has the "heroic" ability (for instance dragons coudl get that, so 1000 peasants would get a really low chance to hit it)

There are escape routes?? I've tried moving my units to and past those bright areas on the four sides of the T.battle map, but it never results in a retreat. Though I only tried it once, and maybe there are some battles you can't run from. Either way, I suppose it's worth another shot. Thanks for the heads up, and you guys have done a great job! This game has caused me to lose many hours of sleep over the past week!

Holy cow am I hearing great stuff here! Devs, please take note!

Of course, I am most anxious for MAGIC!

Indeed, please adopt MoM-style #of like "spellbooks" (or skill points, etc.) to determine max spell level  in a given branch of magic.

Elemental is the name of the game, so elemental magic needs to be earth-shatteringly powerful and diverse. I propose:

*Based on the type of elements known, combination spells can be discovered: earth+fire=magma, for example.

*Rock, paper, scissors magic. If he casts that, I can cast this to cancel it out. Make counteraction spells that can be cast on the fly--we can counterattack, so why can't we counter a spell if we have the right spell in our repitiore?

*Bring in game-shaping global enchantments ala MoM.

*Elemental oppositions: Fire opposes water; Earth opposes air.

*Empire's civs could have connection to fire and air, while kingdom is of earth and water (maybe unique spells, units, magical creatures, buildings based on these elements).

*Unique spell ability for each sovereign.

*More spell schools, such as Mind magic, Chaos (I saw a previous poster suggest great ideas for a chaos branch of magic), Nature (bring the druid civilization! the ultimate race to bring back the lush earth!), Order, Sun, Darkness, Alteration, etc. These will provide replayability and many more types of strategy to the game, but since this is an Elemental War of Magic, make the truly earth-shaping spells from the elemental schools of magic.

*Many, many spells. Don't waste too much time with graphics though (at least not at first). A lot of the spells could share effects (a heal spell and a bless spell could both just make the same sparkle) to save time here.

*Random spells able to learn each playthrough ala MoM with rarity (hooray! I got disintegrate! My favorite!)

*Tabs in spellbook to sort by level, school, tactic, strategic, learned, not learned, etc.

*As above poster, magic tech tree is tied to the ability to research actual spells. This could be where u learn to combine different schools of magic to create/discover new spells; summon magical creatures; learn designs for magical items.

*Adventure tech is for going out on quests and finding artifacts that can greatly enhance both units (equipment) and magic (rods, staves, cauldrons, flying carpets, etc.), gold and riches, travelling into the underground (which is possible, we have been told by Frogboy) world to gain the help of the beings living underground (or in the sky, perhaps?). These should be epic and really affect the outcome of the game (be a viable strategy to win). Think Clash of the Titans and the quests to prepare (the old movie, of course!).

*Magic gives the ability to change one type of resource into another. If I don't have any gold mines, then I should be able to research a away to turn materials into gold.

*Shards need to be something that wars are fought over, not just a damage boost. WAY more powerful and exciting.

*Magic needs to vastly change the world before our eyes. By game's end, my kingdom (earth+water) magic should have created Eden on Earth, while my Empire magic (fire+air) would turn the world into something resembling Mordor. I know this happens to an extent now, but I'd like it to be something requiring a bit more active manipulation on the part of my spellcasters, and with great rewards for doing so (far more food, the civ thrives, with larger city populations and therefore stronger recruitables and champions, etc).

Thank you for your time and your hard work! Keep it up Devs! You're doing great!

I think first priority should be given to makeing the game fast and stable.

I have a very powerful system and i get at most 15 fps even on the cloth map and i get out of memory errors after 200 turns without fail. Balancing can come later i just want to be able to play it without predictable crashes

Please please please make better and more varied spells. Exciting spells!! It's called War of Magic for a reason. Lets see actual awesome magic.

Island Dog

reply 13

 

Seconded!

Guys, it doesn't make sense that you're tweaking the LOD system to me. If this was the issue, then people with more powerful graphic cards wouldn't be having the same FPS as everyone else. The issue to me doesn't seem to be so much that the items don't fade. Newer GPUs should have absolutely zero problems rendering 10 times as many objects as you guys are throwing in there. The problem instead seem to be that there's some kind of bottleneck on the CPU level when displaying cities. Perhaps all these items that you're trying to display for some reason are being parsed by the CPU first before being passed to the GPU? I don't know.

It just seems wrong that on a game that claims to be easy to handle for older systems, you'll end up with 25 FPS (remember that some people here are havign 5 FPS atm). Unfortunately, it does start to look like an issue with the engine was coded which somehow produces this bottleneck. I hope I'm wrong because if I'm not, this will either be worked around with jury rigging such as the LOD above and never be really fixed.

I'm also very surprised you guys didn't pick it up in the beta. How could you miss this?

You know, that's a rather dangerous thing to state...

Anyway, something I'd personally like to see a lot of improvement in is the magic system; for instance I'd like to see more and more varied spells. Currently it feels like most of the spells are summons or re-skinned attacks. "Global enchantments" (as in MoM) would be nice...

I am in game dev myself (programming) and the work / support you guys are putting in to this is awesome.

Great stuff.

Agreed. There should be a way to make a magic-focused sovereign that should be able to do something every round other than a) using a melee weapon, using a bow, c) twiddling their thumbs.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be 0-cost spells though (though I like that idea). You could for instance also add "Wands" as a new weapon type, and have them do magical attacks (damage modified by Int instead of Str).

Because it wasn't an issue in the beta. Either it's something they brought in with the release code or it's a question of scaling. I went from perfect smoothness in the beta to grinding to a crawl in the pre-release. Though that's just about gone now with the patches.

I think you've put your finger on the sore spot there. If I'm some demigodling a wolf or a bandit shouldn't kick my ass, even when I'm unarmed at level one.

Also it should matter which kingdom/empire I play, get some unique units or techs or weapons or SOMETHING in there so I experience at least some difference. + 10% or + 10% tech just isn't enough. I found this a lack in GC too, it doesn't really matter what type of alien you pick, you're all going to end up with the same lasers and shields and shit.

There's a lot to love about elemental, I still think the idea (and the graphics, I love the graphics style) is awesome, but adressing these issues could make it even better!

But there would be a little side effect.

A 10 units stack vs a 1 unit stack = 10 * (1D10 vs 5)

A 10 units stack vs a 10 units stack = 10 * (1D10 vs 5)

It's the exact same roll ! The only advantage of a stack would then be the number of hit points. You should get an advantage to attack with more people.

A simple solution : an attacker that has more units than the defender would get a bonus in attack, unless the defender has the "heroic" ability (for instance dragons coudl get that, so 1000 peasants would get a really low chance to hit it)[/quote]

No, the advantage would also be getting to roll 10d10 in attack instead of 1d10, not to mention the fact that the increase HP will increase the longevity of the unit, making it easier to level. Which is powerful enough. Add in the flanking Wizard suggested and suddenly we have a viable tactical choice. Should I go for the squad or the single soldier? The squad is still by far the better unit but maybe I can take greater advantage of having several single man units for the same price?

I agree completely with Wizard, although maybe the different damage types over complicate a bit. But most of it is spot on in my book.

Tomas

Great job and good luck squashing those bugs.

One of the other major performaceboosters might be looking into the mousecursor. Using the hardware windows cursor surely improves speed drastically for me but it's not as pretty and intuitive as the ingame cursor. The ingame cursor is killing my scrollspeed so I hope you can fix that too.