Kalin

Reply to Pioneer costs... in WOM Mods Elemental Forums

@ Brainsucker: the AI adapts fairly well, they still play okay with modded values, but there are various problems depending on how you mod the values like I mentioned in my earlier post. Most of the issues arises from bad starting location rather than anything else (IE: if they aren't near a tech library and can't research the goldmine techs). But in most cases, those bad start location AI are pretty much doomed anyways. One thing of note is that if you make the pioneer take a long time to tr

Reply to Elemental Mod example requests in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Not sure if this is what you're asking for, but atm I'd like to see: 1) The ability to require certain buildings be present or not in a city to build another. For example, a building that can only be build near a palace, or one that cannot be build if a palace is present. Basically, a Building and a not version of that. 2) A tag that makes certain buildings undemolishable. The most obvious bein

Reply to [Discussion] Human I vs. AI - Risk tolerance, Math, and irrationality in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Wow that's some seriously long posts Jingseng, I practically forgot your first after the 2nd one. In anycase, I'll make some comments, which, might or might not respond to either posts: The AI in GalCiv2 didn't start the way everyone remembers of it now. There wasn't all that different "feel" or "strategy" for each race. It was, however, pretty brutal and gave first timers a hard time on normal, and managed to play the game decently. But as time went on, and players fig

Reply to Pioneer costs... in WOM Mods Elemental Forums

I also tried much higher values, and here's my experience so far: If you make materials anymore than 20, the AI won't build pioneers at all, this is apparently due to how the AI decides what units to build, it is based on material and metal cost, and the most "expensive" units will only cost 20 material/metal. This is actually an okay setup if you like to play on tiny maps, as it will end up being a battle of capital cities most of the time. At 20

Reply to [suggestion] Please give Sov/Champions HP on level-up in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

If you're talking about the basic settings in CoreAIDef.xml I've glanced through those (no major test runs with modded values yet though). It seems to control what the AI research, builds, their relations and some tactical combat priorities. I didn't find anything about monster hunting, or how to influence how they go about doing it to "train" their units, and to be honest I don't expect to. From what I can observe from my game experiences, the AI will just gather the closest available force

Reply to [suggestion] Please give Sov/Champions HP on level-up in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I've been playing with this idea with mods to give heroes (and sov) 3 and 5 points to use on level up. Then I use 1 or 2 points in Con for every level. This seems to mimic what you guys are suggesting. I've only done a couple of trial runs so far, however, from my experience, it is rather discouraging. First of all, there's still no reason to make a melee hero, defense is just too random, so if you roll low, you'll still die when hit by a orge (or w/e else endgame beast

Reply to [Gameplay - new] marry your children to your champions in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

This seems like a nice idea at first... but with the current game mechanics, all that would happen is that you'll get players marrying their sons to other factions (gaining free channeler daughters), and marrying their daughters off to champions for channeler grandchildren since giving away valuable channelers is rather silly. The whole system needs to be revamped, or it'll get abused to no end.

Reply to How bad/good are the bad/good traits Crual, Cowardly, Intimidating, Natural Leader? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

According to the data files: Intimidating gives -20 Morale to enemy morale, Cowardly gives +20 to enemy morale. Cruel gives -20 to your Morale, and Natural Leader gives +20 to your Morale

Reply to The Big Picture -- What Was Supposed To Make Elemental Special? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="74" id="2765649"] We tried a lot of different things and much of the issue was (and it's something that still plagues the game IMO) is a lack of feedback to the player when something happens. The way Dynasties are evolving towards is that when a sovereign dies, their kingdom (or empire) will go to the player who is married to the next in line for the kingdom.[/quote] While this might be a decent fix midgame, it is pretty point

Reply to Disabling AI spouses? in WOM Mods Elemental Forums

This doesn't put the AI on equal footing at all, the AI doesn't know how to find a spouse and marry them. So if you manage to disable the default spouse, all you would end up doing is disabling the entire thing for them, giving you a huge advantage in getting 4 free channelers, abeited rather late in the game. It would also disable your ability to hire their daughters for ... essentially free, and getting 4 more grand children for every boy you manage to produce. In those regards, the dynasty

Reply to Spamming Cities & Enchantments in War of Magic Elemental Forums

PS: a quick mod of the pioneer pack (requiring gold (200), material (50) as well as up the training time (+10 turns)) has helped immensely with city spam. I still can't believe it's so cheap and fast to train a new city... ~_~

Reply to optimal city placement in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Even if its completely legal, it's very abusable and feels really cheap, and thus FEELS like an exploit, especially since the AI doesn't do it. Even if you choose to, I don't recommend destroying your houses until you get to the highest level or unless you desperately need the food, because it takes turns to grow your city, and any turn that your city is sitting at max pop is a turn that could have been giving you those +40% and +50% bonus.

Reply to Let's talk about kumquat, and a few other things in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

I didn't mean to suggest that the tile system was part of the engine. Rather, I was simply trying to point out that they had the engine and pieces for it in place before Elemental went into development. To me, it would seem stranger to go out and use a new engine when you had one of your own (that you thought was ready). As for lighting, as someone with some experience with 3D rendering, I'm sure it could improve immersion and feel for a game. However, when it comes to

Reply to 1.08 slated for tuesday? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Do note that it's spell changes and tactical "tweaks". I think you're expecting too much if you think that will fix tactical combat, perhaps we can get a peak? Still, any improvement is welcomed. Looking forward to it.

Reply to optimal city placement in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Assuming no resource node influence (it's ideal to link cities to certain nodes to make use of the level up bonus), city placement depends on how much you plan to "grow" your cities, this usually have to do with how much food you have available and what side (Kingdom/Empire) you are playing. Let me give a quick example (the numbers are off my head and might not be 100%): A kingdom outpost can grow to a level 2 village with 1 hut (requiring 1 food), and to a level 3 town

Reply to Let's talk about kumquat, and a few other things in WOM Ideas Elemental Forums

Let's talk about Kumquat first. If I recall correctly, Kumquat was designed originally for another game, Society, an MMOG that was being developed and talked about since GC2 was released 4 years ago. If I recall correctly, the custom tile design was a major selling point (it was developed due to GC2's ship design popularity). Somewhere along the way, they decided that they could also use it to develop Elemental. I'm not 100% sure on the decisions behind it, but I assume it was because Society

Reply to The Big Picture -- What Was Supposed To Make Elemental Special? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="59" id="2764682"] Someone still has to adress the one point I made - that for AI succession likely won't be a big help, because of the nature of most 4X games. Once AI loses one sovereign, it is likely already in the process of being mopped up and it can't do anything against player's overwhelming army.[/quote] This is actually usually not the case at all. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Let me give an example (directly from my last

Reply to Really Strange Battle in War of Magic Elemental Forums

The initial Morale values depends on the size of the forces in question. In your example, the ogre had a much higher combat rating, so he got a big morale bonus to his base Morale of 50, while your archer got a negative. Most of the time morale doesn't matter too much, but every once in a while...

Reply to The Big Picture -- What Was Supposed To Make Elemental Special? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

No offense, but it's one thing to say that certain changes weren't well thought out or balanced, it's another to say that changing is bad. If you never try new things you'll never get any better. Sure, you'll end up short a lot of times, but if you're dedicated to fixing it like SD has been trying, it usually ends up okay. To be honest, new and improved graphics has never been the draw of TBS games (at least for me). If you really love MoM that much, there's really nothing stoppin

Reply to resource revealing techs in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Um... am I the only one who thinks that making resource spawnable using essence is a really bad idea? Just for example, say you choose your sovereign with 15 essence, hire 3 champions, imbue all of them, then level them once or twice and put all the points in essence. Now you have 4 people capable of spawning 2 of any resource that you want. Now say you put all 8 of those goldmine in one city and build all the gold resources and level the city with gildar bonus... what's to stop you from buyi

Reply to Familiar vs. Spy in War of Magic Elemental Forums

The Vigilant Minion's Arcane Doom has been discussed a lot already, and SD has said that they will be looking at it, but haven't stated anything specifically because they are planning to overhaul the magic system in general. Still, it's pretty clear that they will be nerfed in one way or another... ... having said that, I went through the files and apparently the Imp Familiar is suppose to evolve into a much stronger version if you manage to level him to level 30, just

Reply to What's the point of balancing weapons when ... in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Guys, I'm pretty sure Brad is saying that the weapon balancing pass they are doing is so that he can re-prioritize what the AI research and builds, and thus makes for a better AI overall. You might not like the simplistic 1 dice rolls, but at least it's fair (you and the AI uses the same system). It's more important right now to make the AI realize that they should not be wasting all their resources building squads of soldiers armed with war staffs or boar spears, especially when a couple of

Reply to Combat Speed Must Die in War of Magic Elemental Forums

While I agree that Combat Speed would be better served by calling it Action Points, I don't think it necessarily needs to "die". There are many tweaks that I think could make it better and more interesting, but it doesn't need to go away completely, because a lot of what has been suggested can be done with the current system with some base modifications. Changing it completely would probably do more harm than good since you would have to rebalance an entire new system. Let me give some exampl

Reply to The Big Picture -- What Was Supposed To Make Elemental Special? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="b0rsuk" reply="15" id="2761339"] quoting post -Dynasties. Dynasties is a cool idea, but they never intended it to allow succession upon a Sov's death. Many argued for this option, but it was emphatically rejected. So, this wasn't promised (and the non-promise was successfully delivered in release), but it could be a feature that offers a promise of how Elemental separates itself from many other games. Doing so would require devs to embrace th

Reply to "Monster Economy" ruins economy balance - multiple balanced ways to earn money preferable? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Um... just wanted to point this out, but to fix this, set the "world" level difficult to easy, while cranking up the AI difficulty in game setup. If you do that the mobs that spawns aren't very powerful, so they won't drop tons of Gildar. Just saying...