So continuing from yesterday. Magic.
There are few issues here. To quote hoverdog:
- magic is the biggest offender. it's bland, uninteresting, imbalanced, broken.
Wouldn't use such strong words myself but it is a bit underwhelming especially compared to ridiculous stuff you could do in MoM. Now MoM is quoted again and again as golden standard but it sure isn't ideal, if anything it's always a trade off between depth of the system and balance, MoM is simply on depth and "cool factor" end of scale (example: invisible flying warships anyone? Cool but also broken as fuck). Honestly I can't blame anyone for not going MoM route, balancing such system is pretty much impossible, at most you can only hope to limit completely game breaking combinations. Another thing is AI...
Stardock is simply going practical route with their games, GalCiv 2 is pretty much opposite of what MoM is, side effect is that well it's pretty much a spreadsheet game, hell it doesn't even pretend it's something else with imaginative technologies like Laser 2 that is better than Laser 1 I guess.
But wait a minute, if Elemental isn't as quite far on "cool factor" scale then why is it so unbalanced anyway? Only thing with any depth at all in MoM is magic system itself, almost everything else is
simplified civ clone (which IMHO is great design). Elemental is suffering from feature overload, things like unit designer, "rpg system" for heroes (and cities I guess
) make it that much harder to balance it as whole. TBH Brad and team are actually doing great job with it salvaging game out of WoM. Of course it's not all sunshine and flowers since they also are responsible for feature overload in the first place. So my point is that I don't really expect it to be MoM clone at this point because well to do that you pretty much would have to start from scratch, Elemental is too different.
By coincidence:
We have a fantasy and space strategy game in development (besides the fe expansion).
am I right or am I right Brad?
So .. onto my issues with magic system in FE.
Magic spells tied to skill level of characters. It's not necessarily bad BUT it does make every (for example) fire mage pretty damn identical, I feel this stuff should be moved to tech tree and quests. However another issue comes up, there isn't that many spells to go around so we would end up with "pretty damn identical" mages anyway...
Next are the magic nodes (they are called shards I think?). When it comes to balance in magic system these are THE problem. It's too damn random, power of spells should be more dependent on character skill rather than these. Sure character skills do matter (a lot) but if you roll fire mage and you don't find single fire node you are fucked. Just 2 fire nodes would make at least some of your spells about 2 times more powerful (!). Of course I picked pretty extreme example but they scale too much. One way is to remake these into generic mana vaults or whatever, another is to give all players ability to change shards into desired type (one faction I think could convert shards into death shards which was OP as hell) and make spells scale less with them (so it's not so broken). As it is this system can't be balanced since it relies too much on random map generator.
Last issue I have is with magic equipment. What's the point of these various burning axes in tech tree? I suspect I know why it was made this way, but seriously? We're talking magic here not ford model t. What if I wanted burning spear? Can't have that? Seriously these need to be enchantments you apply on weapons (placing bunch of particle emitters in correct places on weapon models shouldn't be that much work, balance wise they shouldn't be problem either, you already have various rings and gizmos adding elemental damage). Yes I know we already have unit enchantment spells but I also know that we already have axes and armor in other tech tree.
. Lack of diversity is tricky one. Actual problem I think lies with unit designing. Without it you could just come up with bunch of different units, much less work and better effect to boot (doesn't mean idea of unit designer is bad, I like it a lot actually). As it is (or was, remember I didn't play more recent versions) because of unit designer everyone's unit's are the same, sure a little difference in gear here or there but fundamentally they are identical .
) other than typical dudes with swords you also have some unique units like wyverns, stag beetles or steam cannons, concept with hiring neutrals from camps is really good one but it seriously needs to be fleshed out, would also be good idea to tie it to quest system (meaning it's not just another resource node on the map like iron or something) maybe even make minor neutral kingdoms out of them, but that's not all, there are also race wide perks, like lizardmen can traverse water without ships, every dark elf has magic attack, trolls regenerate, draconians have fire breath etc. yes there are racial perks in elemental too but they aren't as varied. Trogs (or whatever they were called) can wear heavier equipment but does that make them unique? Everyone can do that with few strength related perks from unit designer, sure costs a bit but the point is all trogs have going for them is that they can put out heavy units faster (if I remember right..). They aren't fundamentally different. It's sort of +1 here +1 there bonus. IMHO you should get rid of unit designer perks and focus on making factions unique instead, these perks just get in the way and help to homogenize everything. You can give your units heavy armor but also heavy weapon, you don't have to balance between defense/offense since extra carry weight perks got you covered. Also would help with a bit more variety on battlefield since you'd probably want to mix some different units to do different things on battlefield. Make player choose between alternatives, do I want heavy armor or would I rather take 2 hander? This should go beyond rock paper scissors with armors and damage types.
