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[nenjin]

What I don't get is that for everyone who actually likes the game, they seem unable to explain why that is, in a logical way.  They say stuff like, "I played it for 3 hours last night and I had fun", but I haven't seen anyone actually convince me of how it is fun.

Here's why I've found it fun.

Watching cities grow, the rings of influence expanding to take in more resources, starting caravan routes, combined with the growing monster threat, the exploration and questing, those all blend pretty nicely. Add in new items and techs, creating custom units and building up an army and you have a fairly decent 4x game already.

Notice I didn't mention magic there? That's what's missing. Add in some fairly wonky mechanics balance, which undercuts tactical battles, and you're left with two gaping holes in game play. Add in the bugs, the slowness, the crashes, and you get about 33% of fun, 33% gaping void and 33% problems. Which equals an unsatisfied gamer.

Still, when everything is flowing and you're in the process of expanding, I found myself to be having at least as much fun as MoM...again, sans the magic.

[forsaken1111]

I agree, the magic system just isn't as elegant as the rest of the game. I see what they're going for, and they're pretty close, but its not quite there yet.

Also, the early rewards for 'questing' are so useless as to be not worth the time.

[nenjin]

Yeah, because questing for....junk material and 5 bits of metal really feels epic. That those make up at least half of all notable locations, and you can start ignoring all those "left crates/belongings/caravan ruins."

[Sowelu]

My first real voyage into learning SDL (one of the early game libraries for DOS) was in trying to make a MoM clone.  Of course I only got as far as the overworld map, I was pretty young at the time.  But...seriously, why doesn't someone just make a ZDoom style clone?  Read in the original resource files, require an actual copy of Master of Magic to run, but do it with a totally re-written new engine?  Hell, use whatever new game mechanics you want, but build it closer to the original, actually GOOD game.

And if you end up ripping off the small cool things from Elemental, then okay, that's cool too...

[Fikes]

I think the game is fun, even though I am unhappy with it.

First of all, it is a TBS. It gets points right of the bat because of this. Extra points since there is tactical combat. When was the last time we had a "big budget" TBS released? HoMM5 or Civ4? It is an unused genre I like.

You get to design your units. I really enjoy this feature. I don't care as much about how they look or what their quotes are, but getting to decide that I want to invest in an axe for that extra damage is nice.

I also actually enjoy the research system, particularly the part for adventuring. It allows the area around you to become more dangerous and keep pace with your advancing society, while offering benifits as well.

Provides a decent, though not great, sense of exploration. I've always enjoyed the early game of HoMM or Civ where you are just trying to figure out what is around you.

I like the resource system better than Civ. Instead of just getting horses and building as many horse archers as you want, in EWOM they are consumed when you build a unit.

A game doesn’t have to “break the mold” or create some new amazing feature to be fun. It just has to provide you with whatever desire you have. I desire an epic TBS. The game provides that.

I think overall, this game is only suffering from 3 problems.

#1. Over promised. Everyone had expectations of how great the game was going to be because Stardock told us how great the game was going to be. Even right up until launch you had the CEO playing the game and being all smiles.

#2. We got used to our systems. Civ/MOO mechanics have worked pretty much the same since the 90s. People are producing food, production or science. Now we have food, but it is produced and consumed differently. Buildings do all the work, what is population good for? This was one of my major road blocks with GalCiv.
When Civ 1 came out, I had no idea what was going on. I played it for 30 hours before I even figured out how to delegate what my workers did. But I am sure we all fought through it.

Today we are spoiled. The system isn’t obvious and we don’t want to learn it. It is different. None of the systems really make any sense. Turn based games are a complete abstraction of reality to begin with.  You don’t take turns swinging at eachother!

I agree that the food/housing system is goofy, but I don’t think it is that much goofier than the Civ system. Having 10,999,999 people is way less effective than 11,000,000. The only thing it takes to grow is food and health? Having mines allows you to build things faster? This is madness!

#2 TL:DR systems in EWOM are no more goofy than any other TBS, we just A) aren’t taught them and B) to spoiled to try and learn them
#3.  Bad programming. Most obvious one here. The game was released too early and the company had too much faith in it. That is obvious. But beyond that, how the hell did they manage to break the game on the Win7 ATI combo? No beta testers had this configuration? Why does the game run like garbage on a middle of the road system? How many computer resources do you have to waste to lose frame rate in a turn based game? Are you using CPU power to draw the map or something?

Anyways, those are the 3 problems. #1 and #2 we should just deal with, because those can allow you to ruin a good game for yourself. A Dwarf Fortress with half the promised features and no tutorial is still a very good game.
#3 really pisses me off.

[Sowelu]

Isn't there, like, a manual somewhere that people can read instead of complaining about the lack of tutorial?

Just saying...

[Tilla]

Ugh, another Out of Memory crash :< I'm on 1.05 and updated my ATI drivers last night. This is shit.

[alway]

What I don't get is that for everyone who actually likes the game, they seem unable to explain why that is, in a logical way.  They say stuff like, "I played it for 3 hours last night and I had fun", but I haven't seen anyone actually convince me of how it is fun.

I'm currently running around the countryside with a young dragon, 2 channelers (the king and his daughter) and summoned elementals of fire, water, earth, and air. That in and of itself is pretty fun. However, what I find most fun is that the entire game, especially on large maps, seems to be focused primarily around building up an empire out of the wilderness. In games like Civ4, barbarians and the like will really be very little problem as long as you keep your settlements defended with one unit; it doesn't even have to be an up to date unit to suffice in most cases. Whereas in Elemental, your outlieing cities may be getting harrassed by three or four pack drakes who are as powerful as your main army. In addition to just making it greener, your areas of influence stop these spawns; you end up with your older, larger, and more mature cities being safe from these sort of creatures, while your outlieing cities have nasties all over the place. Thus you have a real incentive to actually civilize the map, instead of merely constructing a few small, isolated colonies around important resources.

Magic is lackluster early on. I can't say for certain about endgame though, as I am just starting to get that stuff. The biggest problem I see with magic thus far is the rate at which you get spells. I've got a pretty decent kingdom going, but yet it takes nearly 100 turns to get some of the good stuff. Compare that to 5 turns for research, and you get the idea. I will almost certainly spend some time in the spell editor to add more in that way to my game.

As for performance, I actually play it zoomed out to the cloth map level, since as far as movement speed is concerned, it is almost like pressing space bar in E:TW due to skipping movement animations. It is nice and fast there. But ya, the rendering code for the 3D seems a bit borked... Best I can figure is the buildings and units may not have enough lower-rez LOD models for playing just at the boundary of zoomed out to cloth map and zoomed in to 3D view.

[nenjin]

The kicker about that is it's totally random. Get two arcane libraries and you blast through the early spell research. It's a plus and a minus, especially when people treat their game as the model for how it plays every time.

I find you can undercut adventuring and the monster threat by just not researching that stuff until you're ready. The AI, as far as I can see, doesn't visit notable locations. So there's no real hurry, other than them expanding over an area you want to explore, and you having to sign a treaty or go to war to explore there. But none of the locations are so important, that I've seen, that they warrant that.

Isn't there, like, a manual somewhere that people can read instead of complaining about the lack of tutorial?

Just saying...

Normally I'm a RTFM manual kind of guy, but with a Stardock 4x game, and the age of tool tips, I figured I could figure it out for myself this time. The tool tips are incomplete though, and the language is often murky (and not properly edited.) From what people have said, the manual, both in game and out, isn't much better.

While normally I wouldn't care about that, because this is the age of the Internet where SMRT people figure things out for themselves, it adds a lot to the sense that they just fucking flew through this release. The lack of a tutorial exposes the abruptness and triviality of the early campaign. People aren't calling so much for a hand held walkthrough of the game, as they are just some basic consideration for getting people INTO the game that doesn't make them see it for the strung-together set of triggers and dialog boxes that it is.

[alway]

I find you can undercut adventuring and the monster threat by just not researching that stuff until you're ready. The AI, as far as I can see, doesn't visit notable locations. So there's no real hurry, other than them expanding over an area you want to explore, and you having to sign a treaty or go to war to explore there. But none of the locations are so important, that I've seen, that they warrant that.

From what I've seen, the monsters will actually increase in strength over time (may or may not be related to the AI researching adventuring techs), so they will still get stronger, just not as quickly.

fakeedit: Oh hey, found Elementium! It was in a level 4 dungeon, got 8 of them. So apparently that is how you get it.

[Fikes]

Isn't there, like, a manual somewhere that people can read instead of complaining about the lack of tutorial?

Just saying...

I fired up the game and wanted to get married. Couldn't figure out where the button was. I opened the manual. Here is the copy paste from said manual.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

  Getting Married
    Getting married is not as easy as one might expect for the sovereign of a Kingdom 
or Empire. This is because, at the start, your faction is not very impressive.
  On the Kingdom Status screen, players can view their current reputation.
    The potential spouses that are likely to provide the most powerful offspring will
require higher reputations than those who are less picky, with more middling 
abilities for future children.

I fucking know it is possible, but how do you do it?

And magic, how do I regen mana? What about the spells contained in a spell book? Quickly friends, to the manual!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Depending on their allegiance, players build up life or death mana that can be used,in
conjunction with the elemental shards that they control (earth, air, fire and water) to cast
spells. What spells they know depends on what books of magic they have along with which
of the spells in those books they have learned. Spells require mana, as well as control of a
certain number of different types of shards.

The manual is shit, worthless. This is true of most games. I never opened my civ4 manual, there was the civopedia for those questions.  EWOM has no such information.

Also another patch is out. 1.05.16 or something.

[Nilocy]

How do I increase my notable area level?

[alway]

Huh. Out of memory crash.

On another note, elementium seems to be somewhat common for level 5, and uncommon in level 4 loot stashes. With my 40 mana champion, I went on a goods collecting spree with teleportation after getting lvl 5 stashes. It seems to be mostly elementium in quantities of 8 or 16 or books which raise intel, wisdom, or base attack.

Got my dragon from a quest; be sure to get a dragon, even if only the young ones. They seem to be the only ones with decent offensive magic spells. In particular, the dragon's inferno spell which seems to deal 100% of their attack damage 100% of the time at any range for only 3 mana. The young ones have about 36 attack, while the adult one has 96. Definately very helpful when you happen to run accross a solo 2200 combat level ogre. The adult dragon 1 shotted it and gave the army it was in a total of about 20-30 levels, including 7 levels to the army's 2 channelers.

[Heavenfall]

Alrighty... that would explain why I never found any elementium... by the way, the ATI update tonight ( 10.8 ) fixed the regular memory leak crash I had almost precisely one hour into every game. So yay.

So there's definitely some synergy across the research trees there.

Edit: Also, it seems like offspring from the dynasty have some in-combat mana-regen if their parents were casters. I got a few with +1 mana per combat turn, and I gained a girl with +2 per turn through a marriage with another faction. Maybe you can breed for that. I also noticed when I married a researcher that some of my kids ended up with the research bonus as well.

[nenjin]

Your offspring are intended to turn into super heroes, so I think they just get good stats and special abilities.

As for mana regen, it's based on Essence. The tool tip says so. Of course the only reason I know that is because someone prioritized the stat tool tips over others.

And the ATi site must be getting hammered, because I can't connect. Totally unrelated to Elemental, my card has some outstanding issues I hope this fixes. But I doubt it will.