Frogboy

My main problem:

- The bugs and glitches. It really hurts immersion if borders do not update or spells/abilities don't work as described.

Other issues:

- City building has almost no impact. I love city building, but apart from the Research produced, most other variables don't matter much.

- Movement is a Pita. You often lose movement because of how stacks work and by midgame, all roads are blocked by 'friendly' units. Pathfinding still does not work.

Even with the weapon abilities it basically boils down to slightly different ways to do damage. It's like lasers or phasers in a space 4x, one might be flat damage, once might pierce armor a little, whatever, it's still the tiniest fraction of ship customization in the games that do it right.

I guess to be constructive I'll expand on what I think is wrong exactly. For starters, customization is so interesting and works so well in the space games because most of the options take up the same space, putting one thing on a ship means less room for everything else. You can make a heavily armored ship, but it will be slow and won't do much damage. In Elemental, you put the best armor, the best weapon, and a mount, on almost every unit. The only reason not to is if you want to quickly mass produce something cheaper. There is (or was, I don't even remember right now, it keeps changing) some small drawback for using heavier armor, but it's not balanced in a way that matters, it's always better to have the strongest armor. There could be some sort of training cost limit that goes up with tech levels, similar to how weight used to work but just a hard cap instead of penalties, IE if you want to use the best armor you have to give up a mount and use a cheap weapon.

Second, there's virtually no utility options. The equivalent of support ships, like ammo supply ships, repair ships, shield boosting ships, carriers, etc. We could have units designed to do nothing but heal or buff other units in their stack, summon other units, or even units that could field train more units anywhere on the map. But then you should be able to make hybrids, units that can attack and buff, or moderately armored healers, but not as well as units designed just for those roles. There's a few dinky traits in the game, like shield wall, and there might be one that increases stack regen unless that was removed, but they don't even come close.

I can't tell you how much time I've spent just designing ships/stations in games like Star Ruler or StarDrive, ships that do exactly what I want, ships that seem like genius designs on my part (but probably aren't). That's what a custom unit system should be. Otherwise don't bother, and it looks like they are just ditching it for the next Elemental game so I guess that's for the best.

Changes I'd like to see:

1- In a game with 6 AI players (on Large or Huge map), the AI is too passive.
  - the AI makes threats, but rarely makes an attack
  - AI is too passive; it is mostly the human player who has to initiate war
  - may be different with a 2-player game vs a 7-player game
 
2- end game not challenging
  - once you get a lead, the AI factions realizes that you are too powerful to challenge
  - the remaining AI factions don't team up against stronger player to bring them down
    - aligned factions could align against player of a different faction
  - it becomes easy as a player to pick them off one by one at your leisure
    
3- tech tree is pretty much the same for all factions
  - most games, it is possible to research pretty much everything..
  - a larger tree, where it not possible to research more than 1/2 the tree would make decisions meaningful,   
    and add more replay value
 
4- More faction-specific buildings?
  - one faction-specific building at each level (1 through 5) would make things different
  - buildings are too similar now
 
5- end-game quests always the same
  - can these be more random / randomized?
  - or have a larger set where some aren't always present?
  - the end game is too predictable once you've done the quests
 
6- if playing a Large map with many opponents, conquering every city becomes a hassle
  - if you defeat opponents, and don't want to raze their cities, the unrest gets out of hand (esp on a large map)...
    ...and there is not much to do about it.  It is hard to build an empire on a large map
  - Can a different mechanism be used to model unrest?  
  - More options to control unrest?
 
7- fire magic seems to be stronger than other types
  - I find myself recruiting fire mages, getting fireball, and then winning tactical battles easily
  - can other magic types be given more battlefield oomph?  more spells?
 
 

I see what you mean here, the unit needed to take the "Chain Mail" or "Plate Mail" traits to use those armours although to be fair that does mean you have to use a trait slot for this.

I was actually thinking the traits and some of the unique traits they added for certain races like the wraiths made it more interesting, but visually units can end up looking very similar with all the same armour and weapons as you say.

I agree though very strongly with what you say about them needing to balance things better so that you have to make more choices here and those design more meaningfuly different units.

I also agree adding more buff/debuff and other special abilities that maybe also limit what equipment they can use would be good.

I still enjoy making custom units but it's not really reaching it's full potential at the moment.

N/A

I too am not a fan of the hex-grid. One of the many reasons I dropped Civ 5 and went back to Civ 4.

Another problem is finding specific heroes when my kingdom has grown large. If a hero was defeated or left in a city I have to hunt through each city to find them again.

I haven't played too much, but these are my main concerns about the game:

1) Lack of diversity:

Everything feels the same. I do not find myself trying new things, because either I have no reason (see below) or because it's not different.

The one main difference between games are if your sovereign is a caster or a melee. Caster is for endgame where you can throw mana around, melee is for early game. Beyond choosing that, I play my race and tech tree the same way, pretty much ignoring the traits I picked for my race (I play custom usually) etc.

I wish for something more like MoM (insecticide patched) where I have a dozen of options to try to beat the game when it's on 'impossible' difficulty. The patched game is extremely hard, and you have to use a 'broken' build to beat it. Some builds are too slow, while others are not powerful enough. I have found 4 builds that managed to win it, and there are probably more.

Fallen Enchantress (and most other games when I compare them to MoM and MoO2, including the civs), as it is now, is really bland compared to a game from 95- we don't have as many spells, the races are nearly the same and there is not nearly as much versatility.

2) Lack of AI:

If I play the game on high difficulty, I simply reach a point where the computer sends wave after wave of magicians till I'm down. Due to the very low rate of experience heroes get from destroying armies, it means that he overwhelms me at some point.

If I play on "normal" difficulty, I am simply cleaning my zones till I feel bored, build a stack of doom and start destroying the AI till I feel that "GG I won" and go away.

The second option happens because I expanded a lot faster than the AI, cleaned the zone faster and got my hero to a higher level (which in turn means I can do this all over again and snowball).

note- I feel about the same option regarding civ4, civ5 and AoW3.

3) Game progression:

You start with a city, research techs and expand. All is fun and well, but the techs are boring. Researching better weapons just means that "yay my units grew stronger", in a very linear way. There is no real thought into it.

I expected at least a tradeoff that was supposed to be in the old Elemental that "I got this new shiny armor, but it weighs so much I have to give up on my giant sword. What to do?", or "Do I have 10 turns to build this unit, or should I build a few weaker ones?". The first is not an issue anymore beside choosing the weapon, and the second has one answer- yes. That is because the units in the game come in tiers. Units in different tiers can't do anything to units in higher tier, due to a much higher defense, much higher offense and a lot more health.

In civ and AoW, deciding to take 3 bad units for the price of 1 big unit could be a serious decision, if I actually believed that they will be able to kill it and survive in some form (in civ many of them will die, in aow a few will die, in mom a few might die depending on the gap in power). I do not find I believe in this kind of tactic in FE due to cost of the death of units, amount of units it's possible to bring to battle, and the gap in power.

For a game that does unit customization right, I would go for Starsector (previously Starfarer) and maybe the first Sword of the Stars.

Oh and Lightning Bolt is grossly overpowered. For 19 mana you can scythe through entire armies. Makes for very boring combat, just get two casters with lighting bolts and force the enemy to fight in a checkered pattern and its game over.

It seems lot of players are using this thread to air long held grievances.

Here are some of mine:

Balance: Trained troops are not balanced with magic or monsters. They scale so much monsters are a joke after boar spears. Some of them have one hit kill spells or super high damage but that just leads to everything becoming a glass cannon late game. Trained troops just scale with larger group sizes and better equipment while monsters and spells don't. You can easily quadruple the hp alone of trained units. So many spells, summons, and monsters are only balanced for an incredibly small portion of the game. Also whats with such low max army sizes. It just forces you to use all elite units. I would remove upgrading group size period, what does it add to the game? At least boost the starting size to 5 so each additional unit isn't such a huge improvement. Yes I know that would require a complete game rebalance but at least it wouldn't require any coding. The ability to spawn and summon units at your highest group size would also be nice.

Unit Design and Combat: As others have said it's not done very well. Not enough traits, limits, or real differences between equipment. See my Blood & Mana mod for some racial traits. We just plain need more traits and items that grant abilities and real noticeable differences between units that allow them to fill different roles. A stronger negative relationship between attack and defense would also help. Right now you just build the strongest unit possible and throw them in waves. Defenders are only real specialized melee unit and the AI has no idea how to use them. Your supposed to lead with your high armor units so they absorb the first blows, not charge in with all your low armor units first.

Map:  You use stamps so why is their so little so look at in this game? This game desperately needs some props thrown in liven up maps and give areas distinct feels. Sprinkle rock formations, ruins, beaches, and whatever across the maps. Sea cliffs in particular are practically disturbing in that they all look so alike I'm half convinced Elemental takes place in some weird demented nightmare world. Throw some rocks and doodads into the ocean please!

Vestigial Remnants: It's really annoying seeing so much stuff that has been removed or ignored remain in the game in some weird unholy half life. Caravans are a prime example of this. They serve no real purpose except maybe scouting anymore so remove them.

One thing that I really don't like is the inability to edit a custom sovereign/race (at least not easily). One of my favorite parts of any game that offers custom races is to tweak them to game to game.