Frogboy: How are you going to deal with "equipment" combinations that simply don't work, either with the unit or with other pieces of equipement? To pick an example to demonstrate my question, what if a player wants to pick a summoned demon for a paladin to ride. A Paladin wouldn't necessarily be compatible with every type of mount the game might offer out of the box or indeed player created mounts.

Or what if the player wants to give a magic item or book a golum or a tamed beast? A tamed beast could not wear a magic ring, a golum cannot read a spell. You get the picture (I hope).

To chose a less unlikely combo, what if a player wants to equip his paladin with a two handed sword and a shield. Unless you find and buy off a friendly settlement of 3 armed men, that ain't going to work. Are there going to be very specific classes of "equipment" that you can use and any player customised items must be designated with a certain classification?

Another question, that kinda ties in: How are you going to deal with animations of customised units? Will each piece of equipment have to adhere to a size constrant to prevent swords clipping through shoulders or shields chomping into the neck of the riders mount?

I love the sound of this system, it just seems like alot of conflicts could occur with so many probable variables in play.

Thanks!

What about magic? Will we be able to use magic in unit creation?

And to second SpoonGod's question, will we be able to use training (or magic, or enchanted equipment, even) to give units special abilities? Like ambushing, night-fighting, some sort of special attack, formations, etc? That would make training much more interesting. Also, even if the answer is no (please don't say the answer is no ), it seems like training would add attack/defense more than HP.

I should have asked here before I posted in the mount section.

Are mounts going to just be extensions of the unit, a horse adds speed and some attack bonus, maybe a charge bonus with lance...   bear adds extra maul attack and massive toughness and damage bonus....  sky shark adds a tone of speed and an extra high damage attack.  Add barding to mount for + defense to the unit

or are mounts going to opperate as their own sub-unit:  they have their own hit points, attack, and defense, + defence if you add barding, + attack if you ... uh... coat their teeth in chrome?, extra HP if you breed them with special hormones.   They can be killed their own.

pigeonx2:    Spells?   I imagine that you could add spell training to a unit pretty easily.   

(I can see 'healing spells' being an area I train almost all my units)

Wow! I love that unit creator screen! It matches the hand drawn look of the zoomed out map

"Another question, that kinda ties in: How are you going to deal with animations of customised units? Will each piece of equipment have to adhere to a size constrant to prevent swords clipping through shoulders or shields chomping into the neck of the riders mount?"
Here is how it will be handled: https://forums.elementalgame.com/332712

And please let there be more stats to units than hp defense and attack... If those are the only stats we would be sad

A couple of thoughts:

- The diagram is kind of wrong, isn't it?  Training takes 5 turns, but those 5 turns seem to be able to occur sequentially with the equipment acquisition.  So, essentially all of those boxes should be on the same vertical line, and the max is what determines the time to create the unit.

- I fear this system is not going to create interesting combinations.  It is never in your interest to create a highly trained unit with little equipment, for example, or a highly equiped unit with little training.  Since equipment creation is done sequentially to training.  Unless the gold cost of the equipment is the issue, maybe.  Not sure whether the same comparison applies between swords/helmets as well.  There, I would assume that different cities would be making the different items.

- This system is actually VERY similar to what was done with military units in Settlers.  Strategic choices could be created by locating your resource creating nodes (blacksmiths who create the swords) closer to your resource using nodes (unit creators).  But is it too fiddly to have the player move those resources himself?  I think having each city have a storehouse, and having AI controlled trader units to move those resources between cities that need them.  Could be very interesting.  

- Look at the CivRev model for road creation.  One unique road between cities built without workers.  This road would provide unique trade route for trader caravans.  I would propose that you should consider being able to fortify/attack those roads just as you would your cities.

- Why are we requesting 10 units?  Are we then waiting until all 10 are complete to get any?  Can we request 1 unit at a time?

- Perhaps all "Beasts" can be mounts?

Yeah, you're right. Either the training should be on the same vertical column as the equipment, or the total time required should be 14 turns, not 9. 14 would kind of make sense really (would be odd to complete training without having all the equipment ready until after training is over). 

I don't understand what you're saying here? Could you clarify?

Yeah I think units production should be on an individual basis. If you request 100 Paladins (and want 5 days of training), then if you have enough equipment for 24 on-hand, and the rest will slowly trickle in over the next 31 turns, then you should produce 24 Paladins in 5 days, with the rest slowly trickling in as the equipment becomes available. 

Somehow I doubt that. If you look in the concept art there are plenty of beasts that don't look like they're cut out for holding human riders... One example would be the fox-looking beast. Foxes are usually pretty small, I wouldn't dare to imagine them supporting human riders. Likewise, an alligator-rider would be awkward at best. Beasts should at least have to satisfy size requirements in order to be used as mounts. 

First off, hello everyone.

I like the fact that you can design your own units. That is a very, very good mini-game for a turn based strategy game to include, in my opinion.

I like the thought of having units cost components rather than some unified, fungible resource like gold or credits. It was certainly cool in "Lords of the Realm 2"; it would be cool here as well.

I like the concept of having local amounts of resources/components rather than a universally accessible stockpile that all of your cities tap into. That is a rarely used mechanic that would help Elemental to distinguish itself from other turn-based strategy games.

However, I am concerned about the micro-management (MM) issues that could be introduced when you combine all three game mechanics.

Most games that include combat have a "build a unit" mini-game. In fact, the build-a-unit mini-game is often one of the central mini-games in strategy games. In Homeworld you needed enough resources, time and the requisite tech to build a unit. Then, you click a button, your mothership consumes the resources, spends time building and finally the unit pops out; neither the time nor the cost element changes in regard to circumstances. In Civilization you needed the requisite building, the requisite tech and a variable amount of time to build the unit. Units didn't cost resources unless you wanted to hurry along their production by sacrificing money or city population (enslaved to rush-build). Now let's talk about Elemental...

There are three questions I need to ask when I am going to decide where to build a unit:
1) How much will that unit cost at location X?
2) How long will it take that unit to be built at location X?
3) How useful will the unit be at location X?

The answer to 1 is, as far as we know, fixed. A "paladin" (as defined in the original post) costs one sword, one set of armor, one shield and one helmet. That cost does not vary from city to city... as far as we know. This could vary but no mechanics for that have been introduced.

The answer to 3 is game-context specific and is not of concern here; I mention it only for the sake of completeness.

This game is being deliberately designed so that the answer to 2 will vary from city to city depending on, among other things, the availability of components. It looks like there are three or more stages to creating a unit: collecting the raw materials (weapons, armor, mounts, etc) into one location, assembling those raw materials into a unit and letting that unit sit around in the queue improving its stats, a.k.a. training. What is required to get all the necessary components (10 swords, sets of armor, shields and helmets) to city X so I can build ten paladins there? We don't know but I want to call attention to this because it's ambitious.

What I am worried about here is the game becoming too MM intensive. If I have to track how long it'll take to get swords, armor, shields and helmets to my city then I am essentially playing four additional mini-games just to complete the "build a unit" mini-game for one particular unit. Do I first have to manage my iron mining and iron distribution to ensure I have adequate sword production to even consider training paladins? How automated will resource management be? How many steps do I really have to consider if I want to build 10 paladins? That's a number that can quickly become too large.

Or not. Turn based games have done all sorts of stuff to streamline; keeping the strategic depth that having addition steps creates while introducing game mechanics that lessen the amount of attention required by the player.

In short, I like the ideas presented by Brad and company, I just want to express my concerns about the challenges surrounding those design decisions.

I'm not sure. It seems fiddly, like I'd have to go in an update my builds every time I researched something. That's one thing that was annoying in GalCiv II was every time I researched a better +x weapon I had to go update all my ship designs. The automated ship designer didn't work because it only focused on one strategy. I wanted the best missile ship, the best laser ship, etc as separate designs. Any time I got a better version of one of those I had to go update my designs for all any design that didn't fall under the auto-designer.

I guess I don't want to be going into the design screen every single time I get a new weapon or armor. I want to be able to have at least a few "best of class" templates, like "max armor", "max speed", "max weapon", "max magic", etc that automatically keep up with the latest technology changes. It's when I have some sort of interesting variant unit that I want to go into the design screen (hmm, I need lightly armored footmen so that pegasi can fly them around, but with strong weapons).

I would find a way to encourage people to not design units during their turn.  Like in a multiplayer game, when they have hit end turn and are waiting for other players, have it appear as some sort of 'quick link' option to the things that can be done off turn.   Other things I imagine that would be off turn includes diplomacy, building queues, and such, but designing units might take time.

also, a 'quick save' option for designing units so that you can pause your work and do your turn when its your turn again.

Brad addresses that issue in the post below. Equipment will automatically upgrade to whatever is best in it's category.

I went back and re-read Brad's post on the intended economics for EWoM. Each unit costs a certain variety of manufactured resources (swords, armor, etc.), some amount of your cities population (so one "paladin" might represent one dude in armor or a squad of ten; regardless, you are losing citizens every time your expand your military), and some amount of time for training the unit (improving it's stats).

As far as the actual interface, it seems fine. What I am really curious about is how queueing up multiple units will work.

Now, let's say we want to build 3 paladins (as defined above; 1 sword, 1 shield, 1 armor, 1 helmet and 5 turns of training) at City X and I have 3 swords, 3 shields, 2 sets of armor and 1 helmet in stock. That first paladin will be completed with no delays (presumably after 5 turns of training) but the second and third paladin will need to wait on a shipment of armor and helmets. It would be nice if the queue reflected the delays for the second and third paladin at the time that I queued all of them. Since caravans can be interrupted, the creation time indicated would only be an estimate if shipping resources were involved.

Now, let's explore having multiple unit types queued up in a city. Say we are wanting to build 6 paladins and 4 archers (1 bow, 1 armor, 3 turns of training) at City X. City X has 6 swords, 4 shields, 10 sets of armor, 4 bows and 6 helmets.

If I queue up the the 6 paladins first, followed by the archers and the queue is handled in a strict FIFO (first in, first out) order then I will have to wait on extra shields to arrive for my 5th and 6th paladins. While waiting for the shields to get in, I have all the resources on hand that I'd need to instead train archers. It would be nice if there were an option to prioritize the production queue of a city to favor certain goals, such as emptying the queue as fast as posssible (favoring the speediest, long-term emptying of the queue). Other queue priorities could be to favor specific units (build paladins first, then everything else), favor specific resources (I have a temporary glut of swords so I want to spam sword-wielding units first) or favor building the fastest-producible units first (short-term queue emptying; an army will reach my city in two turns and I need an additional defender by the time it arrives. As such, I want to prioritize units I can quickly produce over everything else).

Furthermore, there are 2 steps in actually producing a unit (collecting resources and training units). Do each of those steps have to be reserved by the same unit or can each step have it's own internal queue (for the Computer Science people in the audience, is each step part of the same or separate pipelines)? Furthermore, is it ever possible to have multiple training queues (say you build a barracks and an advanced barracks, could you train two units simultaneously)?

For every scenario, for every goal, there is a single, optimized solution. Often times players have to handle this optimization themselves (such as queueing units in Civilization IV just right so the overflow production from each previous build allows you to finish the current build in 1 turn). However, it would streamline the interface immensely if the game simply took your current production goal (long term speed, short term speed or favoring a specific unit/resource) and performed the optimization for you.

About the weapons technology. Are we going to be forced to switch between different weapons because they are better? I don't want to have to swap longswords for katanas just because katanas are +3 instead of +2.

That's enough stats for me, but I would like to see some special abilities add more flexability, like, say, a "Mounted" bonus that gives +1 attack against unmounted units, or a "Spear/Pike" bonus that adds first strike and cancels out an enemy "Mounted" bonus.

Of course, I'm pretty sure you already have such things in..

Other than that, though, I don't see too many more stats being needed.  Total War didn't have many more, for example.

yeah?   so?  thats how it happened in MoM...   generally speaking by the time I started building units my population growth was so high that nothing short of settlers (which cost massive population) would stop growth.

I would imagine there would be several queues to which you could deticate certain amount of population.  Like in MoM, you basically had 3 catigories that workers could be in (each worker representing 1000 people).  You could have farmers (created food) or workers (they created production).   The 3rd kind was rebels, but they didn't do anything, they just took up space and you did not want them.

Now, I would imagine we have   A: farmers, B: smiths (create swords and armor), C: Trainer (train people and mounts, from here I guess you would lose guys when you built things), and D: Builders (create buildings), or something along those lines.   So that way you could balance your different queues.

I can see it being easy to pick the catigories if you base it on which buildings are related.  For example, you could not build swords unless you had a smithy (or upgraded form of it like armory or something) and you could not train troops unless you had a  training hall (or upgraded form of it, like war collage).  You can pick which establishments population would go into.   This could make the Que like a mini-sim game where you could population into other fields as well such as worshiping (or whatever they do to generate you mana), researching (helps research points to your spells), trading (adds boost to city income), miners (work in local mine for bonus income), shipwrights (builds ships) and so on.

This would really make that 'governer' mentioned in another thread an important feature, because many people would want something to auto-balance the queues for you while you were not micro-managing them. 

Upgrades of buildings (which I do think should exist, even if the tech-tree doesn't have it) should increase the efficiency.   So like a smithy is so-so, but an armory is better, and forge and smelter is even better.  

(more examples)  Training hall > barracks > war collage   ...   Stables > jousting arrena > fantastic stables ...   library > university > wizard school    ....  I guess building something like a forge would help the smithy and armory work, so bonus there even though it wouldn't replace the old building per-se.   a smelter would both help the mine (since it would process ore mined straight to tradable goods) and the production of weapons (would be able to take tradable goods and melt them into weapon meterials).

Things you couldn't build would either be A: bought at a higher price via fed-ex air (or whatever) or B: there is a default super-low production that lets you get the very basics that would be related to the trade rate of the town.

Actually, now that I think about it.  I want this!!  I think you should be able to assign population to different jobs avialable through what buildings are built there with a governer of some sort managing queues so you don't have any idoling population.   This is much better than the MoM system and does not sound much harder to implement (thats what sequels are all about right)

so thats my feedback

I agree, however I would like both to be options (I'd expect they do about the same amount of damage if both are well made) as well as other weapons that are made by either stardock or the fan community.

There is no such thing as a Paladin other than the player giving that name to a unit they create.

The player gets a person. They train that person and equip that person with various things (mounts, weapons, armor, etc.). Then they give it a name like "Knight".  Maybe they give the unit an enchanted ring and call that unit a Paladin.

But there is no concept of "can't use X if Y is evil".