THIS.

Lack of balance simply doesn't work in multiplayer games. Everyone will gravitate towards whatever the strongest one is, and complain that they have to choose between having a real shot at winning or playing the faction they actually like.

Lack of balance *can* work in a single player game. Since this is meant to be a single player game and they've said they won't compromise for multiplayer, you may get your wish.

True, true. I just don't want to be forced into a strategy that I don't like, and more than that I don't want the devs to waste resources on stuff that the vast majority of players will never even use.

Not exactly. The most extreme form of heartripping is when you go after a target that will immediately defeat the other player. But really, heartripping is the process of barreling through enemy territory to a high value target fast enough that anyone besides a paranoid would be able to respond in time to stop. A high value target could be a major production city, economic hub, military training ground, resource nodes, shards and other non-city targets. The point is that it is generally far too easy to pop in, even deep within enemy territory, strike a high value target and then pop back out (or die, but at this point dying is generally worthwhile). And it would be effectively impossible to apply such powerful magic at every high value location or target within your empire.

Yeah, all sorts of neat magical defenses and all are fine and dandy and I hope Elemental has all sorts of similar things to the things you mentioned. But I want it to have really cool offensive abilities, as well - and if there is no way to get around enemy defensive magic besides shear brute force, I'll be extraordinarily disappointed. I want to be able to counterspell, or at least work my own offensive mana to negate your defensive magic, or at least compensate for them. So you raised your city a mile into the sky? Well I just built a magical road going right up to it for my army. Or I just levitated my army up to it. Or I countered your magic and forced your floating city to descend back to the ground. You build a magical wall of fire around that Shard? Well I just doused it... But, if we have these abilities, then it must be somewhat difficult to get your troops there to begin with. 

AOW has a bunch of nearly identical sides because the developers were tards and didn't bother with the whole balance thing and just made them all nearly identical instead.  You can do both, it's just a lot of work.  It also takes a brain, which is, by all evidence, an exceedingly rare possession.  Getting close is relatively easy, getting it perfect requires a couple Einsteins.

Going nutty and saying you don't care about balance is kinda silly.  Using difficulty to excuse poor balance is rather silly.  Setting changes accomplish the same disadvantages, and don't limit you to a subset of the available sides.

Balance is a difficult thing. The more complex the game, the harder to achieve.

And many game developers have fallen into the trap to go for the easy way which is making sides more or less equal.

Balance is not something that should be considered as the last thing but instead needs to be rooted deep into the mechanics of a game. Don't sacrifice choice and diversity but instead make sure you know from the start how they will interact with each other.

It is a number game and if you have done it well, then small changes to the numbers will have small effects. Exponential growth needs limiting, countering and associated risks that act as a kind of buffering. And since that is quite fundamental doing it late will likely result in removing the mechanic in the end.

<carries around large sign with blood letters on it> Down with Balance, Down with Balance, Down with Balance!

MOM wasn't balanced are you saying it was silly? lol Shows what a fool you are if you are saying that.

You ever play the Impossible difficulty in MOM as the Gnolls or Klakons? Difficulty settings made the unbalanced game even more fun and challenging.

The developers of MOM were Albert Einsteins

• 9 unit limit. That's right, you can have no more than 9 units occupying a single map square. This means "stacks of doom" a la Civilization series are impossible to achieve. Therefore, your ability to "barrel through" the enemy's territory is severely limited by the damage and losses you accumulate.
  Bagh. What mechanic stops you from just making a two, three, or four-square army?
• Defender moves first! This means that when an attacker moves his stack of 9 units into the defender's city (with 9 units defending), the defender gets to cast a spell of his own and move all 9 of his units (casting spells with each of them, if they are able to do so) before the attacker gets to do anything. With a powerful enough defense, the defender might even be able to wipe out the attacker before he can do anything at all.
  Considering what I just said, that's a pretty big caveat. Nine defenders versus potentially 144 attackers (that's assuming a 4-by-4 square, which is about the biggest thing you would probably get in a single turn, considering movement points).\
• Nodes, the analog for EWoM's "shards", have an extremely powerful dispelling effect. This makes it almost impossible to cast off-colour spells in that node, unless your wizard is a Node Master, which happens to be the most expensive special ability to take (requires at least 1 spell book in each of nature, chaos and sorcery magic as well as 1 point for the pick itself, totalling 4 points out of 11).
  And, HOW big are these nodes again? If it's a huge  field of energy, I could see this being of value, but other than that.....
• Spell of Return. Even if you manage to destroy the enemy's fortress city, if he has other cities left and mana in reserve, he can begin casting the Spell of Return which will summon a new fortress in his largest available city and reincarnate him within it. Also keep in mind that he maintains full control of his economy and all of his units during this process, though he is unable to cast spells.
  Methinks thou hast missed the point of "heartripping". You don't always have to go for the channeler: you take out powerful cities like econ or research centers, and cripple some stat or the other.
• Awareness, Nature's Awareness, Oracles etc. These spells and buildings expand a wizard's radii of sight, allowing him to detect your forces before you reach his cities, allowing time to prepare an appropriate defense.
  Well, that would certainly help, but it would be mighty hard to eliminate the problem just with increases detection. You still have to send a significantly powerful defense force to whichever juicy target the other guy selects. If you guessed right and stationed your forces there ahead of time, then good for you. If not, then you're still in trouble.
• Invisible units. If the defender is in possession of invisible units and the attacker lacks True Seeing (Life magic spell, some units and hero items have it as well), then it is nearly impossible to take the city because invisible units cannot be targeted or attacked at all unless you move a unit adjacent to it in battle. Invisible units for attacking aren't nearly as powerful because they must move adjacent to the enemy to attack, making them vulnerable.
  Flip side of the same coin, if the attacker has invisible units, you're in a boatload of trouble.
• Resources (besides chaos, nature or sorcery nodes) are occupied by cities, so they cannot be "captured" without taking the city itself.
  Ok, you've got me there..... or do you: see the bolded bottom of the post.
  
• Channeling. The further away from a wizard's fortress he attempts to cast a spell, the more expensive it is to cast. This operates at a straight multiplier ranging from 0.5x (only when defending your fortress) to 3.0x based on the range (casting on the opposite plane is always 3.0x as expensive). This means that the defender in his fortress may effectively have 6 times as much mana to use as the attacker. This, of course, is partially mitigated if the attacker has the Channeler ability, but that ability costs 2 picks (very expensive, in other words).
  Again, the flip side problem. You have to wait until the enemy is right on top of you to cast a spoell to get rid of him/her.
• Overland vs. combat spellcasting. Most area-affecting spells can be cast both in combat and overland (out of combat). If cast overland, the spell costs 5x as much but becomes permanent in that city (with a small mana upkeep). If cast in combat, the spell is much cheaper and requires no upkeep. This gives the defender the flexibility to use the permanent overland version on high-value targets and the cheap combat version in less-well defended targets should the need arise. This allows a defender to protect a large number of different targets at low cost, while really beefing up the defenses of high-value targets at a low upkeep.
  Again, this worked, but:
• We have NO assurances that EWOM will even remotely resemble MoM. All of these mechanics could appear in the game, or none of them could. Even if they did reappear, the differences in other areas like algorythms, mana generation, units, and general working of the game would likely distort the effect on gameplay.

No, no no no dear god no! This is exactly what creates the AoW style stack of doom instead, where you just load up a stack with the strongest unit you can possibly make, and nothing can stop it except a stack of the strongest unit on the other side. It obsoletes everything other then elite units.

Artificial stack limits make the problem even worse. What's needed are situations where it's actually worth splitting your army up into multiple groups (which was almost never true in Civ 4 unless you were at war on more then one front).

The fact that you can only attack with one stack at a time and the fact that the defender moves first. This means you could potentially attack with 8 stacks of 9 (72 units total) and the defender would move first in each combat. If his defense was strong with the right units, he could wipe out each of your stacks before you get to move, allowing him to wipe out your whole army without taking any losses.

See above.

Nodes are 1 square in size, just like cities (in MoM).

What's the problem then, exactly? I would consider this to be a basic strategy. You also need to factor in the terrain. The attacker may be forced to go through chokepoints to reach the defender's "heart".

Research in MoM couldn't really be stacked up in one city, by the way. Essentially every city contributed a small amount of research, with the rest coming from your total mana intake.

With enchanted roads and recall spells, you don't need to guess at all, since you can move your defenders faster than he can move his attackers.

No, you aren't. As the defender you are under no obligation to defeat the attacker's forces. If he cannot defeat your defending units, he cannot take the city. An invisible unit that cannot defeat the defenders is useless (unless you are using certain spell combos). Battles in MoM that lasted more than 50 turns automatically resulted in the attackers retreating.

No, you don't. There are powerful overland spells that can wipe out enemy armies outside of combat. There is even the truly awesome Meteor Storms spell which bombards with strength 4 fireballs all units in the world which are not in the safety of a city garrison, every single turn. With this spell, you can "turtle up" and your enemy will have an almost impossible time moving his units around the map.

A red herring. I have no idea what EWoM will actually be like. All I can talk about is what I know, especially about MoM and TBS in general. I've done my best to describe the many different mechanics in MoM and how they work. I believe that most of the mechanics in MoM are heavily interdependent and pretty well balanced (some things need to be tweaked, I know). Because of this interdependence, you cannot really take the mechanics out of context lest you throw everything out of whack.

Another red herring. A properly balanced game does not have a "strongest unit", it has many units which offset eachother in a rock-paper-scissors fashion. Therefore, your 9 unit stack might have 3 rocks, 3 papers, 3 scissors against the defender's 3 rocks, 3 papers and 3 scissors. How is the combat resolved? Tactically, with the best tactician winning the fight, although the defender has a big advantage in moving first, potentially cheaper spells (channeling) and city defenses.

Without stack limits, all of the strategy is thrown out the window in favour of who can mass the biggest stack of doom. You might want to peruse the Civfanatics forums and see how many people complain about stacks with "hundreds of units" being impossible to defeat.

Something is always more powerful then everything else, especially in a game where you can design your own units. If I can only fit 9 things in a stack, that stack is going to be 9 channelers with the strongest equipment I can make (and if I get a Dragon, I'll toss that in too). Ordinary troops won't stand a chance against them.

With stack limits, you get this problem. You might want to peruse the AoW forums and see how many people simply don't bother making lower tier units once they can make upper tier ones. It's a race to whoever can make the strongest units, and stuff like raising a citizen millitia is pointless because 9 citizens won't even scratch my super stack.

One of those big Civ stacks is entirely beatable if your army is comparable. I've done it. A stack of the strongest units in the game isn't beatable without similarly powerful units.

Effectively you want the whole trianing mechanic tossed. There's no benefit to making a lot of poorly trained troops if you can only put 9 of them in a stack, because they'll be facing 9 elite troops and lose every time. The proper battle for the cost of making them is something more like 40 vs 9, at which point there's decisions to make.

You're trying to counter with another red herring. That does not work. In MoM, your wizard (channeler, whatever) is you, not a unit.  Your wizard stays holed up in the fortress, casting spells from afar, not engaging in battle directly.

The toughest units in MoM were high level heroes with good items. However, your empire could only have 6 heroes total and a dead hero was dead permanently, along with all of his experience (which takes an entire game to accrue, reaching the max level of demi-god is very rare). Having 6 max-level heroes with great items for all was unheard of and if you had that you probably controlled the entire world anyway. Heroes were also very vulnerable to being "sniped" with spells.

I really don't want to comment on AoW, as it did not appeal to me and therefore I do not have the experience to comment on it.

Your argument that "There's no benefit to making a lot of poorly trained troops if you can only put 9 of them in a stack" is an argument in my favour, because those types of tactics are dominant without a stack limit. You end up with a silly "arms race" where whoever builds the units the fastest wins. It completely eliminates the tactical element of the game.

In MoM there were plenty of strategies involving the weak units anyway. It's not like they were useless. Bowmen were a very weak unit you could build early on. They were great for taking down even the mighty sky drake, which cost something like 30 times more.

There were also buff spells you could cast that would affect all newly-built units automatically with a flat-rate upkeep cost, greatly emphasizing the strategy of building tons of cheap units.

1. This is not MoM. the channeler does not stay in his captal city casitng spells all the time. If you so choose, you can go Gandalf and make a superpowerful channeler to kill your enemies.
2. Making a lot of poorly-trained troops is not the dominant tactic. In GC2, we devoted pages to finding a way around that game's version of the problem, which involved Huge-hulled starships killing everything they fought. Now we have a solution handed to us on a mythril platter, and,  surprise surprise, peiople want to take it away.

QFT.

We're not talking about MoM here. We're talking about Elemental.

You think I don't know that this game isn't MoM? Let me reiterate:

I know a lot about MoM and other TBS games (such as the Civ and MoO series). I know what worked and did not work in those games. I do not know about EWoM because none of that game is set in stone as it hasn't been released yet. I want to talk about what I believe worked and did not work in those past games, in the hope that it may enlighten and inform Stardock to make a better game.

The argument that this game is not MoM could be applied to any discussion of any game that is not MoM. SO WHAT?!

It does not add any value or insight to the conversation. If you don't like something from MoM or otherwise that I suggest, please counter it with something you think is better and why.

I really have no idea if a mobile channeler is better or worse, it all depends on how it is implemented. Is your channeler limited to casting spells only in combats in which he is a participant? That, to me, would probably kill the appeal of this game. The great thing about MoM is the feeling of immense power you get when casting spells all over the map like some kind of powerful deity.

That's nice. This isn't MoM.

It used the exact system you describe, and once you had top tier units, making anything lower was almost always a waste of time. 8 Dread Reapers vs 8 anything of a lower tier = you win. The same was true for most of the top tier units.

If the strongest units are properly balanced cost wise, not really. I bring 8 of the strongest thing on the map. You use the same time and the same resources to bring 40 of a mixed variety of things. That's not a bad fight.

With a stack limit? I bring 8 of the strongest thing on the map. If you bring a combination of 8 units of varying strength, I crush you.

The bottom line here is that since we can design our own units and train them as long as we want, a stack limit isn't practical. You can't use the training feature properly (raise a big rabble to fight a small elite force) if the rabble has to fight the elite force 8 units at a time.

How original. Please stop spouting this nonsense like everyone else, it's getting old.

Uhhh, no. MoM didn't have "tiered" units. Aside from heroes, there was no clear best unit. Every unit had a counter. If you brought a stack of same units to battle against a diverse opponent, you lost because your monoculture was countered.

Designing a game with "tiered" units is very bad as it creates forced obsolescence. Everything about MoM was designed to avoid this. Rock, paper, scissors is the proper mantra to have.

As far as heroes go, they are a special case. Each one was unique, with many different inherent weaknesses. If you lost a high level hero, you could not replace it. Brand new low level heroes were typically weaker than even the lowly spearmen.

I was describing AoW, since you mentioned you didn't have much experience with it. The quote should have made that pretty clear. Stack limits were pretty disastrous there if you wanted to do something other then stack up 8 of the strongest units (or 7 and a hero).

The usual example is 8 Dread Reapers attacking a town. The actual equivalent in terms of cost is 20 Longbowmen/Ballistae/etc. That's probably not a terribly bad fight, thanks to the walls you'll inflict some reasonable damage even if you lose. But with the stack limit it's 8 Dread Reapers against 8 Longbowmen. That is a rout every time.

A limit based on some kind of production cost metric (1000 production worth of units in a stack in any combination) would be less bad. I could probably go for that kind of implementation. But a straight "9 units" is just painful.

If the way Elemental is being designed pans out correctly, it shouldn't be a problem. A huge stack has several counters, inlucing your own huge stack, a much smaller stack of better trained troops, and overland attack spells. If somebody *really* wants to put their entire army in one spot so I can start casting Lightning Storm or some such on it, I'm okay with that.

I can accept that stack limits are disastrous in a poorly balanced game. That said, removing stack limits in an already unbalanced game does not help things.

The thing I really don't like about unlimited stack size is that a bigger stack nearly always counters a smaller stack. The whole point of having diverse units is to add tactical variety and flavour. If all the tactics in the world cannot counter the big stack of doom, the diversity of units becomes meaningless.

That's what I love so much about a 9 unit stack limit. You need to think very carefully about each and every unit in it. You need to use diversity to cover up the inherent weaknesses in each unit.

A great example in MoM was the Great Wyrm stack. Great Wyrms could tunnel under the ground and resurface anywhere on the battlefield instantly, allowing them to attack any unit they wanted. Great Wyrms were also one of the most powerful melee units in the game, making them a feared opponent.

So why not use a stack of 9 Great Wyrms to conquer the world? Simple, Great Wyrms are land-bound and cannot attack flying units. A single flying unit could not be defeated by 9 Great Wyrms. Try using 8 Great Wyrms and 1 Giant Spider instead. The Giant Spider can throw a web at the flying unit, bringing it down to the ground where the Great Wyrms can feast on it.

So then is the perfect stack 8 Great Wyrms and 1 Giant Spider? No, because the Giant Spider can only use his web once per battle. If the enemy has 2 flying units, the Giant Spider can web only one of them and then you cannot kill the other one.

So then bring along 2 Giant Spiders? I think you can see where this is going. If the defender has 9 flying units, 8 Giant Spiders and 1 Great Wyrm will be unable to defeat them.

There is no such thing as a perfect stack.  

Nice.

I think the middle ground is a limit based on production or cost or something, like I edited into my last post after the fact. If you've got say 1000 production worth of units in any combination, and I've got 1000 production worth of units in any combination, then if we're using the designer well and there isn't some really out of whack ability, we should be able to have roughly fair battles even if we use wildly different units. The big units take more to build and thus you can't have as many of them.

So the elemental example would be one person cranks out some magic weapons, imbues some new channelers, and creates a stack of 50 Imperal Deathguard. Somebody else makes some 50 footmen, 10 catapults, 25 archers, and in a pinch grabs 200 farmers and gives them spears.

Who wins that? I have no idea. But it seems to me to be a fair way to cap things.

(You could also use a hero general with leadership to boost the size, which would create another type of hero aside from the pound everything into the ground type.)

Well, GC2 had a "logistics" system that regulated the amount of ships you could put into fleets (read, stacks), and although the logistics costs weren't directly tied to manufacturing cost by any math, they did mesh up: I prefer a system like that to a sreight-up production limit, since it has exactly the same effect but there isn't that odd leap of production cost directly limiting stack size.

There doesn't seem to be anything analogous to ship size in Elemental, though. How do you price one soldier with a +2 sowrd and 5 units of training to another soldier with a +5 sword and 2 days of training?

Well, not knowing how training and attack mechanics will work, I can only hazard a guess that it would involve adding the number of days trained to the stat bonuses provided by the weapons. However, depending on how things turn out, it could be some bizzarre, esoteric equation system.

Nice. 

I think the middle ground is a limit based on production or cost or something, like I edited into my last post after the fact.   If you've got say 1000 production worth of units in any combination, and I've got 1000 production worth of units in any combination, then if we're using the designer well and there isn't some really out of whack ability, we should be able to have roughly fair battles even if we use wildly different units. The big units take more to build and thus you can't have as many of them.

So the elemental example would be one person cranks out some magic weapons, imbues some new channelers, and creates a stack of 50 Imperal Deathguard. Somebody else makes some 50 footmen, 10 catapults, 25 archers, and in a pinch grabs 200 farmers and gives them spears.

Who wins that? I have no idea. But it seems to me to be a fair way to cap things.

(You could also use a hero general with leadership to boost the size, which would create another type of hero aside from the pound everything into the ground type.)

That's a nice idea in theory, however I doubt it would work in practice. Buff spells, as an example, would throw the whole equation out of whack.

In MoM the number of buffs you could stack on one unit was pretty ridiculous. You could take some of the weakest units in the game and buff them up to the point where they would destroy the toughest units. Because of the figure system, different types of units would benefit more from the same buff.

A unit with 8 figures (such as spearmen or slingers) would get 8 times the benefit out of a +1 sword buff as a 1 figure unit (such as a great wyrm or great drake).

This gave you a huge amount of flexibility. You could choose to use very expensive and powerful units with limited buffability or use a cheap unit with huge buffability.