Elementals

[Fafnir13]

Someone got me started. Shame on them. Here's the original post:

Lessee...Water Elementals get to waterwalk. I've had fleets chasing an archmage spamming those guys before. Rather fun. They also do that split thing now. Not too bad there.
Fire Elementals do....what? I think that things with enough fire damage can light trees on fire just by being on them. That's about it though.
Wind Elementals can fly and spawn lighting guys. Nifty and not too shabby. I think they also get blitz, but don't quote me on that.
Earth Elementals...never built one. Not sure why. Must just be anti-earth or somthing.
Wraiths are big, scary things that are a nice, natural progression from specters. The XP boost is an odd gain, but much appreciated. Very much helps the necromatic image of relying only on your summoned army of doom...

Um...Did I miss any?
I can agree with you that they could use a bit more variation. I think the best thing you could do is give the elementals a spell to cast which does the direct damage, sacrificing the elemental in the process. I can certainly work with the image of a fire elemental bursting into a great maelstrom of fire that burns all things around it.
Bugger, time to go make a new thread

The idea of elementals getting sacrificial spells is rather neato, I think. Other possibilities include combining multiple elementals into super ones. Say...double the affinity and increase the countdown timer by one every time an Elemental is joined to it. Would add some variation to the "summon and attack" that they are currently good for. Add some non sacrificial spells to it and call it good. Maybe leave the idea of elemental combinations to Civs with arcane leaders (they're the guys with supposed mastery of this stuff).
So...what other ideas might others be able to throw around concerning these sentient bits of chaotic energies coalesced?

 

[MiKa523]

Sorry, I can't resist, but with the idea to merge multiple elements into super ones it struck me immediatly that we need love-mana in order to summon captain planet

 

[Fafnir13]

Ack! No! I recant this thread and all of it's content! :suicide:

Well....maybe combining the various suped up versions of the elementals might create something even bigger and nasier. An Avatar of the Elements? Something along the lines of Meshabber of Dis and the Mithril Golem.
For more fun, make it require the Tower of the Elements.
So...you end up needing wind, water, earth, and fire III. Unless you've got summoner as a trait, you need these on separate units. Summon all the elementals. Join the elementals into super versions. Keep the timers on these super ones up until you can get all four super elementals online at the same time, then (whilst in the city with the Tower) join them all together to get a super unit. National limit of one but repeatable?
Heh...Captain Elemental, he's our hero. Gonna put all other civs to zero...

Randomness: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=164

 

[cabbagemeister]

Other possibilities include combining multiple elementals into super ones. Say...double the affinity and increase the countdown timer by one every time an Elemental is joined to it. Would add some variation to the "summon and attack" that they are currently good for.

I dunno, it would be way to easy to create absurdly powerful combo-elementals if the combat duration kept getting extended. Just add another one every turn in peacetime, and by the time you're ready to go to war you have a 30-strength elemental.

I actually think the elementals are pretty good and diverse as they are. The fire elemental, by the way, does collateral damage, which IMO probably makes it the best elemental overall in most situations (especially for capturing cities).

The only really poor elemental is the earth elemental. Yeah it's the strongest one, but I think it needs some cooler mechanic to make it worthwhile, especially since the Earth I and Earth II spells are so poor. Earth elementals definitely could use a spell or something. What if they were a little weaker, but could cast Earthquake? Would this make it worthwhile to go down the Earth line of promotions? (My feeling is that it still wouldn't, and that the real problem is that the Earth II spell isn't good enough.)

 

[xienwolf]

Would be kind of nifty if Stoneskin would grant your Earth Elementals better stats (as a SummonPerk). Then the Earth II spell by itself is still kind of lame, but when you get Earth III you wind up with a much more nifty elemental. Only issue there is that you are highly unlikely to ever LOSE Stoneskin, and you MUST have Earth II to get Earth III. So unless you made Stoneskin wear off (maybe 20% chance per turn - though this makes Earth II by itself even WORSE), it would be just exactly the same as making Earth Elementals themselves simply stronger. The idea behind it though is to allow you to have a summon which essentially requires 2 spells to be really strong, or 1 spell to be decent.

 

[Demus]

you could still have elementals merge, but make it so the lowest duration left is carried over (say, you're playing a summoner leader with 1 air 3 archmage, and 1 fire 3 archmage, having a summon with 3 turns left, and one with 2, the merged summon only has 2 turns duration), so you'd need different elemental magic archmages in a stack to fully use the merging power.

The power of the merged elemental would probably be around X+0,5Y, with X being the strength of the strongest elemental, and Y of the weakest. The merged also gains the special abilities of both predecessors (collateral damage for fire, lightning elementals for air, split for water (no increased strenght here), stoneskin for earth etc.).

 

[cabbagemeister]

Even with Stoneskin making earth elementals stronger, I still don't think the earth line is worth going down. If I'm choosing between promotion lines, having a stoneskin-ed earth elemental instead of fire or air elementals is not going to win me the game. But a hundred turns earlier, my mages having fireball or maelstrom instead of stoneskin might very well win me the game.

I really think that either
1) stoneskin should be the Earth I spell, something else worthwhile should be the Earth II spell, and Wall of Stone should be eliminated, or
2) stoneskin should be weaker, but should affect all units in a stack, or
3) Wall of stone should give +1 hammer in the city (making it more like Inspiration, where you'll want to spam earth adepts in all your cities to get the bonus everywhere), or
4) Wall of stone should be the Earth II spell, and should give +1 hammer per earth mana you have (affinity-esque). This would encourage players to spam earth nodes, and make those elementals very powerful.

 

[Demus]

tbh, i like a combination of 2 and 3. Have stone skin grant "hardened skin" (a lesser stone skin) to other units in the stack (1 first strike, +20% strength, only triggers on defence, removed after combat?), besides the stone skin on the mage. It needs to be a tire 2 spell, to differentiate it more clearly from a spell like dance of blades.

 

[Kael]

Keep in mind that earth has the best mana effect out of all the affinity granting manas.

 

[xienwolf]

I didn't mean allow the Earth Elemental to have Stoneskin. I meant that the caster having Stoneskin makes the Earth Elemental considerably stronger. Like +3 Offensive Strength or something significant. But more creative answers are more desireable.

 

[cabbagemeister]

Keep in mind that earth has the best mana effect out of all the affinity granting manas.

I don't know, I think that's arguable. First, it may have an excellent effect, but it's the least obviously advantageous mana type. Unlike e.g. Law mana, where I can see my maintenance costs going down (as in, my gpt goes up), there's no number for resource discovery rate I can see get affected (in-game, at least). As a result, I don't have any kind of sense of how one earth mana will help me. If I get two resource pops per game without an earth mana, how many do I get with it? Three? Ten? Thirty?

Second, the actual benefit of getting more resources is highly random, depending on whether you have that resource already. An earth mana helping me to pop iron when I didn't have any metals is a game-changer. An earth mana helping me to pop iron when I already have it is...+3 hammers. Not really so attractive. This is why I almost never use earth mana. Oh, I don't have any iron? Well, I can make an earth node which might pop an iron for me if I wait a long time (or it might not). Or I can make a fire node, get some fireball-throwing mages, and go take some iron from someone else.

Remember that the issue for inducing people to use the mana type (and thus getting them to try out all the cool spells in that promotion line) is not whether the mana is useful, but whether the player can see that the mana is useful.

Edit: now I see that you said "of the affinity-granting manas". That's certainly true. But my point is that it's not a very strong effect, and certainly not one that will weight my decision of which mana node to build.

 

[Kael]

Law mana isnt an affinity granting mana.

 

[MiKa523]

Regarding earth mana and its effect I still didn't get an answer wether the odds for ressource-discovery are depending on the game speed or not?!
At the moment it seems that you discover less ressources on faster gamespeeds.

 

[sputnik323]

If you want an earth elemental to do something unique, have all its attacks have a bombard effect. Or you can also lessen their strength and have their attacks lower defences like some effect of resetting defensive bonuses.

Also... do summoned units still give war weariness in .34? I hope not, its kind of annoying since cities dont lose loved ones - the reason behind war weariness in vanillia civ.

 

[cabbagemeister]

If you want an earth elemental to do something unique, have all its attacks have a bombard effect. Or you can also lessen their strength and have their attacks lower defences like some effect of resetting defensive bonuses.

So an earth elemental attacks, and then all surviving units in the defensive stack have their fortification bonus reset to zero? Or maybe they all have -5% fortification bonus? I like this idea.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Would be kind of nifty if Stoneskin would grant your Earth Elementals better stats (as a SummonPerk). Then the Earth II spell by itself is still kind of lame, but when you get Earth III you wind up with a much more nifty elemental. Only issue there is that you are highly unlikely to ever LOSE Stoneskin, and you MUST have Earth II to get Earth III. So unless you made Stoneskin wear off (maybe 20% chance per turn - though this makes Earth II by itself even WORSE), it would be just exactly the same as making Earth Elementals themselves simply stronger. The idea behind it though is to allow you to have a summon which essentially requires 2 spells to be really strong, or 1 spell to be decent.

No it wouldn't, because most civs would require two units to implement the strategy, which is either really cool or tedious micro, I'm not sure which. I lean towards really cool, like having multiple casters power up a spell.
Then summoning leaders could do it with one caster, though even for them it'd be better to have a mage boost the arch-mages summoner. Kind of like having an apprentice allows the master to cast stronger spells.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I've expressed my views on improving summons quite often, and don't feel like typing it up again. I'll just link to one of those times instead.

 

[Avahz Darkwood]

MC I bet you got some buff fingers with all that typing seriously though keep it up I enjoy and look forward to your comments and sage advice.

 

[Mailbox]

But my point is that it's not a very strong effect, and certainly not one that will weight my decision of which mana node to build.

You've definitely never spammed Earth nodes. The effect is huge when your mines are discovering things on a regular basis.


On another note, either discovering resource probability is messed up or the display in the civilopedia is just displaying the wrong numbers.

 

[ultimaterez]

Bringing things back to their original topic as opened by Fafnir13, something along the lines of a Megazord elemental would be pretty cool, but I also think it would be very impractical.

First, with the currently very sparce nature of mana nodes it's a little tricky (though certainly not impossible) to get all 4 elemental manas.

Second, you have to tech up to Archmages. Unless you tech-mine straight for it and leave yourself vulnerable because you have sacrificed other valuable techs this is going to take quite a long time - maybe not until after turn 300 or later depending on how you play it.

Third, you'd have to groom 4 adapts into Archmages with the right elemental path- a very time-consuming process, though since they gain EXP automatically it's not exactly taxing on you, the player.

The very fact that you need Archmages means that this would have to be a very late game spell, and usually by the time you've reached that point you'll have managed to find another, easier way of beating your opponents into senselessness.
You also run into the small problem that the AI most likely would not know what to do with it. They're really good at the, "Hey, I've got 5 million guys and you don't" method of attacking, but usually not so good with the details like, "Hey, I've got 5 million guys and they all know how to summon skeletons and I'm going to do it right now. Prepare to taste boney death!"

All that to say while it would be cool to have something like that, when you have such an impractical goal it usually deters the player from going after it if there's a more efficient option to pursue.