I apologize ahead of time for this monster post, but there are just too many things I feel a burning need to respond to or comment on... Most of these quotes are ChongLi's but there are some other appearances. Forgive me for not attributing them individually.
Pretty much any killer stack somebody used in MoM has a counter that doesn't require blatant out-spending to defeat. The problem was that the AI was too dumb to do it.
But that is not the point. The point is that pretty much every counter to a killer stack is itself another killer stack. A killer stack with a different composition, but a killer stack nonetheless. The point is to allow to allow people to choose between fielding a small elite army, a huge rabble, or some mixture of the two. This is straight-up impossible to do with a MoM-like system.
The problem with this is that it becomes a simple matter to calculate the cost of 50 peasants vs 9 paladins. Once this calculation is done, there is no reason to use the less efficient unit. It boils the entire game down to an equation.
You are assuming here that paladins and peasants will be the only two units in the game, when in fact there will be many more. By the time you throw in the other weapon and armor types, mounts, special items, heroes, fantastical creatures and magic, the above statement becomes nonsensical.
So what is the point of training your troops if it reduces the number of them that you're allowed to field? Essentially, you're trading 50 peasants in for 9 paladins and if the equation is not equal, you'll always do one thing or the other.
You're making the same fallacy as above again. In addition, there are many more things to consider. One is that population is going to be a resource in Elemental, so fielding an equal-cost army of peasants compared to paladins would be a much higher population drain. That means fewer people to till your fields, generate taxes, work in your factories, etc. And you alluded to another important consideration in this quote:
Units in MoM lost strength as the figures died. Many of the weaker units had only 1 hit point per figure, so taking 4 damage would kill off 4 figures. Healing and regeneration spells brought back figures that were lost. This was important to balance these units against powerful single figure units which did not lose any strength until dead.
If you send 9 Paladins against a much weaker force, you will probably not lose any Paladins. If you send an equal-cost army of peasants against that same force, you will likely lose some peasants. It's far easier to whittle down the numbers of a large army of weak troops. The difference between MoM and Elemental here is that dead units in Elemental will not be magically brought back to life (unless you actually resurrect them with magic, maybe) - they remain dead, and a sunk cost.
My argument is that horde-style armies detract from the tactical nature of the game. Just as a horde of players stampeding onto a football pitch detracts from the tactics and overall strategy of that game. It's not at all hard to justify. Many games have restrictions on the number of concurrent participants in the action.
I couldn't disagree with you more. It adds an entirely other aspect to the tactical nature of the game. Combat between different size armies require totally different strategies. You will need to take into account the sizes of your army and of your opponent, as well as the compositions of both. With harshly limited stacks like in MoM, the only consideration is composition.
Large-scale horde combat is just a different style of game, a game more like Civilization which, frankly, has grown long in the tooth.
That is potentially the most egregious comparison I've ever seen in my life. Civilization does not have tactical combat in any shape or form; it has strategic combat.
To me, this sounds too much like the game dictating your strategy to you rather than allowing you to formulate your own strategy. It's taking away many of the interesting choices for you to make, not a good thing IMO.
Right, because the game is forcing you to make every decision you'd have to make in the course of a game? The game dictates your strategy when it forces you to choose pretty much everything about your kingdom before the game even starts. In the proposed system for Elemental, you have choices. There's a fire shard to your west and an air shard to your east, but you only have the forces to take control of one - which do you take? That's your choice. Just like it's your choice to try to wrest control of shards out of other people's hands, or to actively search for certain types. The only thing it does is it makes each game more situational. You have to mold your strategy based on the conditions of each game - and that is something I think every strategy game should strive for.
"Engurance" is not a word, but ok. I don't like the use of decimals in these types of games, it's aesthetically unpleasant.
He tried to type endurance, was pretty obvious. And alright, so decimals shouldn't be in these types of games because it's aesthetically unpleasant, but mechanics that are totally arbitrary and immersion-breaking? Ok, right.
Quake and Unreal Tournament series are. As is tetris, super mario bros and many other console games.
The only example there that I might agree with is super mario bros. No FPS is purely skill-based, there is always some element of luck. And Tetris most certainly has a huge element of luck. The order in which the pieces come can make a huge difference. Sure, the better you are the better you can handle a poor sequence, but it's still relevant.
"I'm just hoping we don't have multi-figure units to begin with. Making a pretense at formation combat and actually doing formation combat are two different things. I prefer the latter, real regiments of individual units."
Guess you didn't see the screenshot?
You're inferring things from the screenshot that are really not that clear at all. For one, that screenshot was made public on the day of Elemental's announcement. Taking it as gospel for how combat will function is probably not the wisest thing to do. Especially when a dev specifically voiced regret over the fact that that screenshot was released at all. Even though frogboy later reused it in a recent dev journal, which was a little odd...
All we can really infer from this is that extraordinarily early on in the development process, they displayed groups of soldiers like they are shown in that image. Is that one catapult? Are those 8 individual people? Is it some abstraction? Who knows! And Frogboy has specifically mentioned that he wants battles to contain thousands of units - and that he wants us to be able to watch it play out in all its glory; and that units will be trainable in groups - what size is your choice. And he mentioned that he might call a group of 20 units a squad, and a group of 300 units a legion... And that you can combine different groups together to form an army, much like combining ships in GC2 to form fleets. All of this leads me to believe that they are not going the MoM route, thankfully.
