Elemental: War of Magic - Fallen Enchantress Developer Journals

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Written by BuckGB on June 21st, 2011

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There are two types of champions in Fallen Enchantress, kingdom champions and empire champions. Players can only recruit champions from their allegiance, opposite allegiance champions can be attacked. So if you are playing as kingdom you can go out and hire kingdom champions, and kill the empire champions so your opponents don't get them.

Champions don't run around as they did in War of Magic, they don't come to you, you must go to them. There are no randomly generated champions in the game, each champion is specifically designed to be unique and interesting. Most are found in the world, but some unique champions can only be earned through quests.

Champions are different from normal units because they can choose traits when they level up (as discussed in an earlier dev journal), they can wield the special armor, items and weapons in the world. Although you can outfit your armies with some pretty good magical armor and weapons (with enough crystal, production time and techs) they won't compare to the equipment your champions can get. Champions have a higher accuracy than normal units, they have a chance to crit for double damage when attacking, they aren't effected by overkill*, they can be imbued to cast spells (more about that in a future dev journal). And, although it's possible to design units with traits, champions have the most interesting ones. Champions also get experience from quests.

But before you go out to try to create an all champion army (btw: Altar is the best faction to attempt this with) they do have their weaknesses. They are expensive to recruit, they don't tend to do as much damage or have as many hit points as large formations of units. And they typically need to have a few levels before they really start to be effective, unlike a large formation of archers which starts killing right away.

1. Despite the considerable work I've put in to the new population use system on improvements, I think I'm going to have to yank it out. The problem is that it quickly becomes incredibly difficult and not-fun to manage when your kingdom gets large. This is a classic case of (kill your darlings).
2. The game mechanic I am interested in seeing is one that rewards the player for intelligently planning out their cities. I.e. better to have fewer, better cities than more, wimpier cities.
3. The default of having 4 guys in a unit is good. But needs more balancing.
4. One of the objectives is to make it clear that champions (and your sovereign) are a very big deal so we want those 4 guys to be mowed down. However, the weapons they carry make them glass canons.
5. Need more random events.
6. Need more variation on what the goodie huts give.
7. If I don't get to redo that tactical battle AI code soon I'm going to die. It makes me cry every time I see the AI sovereign run at my guys stupidly.
8. I am getting dehydrated from crying.
9. I need to get in the reward system so that players get more champions.
10. The game mechanic I am considering is having is using quests as the means of getting champions.

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