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[chaoticag]

So looks like it has been a few days and people have been using the previous version of the thread to discuss the current game so here goes since I own the game and all.

Conquest of Elysium 5 is kinda the latest in the series of strategy games by Illwinter. No not dominions, their other game. The big series focus is to make each of the classes play pretty differently. There isn't the same level of customization that you have in the dominions series.

Spoiler: List of changes since CoE4 (click to show/hide)

Classes

• Three new classes: Scourge Lord, Cloud Lord and Kobold King
  
• Most old classes also have new rituals and units

Independents

• 2 new factions: Celestial and Empire
• Different independent factions will fight more with each other
• Pirates ports will build ships that can raid ports owned by players or the Empire
• Guard Towers spawn Empire soldiers that fight against both players and the wildlife
• New types of monster lairs that can spawn monsters

World and map

• New planes: Sky, Celestial, Primal and Aztlan
• New world generation algorithm, making more interesting geography
• New improved map graphics
• New terrain tiles
• Ships and sailing
• Names for major features like ports, guard towers, castles, cities, etc.
• Overrun, kill small (less than 5 units) inferior forces without a combat
• New random events, some apocalyptic in nature
• Possible to prevent many events before they happen as the instigators are spawned during world creation

Combat

• Battle map terrain, e.g. vegetation in forests and buildings in villages
• All battle terrain features have their own stats and can be destroyed
• Units can interact with terrain by e.g. draining life from vegetation or animating the trees
• Many new fortification layouts, different for different type of forts
• New permanent battle afflictions
• Some afflictions like Battle Fright can affect a units preferred deployment rank
• Equipping a magic wand will also affect the preferred deployment rank
• Some units can burrow down at the start of a siege to appear inside the walls later on
• Smarter setup for siege units
• Ambushes more deadly, commanders are likely to be attacked at the front of the column
• Battle statistics shown for battles if Battle Reports are enabled
• Player units can also ambush enemies

Trade

• Number of town points determines number of offers from mercenaries and merchants
• Merchants can offer magic items for sale
• Dump unwanted resource at a lower price and earn more gold

UI improvements

• Multi-turn movement paths
• Auto recruit
• Info on tiles
• Improved Transfer Units screen
• Dates shown when loading old games
• See trade and corpses directly from map screen
• See what repeated rituals are active directly from map screen
• Huge armies shown as a stack of counters on map screen

Monsters

• About 500 new monster types
• Many new special abilities
• Units with desert move can move quickly through deserts
• Floating and flying units can fly over sea squares
• Flying units will get tired if they cannot land
• Berserking units can continue fighting on negative HP

Rituals

• More than 100 new rituals
• New resources to pay with: Lifeforce, Kobolds and Goblins

Magic Items

• More than 100 new magic items
• New types of magic items like Magic Maps, Teleportation Scrolls and one use Potions.
• Magic booster items available for most magic paths

Music

• New epic music by Adrian von Ziegler
• One unique tune for each class

Network

• New official server that offers an easy way to run your network games
• Old way of running network games is still available
• Possible to give magic item to allies
• Optional turn timer

Modding

• Steam Workshop support for easy installation of mods
• More modding commands, enabling modders to do more advanced mods than before
• Map editor can be used to edit the other planes as well

Technical

• CoE 5 is now 64-bit only, enabling larger games with more units and players than before
• Performance improvements to enable larger game to run more smoothly
• Many improvements to the AI players

So far it seems as fun as the last iterations of the game, but I'm having trouble making the cloud lord work. Gem costs seem kinda high and he has units that go for 75 gold for 5.

[gomez]

I have never heard of this series of games before, and because I haven’t had any time to watch let’s plays of it on YouTube, I’ve not been able to figure out what the game is about.

What other games is this similar to? It sounds to me that it might be like caves of qud and kenshi, would that be accurate?

[( Tchey )]

Hi,

What other games is this similar to? It sounds to me that it might be like caves of qud and kenshi, would that be accurate?

I’d say not at all.

It’s closer to HOMM is many ways : you have heroes roaming a map, capturing ressources or other important tiles, and your heroes have armies with different kind of monsters (1500+ types) with them. It’s a bit roguelike too, with random map and event and deadly RNG, with ways to control it but still, RNG is part of the fun.

Big differences from HOMM :
- When you meet an enemy, there is a automated turn based resolution, you cannot do anything but watch.
- No city to build, no buildings per say

Instead heros have rituals to perform on main map, to summon creatures or effects that can influence one tile, one creature, or the full map, or other events, etc.

With 24 classes with different ways to play, many spells, rituals, events, creatures, the game is very re-playable too.

[Karlito]

So far feels like every one of my games has been ended not by the other players but by an extra planar invasion.

Also gotta say, I downloaded a workshop mod that adds some immobile garrisons to everyone's start, and that really cut down on the problem of AI players offing themselves in 3 turns.

[ZebioLizard2]

Anything new about the Voice of El?

[Il Palazzo]

I'm having trouble making the cloud lord work.

Same here. Kobolds do a better job of lording over clouds than those guys.

[chaoticag]

Anything new about the Voice of El?

Yeah, sorta, I think.

For one thing there is the celestial realm so if you crack open all seven seals you have a gateway to head there that shows up or so I hear. I didn't check if it's quite the equivalent of the demonologist where every angel that shows up has to be from there.

There's also a higher magic item count going around, so it's often the case that summoned angels and saints pull up some magic items to throw into the fray and get passed around. Kinda makes me wish you could get a description on magic items now that they show up this often.

Same here. Kobolds do a better job of lording over clouds than those guys.

Getting the sinking feeling like these guys are going to be very rng dependent. There's really no substitute for having a good supply of diamonds for them. If you aren't able to get at least a little bit of all three other gem types you can't convert them to diamonds, and they compete with your units. And then you have the cloud people units that cost 75 for 5?

They have some benefits like all their units basically being flying units, but trying a lesser summoning could get you a set of six air small elementals (great!), a large one (fine I guess?) or 12 swans (why).

And since they need gems, they'll probably be grabbing mines, which gives them iron and then that ends up impossible to use for any of their units that I have seen so far. But their best units have ice armor so they also want to be in the north where gems don't spawn. Just kinda a lot of things going that makes them harder to snowball like other factions unless I am missing something they can do that others can't.

[E. Albright]

Their two 25g flying melee units need a bit of iron, and they also can build human infantry/catapults/etc like anyone else once they start grabbing land cities. Also, they can just sell it - like you said, they're VERY gold-hungry.

My impression was that what they need to succeed is to get giants summoned ASAP. Getting a storm or frost giant and promoting them to titan is a game-changer - the frost in particular will suddenly turn your mountain of mostly-unused sapphires into a large frost giant horde. I've had the Foo Titans' giant summons give as many as 12 giants for the 100 gem cost.

They feel like a slow start that snowballs once you get something big enough to push a large snowball...

[Also: IDK about gems not spawning in the north. I started at the north of the map over mountain ranges containing numerous gem mines, as well as the gold mine...]

[Cthulhu]

More magic items is nice, they've always been kind of weird in COE, super rare and no real reliable way to get or produce them.

Voice of El is cool but I never thought it was very fun, lots of flavor but you can't actually do anything with it directly.

I'm playing scourge lord, just started but I like the flavor?  I'm not sure where it's going, it seems like there's two separate ideas going on and it's not sure which archetype it should be.

Like, you build obelisks that drain life from the world BUT they're also covered in fnords, lies, and contradictory arguments that break people's brains
Your troops are camel riders and desert swordsmen BUT they're also miscreants and "inclined to believe in saurid emperors or hidden covens of wizards that they blame for any mishap in their lives"

And most of their flavor is like that.  It feels like they wanted to make an evil scorpion king type desert necromancer, but also wanted to make a fantasy qanon as a joke, but didn't have enough ideas for the qanon side so it's just grafted onto the scourge lord.

[chaoticag]

[Also: IDK about gems not spawning in the north. I started at the north of the map over mountain ranges containing numerous gem mines, as well as the gold mine...]

I don't mean the gems you get from mines, I mean the freestanding gem piles in the desert. It's a more common spawn than mines are I find.

Like, you build obelisks that drain life from the world BUT they're also covered in fnords, lies, and contradictory arguments that break people's brains
Your troops are camel riders and desert swordsmen BUT they're also miscreants and "inclined to believe in saurid emperors or hidden covens of wizards that they blame for any mishap in their lives"

And most of their flavor is like that.  It feels like they wanted to make an evil scorpion king type desert necromancer, but also wanted to make a fantasy qanon as a joke, but didn't have enough ideas for the qanon side so it's just grafted onto the scourge lord.

The flavor writing for the scourge lords kinda rubs me the wrong way because it feels like a train crash between the flavor of the in game xenophobe writing all these entries and the attempts at humor just kinda hitting an uncomfortable spot for the flavor text. But I'm excited to contend with the bad japanese of the bakemono and the bad arabic of a new faction.

[E. Albright]

Right, I forgot the gem deposits. I've seen more mines than those, to be honest, but those definitely are a thing.

I'm annoyed that the 5.02 patch fixed portals such that Inferno can now smell sinners from several planes over, and will start pathing to Elysium even if they need to cross multiple planes to get there. Around turn 120 of my second CoE5 game, Inferno's turn resolution time jumped from taking 10-30s to taking ~25m. I managed two turns at that length (and only b/c I have dual monitors so I could faff around on the other one while it resolved), and while it dropped from 26m to 24m on the 2nd one, I don't think I can stomach keeping playing, especially knowing what's on its way en masse. I'd probably be able to survive what's coming since I'm busy carving out a Barbaric safe haven in Hades, but if the converging blob is as big as I think it's gonna be, I kinda wonder if it mightn't be strong enough to kill the AI Bystander...

[Muz]

So far feels like every one of my games has been ended not by the other players but by an extra planar invasion.

I've always wanted a "save the planet" CoE game. It looks hardly any different to CoE 3 and 4, but heck, I'll get it for this.

Edit: Hmm, they've rolled out 3 patches in a week. Maybe I'll wait a bit.

[chaoticag]

If it's any consolation, despite the patches, the game seemed pretty stable even on release. Most of the fixes seem to be related to the networking stuff right now so if you are playing this as a single player game you likely won't notice much unless a typo was bugging you.

[E. Albright]

It's mostly stable. The biggest problem I've seen so far was that the 2nd patch fixed some portals and let the devils in Inferno figure out that there was a path to Elysium if a portal opened from Inferno to Aztlan (to somewhere) to Elysium, so you'd suddenly get 20-30m turns while ALL the devils worked out the pathing through multiple planes. That's thankfully been fixed.

Incidentally, if anyone is playing and gets a magic item that grants flying, can they save the game and either post it or try flying up and ending the turn in open sky? I think there may be a bug WRT magic items granting flying not letting you safely end over open sky w/o dying, but it's hard to reproduce b/c of how random magic items are. [Remembered that modding commands are a thing...]

[Il Palazzo]

I'm digging the Scourge Lord. The disjointed edgelordy fluff rubs me the wrong way, but upgrading uber-blesses and terraforming the world is a lot of fun.


And yeah, anyone knows what's up with those invasions? I've been playing on enormous/monarchy maps, and so far it's almost a given that some cultist will open a portal to inferno. Likely sometime before mid game, rolling over everyone. I wonder if that's tied to the specific era (i.e. monarchy is to blame), or there's a chance per square for a portal to spawn (i.e. to large a map size leads to end times for all). The ridiculous size of the invasions is probably mostly a function of map size, since the hell will be larger with more denizens.

The one time the damn portal spawned nearby and I managed to scramble to destroy it, but a few turns later another happy cultist popped up on the other side of the world (the demons still beelined straight to my cities). Sad face. Angry face. Resigned face.