Elemental all-purpose thread

Want!

Looks great, can’t wait until it is released.

  1. Yes. Most of the victory conditions are non-military. Some of the previews may cover this so I won’t say anything until after the previews hit.

  2. Yes. I think the story is compelling but I’m highly biased.

  3. The mechanics in Elemental are a bit different than the typical 4X game because even in terms of warfare, there are very different paths. For instance, Player A may have a huge army ready to steamroll but Player B may have an incredibly powerful sovereign who can wipe out vast armies and Player C may have built up an incredible well of mana that can be used to decimate vast swaths of the world and all three of these things could come together at once based on which path players take and of course all 3 could lose to Player D who wins through the quest victory condition if they’re not careful.

Most important question: what version of SecuROM will be used?

Can we build walls? Us turtelers need to know.

Yes. One of the key game mechanics of Elemental is how cities are built. In Elemental, when a city grows, it gains a new tile which can be placed where the player wants it to go (as long as it’s adjacent to an existing tile). So cities are a multi-tile affair in the game. Now, how you choose to build up your city heavily determines how defensible or productive, or rich it is. Cities are only conquered when the keep tile is taken which could be in the utter center of the city or could be at the end of a peninsula.

Yay for not-MoM!

Hmmm, Michigan is a bit off the beaten path for me to drop by and play though. Guess I’ll have to wait.

It’s using a combination of SecuROM and Starforce so that the game will require a CD in the drive, a USB key to be inserted and the reading of a particular word on a particular page of the user manual (which won’t be hard since it’ll only have a 2 page manual naturally).

The docs, which we expect to be written by fans, will be online only which will be fine since the game will require players to be on-line at all times due to the by-the-hour activation checks the game makes to the single player mode.

Also, the game won’t work if you have any CD-ROM burning software including the built in media player software (users will naturally need to uninstall any media players including iTunes in order to play).

All of this will be integrated into the game by our eastern-european CD manufacturer (the copy we send there will be completely clean of course) so we’re confident that no pirates will get it…

I don’t have to worry about all that crap. I’ll buy it from Steam.

Good luck with the game. I’ll be avoiding previews because 18 months is a long way away!

Any particular accent required when reading the code word?

That’s a hilarious response, Brad… I’m just wondering how long it will be before someone finds it and puts it up on a gaming news site, thinking it’s a serious statement of intent. :P

Brilliant. That’s always kinda bugged me about Civ… no matter how big & sprawling a city gets, it always occupies the exact same tile. (It made pillaging the countryside feel kinda hollow, since I know I should be able to pillage at least a couple of those improvements.)

BTW… good name for the game.

I just checked Kotaku, and it’s not there yet. Those guys are slacking off.

It will always be Not Master of Magic for me :(

I have some questions, if there is something that can be answered at this moment, thanks in advance.

How many single players modes it will have? You mention at the webpage a campaign telling the story of Elemental, but will you offer non story driven campaign too?

What are the objectives for the creation part? how many aspects will be able to be manipulated? will it be part of the game or you have to work on that on a separated editor (one of the many things I loved from MoM was the ability to forge items that were mine, created by me as part of my campaign and war effort).

I guess it will have random maps, what is the target for sizes?

What type of feedback are you looking for the beta process?

Any extra payment for the MMO part? what is the general idea of this?

How will you organize the generated content and make it work as part of a balanced strategy experience? What limits can we expect from the creation side?

The “Pollination” works like Spore?, where I start a single player campaign and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to find?

What about diplomacy? will you try to improve the achivements of GalCiv on that? Will you be able to be influential to other civilizations, develop trade routes or work in resources?

What type of players are you looking the most for the beta process? 4x experienced players? people who played MoM and AoW:SW? What is the type of things you need more intensive testing?

Best of luck :), this is from now one my most anticipated projects.

I’m sure 1up will make at least one sentence of that joke a headline, with the rest as quotes from the maker of the game in the article, and a link to the post (post only, not the thread, wouldn’t want any of that pesky context to get in the way).

Great to hear! Thanks Brad.

Art does look great. I thought you guys bought the rights to the Master of Magic name, though, am I crazy?

Do we really need yet another fantasy TBS…I mean, cmon, just like I HATED Oblivion cause it was just another fantasy RPG, there have been so many fantasy TBS’s. Yes, I loved HOMM2, played all the others including MOM, but it’s just been done…too much. Yea, a few different features here, a few different there, a few new victory conditions here, a few there…I look at the screenshots and it looks like any other fantasy TBS I’ve played over the last 20 years.

Of course, I’ll buy it and play it…I bought Hinterlands, played it for 10 minutes, quit…I’m an addict.

They’re large. I can’t really relate the specifics, but we’re (me!) putting a great deal of effort into the map generation process so that each game world will end up looking like a map created by a level designer.

That sounds sort of like a stock response, but even in its current iteration the map generation creates some pretty impressive results.

Close enough. Plan to preorder as soon as my credit card stops smoking.

What’s up with Vista/XP 64 possibly not being supported? That’s singlehandedly keeping me from pre-ordering.

What exactly happened to the Master of Magic intellectual property? Why didn’t this game end up being the next MoM, which is what seemed to be hinted at by yourself (Mr. Wardell) and variety of press for many years…?

Will game focus on being a sequel to MoM? Same factions & critters (or slightly different-looking critters with slightly different names but same stats)? Or is it going in different direction?

If game takes a totally different tack than MoM, that’s fine…but will have trouble looking at it as anything other than yet another fantasy non-MoM (e.g. HoMM series, AoW series). Nothing wrong with that, mind (and I hope it’s at least as good as AoW:SM, which is the closest thing to MoM 2 so far), but if game is truly getting away from MoM, would suggest not throwing around MoM name publicly anymore. Can come off disingenuous and confusing.