2701

Ohh yes. Stardock, please make this. How can you know what stuff to buy in the shop? You have to look at the inventory, enter in shop, and look again. And if you buy or find a piece of equipment, and your champion doesn’t have anything in that part of the body (say… helmet, for the head) then it should equip automatically.

2702

Well, now you’re just playing armchair designer and that’s cool. Those are all fine solutions. But the issue isn’t how you would do it if you were a game designer. The issue is that whatever choice has been made by Elemental isn’t communicated to the player. It’s a recurring, deep seated, and potentially catastrophic problem with the game.

-Tom
2703

I agree with the first three points, they are some of the strongest points of the game, but i am bit ambivalent with the unit builder. I think the idea worked better in GalCiv 2, where you mixed engines, weapons of different types, plating armor, sensors, fuel storages etc in a much tighter and interesting ways. Do you want a spy constellation defense sytem? Lots of little ships full of sensors around your empire without engines. A fast attack force to inflict damage in the undefended worlds? Lots and lots of engines and fuel storages to go around the defenses. Defenders? Lots of heavy armor without need of fuel storages as they are going to stay in home. Scouts? Lots of engines and some sensors. Or a balanced attack ship, of course.

Here? Well, it offers a decent variety of units to train, yeah, but the idea isn’t exploited as well.

2704

Oh, of course, in addition the weak design in some areas (armchair designer/reviewer ftw!), the game has some serious problems communicating with the player. You and other posters has touched the issue, that’s why i just skipped it, but i agree with all of you.

2705

Hmh, I never saw my action bar get empty by casting a spell. My monarch was always able to cast two spells per turn just by standing there. It seemed logical as most melee guys could also make two attacks per turn.

2706

Mmm i will check out when i get home. Maybe we jumped the gun too early in that issue.

2707

It seems like the AI is pretty weak. I started a game on a small map and easily trounced two empires. The first empire’s town was completely undefended. The second empire had a level 10 combat rating on their city, but was easily wiped out by a sand golem I got during adventuring.

While I was approaching the 2nd empire’s town, and after I declared war on their empire, the sovereign sat 1 tile away from the town doing nothing. He could have entered the town, helped his army, and used magic to put up a defense.

I also haven’t seen enemy sovereigns use magic at all. I was facing procipine, she had 15 mana, and with her +1 to arcane research bonus she should have had a combat spell by then. Maybe the research priorities are off.

On the subject of the enemy sovereign sitting 1 tile away from a city and doing nothing, that happened to me in an earlier game as well. I took his city, I had 1 hp left, he could have retaken the city easily, but he just sat there doing nothing.

That being said, I really like this game.

I’m hoping the additional ai refinements that come with the day 0 patch tomorrow really beef up the ai.

And if they’d expose us to the python scripting, I’d happily code my own AI :)

2708

I think it gets quite interesting in late game. At the beginning it’s simply which weapon and what level of armor do you want. But there are a lot more options once you get magic items, superior inventory items like the various backpacks, and mounts. The mounts and magic items are particularly interesting since there are a pretty limited number of mounts and magic crystals, even if you have access to one of the resources. So it’s much more interesting than when you’re just buying units with gold, material, and metal. You really have to decide what kind of units you want to build with your carefully horded crystals.

For example, do I put on a healer’s pack on this unit, which increases their health and gives them health regen, but which increases the cost of the unit by 30% or more? Do I create scouts with just stuff to increase their sight, or do I give them decent weapons and armor too? I’ve got a limited supply of magic crystals – do I create super-units with them or spread them out? (This issue came home to me when I created some monster units with all the best magical armor pieces, decked out with magic rings, amulets, and cloaks, then discovered that one four-person unit of them chewed up half the magical crystals I’d been saving since the start of the game).

2709

The AI could use some work. It does have a tendency to send units in small-sized packets to attack my towns, instead of waiting until it has a large enough stack of units to do real damage.

I can definitely confirm though that the AI does use magic spells on the attack. I had the enemy sovereign coming at me, and she definitely walloped me with several very powerful magic spells.

2710

So 1.0.0 -> 1.0.1 isn’t the 0-day patch? Do we have an ETA on that at all?

2711

Tomorrow, think.

But tomorrow (or later today as I write this) is the big one. The official day 0 update that the team and I have been working on since Beta 4 (the beta group can go into more detail on this but in brief: After beta 4, the game tree was split in two. One version went on to be the gold version which is what those people who have it early are playing. The other tree went on to become day 0. These two trees were merged today already and will be going up tomorrow.

2712

OK, thanks.

(Boo.)

2713

Someone could think we are over-criticizing the game, as we just began to play it. Which makes sense.

But in the other hand, because we barely scratched the game, we barely began to notice what it needs improvement. No one in this thread has said anything about the totally broken stacks of doom (6 soldiers forms an unit with 6 times more attack, defense and hit points than normal), or the balance of the too expensive heroes (in comparison with normal units) or even the over reliance in randomness (bell curve system would produce better results than pure random numbers from 0 to a stat, this was a battle that Age of Wonders fans had to fight hard until the developers gave up).

I suppose we will have a good discussion about the stack system in two, three days max.

2714

What?!? You didn’t carefully read through the 2700+ to find my mention of the stack-of Doom?

Yes, the 1-4-8-12 guys/unit mechanic could make it hard for anyone to choose a completely non-military route. We’ll see.

2715

Today (Tuesday) is the official launch of Elemental. The 0-day patch will go out sometime today which includes:

Here’s a few highlights:

The UI is updated to be somewhat more intuitive.
The campaign is significantly updated (though only for those starting fresh).
Resources are treated more like units. This is hard to explain but essentially the game will let you know of what resources you’re not using and how to make use of them.
There’s a lot of performance improvements the day 0 build, particularly for those with lower end CPUs.
The “day 0” AI is in it.
There’s been a polish pass to the spell books and tactical battles.
There’s been a general polish pass to the main game UI overall.
There’s been a lot of balancing to monsters, units, etc.
The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/391747

2716

Thankee kindly. I hope it does the trick.

2717

Hmm. Book 1 of the campaign is all we get at release.

2718

I have no regrets buying this game. Sure, the release is a little underwhelming, but I trust Stardock to effectively smooth out the rough parts of the game, and remould the game into something far more superior. It just takes a bit of patience I guess.

The last 15 pages or so effectively hashed out a few things I don’t like about the game, namely the lack of communication and feedback to the player. My goodness, I have no idea half the time if what I am doing is completely wrong.

Do I really need to found a city next to fertile land, or can they go alright if placed in the middle of barren wastes just so that I can get a resource? What happens if I decide to expand too quickly? Will it be like Gal Civ 2 where I can cripple my economy with hefty planet maintenance? Or, is the name of the game to build cities as long as I have the gildar available to spend to establish the city? Should I be specialising my cities, or is it ok for each and every one to be building everything they can?

These are questions which I can only answer via trial and error, or asking here (or the other thread) I know. But, if I don’t have to specialise my cities, then the interest in my cities goes down dramatically, and the only key feature of any of them is that they have intriguing names. No longer could I associate City “Aztreonam*” as being my economic powerhouse that will be the key in sustaining the military that City “Imipenem*” will be pumping out, much akin to Sparta of the Ancient Greek times.

Then there is the city overview. Something like the city advisor from the Civ series, or the colony advisor in Gal Civ 2 is a must. Being able to view and compare easily each and every city would be lovely. And more htan that, but managing each city too. I see the empire tree on the left, but is it enough? Or maybe the city screen is a screen which I have completely missed whilst trying to dig through the UI.

And then there is the map. There are all of these cool things with the map. Quests to do, locations to discover, trade routes to establish, resources to utilise. The map is potentially the strongest part of the game. So much can be done with it. It is a fantasy game, the imagination should be able to go nuts. Haunted forests, rivers, lava flows, volcanoes. And yet, it is currently a mish mash of things allocated at random. What about getting the mining sites more discretely located near the hills. Old growth forests near the actual forest rather than poking out in the barren wastelands all alone. And make the forests interesting. Have some sort of risk/reward for building near a forest. Fantasy has forests as a cliched evil place to be near. Or a happy utopia of fairies farting sparkly dust. Farming sites, surely if we can raise and lower terrain via spells, then it can affect the relative rainfall right (ala Alpha Centauri) which could affect the relative chance of the ground being fertile. Or vary the fertility of the land. Does it rain in the world of Elemental by the way? I assume so, there is water right.

I saw the terrain change earlier, when I built a building, which made a hill smooth out, and I thought that was cool. I’m not kidding. The map I think is the strongest part of the game. Random maps? Meh, that’ll happen by the sounds of things. Believable random maps though, that I think will take a lot of work.

I know this is all armchair designing stuff, especially the latter part. But nothing wrong with throwing out these things right. If they are rubbish, then nothing more needs to be said, well, except harsh rebuttal, but I promise I won’t flame. I’ll just shrug my shoulders. Better things in life to be concerned about. But really, I’m trusting that Stardock can deliver a game which someday will make me think wow! It won’t happen tomorrow, or next week, or next month. But, it will happen, that I am sure. I don’t plan on being dead or incapacitated anytime soon and being unable to play the game. There is still plenty of life in me yet I hope, and so I can be patient.

Anyway, thank you Island Dog and Brad for venturing into this thread. I have one final question though. Will there be any sort of debrief for the community to highlight the release, and where things could have improved? I’m not 100% sure, but something similar was done with Gal Civ 2 if I recall, and it was a good read. Or maybe it was another game, but I distinctly remember it having some of Brad’s particular “writing style” about it.

*My imagination right now is limited to thinking of antibiotic names to make up for the fact I can not think of the Fantasy city names.

2719

Is there any way to “eject” all the units from a city, in a fast way?
And btw, does anyone have a weird problem with the mouse if you hold the control key to select several units from one group? It doesn’t move well in the horizontal axis if i hold Control.

2720

You definitely want to specialize your cities. You have a limited number of building tiles and there are not nearly enough for you to build everything you are capable of building in each city. I’ve got a game where most of my cities are level 4 and they are all maxed out on tiles, and I’m having to go back and tear stuff up, and decide what to keep and what to throw out and what to add, with all the stuff I’ve built into them, I can’t build enough houses to let them grow to level 5. Major urban renewal in progress.

tgb posted out on the oo boards and said that as of Beta 3 there is a penalty associated with each additional city you build and that you can cripple your economy by expanding too fast.