2841

Link from the elemental forums regarding the tutorial situation (dragged in from Octopus Overlords but I thought it was funny)

http://forums.elementalgame.com/391994

2842

We do, and your summary is basically correct. Actions either cost X, or however much AP you have if your current total is less than X.

I want to like it, too, but the game is certainly not making that easy. I’m going to take one more crack at it, with tactical combat turned off as per your suggestion. That whole portion of the game is a real mess, but perhaps I’ll be able to enjoy it more with that out of the way.

Yeah, that’s been my take so far as well. There are lots of neat ideas in the mix. Some are good ideas borrowed from other, very different games that have questionable value here. Like the Sins of a Solar Empire unit tree, which was a very clever approach to monitoring the status of a massive number of ships scattered across a realtime empire, but somewhat less relevant in a turn-based game in which you move each of your units in sequence. And there are some original ideas that are interesting, but don’t seem to serve a coherent purpose in the game, like laying out your cities.

It’s possible that all this stuff makes sense and starts to click at some point, but I’m about 6-7 hours in, and I’m still not really enjoying the game, and I’m getting pretty close to invoking Old Man Murray Codename Eagle rule.

2843

Change log for day 0 patch:

http://forums.elementalgame.com/392088

2844

Well, that was fast.

2845

Looks like they really tweaked tactical combat, especially in regards to AP usage. Not surprising, they’ve said they were unhappy with the current state of tactical combat.

  • Casting a spell will now properly check action points for special abilities and ranged attacks.
  • Casting spells in tactical battles costs 2 action points now.
  • Using special abilities in tactical battles costs 1 action point now.
  • Shooting a ranged weapon in tactical battles cost 2 action points now.
2846

Okay, here’s a weird one. What the hell is going on with the way dexterity determines the effectiveness of armour?

So I got one of my dudes a lovely dirt brown padded cuirass. Little shield symbol 3. I put it on him and he goes from defense 0 to 2.6. So I mouse over the 2.6 and the tooltip says:

Padded Cuirass: +3 x 0.88 from a Dexterity of 8.8 = 2.6 Defense.

I’m glad that the game told me this now. But why did it not mention earlier (like at level up) that a dexterity of less than 10 basically is negative defense? And why didn’t it tell me (for instance in the shop screen) what the value of the armour was to the guy who’s currently shopping?

I hate that this game punishes me for things it didn’t bother to tell me in advance.

2847

Does anyone know what determines whether spells miss, and if they hit how much damage they do?

2848

I don’t understand this complaint. It’s all relative, who cares if a dexterity below 10 decreases your armor rating? Putting points into dexterity increases defense, why are you complaining about the frame in which that is happening.

Put another way, what is the practical difference if each point is +10% compared to +(DEX-10)%? With a 3 armor item you are getting a 0.3 armor bonus with each stat point either way. They are just arbitrary numbers that go up or down depending on the stat value.

2849

I think it might be the defense stat, but in that case I don’t know what the “to-hit” is. In my limited experimentation, it always seemed harder to nuke the higher defense units.

2850

The spells usually do damage based on your intelligence. Usually it’s a damage range – either from 1 to your intelligence, or 1 to half your intelligence, or 1 to twice your intelligence. These are also modified based on how many nodes you have from the appropriate magic sphere.

The spell descriptions also include ranges – often, but not always infinite – and damage radius.

Not sure about what determines if they hit or miss. But the patch notes say this about boulder “hurl boulder spells … that it does non-defendable damage” which might imply that regular defense is used in the calculation somehow. Are maybe there’s some magic resistance stat that we don’t know about.

My magic spells do seem to miss more frequently against high-level targets. That might mean some sort of level-based system, or it might be armor based (since high-level targets have higher defense values), or it might just be my incorrect perception.

2851

Brad recently updated his Day Zero Patch Post with this:

What about a Demo version?

* As soon as our Multiplayer customers are taken care of, we will start work on a demo. No specific ETA though.

Multiplayer is supposed to be worked on the rest of this week, and up next week. So figure it will be at least a week or two.

2852

hit refresh folks.

2853

The patch is up now.

2854

uh that was weird. hit refresh now folks.

i posted this, then kerzain posted, then i deleted this since kerzain posted, now kerzain deleted his :)

2855

I didn’t want to steal your thunder.

2856

Looks like there might be a bug with custom factions: When you use a custom EMPIRE faction (in my case it was an empire faction I created in the toolkit), you won’t have any tech’s available in the tech tree once you start the game and attempt to research.

Custom Kingdom factions still seem to have trees though.

Looks like Catapults are currently broken, they won’t fire because they don’t have enough action points.

2857

Does that mean this thread broke catapults?

2858

Really really liking the new fellowship/group/party manager they added (click the silver shield to the left of the circular pics of the folks standing on the same tile/city). it is simple, but so much better to use, and does a better job of quickly showing different party attack ratings based on party config.

2859

Hey nifty. Had no idea that was there. This is definitely much easier for selecting units to move out of a city than the old shift-click method was, particularly if there are a lot of units in the city.

It would probably be even better if the popup window grew as the number of units in the city grew. There’s really no reason why the box can’t be much bigger than it is, so I don’t have to scroll it up and down to see all my units.

2860

Yea, there is room for improvement, but this is a huge step up.

This was posted a few minutes ago by Brad in public chat (archers and catapults were broken in last patch because they didn’t have enough action points to fire):

[22:19] <@Frogboy> We made it so that there’s an action point cost of 2 for certain actions in tactical
[22:19] <@Frogboy> but the archer equipment has a -0.5 combat speed hit
[22:20] <@Frogboy> so your archers wouldn’t be able to fire.
[22:20] <@Frogboy> So we fixed that…
[22:20] <@Frogboy> …and while we were in that XML, we increased the combat speed of everything to a minimum of 2.
[22:20] <@Frogboy> Which makes tactical battles MUCH more fun.