2941

Really? You can make insane amounts of gold off of the Notable Level 3 treasure chests. It also unlocks a bunch of new resource nodes, especially gold mines. I always push pretty hard for Adventure because it really seems to be a boon to my economy, which has a lot of synergy with the +gildar buildings in the Civ tree.

2942

Just to add with the release thing, I believe Brad was really confident that by this date, based on the beta progress, with the schedule laid out, the game would be ready. Obviously not, but, once committed, what could he do with store agreements, contracts, publishing and the like? I’m guessing there are plenty of obligations that have to be met once committed, and potentially financial ramifications if they aren’t? And what could he do if it were a February release from a community perspective? Beta testers are clamouring for the game, but I suspect a lot of what I dislike with Elemental would have been rectified by an internal beta where things could be considered more critically. Does the community beta team still get a regular release build? I’d say no personally. There needs to be a single unified force driving the polishing stages, not the mouths of Stardock fans.

And for what it is worth, I’m not trying to be an apologist here and justifying the release date, I’m just trying to recall the bits and pieces over time, and put them all together. Sad thing is, what has happened has happened, and nothing, forum posts, game reviews, diaries, Satan worship can change that now. I’m personally taking the optimist approach and looking ahead to the future with how the game will now pan out.

People care because they want the game to be good? For me, it is less to do with Stardock, and more to do with, on paper, this is the sort of game I would, and should enjoy, for a very long time.

In short bursts the last few days, I enjoy it, before rapidly growing weary of feeling lost, with no direction to go, no strategy implement and follow. No planning to do, then reacting when the plans change. The strategy doesn’t feel like it is there. You know what I would like to see? Sid’s thoughts on the game, and how it could improve. Why? There isn’t much in the way of interesting decisions right now.

2943

[/li][/ul]

That’s a ridiculous reaction, Dan. Tom doesn’t sound like he has an axe to grind, he sounds heartbroken at what he has to write, but motivated by a desire to warn gamers not to waste their money on a broken game. I certainly appreciate it - I hadn’t been following the elemental thread, and had no idea what kind of state the game was being released in. Without the warning, I’d have picked it up and probably been angry and disappointed as hell.

2944

I agree. Also in general the game needs to do a better job with displaying distance measurements. For example in the main map it should show the path my army is going to take, and highlight the squares which I will be going over this turn vs. the ones I’ll be going over in future turns. This just seems like such a basic feature, I’m really surprised it’s not in. But I’ve always felt like something is off on how Stardock handles movement from turn-to-turn. GalCiv’s movement also doesn’t feel right to me somehow.

2945

It’s in the Civilization/Empire technology group. It’s called something like Improved Housing. You can research it multiple times and each time increases the amount of population you can have in a house (by 10% I think).

2946

YES PLEASE. Aside from all the myriad other problems with tactical combat, I also find it kind of boring in a general sense, and part of that is the pacing. You sloooowly move your units into a good tactical position, and sloooowly wait for the enemy to close, and then sloooowly take your attacks and actions. After firing up HoMM II yesterday to fact check something for the action point argument, I was greatly struck at how much better the pacing of the battles is in that game. Part of it is movement speed, part is the smaller size of the map. The battles just feel a lot more “dense,” with no filler or downtime. There is never a point in a HoMM battle where I am hitting “end turn” over and over to get to the action. I do that frequently in Elemental. I think there are a number of things that could be done to make the battles snappier, but increasing the speed of unit animations would be a good start.

Unfortunately, the other major element that makes Elemental’s combat dull is the AI, which seems to have the fighting spirit of a lobotomized lemming. That could really use fixing, too.

2947

I went ahead and plonked my 40€ down for this. I love TBS, I figured you guys were just complaining for the hell of it. Nope. It really is obtuse (1.05).

Game 1, campaign. Right click to move. OK, I see my boat wreck, maybe there’s some equipment in it? I right click, nothing happens. The very first action I tried to do was met with failure. OK, go inland. A popup, ‘you see Janus’. I don’t see Janus anywhere. Finally I see him, I find the other guy and the peasants. Tell me to found a city, I head there. Popup, you can buy stuff in the shop. Sorry, haven’t built the city yet. There’s the spider, I leave the peasants to guard the city, head out with the 3 named chars, the spider wipes me out I miss 90% of my shots, the spider never misses.

Game 2, this time I bring the peasants with me to fight the spider. Everyone dies except the hero.

Game 3 is actually going ok. I equip everyone with clubs, kill the little spider first, finally the big spider dies. I head back to town for a bit. I happen to mouse over the spider’s lair by chance, oh there’s some treasure there, why didn’t I get it when I killed him? Go back and get it. Open my spell book, oh hey, I can learn every single spell there is. Click, learn spell, click, learn spell, x12. Go to fight the bandits, now I have spells now. Mouse over the spell book, you have no tactical spells. WTF, I have mana, I just learned them. At one point, I couldn’t move nor end turn in the battle. Had to auto resolve to unblock it. Head north, there is a fire shard. You must learn some tech beforehand to get this. Still can’t research tech, no idea how to do this. Train units, create, oh hey, I have pioneers now. I click pioneer. Nothing happens. I close, pioneers are not in the list. Open it up again, click new, find the pioneer sack, create, the name is ‘Scout’. WTF. Rename to pioneer, now I have 2 pioneers in the list, one which doesn’t work. Delete. Send my guys back to the city center to rest, but now they’re not an army anymore. Have to send them out one by one.

I really can’t recall another game selling for $50 that is positively fighting me to learn it.

DeanCo–

2948

And yet the names he chose to specifically respond to weren’t the ones trolling and were the ones posting reasonable criticism. That’s what was bizarre about the whole thing. If Brad had told Matt Gallant to fuck off, it would’ve made a lot more sense than telling Ben Sones not to buy anymore Stardock games.

2949

Deanco, you don’t instantly learn spells, you’re queuing them up to learn. You can see your spell training progress in the lower left of the screen. The rate is based on your arcane knowledge, or whatever their term for it is.

2950

Yes I agree. There’s something really broken about the pathing in this game. You have to micro manage your army movement otherwise they’ll insist on taking offensively stupid routes. “Oh there’s a nice road running trough the plain connecting these two cities. Well I guess I’ll walk through this forest instead!!!”

In version 1.00 I saw the pathing break the AI factions, they built a city at a choke point then seemed unable to route units around or through it. I think that might be fixed now.

2951

My comment on how well Elemental’s release compares to other industry releases comes in part from some discussions on another forum about DoW2 at release. I can’t remember off-hand any problems with DoW2’s release, but people were posting up and down the forum about how absolutely awful the state of DoW2 was, and how everyone was going to quit playing it as soon as Empire: Total War came out, and how that would sure show Relic. Then of course E:TW came out and it was in far, far worse shape than DoW2 was.

So yeah, forums are often just horrible, hostile places. I think it’s really great when developers come to forums to talk. But I’m very surprised at how much hostility some of them are willing to put up with.

2952

And in the campaign, you don’t learn spells for a long time.

2953

I could go back and pick out specific posts if you like but I thought the general tone in the thread for a while from a few posters, but particularly the series from Matt G before he was banned. Things like attacking details of the game based on screenshots without playing it and thereby picking up on things that weren’t actual problems like the ‘barren terrain/fertile terrain issue’ and what I also felt was goading and mocking of Brad while he was still trying to contribute positively to the thread. I don’t know exactly why he (Matt) were doing this but it wasn’t helping me figure out if Elemental was any good or not, instead it just obscured valuable feedback to the skimming reader from people like Ben and yourself. Anyway, now we have ended up with two threads to keep the madness in this one :)

I generally feel that personal vendettas should be kept out of the QT3 game forum, but particularly if people are going to be cryptically vague about them and not upfront with why they are acting like a jerk!

2954

This almost exactly describes my experience with the game last night. I never did figure out what the deal was with the Pioneers not showing up on my list of units that were trainable.

2955

Steady now! I was trying to play EUIII on Sunday. That game really doesn’t communicate to me what’s going on inside it. In the amount of time it took me to lose to France in EUIII while learning little, I learned all the basics of playing Elemental.

2956

I don’t think you can use Pioneers in the campaign until it gives you one, which doesn’t happen until chapter II or III. The best approach with the campaign is to just do exactly what it tells you, without trying to figure anything else out on your own. A lot of the game features are disabled until the campaign eventually turns them on, but you can always count on being able to do the things that it specifically tells you to do.

2957

I do wonder whether people should just stop trying to play the campaign game and go straight for the main course. At least here, where most people are at least familiar with 4X games.

2958

I agree with this completely. It’s just that there were about 3 people posting in that fashion, and the vast majority of posts weren’t by them.

There was little outright hostility to Brad, and in any case Brad’s reaction seemed to be aimed at the criticism towards his game - and only the people playing it made actual criticisms instead of pointless “me too” posts.

I think the few trolls are balanced out by the couple of fanboys (not you!) who are doing a good impression of the three wise monkeys.

Play the first bit of the campaign to get the basics then ditch it and run for the sandbox mode.

2959

It was just weird that the game let me design and built a unit that did everything the Pioneer did, but wouldn’t let me build the default Pioneer. Certainly confusing. I’m looking forward to going back and restarting the campaign with the more robust tutorial stuff built in.

2960

And I consider EUIII to be by far the best most communicative interface on a Paradox game :-)