3041

What’s an “FB friend?”

3042

Facebook, most likely.

Possibly Full Bore, yo.

3043

Friends with Benefits.

3044

Jesus yes. I just preordered the game when they put it up, figuring it was a lot like a Gamestop preorder: put down $5 or whatever and finish it up later on. This was when I was still in college and significantly poorer than I am today. When I got hit w/ $50 unrefundable (they weren’t doing it at all at that point, apparently because buying a preorder got you beta access), I was pretty peeved.

And I like the game a fair bit right now, but if the bugs annoyed me sufficiently to want to get the hell away from it, I’d be super peeved at not being able to return it, since I have a digital copy and they’ve lost no significant cost in my having tried it other than a few cents of bandwidth. I get that physical packaging and whatnot costs and used sales are eaten up by the actual game stores in the brick and mortar environment, but games that don’t offer refunds on digital purchases are beyond my fathoming.

AKA, it’s awesome that Stardock does so at all, seriously, but I feel very bad for preorders who don’t have as high a tolerance for weird bugs, bad design, and CTDs as I do :-/

3045

I had a battle where I clicked end turn and it wouldn’t go on to the next turn, but clicking the auto-resolve button at least got the game to continue.

3046

And in case you (or anyone else) missed it, I did say that I understood that you were frustrated, and that I didn’t take that comment personally. So don’t sweat it, and I hope we can all can move along to more constructive topics of conversation.

That is why context matters.

It does. To provide my own: If a game that was giving me this much frustration came from a publisher other than Stardock, I probably would have uninstalled it by now. I certainly wouldn’t be spending all sorts of time posting detailed impressions. But because it is from Stardock, and because it’s a game that I think has a lot of potential, and because I know that you are reading these threads and have a long history of listening to user feedback, I feel more like my time playing and writing about it is time well spent. That said, it has been pretty frustrating, and I do stand by what I said about feeling like this game was released too early. I’m still playing, but as Adam Altmann says–it’s rough going.

Since I have your ear, though, let me leave you with three words: unified equipment manager. I restarted the campaign after the latest patch, and got my city up and going, took out the spiders, and headed back to upgrade my equipment when the city reached level 2. This is how that went:

Click on Shop. Staves are available and better than the clubs that I know my guys currently have, so I buy staves all around. Travelling boots are also available–I want those! Whoops, I don’t have enough gold to buy them for Relias. Well, I’ll just sell all of my clubs! Oh, they are still equipped, so I can’t sell them. Leave shop. Open inventory window for Relias and unequip club. Close inventory window for Relias. Open inventory window for Janusk and unequip club. Close inventory window for Janusk. Open inventory window for Mithrandir (or whatever his name is) and unequip club. Close inventory window for Mithrandir. Go back to shop. Cycle through characters and sell all of the clubs. Finally, I can buy travelling boots for Relias! Leave shop. Open Relias’ inventory window and discover that he started with travelling boots. Wow, I wish there had been some way to see that in the shop. Sigh. Close Relias’ inventory window. Go back to shop and sell the boots… for half the original value.

There is a similar window dance when you decide that you need to redistribute equipment among your party, because as with shopping, you have to hop between separate inventory windows for each character, unequipping things, and then also a completely separate trading interface that, like the shop, can only detect items that are unequipped. And then you have to do the rounds of all of the character inventory windows again, equipping the stuff that you just traded. I’m trying to think of a diplomatic word to describe this system of inventory management, but “nightmarish” is the only thing that comes to mind. Why not just have one window that lets you do all things item-related–manage inventory for all characters, trade items among characters, and also buy new items whenever a shop is present (perhaps a new Shop tab appears when you are in town)? Yes, /armchair designer and all, but I would love to never have to do the inventory window dance again.

3047

Is it just me or does the tactical combat interface in that old screenshot look better than the tactical combat interface I have now?

3048

I assume this is OK to download to a second computer as part of the original purchase?

3049

As it is for all the cool people. ;-)

In general, how much has the game improved with the “day zero” patches from the first wide release version? Was it significant enough for people to think this will come together quickly, or is it going to take a lot of patches and time before the game reaches the equivalent of a “GalCiv2 at release” status?

3050

1.05 patch last night is a huge, huge improvement over the gold master game and the 1.01 release. For me the game went from quite unstable to almost rock solid (the almost qualifier is due to alt-tabbing issues). The interface is much more polished and things have generally been cleaned up. While it’s too early for me to give a full evaluation to the balance changes, so far I like what I’ve seen of them.

I personally think the game is quite reasonable now. My two caveats are (1) I haven’t touched the campaign, and probably won’t and (2) it’s too early for me to evaluate the AI.

I don’t remember GalCiv2 at release, but I’m doubtful it was much better than Elemental is now.

3051

1.05 isn’t perfect, it’s still rough around the edges, but it is a substantial improvement for me.

3052

Duh! Now I really feel uncool.
I’ve been on this forum since… several years before 2003 at least. (Is there a way to find the old posts, from before all the accounts were reset in 2003?)

Your remark made me realize that there are options to be fiddled with. Thanks! Now we’re on the same page, 76. Does that mean I’m slightly less uncool?

3053

Even though I’ve been critical of the man, I’ll be the first to give him props for this apology to Ben:

In the article, he quoted an inflammatory forum posting I made on a site I participate in called Quarter to Three. This is a site I’ve been a participant in for many years and many of the people I discuss things on there are personal friends of mine.

During one such exchange with my friend Ben Sones, I angrily responded with a statement “Ben, please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”

This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel. Ben’s a friend of mine and his comment that the game felt like a “beta” to him upset me and I responded inappropriately. I post a lot on many forums and unfortunately, sometimes the things I say are inappropriate or inflammatory.

As the CEO of Stardock, I want to be clear that my comments on the Quarter to Three forums do not reflect my team at large. They were words spoken out of frustration and sleep deprivation and I am truly sorry. We stand behind what we feel is a great product, one that we will continue to support for a number of years.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/392474

3054

I’d agree with this sentiment. GalCiv 2 at launch was just about similar to the experience of Elemental after the latest patches.

Take that as you will.

I liked GalCiv 2 at launch, but a lot of people didn’t because they found it cold and disjointed. I know I’ve seen similar criticism of Elemental.

3055

Yeah, I personally think it sucks that Brad has to watch what he says around here lest it be trumpeted as company policy. The cool factor of having devs as an active part of the community decreases somewhat if they have to run every statement past the PR department.

3056

That aside, GalCiv2 was stable and relatively bug free at launch, which is the state I expect all Stardock games to be released in. I’m willing to give Stardock the benefit of the doubt over the “day zero” stuff since that was the intended “release” version of the game, and not the version released earlier to deal with the broken street date (though I really don’t understand why Brad & team thought pushing out a flawed earlier version was the answer to that particular issue - there’s a reason the bigger publishers don’t do stuff like that when their street dates are broken).

3057

I had some solid fun with the 1.05 last night.

Some things still feel a bit obtuse but it’s getting better. It’s certainly a game I’m willing to put some time into, hoping that the mid-and-late gameplay is solid.

I guess my biggest hopes at this stage would be that the tactical battles improve dramatically (I am really finding them a chore rather than fun, and usually just auto-resolve) and that magic takes on a bit more personality and includes a more pervasive sense of “choice”. I’m still just clicking on spells, many of which seem to do the same stuff, and I am learning them and leveling up to the next tier of spells so fast that I don’t really get a sense of accomplishment from them.

I did create a mountain pass to get to the other side and end-run the AI, which was kind of cool.

I really do love the city influence mechanic and how you can level up adventuring and reveal new resources. It is really satisfying to have this city with a huge influence taking in a ton of resources.

3058

Okay, so good tone and all, but in terms of the actual substance of what he’s saying, he’s basically doubling down. Ben and others are saying that Elemental isn’t release quality; Brad was stating that as far as he was concerned it was release quality by Stardock’s standards.

So now he’s apologizing for saying that, while reiterating that Elemental is a great game. So I know he’s really apologizing for the tone and the soundbite, but still, it seems to me that a true “take-back” would be admitting that Ben was right, and the game right now is in fact not a release quality game.

And I don’t think Brad thinks that, which means that Stardock probably will release their next game with this same level of quality, which means that if you don’t like that, you really shouldn’t buy their next game at launch. So, leaving tone aside, nothing substantive has changed.

3059

But I don’t think he thinks that. Hell, I don’t know if I think that, but I acknowledge my tolerance for release-level polish (or I should say the lack thereof) is higher than the average gamer.

I played about 250 turns on 1.05 and overall it was a solid, fun, experience. I’m sure many others would disagree and their opinion on that is completely valid, but in Brad’s mind I think it’s pretty clear he feels Elemental is release ready.

3060

Based on the comments on this thread…

I ordered the Civ IV complete pack for Fall from Heaven 2 (since I never did get around to picking up Civ IV).