Elemental all-purpose thread

[frank_austin]

Wasn’t it more like GPS shipped both of those in terrible shape, there was some contractual issue that got in the way of them fixing it and eventually Stardock came in and rewrote the stuff themselves in order to get it done?

While that is certainly a version of events, I wouldn’t call it anything close to true.

[rhinohelix]

While that is certainly a version of events, I wouldn’t call it anything close to true.

Since it was a question, why don’t you answer it with truthiness?

EDIT: This is what I had stuck in cache and failed to properly recall:
DOUBLE EDIT: no need to be extra rude.

The Death of Demigod

Oh yea well I definitely stand by those statements.

But in general, as I said at the time the cause of Demigod’s networking issues was that we were “babes in the woods”. But that doesn’t mean Impulse Reactor handled connectivity.

Originally the plan was to use GPGnet but that turned out not to be an option so we had to look for alternatives. Early on I had hoped we could develop it ourselves but there wasn’t time so we licensed Raknet to handle connectivity but it wasn’t really set up to do so many peer to peer connections.

A better analogy would be if we licensed Bink to do video and tried to use it to play 50 videos at once on a screen without properly seeing what systems could handle that. It’s not Raknet’s fault that we didn’t properly stress test it.

[Lloyd_Heilbrunn]

I seem to have a repeatable bug where units disappear upon loading an Autosave. Jasek once and a Pioneer another time.

Anyone else?

[kerzain]

I haven’t had that happen (that I’ve noticed), but I’ve had creatures in the world be in different spots.

[Marcus]

So I got an alert that 1.06 was the new update. What did they fix?

[Lloyd_Heilbrunn]

So I got an alert that 1.06 was the new update. What did they fix?

---

----------- Elemental v1.06 Change Log ------------

---

• Gameplay / Balance *

• Cost of weapons increased in terms of gold and materials
• Monster leveling tops out earlier so that there aren’t crazy powerful monsters late game
• Training time increased for the more sophisticated weapons
• AI will focus more on training soldiers rather than building up their cities if under threat
• General AI improvements
• AI smarter about training units in cities based on their current resource situation
• AI more effective at determining who to go to war with
• By default, the AI opponents added in the Choose Opponents window get difficulty set based on the World Difficulty
• Campaign: Markinn now gives tactical HASTE spell instead of strategic SUMMON ROCK GIANT spell
• Campaign: city leveup bonuses for TECH KNOWLEDGE and ARCANE KNOWLEDGE now suppressed in campaign
• AI sov’s are now using an HP adjustment multiplier based on AI difficulty settings

---

• Battles *

• Hooked up the projectile follow camera code to obey the Auto-Move Camera in Tactical option.
• Adding message boxes to explain why spell casting fails.
• Fix to repick targets in autoresolve when a counterattack kills the attacker.
• Fix to make targeting picking more intelligent (to be sure it doesn’t pick invalid targets).
• Auto selection of the next unit in tactical battles should no longer occur if the game option for not auto selecting is turned on.
• Tactical action cost modifiers for everything except for movement (which can have buffs) should now be 1.
• The tactical action cost of special abilities is now 2.
• All tactical actions use up to their cost, except for spells which require at least 2 action points.
• When a tactical battle closes it now sets the cursor to be an arrow.

---

• UI *

• Fixed Map Notifiers only placed for resources your faction can eventually tap (ex. won’t tell kingdoms about wargs)
• Trade Equipment Wnd tweaks so that summoned creatures show up in the scene views better.
• Hooked up new entries for the actions list, vitals list, and other basic image entries in main game wnd contexts to act more like buttons (highlight and have a click down state) to indicate that they are clickable

---

• Bug Fixes *

• Fixed the infamous “white screen” in tactical battles that occurred on a very specific hardware/driver/OS configuration.
• Fixed a problem that would cause the particle effects to disappear after alt-tabbing out of the game when running in full-screen.
• Fixed a DirectX warning in Tile Highlight Graphic
• fixed uninitalized UNIT pointer in AIMessageBox (caused a debugger crash, probably fixes random crashes users have witnessed)
• Fixed bug where linked pioneer improvements were getting the multiplier bonuses from their linked cities twice
• Changed around the values grabbed for some resource breakdowns so that they match getting rid of this double bonus
• You can no longer build pioneer improvements on resources outside of your ZOC, even if they are adjacent to a city, to prevent them from getting destroyed if they can’t get absorbed in time
• Adjacent pioneer improvements to cities now get absorbed into the city the very next turn, instead of 2 turns after they became adjacent
• Fixed bug where custom empire factions designed in the faction designer wouldn’t have a valid tech tree
• Custom factions now get the appropriate wall set, and change their name to “Kingdom of” or “Empire of” appropriately
• Fixed a bug in the faction designer that caused the race spinner to not match the actual race being displayed
• Shortened the text in the caravan info cards to make it less likely that text entries will overflow to the next line down, and got rid of some old text that doesn’t mean anything to how caravans work anymore, and got rid of some hardcoded strings, and moved the hardcoded quote to the different caravan/trader unit types
• CMapGenerator no longer generates race starting position for tactical battles, since they aren’t used in that mode and were causing debug messages to flood output as the random land tile buffer isn’t getting filled after the first tactical battle map is created.
• Campaign: Fixed oddity where reloading a save would reblock the pass between New pariden and Gilden.

[vyshka]

So I got an alert that 1.06 was the new update. What did they fix?

http://forums.impulsedriven.com/393126

Saved games might not be compatible with 1.06

[Cubit]

Saved games might not be compatible with 1.06

I laughed. Hopefully retaining save compatibility is something Stardock will focus on soon, or the months they will be long.

[vyshka]

Is it possible to make an update that doesn’t wipe out people’s settings ffs?

[kerzain]

They’re coming out with another patch tonight, a followup to the 1.06 they just released a couple hours ago. The save games from 1.06 will NOT be compatible with the update due in a little while, so if you’re like me and you’re like ninety minutes into a new game, you can update and lose your progress, or finish the game before you update.

I’m not sure what the latest update is going to fix compared to the 1.06 that came out earlier tonight.

[Lloyd_Heilbrunn]

Yeah, I paused the 1.06 download because I decided to finish the current game.

[Adree]

I’ve basically taken the week (or month) off from the game because at my pace of playing I’ll have to restart the campaign fifty times.

[ArmandoPenblade]

If/when they fix the out of memory crashes and GPU issues (game apparently doesn’t utilize the GPU on the world map for dozens of people on their forums, rendering the game nigh-unplayable once you get a few things onscreen at once), I’ll be able to continue, because I really enjoy myself between crashes.

Till then. . . watching all of season 5 of the Doctor Who reboot with the missus and losing at Starcraft!

[TurinTur]

I have come to the conclusion that Stardock really sucks at game design. They should just stick with publishing other company’s games.

My 0.02$, about something that i don’t really have any idea.

I vote for Brad dedicating himself at the AI, and that’s it. Designer should be another person. (and also, now that we enter in this waters, he should delegate in other people for the CEO / PR role).

First, he is better at doing AI that he is being a designer.

Second, even forgetting that fact (he is at heart an AI guy), it’s not good for a game that the CEO, AI dev and designer are all the same person. It affects the game.
The game designer should fight against the AI dev to make a crazy, charming game, while the AI guy should fight back. And when the CEO comes and says he want to release the game already, the designer should try to fight back and stant in his ideals, trying to save the game from an early unfinished release. The fact that here the three roles are the same person (so no fights) is detrimental for the game.

[TurinTur]

Just curious if this is random hating or not -

I know reviews aren’t exactly a reliable barometer of a game’s quality, but most of their games have been pretty well-recieved. They really haven’t made a whole lot of them in recent history, so there’s not much of a sample size to go by. GalCiv II and its expansions are the last major foray before Elemental that I’m aware of.

“Most of their games”?? They only had one well recieved game by public and critic, Gal Civ 2. And also the expansions for that game.

[Sarkus]

I can’t comment about what state this game was in before yesterday and the 1.05 patch, but they released another patch today and so far I have yet to see a CTD and peformance seems notably better with today’s patchy. And so far not much stands out as broken.

Considering we are still waiting for the first post-release patch from Victoria 2, I can’t say I feel the need to sharpen my pitchfork over the current (two days later) state of Elemental. If there is stuff missing, then my choice to not pay close attention during development is apparently paying off.

[Alex_Hopkinson]

To answer your question, Mr Z-lows, the spell system – Arcane Lore, I guess you would call it – really needs another pass or two. But I really like how Elemental handles its non-arcane tech, which ties into nearly every single aspect of the game. I’d say it’s a huge improvement over GalCiv, which really didn’t come into its own until that expansion in GalCiv II that added racial tech trees. You can tell that Elemental is drawing from that.

Just wanted to add my +1 to this. The worldy knowledge tech tree side is really good in Elemental. I’d not played a game with this approach to the tree advancement before and I would have assumed I wouldn’t be happy with anything other than a Civ 4 style tree. Glad to be wrong!

[Evil_Steve]

the fantasy general intro (or is it outro?) brought a tear to an old man’s eye. game is pretty and interesting. i think it will be a hit.

old one eye

[KieronGillen]

I’m curious why you don’t just drop all pretense and reveal your true identity as Kieron the Conquerer.

I want to write Kang just so I can write KANG!!!

It’s just a brilliant word.

KG

[zx81-Amd64]

I cast the runes last night, they told me Elemental will be a great game. We just need patience.