Elemental all-purpose thread

[JM1]

There’s very little that’s good about Elemental, to be blunt. It’s a horrible mess of idea soup that fails to become a proper game.

[vyshka]

Which reminds me, Stardock’s built-up good relations must be having some impact. Tom’s review, I thought, had some pulled punches, but even GameSpot put up a review in progress instead of reviewing it in the state it was in during attempted play. Past good will accounted for something; it just means that Brad et al will be back on the PR bandwagon to smooth things over.

Fortunately for them, most gamers tend to have short memories.

Which is odd, because Gamespot didn’t wait for things to get fixed with Demigod before reviewing. I can’t think of any other review I have read on the site where they have held off reviewing a game because of glitches and bugs. Usually that results in a score like a 5 or a 6.

Sounds like the tie-in book is even worse than the game.

[Ben_Sones]

Gamespot is no stranger to pulling punches. They are the guys that cut Master of Orion III a break, remember. They have always had an aversion to taking a strong stance on anything–or at least they used to. I stopped reading their stuff years ago. They practically invented the 7-9 scale, though.

[Alan_Friesen]

Gah - second game that exploded due to “Out of Memory” error. Out of memory? I have eight gigabytes of RAM! Grr…

[Jon_Shafer]

Gah - second game that exploded due to “Out of Memory” error. Out of memory? I have eight gigabytes of RAM! Grr…

Only if the program is 64-bit. Otherwise you have much, much less available than that…

Jon

[KieronGillen]

Best In Thread, “Elemental all-purpose thread,” 2010.

Jason, meet Tei. He’s quite the human. Assuming he’s a human.

KG

[Oghier]

Gah - second game that exploded due to “Out of Memory” error. Out of memory? I have eight gigabytes of RAM! Grr…

If you have an ATI card, definitely update to the latest set of drivers (released 8/25, I think). Before this, I crashed after about 30 minutes. Now, I can play for about 2 hours before getting that same error. So… it’s partly fixed.

[MrCoffee]

Hi guys! I’m back from vacation! So is this game any good?

It must be, look at the amount of pages in this thread.

[Sebmojo]

Is a crazy game, made of volatile magic. That’s why implode on some people computers.

That so needs to go on the box.

[Sebmojo]

And what a honest and insightful review it is. Nice work, Tom.

Agreed.

[ArmandoPenblade]

Notice a lot of people assuming major issues are linked to ATI cards, and basically you get to choose between alt-tab-crashes or out-of-memory bugs (although there are pretty significant memory leaks throughout the game on either major card brand), but another huge performance issue happens to both ATI and NVIDIA owners.

If you find your game slows down almost immediately upon starting, load up FRAPS and zoom into a spot of ground w/ no cities on it at all. Now zoom out till you can see a city and watch to see if your FPS drops by 3/4 or more. If so, you are the proud owner of the Elemental Doesn’t Render the World Map Using My Graphics Card bug!

Yep, check your GPUz or similar while surfing the world map: 0-2% utilization of your GPU throughout, compared to as much as 50% utilization in tactical battles. This bug occurs on AMD (Phenom, Athlon, and Phenom II confirmed in forums), Intel (Core2Duo and Quad along with i7 confirmed on forums), NVIDIA (8000-, 200-, and 300-series cards confirmed), ATI (3000, 4000-, and 5000-series cards confirmed), Win7, Win Vista, XP, 32, and 64 bit systems on Asus, Gigabyte and other mobos. The devs still have no idea what’s causing it to happen, despite having dozens of debug filedumps to mess w/ on it and nearly as many complete system spec-outs. It’s awesome.

Just trying to be sure that Qt3 gives credit where it’s due for some of the bugginess. . . sure ATI drivers aren’t perfect (10.8 makes my software mouse cursor disappear while moving at all), but Stardock are doing just fine making crippling bugs all on their own! :)

[RepoMan]

And I can’t help but look at things like Tom’s preview and Brad’s frequent “we know it’s not done yet, tons of content are coming in at the last minute” postings, and be fairly convinced that this is a last-minute rush job.

There is almost certainly a large foundation of a fun game there. Stardock may well patch the fun in like GPG did with Supreme Commander 2 when they brought that AI guru in and put out the major AI patches in April. (And for Tom’s sake: Stardock may well patch the completeness and the polish in, since that’s what is most clearly lacking now.)

But nonetheless I’m disappointed Stardock didn’t have the financial luxury to give this epic strategy game (the exact genre that most needs real prolonged betas with the game in almost-final form) the baking time it needed. Bummer.

Oh well, my backlog needs the love anyway.

I posted this before I went on family vacation last week, and the ensuing 51 pages (!) of this thread – plus Tom’s review – make it manifestly clear that I was exactly right.

To think Brad had the gumption to ask me, in a reply, whether I had played the release of Elemental – as though that would have made any difference to my points! I’ve been programming for 20 years, and after that long, you learn the difference between real betas and misnamed pre-alphas, and the difference between rush jobs and properly polished releases. You can smell them a mile away, in fact, and that’s exactly what happened this time.

I will definitely never preorder anything from Stardock again; I am disappointed in how they used my preorder money for Elemental, and I consider the jury very much still out on whether they can turn it into a properly polished game or not. Has Empire: Total War ever gotten to a proper level of polish (say, as polished as Civ 4)? If so, I haven’t heard about it.

I’ll certainly wait to install my preordered copy until the hivemind verdict (including Tom’s, since I trust his opinion on strategy games, unlike shooters) is that it’s been patched up to its potential. I do hope that happens; otherwise, my preorder money will have been wasted.

Very sad, Brad.

[Tide]

Sorry all, but it’s unplayable for me. It CTD’s every session. It won’t use my GPU. It’s unplayable junk.

I feel like I pre-ordered a half baked pizza that I’m expected to reheat and finish cooking. Over several days. So far it’s just food poison.

I had major problems with GalCiv2 and I ignored them, but it’s clear to me now these guys – small company or not – don’t know what they’re doing. This is beyond the pale bad.

[Fenris99]

The warfare heats up rather quickly. The AI builds massive armies very early on, anyone else noticing this?

[Fenris99]

Also, why is it so difficult to get non-aggression treaties? What am I missing?

[Alan_Friesen]

Also, why is it so difficult to get non-aggression treaties? What am I missing?

In my latest game, a neighbour declared war. I quickly went to his closest city, captured it (he only had a squad of axemen, while I had my badass sovereign and a squad of archers), then demolished every single improvement in his city. Everything. Left the next turn, headed back for my territory successfully.

One of the other factions messages me and says, “Um, hey. You’re… yeah, pretty powerful. Non-aggression pact? K thx bye.”

Of course, I was pretty much leveled ten turns later when the first guy’s king came at me with siege engines, stone golems, and a whole lot of infantry, but I thought that the AI was pretty clever: don’t get into a non-aggression pact with somebody until he’s proven to be pretty damn aggressive.

[lokiju]

I had major problems with GalCiv2 and I ignored them, but it’s clear to me now these guys – small company or not – don’t know what they’re doing. This is beyond the pale bad.

I’m sorry, but this means the majority of developers don’t know what they’re doing. Honestly, how many games get released that run smoothly or are at full potential out of the box for most customers? I just recently wrangled with Dragon Age…hours of research to get it to run for any length of time. This is pretty much the status quo for PC games imho.

As to the GalCiv games…I’m not sure where all the hate is coming from. It’s not all encompassing, but a basic look at GameRankings has them at:

GalCiv 83%
GalCiv Altarian Prophecy 80%
GalCiv2 86.%
GalCiv2 Dark Avatar 92%
GalCiv2 Twilight 92%

That does not indicate to me that Stardock is bad at development.

[Disconnected]

The warfare heats up rather quickly. The AI builds massive armies very early on, anyone else noticing this?

I wish…

Assuming it’s a problem for you, try getting into the habit of training two starter units to guard (each of) your town(s) right away, and make your first two techs parties and basic gear. When those two techs are done, train two parties of your new unit type to guard your town(s) and disband the starter units (disbanding in town converts the unit to population) as soon as your new units are trained.

Unless your AI is a very great deal more competent than mine, the above should keep you quite safe for a long time. A potential alternative might be to research two levels of the notable location tech. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t really know if it’s a viable approach, but level 3 notable location tech unleashes small armies all over the map, who’ll attack all factions. Tech’ing to it right away strikes me as having the potential to kill off the AIs. Of course, it might do the same to you if you’re as bad as the AI :p

Also, why is it so difficult to get non-aggression treaties? What am I missing?

Your reputation might be wrong. What the right reputation is, depends a bit on who you’re dealing with.
Your military rating might be wrong. Neighbouring factions are disinclined to sign non-aggro pacts if you pose no threat or a very severe one. Factions isolated from you seem to be (it could be a fluke) more inclined to sign non-aggro pacts with weaklings.
Opposed faction types are generally disinclined to sign non-aggro pacts.
Low diplomacy tech makes everyone dislinclined to sign non-aggro pacts.

There’s more to it than that, but I believe those are the basics.

[Fenris99]

Thanks for the replies. I’m still not getting it though. Why is the AI so quick to declare war? I’ve played Civ4/Galciv2 and I’ve never seen anything like this. Sooner or later (an it’s usually sooner) everyone is declaring war on me. I don’t see how one can possibly win through any other victory condition besides conquest.

[Teiman]

Fun bug:
forums.impulsedriven.com/393908

You can sell your wife, and she still give you childrens :D