5521

On a more upbeat note, patch 1.08 is now live.

----------- Elemental v1.08 Change Log -----------

  • Performance *
  • LOD optimizations across improvements and tile designs
  • Continued memory optimization/leak squashing
  • Gameplay / Balance *
  • AI handles its sovereign more intelligently
  • AI more effective at going after targets of opportunity
  • AI sovereign is more careful about going into enemy territory
  • AI has new APIs for determining whether there are targets of opportunity in the area
  • Balance pass on resource distribution
  • Base tech cost changed from 4 to 5
  • Merchants/Money Changers now require 1 food to construct
  • Study/Archivist now require 1 gildar per turn to maintain
  • Gildar deposit now seeded near starting location
  • Tracker talent cost changed from 15 to 10
  • Organized talent cost changed from 10 to 20
  • Combat Rating calculation altered in an attempt to be a more accurate gauge of lethalness
  • Fewer resources spawned per 1000 tiles.
  • Fewer minor factions spawned.
  • Added scalars to attack and defence for units who are in home territory or foreign territory, modifiable in ElementalDefs.xml
  • Territory scalars now work as Empire v Fallen (e.g. Kingdom guy on Fallen territory gets penalty, etc).
  • Updated formula for gildar given when killing a given unit
  • Child essence is no longer modified by spawn rating, but is instead a value between 50% and 100% of the more powerful parent’s essence.
  • Updated TerrainTypes.xml to make Forests and Swamps take 2 moves
  • Changing the “IncreaseMorale” modifier attribute to “AdjustMorale. It’s more clear for the modders.
  • Battles *

-Revamp of the way offensive spells hit/miss and deal their damage
+HIT/MISS is deteremined by an attacker roll (minDamage – maxDamage) and by the defender roll (0-DEF)
+Values can now be specified as a MinValue and a MaxValue rather than just a Value (support for constant value spells is still supported)
+If a MinValue and a MaxValue is specified, the Value is defined by a rand roll between the two numbers based on the modifiers internal rand roll.
+Updated descriptions for all core spellbook spells to show bonus damage from INT and bonus damage from shards in the spell description.
+The SpellbookWnd has been updated to properly display the damage range if there is one, and the constant damage if there isn’t one.
+All core spells that were using stats to calculate the value but didn’t have a ValueOwner specified have been fixed.
+The elemental shards unit stats now default to 0 instead of 1. The calculations in the existing spells have been redone to reflect this.

  • Fixed BURNING BLADE spell to appropriately increase attack.
  • Fixed SHIELD OF FIRE spell to appropriately increase defense.
  • Fixed CRUSH SPIRIT spell to appropriately decrease morale.
  • Fixed BRAVERY spell to appropriately increase morale.
  • Fixed DRAIN LIFE spell to appropriately transfer HP from target to caster.
  • UI *
  • Changed the display code for the main UI bar to round attack and defense rather than truncate.
  • Hooked up the CTRL+ARROW and SHIFT-ARROW camera rotation and movement hotkeys to tactical.
  • Added save game descriptions
  • Bug Fixes *
  • Fixed bug where dialogs from triggers in the campaign (like moving beyond where you should build a city) would pop up many times when a unit moved into that tile.
  • Fixed AI bug where it was doing deficit spending and creating units still
  • Removed the max spell points entry from the affected stats in the level up wnd, since it isn’t affected by any unit stats anymore
  • Fixed bug where non-aggression pact wasn’t being checked for when left-clicking on a unit in attack mode
  • Fixed modifier in Refined_Economics_Amarian_MP to modify A_Gold player ability instead of A_Wealth (which doesn’t exist)
  • Fixed golem animation pack (commented out an animation that was missing and causing t-poses)
  • Fixed crash when making a mountain in map editor
  • Fixed trading your spouse (if she was a recruited NPC) in the regular unit trade
  • Perceived value stuff gets hidden when arranging marriages, instead of showing whatever was selected last
  • Entries for kids when arranging marriages now use a male and female icon to denote boy and girl, instead of the words in parentheses after the name
  • Fixed “…” from string overflowing for the divider title when trading or arranging a marriage
  • Fixed the divider title not ever changing from “And” once the arrange marriage screen was shown
  • Fixed display of tooltip text and color text on Customize Faction window
  • Tweaked SetToolTip to calculate the necessary size of the window more accurately, to fix bug where tooltips were sometimes being truncated
  • Fixed bug where clicking a new destination while the unit was moving would cause the unit to get a free move
  • You can no longer set a units destination while it is moving
  • Fixed Refined Housing and Refined Economics techs (and their fallen equivalents) so that they correctly provide the bonus they say they do
  • When a unit inside a city or an army is selected and asked to cast a spell, that is the unit that is used for spellcasting now, instead of having it just fail (in a city) or try to cast the spell from the leader of the army
  • Fixed bug where summoning a unit while in a city would cause that unit to be summoned in an army with you within that city (causing weird behavior), now just stations the unit in the city with you
  • Fixed bug where raise land spell would not work on all land category terrain types, like swamp or rugged terrain. Now, if a land tile is not hills, it raises that land to hills, instead of checking for only some terrain types
  • Fixed a bug where, in the faction editor, you could select ability bonus options for free by selecting and deselecting them, and then spinning the race spinner, caused by deselection not updating the faction config correctly
  • Fixed units that finished training on the same turn as an autosave not being there when the autosave was loaded
  • Fixed players not being able to select their city level up bonuses or tech breakthroughs on loading an autosave if they were earned that turn, by having the local player mark themselves as needing to get user input for these things instead of unhiding the windows to allow the choice right away during CWorld::EndTurn, and not letting the user choose until after the next turn starts and the autosave has been made. If one of thses autosaves is loaded, the local player will be allowed to choose their tech breakthroughs and city bonuses once the map is unhidden. This keeps us from having to delay an autosave and the start of the next turn by waiting for the user to choose their bonuses, instead making that choice part of the start turn logic after the autosave has been made and saving the mark saying the player will get to choose at the start of the next turn.
  • Fixed treaty turn counts not matching if an autosave was loaded
  • Based on confusion in the forums, removed ability to automatically unlock a spell in the learning queue if it makes it to the front of the queue when the player has enough research to buy it, so that users rearranging their spell learning queue don’t have their spell points silently taken away while shuffling spells around, if they didn’t intend to learn that spell next
  • Now it always takes at least one turn to learn any spell
  • Fixed bug where tile highlights in tactical battle would disappear after an ALT+TAB
  • Fixed bug where trees would not look correct in all cases after loading a gamesave.
  • Fixed an issue that was allowing counter attacks against units with abilities of type DoesNotProvokeCounterattacks.
    +Fixed an issue that was causing modifiers applied in tactical battles to persist after the battle.
  • This fixes the bug that causes XP and Gildar rewards after battles to be negatively skewed if the enemy unit combat rating was lowered due to debuffs.
    +Fixed an issue with skipping turns in tactical battles that would cause a stuck turn if done when the unit being skipped was in motion.
  • Pressing spacebar now sets a tactical units moves to zero AND cancels their destination.
5522

I’m not seeing it, but that is a lot of text and I might be missing it, is multiplayer live?

EDIT: Oh, I just saw this at Stardock’s forum, in a changelog:

5523

I don’t know that very many people are in that type of total denial mode at this point. Most places, discussion of the game has slowed way down, which suggests that people are putting it aside. And what it comes down to is after you get through the initial “I’m learning and having fun” phase and begin to see all the problems, you then either feel your time spent was worth it or it wasn’t from an entertainment value standpoint. If you feel your time spent was worth it, then you are probably more positive about Stardock’s promises then someone who feels like they got ripped off.

5524

Loaded up 1.08 and rampaged over the AI with the usual Organized army abuse + Sovereign assassination that the computer is still oblivious to.

Bleh. I think I’m done with this game.

5525

It isn’t denial, it’s just the normal kind of faulty conclusions we tend to draw while we’re under the influence of having fun :D

My point was simply that I disbelieve that a significant number of the people who don’t currently consider Elemental broken, are in a position to offer an opinion.

5526

This isn’t directed just at you, but honestly at this point I’m not sure why people who are severely frustrated with the game are firing it up until after all the patching is done. There are several updates and patches already planned well beyond the 1.08 that was just released. If the game needed as much work as people are saying, stop beating your heads against the proverbial walls and wait it out a bit more so that hopefully major changes can get implemented.

Oh, and there’s this:

(emphasis mine) I’m actually not quite sure what that means because of how it’s phrased, but I think it’s that AI fixes aren’t in just yet. Who knows?

“I’d respect your differing opinion except for the simple fact that you’re wrong.” I wish I had some political cartoon to add that as a caption to.

5527

[I]

This version of 1.08 is enabled for multiplayer. 1 vs 1, 1 vs AI, and up to 8 human players in a custom match (16 players coming, no major AI’s enabled in this build).
[/I]

I believe what he is saying is that if you download the multiplayer beta they’ve now released, it will just be you and other human players and the AI only controlling minors. No major power AI’s are “enabled.”

5528

Ahh - that makes sense. Thanks.

5529

Yes, haha! Let’s Go-Go-Google pictures!

Hey wait, let’s re-read that conversation first, just to make sure we didn’t fail miserably at reading comprehension & accidentally make ourselves look silly ;)

5530

Here’s some selected bits from the Elemental Dev Journals. I bolded the parts I find especially valuable. Some good improvements are in the pipeline.

Next week we anticipate releasing v1.09 which will continue to address issues that were not found in the initial release, improve computer AI further and provide it and other new MP features. After that, we will begin focusing on v1.1 which will be the first post-release update that is designed specifically to extending game play.

Anyone who has performance or technical (stability) problems with this build please make sure you let us know. At this stage, the technical issues that were present at launch should be fully addressed. If this isn’t the case for you, let us know as much as you can about your system as we will personalize our efforts as much as possible.

We are anxious to move forward to begin our traditional policy of extending the game to suit the desires of the gaming community.

Other notes:

  1. We have implemented an option for quick moves in tactical battles but it was not checked-in in time for this build.
  2. We intend to provide an option for the amount of gildar that will be present in the world (both in terms of loot and the amount of gold that gold deposits provide). We dramatically reduced the amount of loot that monsters provide because it was not intended for players to run their economy “harvesting” wolves and other creatures but rather supplement. We recognize that others enjoy this and will address this as an option in future versions.

Version 1.08 is now available

Known issues:

  1. If you are loading a saved game created with a previous version, there may be some anomalous behaviors in tactical battles with direct damage magical spells (we may release an update to address this).
  2. Some outlaw adventurers are appearing as if they are recruitable, this is a UI issue that will be addressed in the next update.

From Wednesday:

After the initial launch of Elemental: War of Magic, we went back and did a post-mortem on how things could be done better and through this has emerged an updated QA policy. This has in turn meant that the multiplayer launch, which was originally going to be just a flip of a switch has gone through considerably more QA (and will continue to go through more QA) to improve the general quality going forward.

5531

It’s unofficially live. Click on the beta updates tab in Impulse (show pre-release or something), and another 1.08 will show that has MP.

They don’t think it’s ready for prime time, but they’re letting people try it out.

5532

This is the best chance Elemental’s got: A stubborn, self-funded CEO behind it.

5533

I like this game. My honest opinion is it is good, but was released too early.

There were issues with the engine, a shortage of content, and a lot of minor polish, UI, mechanic issues.

I support Stardock moving forward. They have done the right and brave thing and admitted to the mistakes. They have said they will support the game and furthermore even release the first expansion pack free to people who bought it.

Elemental is good, it just needs more stuff. More races, more monsters, more magic and some mechanic / UI polishes.

5534

k, just read over the patch notes as best I could (I’m not rocking enough caffeine right now). Is the shards-not-affecting-tactical-combat-casting-bug still in there?

5535

Welcome to QT3!

I think just adding “more stuff” is entirely the wrong way to go. Brad acknowledges this. Adding more to a borked system doesn’t make things better.

5536

I don’t recall, but the entire magic system is revamped in 1.1 anyway, that’s going to be the first real gameplay related patch so I’m completely holding off on the game until it’s out, at least.

5537

This. I’m all about FfH2 until then.

5538

Hmm… I downloaded the patch and took it for a spin. I have to say, I enjoyed it. I got into a war with Magmar and the guy from Umbar right from the start, and they sent in some forces, without their sovs, which I found hard to deal with. In the past I would have easily crushed them.

Also, though it’s much easier to find a mate in the beginning now, which is good, the game seems to be back to spawning more than one of some of the heroes. I had two of the assassin girls chasing me around for a while. (It seems the scripting actually keeps some of them around your start location.)

Lastly, it’s running much smoother on my old machine. I still have to run in the cloth map view (I really like that view anyway) but it’s as quick as can be now, even in tactical battles. They used to take forever.

5539

Brad?

5540

Admitting the obvious after staunchly denying it is now an act of bravery. A CMoH is in Brad’s near future.