5721

According to wikipedia:

The link in the source to the battlenet faq doesn’t work, though.

5722

Weird. Thanks for that. I figured it had to have been one of the odd 3rd-party discs that got shot out, but I never knew that any of them were authorized.

5723

Sounds like the Sierra-made Hellfire expansion to the original Diablo…

5724

I wonder what “authorized” means in this case.

If you watch Warren Spector’s talk with Mike Morhaime, he talks about Sierra’s Diablo expansion and about how it was the first and last time Blizzard would ever let a 3rd party develop an expansion for their IP. I guess Blizzard wasn’t going to sue but it’s not official in anyway?

It’s interesting that Brad blames the engine for their woes and says the design was complete… while in other posts he talks about the complete revamp of the game’s design.

???

5725

I had Retribution, and it completely sucked. It was just a bunch of fan-made quality scripted maps. It made the Sierra Diablo 1 expansion look like a major project.

5726

For those of us still trolling on page 284 … is the game relatively patched and fun at this point?

5727

I think as of 1.09 it’s supposed to be patched up to “working”. 1.1 and beyond is where the major gameplay changes start coming in.

5728

Good to know Kevin, thanks for that. I’ll try to make an opinion based on a quick play through at 1.09.

5729

And … 1.09 is out.

----------- Elemental v1.09 Change Log -----------

  • Gameplay / Balance *
  • AI sovereigns take more care about where they are doing their attacking
  • Added code so that AIBasic is smarter about attacking units in cities
  • ‘Equipment Cache’ goodie hut now hands out cloth armor, instead of the patchwork armor that should not be in the game anymore
  • You can no longer train groups of Dragons, Catapults, or Giant Demons
  • New option: Players can choose not to have monsters spawn
  • New option: Players can disable minor factions
  • Loot given by monsters increased
  • Fixed bug where some AI-controlled caravans that had already established trade routes would wander off those routes while delivering their stuff at a city
  • Fixed a bug where caravan pathfinding through territory owned by anyone other than their owner would still have a penalty, even through caravans can always move freely through any territory
  • Changed dynasty kids to determine their essence based on the BASE essence of their parents (ignoring equipment, player ability bonuses, etc.) This should keep kids from double-dipping from things like player-wide essence bonuses and keep their max mana at more reasonable levels
  • fixed several armor and special ability xml issues (that were either pointed out on the forums or that I discovered while fixing others)
  • Battles *
  • The starting side in a tactical battle is now chosen randomly. The attacker and the defender have an equal chance to go first.
  • Added shorter/faster annimations for bow attacks and spell attacks
  • Fixed a divide by zero error in spell damage.
  • Fixed some logic to determine whether or not a tactical unit was moving.
  • Added code to make sure a unit cancels its destination when it skips a turn.
  • Added some additional checks to skip turn logic in tacatical battles to stop a turn from being skipped in the middle of other actions.
  • Fix to be sure ranged attacks don’t always do max damage in tactical battles.
  • Fix to experience display for battles, and fixed a bug where auto resolve was only rewarding experience for killing the leader unit.
  • The AI does not take its first turn immediately after the window loads. This will prevent cases where the AI takes its turn before the window finishes rendering.
  • Fixed a spell type tag for Quicken (now shows up in Tactical Battles)
  • Fixed an issue where a single unit might lose its mana after attacking and killing a defending team.
  • Added the UsableInBattle tag for item types, will help to determine if an item should be displayed during a tactical battle. This defaults to FALSE.
  • Items in a tactical battle will now properly stack in the UI.
  • UI *
  • NEW! City List window which can be brought up via a tab on the kingdom screen
  • this will list all your current cities, along with vital information about resource, training, and building being done there (ie: it’s a city spreadsheet)
  • New icons hooked up for sovereign talents
  • Got rid of trailing decimal zeros for the global resource pool tooltips, to clean up the display of resources that are always integers
  • Fixed bug where the global resources for a player didn’t refresh when a city was lost through razing until the next turn
  • Tweaked the spell info card to get the stats to show up in the grey bar at the bottom of the info card, and to support multiple text entries of varying sizes
  • Item Shop now shows change in Combat Speed, Defense, and Attack for the highlighted item
  • Message Box input field now limited to 20 chars
  • Made auto-select next moveable unit code not select caravans
  • Fixed City HUDs clipping at the end (now they all get rounded edges)
  • Performance / Stability *
  • Moved code around that calls clean-up functions so that we don’t get false mem-leak messages anymore
  • Moved clean up code around so that game within a game cleans up properly
  • Fixed mem leak in Trigger Manager, city wall nodes, destination and selection cursors for destroyed objects
  • Removed code in CTreeGraphic that was causing a leak
  • Fixed big leak in DecalGraphicGraphicManager where every decal in the game was leaking when starting a new game within a game
  • Fixed leak in CUnitSceneViewWindow (which is used on lots of screens)
  • Fixed random crash in kingdom screen with the filling of the Lore Book
  • Tile Designs now flush out the graphics for their “base graphic” (the one that the graphic instances use to render) once the instances for that base graphic are released
  • Fixed crash if a spellcaster ever had to cancel more than one enchantment at a time from losing 2 or more available enchantment slots
  • Fixed memory leak in UnitAnimationHelper that caused unit gfx to leak after the unit was destroyed
  • Fixed memory leak in TreeGraphic that caused tree batches to leak on game within a game or destruction of the forest object
  • Bug Fixes *
  • Fixed bug where mini map would not update itself after starting a new game from within a game
  • Hooked up renaming cities and units to use events (for MP)
  • Fixed bug where you could go into the enchants tab for any unit and cancel their enchantments, whether that unit belonged to you or not
  • Fixed bug where destination cursor would disappear if the unit it belonged to was off-screen
  • Added support for Resource modifier types in unit ability bonus options to be taken into account in what resources a unit always provides, without needing to be stationed in a city
  • Fixed Bug When reload a game with Wild Shard Improvements, the game now properly relinks them to their resource hoards (fixed issue where destroyed shrines would not regenerate shard resource)
  • Fixed particle effect render order on main map screen
  • Fixed graphical bug where mounted units in an army did not scale properly
  • CalculateAbilities now uses champions for ability modifiers (this fixes NPCs that should give bonuses but didn’t, such as ‘Royalty’)
  • Fixed bug where the NPC AI player would spawn new NPCs based off of the unit types of dynasty kids. This would cause champions wandering around with the same name, and with baby portraits if they hadn’t grown up yet.
  • Attacking cities or lone improvements while in attack mode now works
  • hooked up the cursor to change to the crossed swords at the right time for cities/improvements when one of your units is selected
  • Fixed comment in CityLevelUpBonuses.xml that caused malformed xml
  • Fixed badly merged text in QuestUnits.xml for Talax
  • Fixed end tags in CoreCityWalls
  • Fixed game modifiers and ending tag after Magnar_Staff in CoreSpecialWeapons.xml
  • Fixed end tag for Thumb in SpecialUnitProps.xml
  • Fixed comments in UnitSoundPacks.xml
  • note: thanks to ‘kenata’ and ‘heavenfall’ for helping us hunt down those above XML issues down and pointing us to some cool data checking tools
  • Modding *
  • Tile Editor: Fixed bug where large silhouette figure would render in the middle of a tile design when placing pedestrians
  • Map Editor: when using the creature placement tool, defaults to giving the creature a random wander radius, which can be changed with the tool’s third spinner in the bottom left corner
  • Also changed the wander radius 0 item to say “Don’t Wander” instead, does what the default used to do, cause the unit to not even go into auto-patrol mode
  • Added new data def type, CSpellResourceCost, which can be used in spell def xml to specify resource costs on casting a spell, as well as any persistent maintenance costs if this spell is an enchantment
  • tag used in the SpellResourceCost xml object to say whether the cost is deducted at time of casting (Per-Turn is 0), or if it is a continued maintenance cost that exists as long as the spell is in effect through an enchantment (Per-Turn is non-zero)
  • Note: maintenance resource costs can only be per-turn if the spell is an enchantment; there’s no one-time cut to per-turn resource production from an instant, non-enchantment spell
  • Here’s an example of some xml to put in a spell def, making this spell cost 5 metal immediately when cast, and having a maintenance cost of 1 material per turn until the enchantment is cancelled:

Metal
5

Materials
1
1

  • MODs folders now creatured for the user in their My Games/Elemental folder
  • Fixed Bug: Quests read in from XML (after loading the Data.zip) no longer override QuestDefIDs
  • Images and models now read in from the Mods/GFX folder properly
  • Mods are now enabled by default in Prefs.ini
  • Overlay: Implement tile upload/download
  • Multiplayer *
  • Added code to prefer a random map that supports the max players
  • Cloud saving/loading enabled
  • AI opponents enabled
  • Added handling for if firewall is turned off
  • Added check for if player is disconnected before starting turn timer when the end turn is requested
  • Added check to prevent player from going to multiplayer menu if it’s still checking for an update
5730

So I was planning on not firing up the game again until 1.1, but I was bored and decided to give 1.09. The game certainly “feels” a lot better. I mean nothing drastic has changed yet, other than some rough edges worn smooth, but that combined with significant performance increases (at least for my rig) made for a better play experience. The design problems are still there, but a lot of the technical stuff seems to be gone for me.

I was happy to see that magic spells were no longer 0-INT, that alone was a big improvement.

I’ll be interested to see what they do with 1.1.

5731

1.09b just released - I can’t see anything different in the change logs, likely just a minor tweak.

5732

no, it still has game-breaking bugs

my favorite is still ‘after ~150 turns you can’t end your turn’

5733

I believe it has something to do with MP.

I find this version about as stable as GalCiv after its first content patch, they’ve done a good job making it run acceptably now, though I’m sure a few people are having issues.

5734

I’m 500 turns in on my newest game. I think the game plays fine now, at least on my old machine. The AI is doing a much better job of protecting the sovereign, though not so good at protecting the kiddies. At Extreme difficulty, Kraxis is slowly losing a war of attrition, but has done a good job of keeping me hemmed in. (On hard I can just steamroll anyone once my kids have grown – the AI still has a hard time evaluating all that magic.)

Magic has been rebalanced as to essence cost, which makes me think about what I’m casting. It does appear that the shards have been nerfed quite a bit. I have an air shard and I can’t tell that it does any good at all.

I think one thing having a shard could do is give an essence discount on casting spells of that type.

Anyway, I’m having fun with this version.

For me, I’d be fine if they turned to making quests and magic more interesting.

5735

Yea I agree, the game is playing much better. If this was the version of Elemental that released I think it would have gotten some pretty decent reviews. Not glowing by any means, there’s still a ton of design problems, but I’m actually having a little bit of fun with the game now.

By the way, you can see what effect Shards have by looking at an individual spell description. The bonus they add is significant, but not crazy good like it was before (doubling spell damage).

5736

How to find the posts of a person on a Stardock forum

Command line:
http://forums.elementalgame.com/replies/full/<user number goes here>

Forum UI:

  • click a user name in a thread
  • choose “Find Posts By <user name>” from the pop-up menu
  • choose “<user name>'s Replies (Full Text)” from the pop-up menu labeled “View:” located just above the list of the threads the user has started

Don’t bother trying to open the original thread from the link in a listed post header. The link is malformed and does not work.

Stardock forum terminology:
(vBulletin - Stardock)
post = reply
thread = post

It took me a few weeks of using the forums to learn these methods. Hopefully you guys found them quicker if you searched for them at some point.

5737

Aside from Jarmo’s cryptic post, this is all good stuff to hear. I may get around to giving this a spin sometime soon. Would people suggest I hold off for the magic redesign in 1.10 or get something going sooner than later?

5738

Its up to you, but I’m holding off. Just because it doesn’t crash any more doesn’t mean it’s yet worth starting in the first place.

5739

There’s been a great deal of what I’d guess ought to be called error fixing. Equipment modifiers & costs aren’t all over the place, for example, and something comparable has been done to spells. If those were your only issues with Elemental, it’s playable now.

However, if you - like I and a great many others - think the city building, magic system, character system, combat systems, research topics, resource generation systems and every other game mechanic in Elemental, were an almost perfect combination of self-unbalancing descend into cluster fuckedness, then nothing has changed. The game is just as broken now as it was at release. And while v1.1 will allegedly makes major changes, it is to just one of those systems, so it’s probably safe to hold of for v15.1 or so.

5740

It’s just a technical guide to using the Stardock forums. I’ve noticed some negative comments about their search in this thread and seeing as I’ve also struggled with it I wanted to share my latest findings. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.