Elemental - Now Fallen Enchantress

[Typhon]

I like what he did with the game, but I don't think it replaces MoM.

It's a nice framework for someone to create a game that replaces MoM.  As an analogy, it's "Civ 4", now we need someone to create the FFH2 counterpoint that elevates it to something that will allow you to remove MoM from you harddrive.

[Ghambit]

So wait... did I just purchase a game that I could've gotten from a Civ4 mod?

[Sky]

I'm skeptical you got a game as good as a civ4 mod. :)

[Modern Angel]

There was something about this thing that wasn't passing the smell test for me as of a few months ago. Glad I held off, since the best that people seem to be saying is "Nice but bland."

[tazelbain]

Good luck doom-casting a game that's already made back it's development costs.

Had fun in the beta, very excited about this game. 

And MoM always was just a Civ mod anyway.

[Typhon]

So wait... did I just purchase a game that I could've gotten from a Civ4 mod?

Lol, no, that's not what I'm saying.  I was using an analogy to say that as FFH2 is to Civ 4, X will be to Elemental.

Elemental is not FFH2.  I think it's a significant evolution of turned based strategy and it has tactical combat (which is something like MOO2 and MOM), which I consider a plus.  HAVING NOT SEEN THE RELEASE BUILD, my feeling is that it's good.  Because it is an evolution in TBS, it has tactical combat and it has customizable leaders I feel that it will hold my attention quite a bit more than Civ 4 (which I bored of pretty quickly).

That said, at this point, it's not spectacular.  My feeling is that someone will create a mod for it that will be spectacular (because it's so moddable) - or Stardock will release an expansion that is spectacular.

[Modern Angel]

I'm not doomcasting it. It's going to do quite well. I just don't feel that Stardock games are all that. GalCiv2 was functional but bland and that seems to be the nearest analogue people are discussing.

[Merusk]

And MoM always was just a Civ mod anyway.

You shut your dirty whore mouth until you know what you're talking about.

[Reg]

Don't rush into this one guys. I played for a few hours today and I wish I'd waited 6 months.

[tazelbain]

And MoM always was just a Civ mod anyway.

You shut your dirty whore mouth until you know what you're talking about.

Does your nerd rage keep you warm at night?
Go ahead play Civ1 and the MoM back to back. 
And why is mod such a inflammatory word?  Mods are can be great these days.

Anyway, I'll have to echo Reg.  If you haven't bought already I'd wait until they pull the game together.  I don't know how you get "ahead of schedule" with so many serious bugs.

[Merusk]

Apparently I should have used green. 

[Typhon]

I played for an hour and a half with no memory leak and no crash - from a sample size of one it seems much more solid.  This game is definitely it's own flavor of TBS.  I like it a lot.  It still needs tweaking (ranged needed toning down, but now it feels too weak) and there are some new oddities - there are goody bags that appear in the world as time goes by - previously you needed to research Adventuring to gain access to the higher level goody bags, with the release build this seems to be not working (consistently).

If you are on the fence (if you aren't a massive TBS junky), wait for the planned demo.  

[Trippy]

Calm down people.

[tazelbain]

Apparently I should have used green. 

[Sir T]

The rumors about the "day 0" patch are apparently true. There's a 9 and a half meg patch there this morning, with a fairly large list of tweaks.

I've played a few hours of it now. The campaign is pretty crap to be honest. Your not allowed to research anything as you are given units types as you go along. I havent finished it yet though. Also I find the units very... soulless and bland. Very little character. You research better armor and weapons and replace the earlier stuff with better stuff. To be honest, I find the normal game to be much more enjoyable. Mainly as I wound up summoning a load of elemental giants and went 'stomp' all over the map   

I can see the Civ 4 comparisons but it also has similarities with Age of Wonders.

[Kitsune]

We will hope that patch takes care of the bulk of the stability issues for everyone.  As is usual for Stardock strategy games, my first short playthrough was a lesson in confusion.  I'll be learning as I go for a while, but I'm confident that I'll be getting the hang of it soon.

[Sir T]

Seems that WASN'T the 'Day 0' patch after all...

http://forums.elementalgame.com/391747

AUGUST 24th, 2010.

This is a day that the team has been waiting for for three years!

As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didn’t get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).

It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.

First, tonight we released a new interim build. This version is basically bug fixes and such based on player reports. You can see what’s new in it here. Looking at the change log gives you an idea of the complexities of making a new PC game in 2010 with a brand new engine.

But tomorrow (or later today as I write this) is the big one. The official day 0 update that the team and I have been working on since Beta 4 (the beta group can go into more detail on this but in brief: After beta 4, the game tree was split in two. One version went on to be the gold version which is what those people who have it early are playing. The other tree went on to become day 0.  These two trees were merged today already and will be going up tomorrow.

So what can you expect?

Here’s a few highlights:

   1. The UI is updated to be somewhat more intuitive.
   2. The campaign is significantly updated (though only for those starting fresh).
   3. Resources are treated more like units. This is hard to explain but essentially the game will let you know of what resources you’re not using and how to make use of them.
   4. There’s a lot of performance improvements the day 0 build, particularly for those with lower end CPUs.
   5. The “day 0” AI is in it.
   6. There’s been a polish pass to the spell books and tactical battles.
   7. There’s been a general polish pass to the main game UI overall.
   8. There’s been a lot of balancing to monsters, units, etc.

The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play.  We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.

Now, a couple words on multiplayer.  The servers are up but we are not going to enable multiplayer until next week. Part of this is, to be honest, team exhaustion. The early release meant a lot of people who were expecting this weekend off to rest from the grueling last few weeks had to come in.  So we’re going to let them get a couple of days off later this week and open up the MP next week.

One piece of good news on MP. Originally we had planned to eliminate tactical battles from MP entirely because of balance. Some people correctly guessed the misguided (in hindsight) reason for this: We were approaching MP from a purely competitive point of view.  Based on the persuasive arguments made by our players, we have decided that tactical battles will be made available in MP – as an option – at a later date as a free update.

So that’s all for now.  After the day 0 update, I plan to take a day or two off too. I hear sleeping is the new “in thing” and you guys know me, I’m all about being cool and…um..what not.

[Typhon]

For those who did get the game:

- You can open the build screen for a city by double-clicking it
- You can open the training screen for a city by clicking on the city, then clicking on the little "more" button in in the city status panel (lower left) and choosing the "Train Units" option
- You cast spells by clicking on the spell caster, then clicking on the spell book in the lower right panel

Kind of hard to figure any of that out "intuitively".  The UI took a step sideways from Beta 4 it's functional, but non-obvious (at least to me).

:) course, today's patch probably makes all the above obsolete.

[Reg]

With those summon spells (which are awesome) you cast them from the spell book and click on yourself in the worldview.  The summon will appear in your stack.

[Tebonas]

They certainly have to tweak the UI a bit, its kind of a mess right now. Last time I played was early in beta, but I found the UI more intuitive back then.

[Murgos]

I am going to get this game, eventually.

Right now though, I am enjoying the schadenfreude of frogboys last 20 or so posts on the topic of stability claiming, "Crash bugs are easy to fix, we can knock all of them out in a morning and be ready for launch." And then watching the number 1 complaint be day 0 crash bugs.

This is followed by the close second complaint, "The AI sucks." An AI which frogboy put in pretty much in the last three weeks and didn't test in open beta.

So, typically, there is a reason you get feature complete and then iterate on test for a while not get feature complete and then stop testing.

Still, I'm ready for a fantasy 4x and since this pretty much is it for a while I'm just waiting until I finish SCII before dropping the cash.

[amiable]

Any chance of this hitting Steam?

[Modern Angel]

All the talk made me reinstall Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Still brilliant, still awesome multiplayer. So while I'd like to see more fantasy 4x games I don't NEED them because the genre was pretty much perfected by the early Aughts.

[Reg]

I doubt it'll ever hit Steam because Stardock runs Impulse which is a Steam competitor.  I don't mind using Impulse though. It only needs to run when you install and update a game. After that you don't need to worry about it.

[JWIV]

All the talk made me reinstall Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Still brilliant, still awesome multiplayer. So while I'd like to see more fantasy 4x games I don't NEED them because the genre was pretty much perfected by the early Aughts.

I've been fighting off the urge to reinstall Age of Wonders.  It was so damn good.

[Sky]

Yeah, I think I'd go back for some retro AoW lovin' before hitting up Stardock. I didn't play galciv2, but galciv got old pretty quick.

Wouldn't mind seeing an updated AoW with higher res graphics (it does have widescreen support, though!). NOT THREE DEE, just higher res sprites. A lost art form.

[Yegolev]

Any chance of this hitting Steam?

lol wut



Also... buggy.  No other way to say it.  I eagerly await the first expansion that makes this game super-awesome.

[JWIV]

Any chance of this hitting Steam?

lol wut



Also... buggy.  No other way to say it.  I eagerly await the first expansion that makes this game super-awesome.

The patch this morning solved a lot of my issues, but it was damn near unplayable yesterday.   

[Yegolev]

I meant after the patch.   

[Paelos]

I'm waiting until Christmas sales to see if this gets unfucked technically. Also, perhaps a $10 price drop wouldn't hurt.

[Modern Angel]

Yeah, I think I'd go back for some retro AoW lovin' before hitting up Stardock. I didn't play galciv2, but galciv got old pretty quick.

Wouldn't mind seeing an updated AoW with higher res graphics (it does have widescreen support, though!). NOT THREE DEE, just higher res sprites. A lost art form.

You'll be pleased to know that Triumph announced that a digital download of all three games is in the works, presumably with a few tweaks like that. I was shocked that I could play it in 1680x1050.

[Merusk]

I never got into age of wonders because I hate static maps and city placement.  Did AOW2 remove this or was it more of the same?

[Sir T]

You could convert captured enemy towns into your faction in AOW 2 and found new cities, and in AOW2 - Shadow magic has a faction that could pack up its cities and move them around.

AOW SM, in my opinion, changed a few things badly from AOW 2, for instance having 2 gates on each wall rather than one, which made sieges too easy as there was 2 weak points instead of one.

[Hayduke]

Shadow Magic expansion had a random map generator (AoW1 & 2 didn't).  But imo it didn't work as well as MoM.  Also I'm not sure on this but didn't AoW have three worlds?  MoM had the normal world and Myr-something.  I think AoW tried analogues of that plus an underground cave system.  A cool concept but I usually ended up disabling one of them just because the games got too sprawling.

[Modern Angel]

Yeah, you ended up having to turn off one. I usually disabled the shadow world. I actually really like the SM random map generator. Didn't have too many issues with it. The graphics really hold up, as well. Low poly but the art's gorgeous at the default zoom and it looks far better than it should.