Headline: Obama has a 3 point lead over Romney in the latest ABC/Washington post poll.

As a stat nut, I like to look at the internals.  So here they are:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postabcpoll_20121013.html

Lots of interesting stuff in there. Especially when you get to the bottom:

Wait a second.  So they changed their sample size since the September (pre debate) poll to give Democrats a +9 point advantage in likely voters versus a 3 point advantage of LV in September?

That seems odd.

Series of games with AI vs. AI. Special map (Arena) where each player has an equal shot.

Game and Winner.

1. Tarth (Kingdom)
2. Yithril (Empire)
3. Kraxis (Empire)
4. Kraxis (Empire)
5. Tarth (Kingdom)
6. Gilden (Kingdom)
7. Magnar (Empire)

More testing to come..

When games come out, one of the things that helps them pass the test of time is modding.  It's a big deal to us and in 20 years of making games, we've never put so much effort into modding as we have in Fallen Enchantress.

Here's a video of me playing with the map editor today which comes with the game.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be released on October 23rd.

Visit www.elementalgame.com to learn more.

There's only a week left! That's just so hard to believe that we're almost there.

Looks like there's going to be another public update tonight. They want to test out some installer improvements and...well since they were doing that, we snuck in some tweaks, fixes and I ninja-checked in some AI improvements.

The team that started Fallen Enchantress includes virtually everyone who made Galactic Civilizations II (and expansions).  It's been a real joy seeing the team together again and teaming them up with Derek (Kael) and Jon (Shafer).  

For me, it's been a much more enjoyable experience than anything I've worked on before. Having someone dedicated to the design and to the project itself has made a huge difference to both team morale and the quality of the game.

Just after lunch today, with my iPhone in hand, I went through Studio A's lab area and talked to some of the coders and artists. Here's the video:

One of the changes we've made for the final public build is that we've greatly reduced the costs or raising and lowering land.

Now, you can't use these spells to create mountains or make islands. That's not their purpose.  What they can do, however is create shorter routes through mountain regions (lower land) and connect players to other parts of the world that aren't normally accessible (raise land).

This will become a particularly big deal after release when we start releasing map packs to supplement the random maps. In these map packs, the players (AI and human) will be able to explore larger areas if they make use of these spells (i.e. goodies and special quests hidden behind mountains OR by island hopping).

Here's a video that shows this off:

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be released on October 23!

My home network is probably a bit unusual. There’s a ton of things connected to it:

• Lutron Lighting (all my lights are fly by wire)
• Control4 (lets me control audio/video/lighting/temp/etc. from various wall pads or my iPad/iPhone
• An AppleTV 1
• An AppleTV 2
• Two AppleTV 3’s
• 2 Tivos
• Roku
• Various “smart” receives (they’re not smart)
• Various TV’s with their own Internet support (which rarely if ever gets used)
• Lots of PCs and Macs
• various Kindles and iOS devices
• Other stuff I haven’t thought of

Our home rack is jammed full of junk. And all of this was ultimately connecting through a consumer WRVS4400N V2.  It was too much for it and it showed through flakey network connections, lost packets via the Internet, etc.

While it technically supported 802.11N, it didn’t support 5Ghz which is supposedly faster.

First impressions:

Pros: Airport Extreme over Cisco WRVS4400N

• Much faster. About twice as fast as the Cisco was in throughput on a wired connection
• No lag/lost packets.  I’d gotten to the point where my ethernet connection ping time to the router was about 2ms.  That’s pretty bad. 
• Ping to router is now <1ms, no lost packets
• Support for SNMP which lets apps get router level statistics (like seeing who’s eating up all my bandwidth)
• Slick Mac/PC/iOS utilities for managing it.
• 5Ghz N support
• It just “works”.  The Cisco was flakey. It had a lot of goofy “security” features that did nothing but cause problems (IPS, goofy firewall).

Cons: Things I miss from the Cisco WRVS4400N

• No web admin page. This is a bummer because I have to install the Airport utility to do anything.
• Can’t block domains.  This is a bummer. I used this feature to keep my kids from going to certain site during certain times of the day
• No access control. I also used this a lot with my kids. I could keep their gadgets from working on the net during certain times of the day via their MAC address
• No easy way to see who is currently connected to it. Makes various diagnostics harder.

Overall

At the end of the day, reliability and performance trumps the various complaints I have.  The AirPort Extreme just plain works. I was really surprised how easy it was to get working.  By contrast, the Cisco had to be configured relentlessly to function properly (have to disable IPS every time it resets itself).

It’s a rainy Fall Sunday here in Michigan.  The team play tests and play tests. We’re in the final polish phases for the game. 

Today’s video shows the tactical unit placement updates.  In the current public beta, the algorithm for placing units left something to be desired.  Now, ranged units and defenseless units are explicitly shoved to the rear which results in a much more satisfactory experience.  Also, the AI has gotten a lot better at tactical spells and autoresolve has gotten a lot better.

Here’s today’s clip:

In 9 days, we hope you find Elemental: Fallen Enchantress to be the most satisfying 4X fantasy strategy game experience…well if not ever then in many years.  Be sure to let us know what you think.

www.fallenenchantress.com

Tactical battle, fought by me vs. AI.

and…

Auto Resolve:

It was raining today so I thought I’d peek in on how the auto resolve code worked.  The idea behind auto resolve is to provide a *fast* perf wise estimate of going through the motions of a full tactical battle.  It’s not the same and can’t be by design because otherwise, the time between turns could get ridiculous.

However, some smart beta testers (who we’ll refer to as evil overlords who I’ve sent goons after) observed that the auto resolve didn’t make use of the various abilities and spells sometimes available, especially to monsters.

So that’s what I did today was hook those up.  What I didn’t do (sorry fellow grognards) is hook every single thing up to the details area (hence you’d lose a lot of the perf with all those strings being written out).  Mainly buff spells and the like. They’re used but they’re not documented in the turn by turn because there isn’t a reporting area for buffs in the code and again, the purpose here is speed, speed and speed.

But as you can see, auto resolve and my efforts at tactical resulted in the same result.  The only shameful thing is that when I fixed up auto resolve I realized that there were some combat abilities not being used well by monsters in tactical (like acid spit). 

The good news is that this should make sure that auto resolve can’t be abused to take out range-heavy armies or armies that rely heavily on spells.  Sorry Verga. 

But unlike most people. I don’t fear Verga and his Trogs. Those goons would never dare confront me. 

Hmm. Someone’s at the door…

In 10 days, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be released to the public.

Building a new 4X franchise is a challenge.  If you look at Wikipedia’s 4X chronology there aren’t that many, particularly if you focus purely on turn-based ones. 

What features matter depends on the person.  For me, I want to feel like I’m building a civilization.  That’s why I was drawn to Master of Magic and Civilization.

Creating a strategy game that focuses not just on warfare but magical ability, technological research, diplomacy, questing, etc. means that the computer AI has to be really really good. And having spent the better part of 20 years writing AI, Fallen Enchantress has been the biggest challenge in my career.  It’s the first AI I’ve written that is explicitly multi-core which lets the computer players do a lot more strategic modeling (basically, playing out different scenarios) than anything I’ve written before.

The biggest challenge has been simply getting good enough at the game to translate my “skillz” to the computer players. That’s where you guys come in. I read your reports and go “Aha! That’s a great strategy!” and soon it shows up.  I don’t expect to stop improving the AI on this game for a long time – well after release. I think we’ll see some really interesting player strategies post release that will simply be too tempting not to incorporate.

With that in mind, here’s a video that demonstrates some of the improvements made in the past few weeks that have been getting checked into the code base in preparation for the October 23 release date.

Ok, sorry we didn’t get this out. So I’m play testing this week’s update.

Just a few things I thought I would share with you guys. This is just my personal view:

1. Performance is much better. I mean in terms of framerate. Part of that is the optimized font handling and other tweaks. But the result is a lot smoother experience.
2. The elimination of the old sound effects made a big difference. I didn’t really notice how bad the old sound effects were until the new Dolby 5.1 ones got added. If you wear headphones, it’s really noticeable.
3. You need to build militia now. It’s going to take some time to get used to this. But no, you can’t just go and solo the monster layers anymore willy nilly. Some you can take. Others you can’t.
4. Animations are much better now. It’s a polish thing but very  noticeable. You see those enemy units doing their thing just as smoothly as you do.
5. No more moon walking. Finally.
6. Bug: Saw a monster running in place when my attack dialog was up.
7. New music is nice. Though, at this stage, it would take a fully new 90 minute sound track to make me appreciate how much better the music’s gotten in the last several months.
8. I wish the ice spear appeared differently on the main map than it does.
9. The frame rate…just gonna mention that again. Everything is just so much smoother. Feels weird to get used to.
10. I don’t think we’ll see many people winning on ridiculous.