This fine, Sunday afternoon I'm messing around with making animation run smoother. In the process, I discovered something -- the AI's moves can get aborted in some instances due to framerate. Just fixed this. Should make a big difference in AI quality, especially late game.
We have touched on the discussion of multi-tile cities recently:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/420896
https://forums.elementalgame.com/420585
For those of you not up on the discussion, a brief recap:
The current city construction system
In Elemental: War of Magic, players built their improvements directly on the map. This was a pretty fun and cool feature and exists in the same way in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Beta 2 (0.86).
There are, however, some problems with the system:
(1) It encourages players to create snaking cities that look ridiculous, are gamey, and easily exploitable.
(2) It results in the maps, especially late game, feeling very urban as you have many cities that are often using 20+ tiles of space on the map.
(3) They affect performance considerably late game (those beautiful, intricate buildings have to be drawn).
(4) They limit our game design possibilities since we are constantly reminded that we need to keep the # of city improvements to a minimum lest the map get filled with buildings even though often times, the design calls for a city improvement to be available.
A high level city might appear like this:
(this assumes the player didn’t “snake” the city out in some weird shape so this is somewhat close to an ideal).
As a result, the plan was in Beta 4 (Summer 2012) to migrate to a different system.
The new city construction system design
In this system, each faction would get their own city hub tile that would change based on city level. In addition, cities would specialize (that will be a separate dev journal) and based on that specialization, a different sub-tile would be be added to the city that would indicate, at a glance, what level it was (higher level cities would have more subtiles).
External improvements, like shards, crystals, etc. would be unaffected and if adjacent would become absorbed in the city.
So a level 5 city might look something like this:
(a level 1 city would just have the city hub)
When players clicked on the details button for their city, a new screen would come up and show all their built improvements in all their glory. Players could zoom around, rotate, and see the fully fleshed out city along with all the stats and other information. But this would be a separate screen ala Civilization rather than on the main map.
Now, since this has begun being discussed, we’ve heard a lot of different views on this. Since this is still months from being made available in a public beta, we very much want to hear from you since most of you, like us, have been on the Elemental journey for a long time now and have a vested interest in the game’s ultimate success.
The question before you is, what are your thoughts on this?
So we’re getting a lot of feedback on the concept of “1 tile” cities vs. building on the main map.
Those in favor of building on the main map itself make many good arguments on how it’s inconvenient to have to go to a separate screen to build improvements and that it’s fun and useful to be able to see, at a glance, what a city has.
The problem that many of us have with the WOM style of city building is the gaming of it – snaking cities to be used for teleporting units or getting to far off resources.
In my build, as a test, I made it so that you can’t build beyond 1 tile of the hub. This makes some sense since the resources you see when you build the city is the culmination of the resources in that 1 tile plus all the tiles within 1 radius. Therefore, it would make sense that you could only build within 1 tile of the hub. It would also result in rewarding the player who carefully chooses what improvements to build in a city and reward specialization rather than “all of the above”.
The above screenshot is an example of a city that must build within 1 tile of its hub:
You’re still talking about being able to build about two-dozen improvements in a city.
Video of a close up shot of a city:
Strategy Informer has an article regarding why Stardock is giving Fallen Enchantress away for free to early War of Magic adopters.
Read the whole thing here:
I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since OS/2 2.0 shipped! It certainly changed my life.
To recap, here’s an article I wrote…for its 10th birthday. 
Just a head's up, Beta 3 is scheduled for April 12th.
The Beta 3 series of Fallen Enchantress will be revolving around faction differentiation. It also contains a lot of tweaks and balance based on player feedback.
One of the things we’re working on for Beta 3 is beefing up the spells -- both visually and in terms of their power.
In the above screenshot, you can see Flamewave which makes use of the new particle system being developed for Fallen Enchantress.
This week we met with the press and one of the topics that kept coming up over and over was just how much better Elemental: Fallen Enchantress looked and played versus 2010’s first attempt at a fantasy strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic.
This begged the question – why would Stardock tie Fallen Enchantress to Elemental: War of Magic which was a pretty mediocre game.
This article on Gamasutra goes into some depth as to why we are pursuing this strategy.
Gamasutra:
Related articles:
http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/30/stardock-elemental-sequel-to-make-up-for-mediocre-first-game/
If you’re in the beta:
Some of these articles are asking for feedback from beta testers. Feel free to give your impressions. Beta 3 is coming soon, final game due this Fall.
By default, Fallen Enchantress draws a black outline around units, buildings, and mountains.
However, if you go into options and click on the video tab, you can choose “disable outlines”.
For those of you who are in the beta, let us know which you like better – with outlines or without outlines.