Greetings!  We haven’t done a FAQ in awhile so here we go:

Q: Is Elemental: Fallen Enchantress an expansion pack to Elemental: War of Magic?

A: No.  Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is a stand-alone game. It exists in the same world and is a 4X strategy game, but beyond that, they are very different.

Q: How much does Elemental: Fallen Enchantress cost?

A: It’s $39.95.  You can pre-order it now and join the BETA. We plan to provide some additional goodies for those who own a copy of it prior to release.

Q: What kind of goodies?

A: Additional quests, monsters, and items.

Q: I have Elemental: War of Magic already, is there a discount for Fallen Enchantress?

A: Yes, if you registered War of Magic in 2010, you get Fallen Enchantress for free.  If you bought it in 2011, there is a discount.

Q: When will Fallen Enchantress be released?

A: When it’s done.

Q: No, seriously, I hate when people say that. Do you have any sort of time line?

A: This Spring we plan to release a BETA 3, in Summer we expect to release BETA 4. During Beta 4 we’ll evaluate where things stand.  But we still view the game as being in a good place but still months away from release.

Q: How much will the final game be different from the current game?

A: Probably quite a bit. We get into a lot of debates on this subject with beta testers because there is often a disconnect between what is part of Fallen Enchantress’s design principles versus what a user thinks “needs” to be in the game.

Q: Ok, that was pretty vague. What do you mean by design principles?

A: This would require a separate journal entry but broadly speaking, we mean that Derek Paxton (Kael) has a specific vision for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress which falls under a number of broad design principles. A common request is that the tactical battles be much more complex than they currently are. But one of the design principles of FE is that tactical battles should not decide the outcome of the strategic game. That is, no matter how good someone has mastered the tactical part of the game, it shouldn’t enable them to turn what would normally be a loss strategically into a win.  This is an intentionally vague concept since we want tactical battles to be meaningful but we don’t want someone to be able to win against 10 to 1 odds because they’ve mastered that aspect of the game.

Q: Does this mean tactical battles won’t be changing?

A: We have a number of changes planned. We just can’t commit to anything specific until we’ve had time to play through it via iteration.

Q: What areas of the game do you consider furthest along?

A: The general flow of the game is fairly far along in terms of having a solid core.  It’s not any particular feature. We are in BETA 2 presently, Beta 1 was to make sure the game was compatible (hardware wise). Beta 2 is designed to allow us to create a very tight core from which we can expand upon.

Q: What areas should we expect to see the game expand on?

A: Our recent poll confirmed that our beta group seems to be on the same page as us.  Making each faction be very different matters a lot to us.  Secondly, the city management is an area with a great deal of work ahead for it.  Not on the poll but diplomacy is an area we want to expand on.

Q: What is the future of multiplayer and why isn’t it planned for initial release?

A: 90% of the multiplayer features are in.  The issue is that we don’t want to split our resources between supporting multiplayer (from a bug testing / stability point of view) while also trying to do the same for the single player game.

Q: What can you tell us about the campaign?

A: It’s been designed and created by Jon Shafer (designer of Civilization V as well as having worked on the Beyond the Sword expansion for Civilization IV) and written by fantasy author, Dave Stern. Voice overs are being done by some of the people involved with Fall From Heaven and music provided by a team up musicians who worked on Civilization V and Galactic Civilizations II.

Q: I have heard that Fallen Enchantress is a different development team than War of Magic?

A: Yes. After the sale of Impulse, developers who had previously worked on Galactic Civilizations II were brought back from the Impulse team to the Games group to work on Fallen Enchantress. It is led by Derek Paxton (Kael) who had previously worked on the Civilization IV mod, Fall from Heaven and as previously mentioned the campaign was designed by Jon Shafer formerly of Civilization V fame.

Q: What is your role on Fallen Enchantress vs. War of Magic?

A: On both projects I am the Executive Producer.  I wrote some of the strategic AI for War of Magic.  In Fallen Enchantress I am the lead developer and am writing both the strategic and tactical AI. This is only possible because we sold Impulse so I have more time to devote to our individual projects.  Kael has the final word on design. It’s his baby.

Q: When will we see a trailer?

A: It’s being worked on.  Since Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is coming out sooner, its trailer got the art team’s attention first. Now they’re onto the Elemental related work.

Update #1:

Q: How much will tactical battles change between now and release?

A: It’s too early to say. We have the broad requirement that someone should not be able to turn a clear strategic defeat into victory through “massive skillz” at tactical battles. But there are a lot of areas we are looking to expand on and enhance. We’re more inclined to find ways to make them more fun without them becoming more complex. Think MOO or MOM for what we’re looking for.

Q: Do you plan to use Steamworks in FE?

A: There are no plans to use Steamworks with Fallen Enchantress.

Q: When is the next beta?

A: We expect to release Beta 2-B this month.

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Andrew Orlowski has a really good article about the the state of Windows 8.  Check it out here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/03/andrew_does_windows8/

The lack of a start button and start menu in Windows 8 has made using Microsoft’s new OS a non-starter for me and a lot of other people. 

I like Metro, I really do – for tablets. But as a desktop user, I need a consistent work flow that lets me have my windows together on my desktop and don’t want to be jerked out of that environment every time I want to start some new program.

So here’s a free utility we put together that brings the Metro start menu onto the Windows 8 desktop:

https://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

Just wanted to let you know that there won't be a new beta this week.  We're in progress with quite a few additions that won't be baked in in time for the beta.

Some of this involves the diplomacy area to support new types of treaties as well as some coding to make it easier for us to do faction differentiation (for instance, we can't easily make a tech that is only available for Tarth and we can't exclude a particular race from using a particular weapon easily).

Plus, there's all the generous bug reports we've been getting in from the beta group that just take time to work through and address.

We'll be keeping you up to date with what we're working on.

We’ve got N resources and M things to work on. Based on your experiences with beta 2, where would you like N to go the most?

Vote here:

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Update: We've made a Start button for Windows 8 that brings up a Start menu. Click here to sign up.

So here’s my Metro desktop.  Now, I’ve only been using Windows since v2.1 so maybe I’m missing a few things like…

1) How do I sort the tiles?

2) How do I organize them into groups?

3) How do I change the size of tiles?

4) How do I change the color?

These aren’t customization requests, these are basic organizational features people expect.

I like the Metro style. So I’d love to be able to color code tiles based on how I might use them.  Intuitively, I’d expect to be able to drag select (or shift select or ctrl select) a bunch of tiles, right click and choose various options. Except, there are no context menus. Instead, you get an option to unpin or uninstall at the bottom of the screen – great for tablet use but not real useful here.

Android and iPhone users are used to being able to put their stuff in folders/groups/whatever.  What about here?  This seems pretty basic stuff.

The tech is good

Here’s the maddening part, Windows 8 is the best version of Windows yet – technologically. WinRT is great. The memory optimization they’ve done is fantastic. It’s faster. It’s smoother. But it’s also unusable for trying to get a lot of work done. 

This isn’t a case of “just get used to it”. There’s not a lot to get used to. This would be akin to taking away the keyboard on a tablet/smart phone and telling people to just use a stylus to draw what they want and accuse them of not “giving it a chance” when they complain.

What’s the usage case?

In Product design, we typically create use cases. How we expect people to use what we’re making.  I honestly can’t see what their use cases for this is.  How is a user seriously supposed to do serious production work if all the “new” apps are full screen with no quick way to switch between them? 

And I’m not talking about power user stuff here, I’m talking what is the use case of someone who is trying to use Power Point, Word, and Excel together in a Metro environment?

That is an example of an app (the reader app).  The back button does not take you out of the app. It’s disabled. To get out of the app, you move your mouse to the top left or bottom left of the screen.

To switch between your running apps you move your mouse to the top left and then to the side:

And you get a list of tiles.

Now, again, I am not trying to beat up on Windows 8 here. I would like one of the Windows 8 fans to make the case on how that metaphor is faster or better or more intuitive than the case where I could have all 3 apps up on the screen at once.  Note that I used the word OR.  You don’t even have to make the case for all 3.  Just one of them would be fine.

Heck, even my Iphone is easier to switch apps than this (double tap and pick the app).

And the PC is not designed to run everything full screen. How many people choose to run everything full screen?

It’s not all doom

The problem with Windows 8 isn’t technical. It’s political. Someone, way at the top, almost certainly over the cries of developers and designers, is insisting on this.  Here’s why I say this:

1. They could easily let the Windows desktop load Metro apps in a window, on the Windows desktop. How do I know that? Because we’ve already done it internally here. So it’s definitely doable. So why not? Why force desktop users into Metro when the current Metro experience is a big step back for 90%+ of PC desktop users?
2. A lot of the problems with the Metro experience boil down to trying to treat the mouse as surrogate for a giant pointer finger. Hence, no context menus – no menus whatsoever. These could be overcome by treating the mouse as a different class of input device.
3. There is technically no reason to force users into Metro to launch apps or to interact with Metro apps. Under the covers, they’re just full screen windows.

A warning to the fan community

You’re not doing Microsoft any favors by shouting down people’s complaints with Windows 8’s consumer preview. I have a vested interest in the success of Windows 8.  Professionally, I need Windows 8 to be a huge hit.   I can tell you straight out, unless these things are addressed, few enterprises will move to this and few consumers will voluntarily move to it.  And in an age where “Getting a new Dell” is no longer automatic, those Mac Airbooks start to look compelling to a lot of consumers – and it will be a lot more familiar to use than the current Windows 8 experience.

Am I the only one who has wished they could press a button when reading some trolling comment and summon the troll to their presence?

Not to punch them in the nose or anything but for study. What kind of person is a troll?

My personal favorite troll that I encounter is the entitled gamer. Are they an adult? Do they have a family? Do they literally live under a bridge?

Greetings!

March is here! If you’re not in the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion beta, which starts this week, then you might be interested in what is happening in the world of Elemental. So here is where things stand.

The Beast Lord has the power to recruit certain monsters in battle

We plan to release the next build in the beta 2 series within the next week or two.  I can’t tell you what will be in it yet. There’s a lot of things that are being worked on at once. Derek and his team have all kinds of diabolical stuff in the works.  A lot of Fall From Heaven players have noticed his influence on the Elemental universe and he’s just getting warmed up.

What I can talk about are the things we’re concentrating on here.

Stability

For most people, stability hasn’t been a major issue. But the game will crash occasionally at some point regardless of how stable it is for you. I can assure you, it will crash some % of the time in Beta 2.  That is because of the migration to a much more heavily threaded architecture.

Most of you have played War of Magic. So you know how much faster and smoother Fallen Enchantress is even on the same hardware. Why? Threading. Lots of them. The more cores you have, the better it gets. And even if you have only 2 cores, it’s still a lot better.

Even as the AI has gotten smarter, the world more complex, the time between turns and performance has improved. This is because of all the threads happening in the background.  But the challenge is making sure those threads are messing with each other’s data at the same time. 

We’ve made great strides here as we’ve nearly finished our migration to the threaded engine update.  We hope this will become apparent in Beta 2-B. However, that said, Beta 2-B will not be rock solid. I’m just warning you now.  It’ll be better than Beta 2 but as we fix problems, we add new ones. It’s for a good cause. Memory optimization is necessary but painful. 

If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows, you’re already set because Fallen Enchantress will use 4 gigs of memory if it can. So that lets us have more monsters, more players, more everything. But Windows XP users can only see 2 gigs which is why we have to focus on optimization. It’s good to be lean and mean (though my Amiga could do crazy things with 512K of memory).

Balance

Other than making sure the game is reliable for people, balance is our top priority.  Balance can include everything from tweaking numbers to adding new assets.  Making sure that higher level weapons and armor matter a lot more has a huge game play effect.  For example, spears do less damage than they did before and as a result, they’re still good weapons early on or in mass but they’ll get slaughtered by knights. Right now: You can beat the AI by creating cheese spearmen (throw in a few negative traits, get squads and go to town – that’s how I do it anyway).

Similarly, lots of new magic spells are being added to the game which help us make sure that the different paths to victory are distinct, fun, and meaningful.

Diplomacy

This probably won’t make it into the beta 2 series.  But diplomacy is going to get a lot more attention for Beta 3. For example, we are considering an option to let players surrender to you where their sovereign becomes your vassal (they get a negative trait called “broken spirit” that keeps them from being too powerful – last thing we need is players being able to spring Verga on their enemies).  The idea of snooty Procipinee doing my bidding has some appeal.

The Diplomacy screen is likely to change quite a bit from what you see now to provide more information and more opportunities for interesting exchanges between you and your opponents.

Unique Factions & Champions

The champions have been getting a lot of attention. The idea is that each of them should have a fairly unique ability. This way, as you come to know the world, you know that if you get, say Adant Verris, that you’ll be getting Chain Lightning.

The same goes with factions as we start to incorporate different equipment, traits and such into each of them.  If one faction is largely impervious to archery and you’ve decided to focus having massive archer armies, that may affect your strategy for dealing with them.

We are still playing around with different ideas here.  Unlike with Galactic Civilizations where players (ironically) intuitively understood that shields were effective against beam weapons and armor was a good defense against mass drivers, most people aren’t that familiar with medieval level armor. We’ve grown up thinking that plate male is always the best and you should just toss that on to everything.

The modders…well, the modders are going to go to town on this game.   There was some joking earlier internally about how long it would take someone to make an Alpha Centauri total conversion with this stuff.  Even the “look” of the game is, ultimately, just PNG’s and DDS files.

Art, Music, Animation

Making the world of Elemental a living world is the goal here.

At some level, knowing you will never see this world again is part of the appeal. Randomly generated worlds mean you don’t know what’s going to happen. 

Don’t judge me. So yea, I name my monsters.

Keyboard

Maybe I’m just old but I want to be able to navigate more with the keyboard.  This is an area we’re starting to put more attention to. Not just in terms of hot keys but just general navigation through the game.  Fallen Enchantress is a game that you “might” play 10 hours straight. So less forced mouse moving = better as far as we’re concerned.

AI

This is something we will constantly be improving on. Every day I play the game, I find something.

For example, today I was able to find out why the AI wasn’t taking over monster lairs. They’re “goodie huts” but they’re a special kind which the AI couldn’t “see”.  Another little thing I found was that once the AI merged armies into army groups, it wasn’t treating nearby units as anything worth considering. So you could walk by a bunch of enemy armies safely because it didn’t think it was worth bothering with something so little – as you then went and conquered its city. 

Then in tactical battles we fixed a problem where some of the more powerful spells weren’t used because they’re classified differently so again, the AI couldn’t “see” those spells.

Plus, there’s no substitute for play testing and refining.

The next beta will probably lower the default AI difficulty to easy instead of normal because if you’re just learning the game, normal now will destroy the average player.

What’s next

We really hope you guys are enjoying the beta as much as we are having making it.

We got a start button / start menu up and running this afternoon.

http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/418946/Windows_8_Start_button_returns

I’ve already seen a lot of Microsoft fanboys complaining about how “Stardock always makes Windows look old” which is pretty ironic since it was Stardock that first introduced Windows users to the concept of ZIP files as folders, widgets, gadgets, docks (which we were doing before OS X), side bars, shadows, GUI skinning, composited desktops, open file dialog short-cuts, file version revisioning, etc. etc. 

What we do at Stardock is take Windows to try to make it better. Normally, it means adding new features to the OS. Having to bring back the Start button and Start menu is something, ideally, Microsoft will do before Windows 8 ships.

While Microsoft is at it, here’s a few other things that would be nice:

• Option to show Metro apps on the Windows desktop inside of window (there’s no reason they need to be full screen).
• High DPI mode
• Better multi monitor support
• Option to have the charm hot spots activate on mouse over rather than mousing over and clicking
• Being able to use the mouse to click drag around Metro (i.e. pretend the mouse is the finger)
• Some sort of…design understanding that 99% of Windows users will be using this as a desktop computer, not a tablet. I love tablets. I have several. I’ll happily use Windows 8 as a tablet. But when I’m at a desk, I have a keyboard and a mouse. PLEASE design the user experience with that in mind.