I’m one of those people who have traditionally disliked tactical battles because I hate having to fight all of them out.

In FE, my goal is to make it so that the AI does a pretty good job of fighting the battle for you. You’ll still want to fight it out if it’s a close thing or if there are particular units you want to spare. But overall, it does a decent job.

Right now, I’m still toying with the concept of having units retreat from battle to let others take their place. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not in *this* game given the game mechanics. 

Here’s a battle where my side lost but in 0.77 would have been a walk over because the tactical AI sucked so badly.

http://screencast.com/t/Uj0Wp0DAU

Also, fun tactical battles:

[Warning: Explicit]

One of the big changes in FE beta 2 that wasn’t in GalCiv II was the concept of army groups. 

Who here is a WW2 history nut? If so, you know what army groups are.

Well, I put in army groups to fix a different flaw in the AI but I didn’t recognize the issue they created. The AI is now really good at having armies from different cities converge on a single city on the same turn (the AI treats army groups as a single unit).

I’ll await feedback but I’m thinking normal is too hard now.

Between the Nanny Statists on the left and the thumpers on the right, I just can’t get excited about politics anymore.

I really don’t need anyone to tell me how to live.

I also really don’t care to hear the religious beliefs of a federal candidate. Why tell me? Are you hinting that you’re going to use the power of the federal government to compel me to live by your beliefs? No? Then quit talking about them. I care as  much for a Federal candidate’s religious beliefs as I do to who their favorite NFL team is. In other words, not at all.

It’s a no-win situation if you’re an actual political conservative (as in, limited government, personal responsibility, capitalist). 

You have Obama and his ilk trumpeting that it’s somehow a good thing for the federal government to require private insurance companies to provide birth control as part of their policy. People think this is a good thing? Really? Forget your position on birth control for a minute – you think the federal government should be able to tell a private company that they have to include? Can’t people decide for themselves?  This is why insurance costs so much – the government requires them to cover the costs on all kinds of things whether they’re applicable or not.

And Santorum…ugh.  He gave a speech talking about Satan and his diabolical plans for the United States. This is the sort of talk that allows politicians to justify all kinds of meddling into our lives. You know, “for the children”. 

It’s hard to believe that our dog Bailey was just born one year ago tomorrow.

Here’s how she looked 1 year ago:

At 4 weeks:

Here’s how she looked at 8 weeks.

Now, fast forward about a year…

Anyone know when Visual Studio 11 is supposed to come out of beta?

A lot of people who read these posts don’t know me. This post comes from my blog site (http://draginol.joeuser.com) but gets syndicated out through Stardock’s various forums too.

I’m the President & CEO of Stardock. My day job handle on the forums is “Frogboy” (I post occasionally on WinCustomize.com and the other Stardock sites).  But I never intended Stardock to be my career.  I started this company to help pay for college at Western Michigan University, which was the cheapest university in the state at the time that offered engineering classes.

At the time, I had multiple jobs at once.  I taught Assembly language labs for the EE department (micro controller stuff), substituted for professors in freshman lecture classes for the EE department, was the assistant to a Geography professor, worked at Babbage’s (game store).  This was all until I could get a real job.  And when I finally graduated, it turned out Stardock was the best opportunity, so I stuck to it.

Most of the things I’ve worked on have been extremely cool but not necessarily commercially successful.  If we had patented our stuff, I suspect we’d be having a different discussion.  

The thing about the technology industry, whether it be game related,  enterprise related or non-game related it is that it’s always changing. You hear that a lot but I mean seriously, it changes fast.

There’s been a lot of highs and lows over the years. The biggest professional heart breaks of my career were small projects (relative to the rest of Stardock) that mattered a lot to me personally. The most recent was a PC game called Elemental: War of Magic. 

I wasn’t that involved with that game until the end and at that point, my job was to salvage what I could.  It was that project that I discovered cognitive dissonance (technically, there was an incident with an Impulse released title called Warlords: Battlecry that gave me a taste of that).  I thought the game was really good at the time we released it.  But it wasn’t.  I lost a lot of confidence in my judgment on such things.  I was fortunate enough to be able to bring on incredibly talented people who I am proud to say have become good friends to direct these endeavors going forward.

Right now, the games group is concentrating on a new game, Fallen Enchantress. I think the new beta is pretty awesome. But then I remember War of Magic.  I’m a lot more distanced from FE than I was War of Magic so I feel a bit more confident.  But I also wonder whether I’m just becoming part of an increasingly smaller generation.  That is, gamers now expect to be hand-held.  Put a “!” above everything. Walk them through it all.  I really hate that. I liked Ultima IV where I had to question people in town, take notes, and put together the next steps myself. I seem to be a minority.

I don’t really have a theme to this blog post.  I just really hope people like what Derek and his team have done with Fallen Enchantress.  This week will be Beta 2 of that game.  I hope people like it.  I know I do. 

There’s so much text in Fallen Enchantress that author Dave Stern and I are thinking of having an e-book for players. There’s a lot of material and now that much of it is getting integrated, we hope it’ll start making the factions more distinct.

I can tell you that the AI behavior now follows the writing.

Writing and AI behavior are two key elements. In Galactic Civilizations, all races were the same other than their graphics, text, and AI behavior.  And all that AI behavior work would have been for nothing, imo, if players weren’t made aware that they were actually playing differently.

The world of Galactic Civilizations has some great heroes and villains.  The Drengin think you’re delicious. The Yor are bemused that meat can talk. The humans want to get along…but, don’t ever think the talking apes from Sol 3 won’t grind you into dust if they have to.

Elemental has some really great factions too.  Both before release and after release, we’ll be doing a lot more to make them feel and play differently.

I have my own biases for the different factions.  In my mind, as I code up my interpretation of the various XML tags I’ve come up with some basics on how they behave:

• Pariden is bugged that the riff raff are squabbling over what is rightfully theirs
• Capitar are a bunch of objectivists.
• Altar wants to unite everyone – except the Empires who they despise
• Tarth doesn’t like anyone.
• Gilden are Paladins. Noble and honorable beyond reason.
• Magnar are evil but make no bones about it.
• The Wraiths would rather everyone just die. Nothing personal though.
• The Urxen

I’m still working out some of the others in my mind in terms of programming them.

The way this comes through is in terms of whether they’re paying other players to do things to each other (don’t tick off Pariden as you will find others suddenly attacking you). Another area this comes through in what they say to you when they interact with you.  There’s also what units they build, how well they defend their cities, their biases in research, what they like to build in their cities, etc.)

This is why it’s so important to get good writing and have it communicated – without it, players may not realize just how much the AI is thinking about what say Gilden builds in their cities versus Yithril.

In GalCiv, this was communicated clearly to players via in-game dialog.  In beta 2, we’ll start doing more with this.  And what they say depends on who you are and how you’ve played.

From a player point of view, it lets me incorporate different strategies into the game.  Rather than trying to come up with “the best” overall strategy, I can implement several different ones (some of which may fail).

And a gratuitous tactical battle shot:

You’ve won.

Or

You’ve lost.

But the game won’t end.

The ultimate outcome is known. The rest is just theater.

Boring theater at that.

This is the ultimate fate of so many 4X games.  You know you’re going to win (or lose) eventually but you still feel like you have to go through the motions of slogging it out. 

For Beta 2, the AI will just surrender when it’s hopeless.  But humans have the choice to fight on.  Because there’s always hope.

In the game I’m playing right now, the AI has me down to my last city.  But he can’t take that city.

They have me surrounded. But they can’t take the city.  I am not sure they can.

And I can’t take them.

I’m down to my last city.

They’ve destroyed all my outposts. My shards are gone. My metal is gone.  I have just this one city.

Different Ideas

Laying siege is how this sort of thing would historically work.  Have the player lay siege and it’ll slowly wear me down.  This fails because my army in the city is easily powerful enough to wipe out any individual army that would try to lay siege. Plus, it’s a pretty significant game mechanics to add, test, and balance this late in the game.

The idea I’m playing with tonight involves magic.  If you can’t take the city by force, make it miserable to live there through magic until the city finally destroys itself if not countered (which I wouldn’t be able to since I have no mana).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiting_(video_gaming)

This is an issue that, as the AI guy, I'm still struggling with.  How to defend against this?

I've been tempted to have the AI do it to the human but the more I think about it, the more unsatisfying that would be.

In beta 1, the kiting issue isn't huge because the tactical maps are so small. But in Beta 2, they start to get a lot more interesting (I have one map that is basically inspired from Demigod complete with multiple paths).

I'd be interested in hear different ideas on how to prevent excessive kiting.

Greetings!

It’s hard to believe it was just under a month ago that Fallen Enchantress went into public beta.  We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, a lot of bug reports, crash reports, and suggestions.

Next Thursday, we plan to release BETA 2 which is intended to go out to everyone who purchased Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 plus anyone who has pre-ordered Fallen Enchantress.

Today, I’m going to walk you through some of the changes Derek and his team have implemented.  Those of you who were Fall From Heaven Fans or Galactic Civilizations fans will hopefully see the combination of the two really starting to show in beta 2.

Character Creation

We have gotten a lot of feedback with regards to the “first impression” elements of Fallen Enchantress. Part of that goal is to make it clear to players what the distinctions are between each faction and each sovereign.

Visual Pass

Across the board the art team has started to put in the Fallen Enchantress specific art assets.  This effectively means the world will look quite different.  More punch, less blah when it comes to the scenery.

User Interface

Beta 2 is our first pass with displaying the path of a selected unit.

The main map UI has bee modified as well to place the often missed Govern button down with Spells and Turn in the bottom right.  In addition, important events now pop out for a turn from the side to inform players of events without interrupting the action.

The new Kingdom Report screen helps players see where their kingdom stands as well as how far along they are towards achieving victory in one of the 4 victory conditions.

Music & Sound

Beta 2 includes the first set of new sound effects for Fallen Enchantress along with many new musical tracks to help bring the world to life.  I suspect the sound will be something that has amongst the biggest impact since FE beta 1 barely had any.

Balance Changes

Balance changes will be both subtle and obvious to players.  Fallen Enchantress provides 3 different technology paths to choose from.  Beta 2 is designed to give each technology tree its own path to world domination.

The Warfare path is much the same as it was with Beta 1. The key resource for mundane warfare is metal, a resource that players pursuing this much live and die by.

The Civilization path has been altered to give more emphasis on building up your Empire through using diplomatic power. The resource of power here comes in the form of Diplomatic capital which is spent recruiting mercenaries, monsters and other factions to the war fighting for you.

The Magic path has gotten the most love.  Between raw mana power and magical equipment that uses crystal in lieu of metal, you can end up with a very powerful force of magical units.  Mages, Warlocks, and all manner of new units start to appear as the player goes up the magic tech tree.

Champions are automatically able to cast spells.  What makes the sovereign special – as a channeler – is they’re the ones with the ability to derive mana from the shards. All spell casters use the global pool supplied, ultimately, through your channeler.  The bottom line, lots more magic being thrown around.

Caravans are gone. They were a held over idea from GalCiv II that never made the sense in the Elemental universe. Roads now grow up somewhat more organically based on  your civilization techs with corresponding economic benefits.

Pacing

Beta 2 is our first pass at nailing down the three distinct acts of Fallen Enchantress.

Act I has the player exploring the world, building up their kingdom and trying to keep the world from ruining them. (Explore, Expand).

Act II begins when players determine the strategy they’re going to use to achieve victory. Maybe they’ll do it by building lots mundane units, maybe they’ll focus on a handful of champions, maybe they’ll recruit their armies, maybe they’ll build a force of powerful, magical armies or maybe they’ll amass enough mana and spells to bring ruin to their enemies and glory to their friends. (Exploit)

Act III is the end game, it’s the execution of their strategy. And this is where a lot of thought and effort has been put in.  Wrapping up the epic wars, quests, schemes, etc.  For me, personally, I enjoy being able to do very horrible things to my enemies with mana. If I have enough mana, I should be able to bring down the pain to those who oppose me while making my kingdom a land of gods.  This means expensive spells that can be stacked but don’t necessarily have upkeep. 

In addition, the final quest and the spell of making are in the process of being made a lot more interesting and accessible.

AI

I would be remiss to not talk about the computer players. The tactical battle AI has been written from scratch for Beta 2. Late game, there will be no mistaking that this is a game with magic. Watching players and AI setting things up with their spells, countering each other spells, etc. is very enjoyable. I have come to the point where I end up watching the battles on auto play instead of using auto-resolve because it’s fun to watch ala GalCiv II battles. 

The AI is much improved when dealing with custom created factions. In my game, I have created all my favorite Tolkien races and put them up against me. The AI will use the attributes that go with them to make them play differently. So my "Orcs” play quite differently from my “Elves”.  Modders, post-release will of course be able to take this to ridiculous level.

The AI is also much better strategically. It manages groups of armies now, this is something I never did get quite right in GalCiv II’s AI but the FE game engine makes it a snap for me to organize vast swaths of units and treat them as a single unit – and they don’t have to be on the same tile so it’s not some obnoxious death train. 

As a result of the AI improvements, the harder difficulty levels, where the AI gets special bonuses, have been drastically turned down.

The AI will raze cities and will surrender rather than dragging the game on endlessly. How they play depends pretty heavily on the faction. So don’t expect them to train or

Misc

I’m only scratching the surface here and I’m forgetting lots of small and large balance tweaks to the game ranging from cost of upgrading units (much cheaper) to the pacing of the tech tree to the cost and maint of units.  You’ll have have to wait and see for answers on all those things. 

I will say Champions are still very powerful but they will level up much slower if you try to just create a stack up them.  I had..ahem…a game last night where my “mega stack” of 5 champions got killed by a single AI champion because my stack was only level 5 and the AI champion was level 8 (and since the AI now makes great use of magic in tactical battles, it can do some horrific things to those who are unwary).  On the bright side, trained units don’t count against you in terms of experience sharing. So put that champion with lots of trained units, it’s what the AI does.

When will the final version be released?

We still see months of work ahead of us. We don’t have a specific “gold” date yet.  We intend to follow-up with a BETA 3 roughly a month from now. We’ll have a better idea where we are at that point to start thinking of release dates.

Cheers!

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is the first Stardock game I’ve been the lead developer on since The Corporate Machine.  Being able to dedicate development time to a game was made possible by last year’s sale of Impulse to GameStop. And I’m having a blast.

Those of you who have been with us since the original Elemental: War of Magic have hopefully noticed some changes besides visuals and game play.  My focus has been on performance, robustness (which is different from stability) and of course my particular coding niche, multithreading. Hence, in the upcoming beta 2, I’ll be extremely ticked off if it crashes for anyone in any way ever.

Now, Beta 2, which is due next week for you guys, is going to be a pretty big change from beta 1.  I won’t spoil things by listing those changes except to say that we’ve taken your crash logs, your feedback and combined it with our own list.

Personally, the thing I’m noticing the most, the #1 thing that screams at me, is that battles are magical duels. Part of this is because for beta 2, the tactical battle AI is in. And part of it is just because more spells keep pouring in.

An aside: Let’s talk about spells

As I play the game, I think “I have all kinds of mana”. There’s a TON of shards in beta 2. They’re common. You are swimming in mana income. Which means we have to provide interesting ways to use that mana.

So as I play, I have been building up a file called BradSpells.xml which is, simply put, spells that I am lobbying for inclusion into the game.

Let me show you how easy it is to add a spell –- if a monkey like me can do it, anyone can:

<SpellDef InternalName="BlessCity">
  <DisplayName>Bless City</DisplayName>
  <Description>Decreases unrest in friendly city by 10%.</Description>
  <Image>S_Inspiration_Painting.png</Image>
  <IconFG>S_Inspiration_Icon.png</IconFG>
  <IconBG>S_Inspiration_Icon_BG.png</IconBG>
  <IconColor>217,206,225</IconColor>
  <AutoUnlock>1</AutoUnlock>
  <CanStack>1</CanStack>
  <SpellType>Strategic</SpellType>
  <SpellClass>ImpResourceBooster</SpellClass>
  <SpellSubClass>Other</SpellSubClass>
  <SpellTargetType>FriendlyCity</SpellTargetType>
  <SpellResourceCost>
    <Resource>Mana</Resource>
    <Amount>500</Amount>
  </SpellResourceCost>
  <GameModifier>
    <ModType>Resource</ModType>
    <Attribute>Unrest</Attribute>
    <Duration>-1</Duration>
    <PerTurn>1</PerTurn>
    <Value>-5</Value>
  </GameModifier>
  <ValidTerrainCategory>City</ValidTerrainCategory>
  <AIData AIPersonality="AI_General">
    <AIPriority>30</AIPriority>
  </AIData>
  <HitSoundFX>Spell_DarkEnchant_01</HitSoundFX>
  <SpellCastEffectName>Brilliance</SpellCastEffectName>
  <SpellCastEffectScale>.4</SpellCastEffectScale>
  <SpellDefEffect>
    <EffectName>S_Inspiration_Particle</EffectName>
    <LocalPosition>0,0,0</LocalPosition>
    <EffectScale>0.75</EffectScale>
    <EffectDelay>0.5</EffectDelay>
    <SnapToTerrain>1</SnapToTerrain>
  </SpellDefEffect>
</SpellDef>

This is just copy and paste from other spells that are remotely similar.  Bless City is one that can STACK. That means you can put lots of them on your city.  I also made one called Curse City which does the opposite to an enemy city (increases unrest).  I am hoping that we can put something in where if unerst == 100% then the dice start to roll and if they fail their roll, the city razes itself.

Speaking of which, SOME of the AI factions will raze your cities if they capture them and they don’t want to keep it.

I’ve got a bunch of these kinds of spells that I’ve whipped up that reward me for having a crapload of mana. 

My Test Game: Begins

This is a 1 on 1 game. I just want to see how the AI does.  This is on “Normal”.

Now, in beta 1, your offensive strategy largely consisted of going up the warfare tree.

But in beta 2, diplomatic capital and crystals matter equal to metal. One lets you recruit from the countryside and the other lets you have tons of magical equipment.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

The AI’s handling of money in beta 1 was…non ideal.

So in Beta 2, the system works on the concept of a credit score.

The calculation behind that simple –4 to +4 number is a bit crazy but it lets the AI get an idea of how he’s doing and what he should do.

Those silly monsters

This is a Dreadling.  What a joke right?

These are Dreadlings. Not such a joke.

I like Dreadlings because I like to feel like a big man. And a big man can kill lots of things. It’s like in SWTOR where my 10th level Sith feel big because he can kill all kinds of stuff (but if he steps off on a level 20 planet he’ll die by a random blaster shot).

Exploring

It is morally wrong that I cannot use this cool weapon right now. In fact, you know what? I’m taking this game back to the store right now.

Tactical Maps

I don’t know about you but if I saw those same tactical maps, regardless of how large my army was I was going to die.  I don’t want to sound melodramatic but in the history of all mankind, no pain was greater than having to see the same tactical maps in all situations.

So I wrote a bit of code and asked Paul to help me on designing a series of new tactical maps that are based on a lot of different things including the number of units in the battle.

The AI likes to get on hills for some reason…

…no idea why

Meeting Magnar

Our lawful evil adversary, Magnar has shown up on the scene on turn 60.

They’re only 2 points behind me which isn’t too shabby.

NOW they must die…

I’m going to keep doing this until the AI gets good at handling this because it’s what any decent player will do: I’m going to put together the best stack I can and go after them.

There is nothing wrong with stacks.  The question is how to deal with them. If you have all your eggs in a single stack, then they should take your largely undefended cities or crush your stack.

Magnar’s crappy artwork needs to go away soon. Ack.

Anyway, now they will die.

I took their first city easily.

I can tell already they’re doomed.  Notes taken. New build.

Second game.

Second game..ended less well for me.

I meant to lose.

Third Game (No more Mister Nice Guy)

Pioneers are now very inexpensive.

Ok. Lost. But I meant to lose…I was…you know, testing and what not.

Fourth Game

Ok. Lost again. Must be some sort of bug. No way this is happening legitimately.