The AI still has a long….long….long away to go.

But finally, today I had my first satisfying defeat by the AI.  Now, I wasn’t playing to win, I was just messing around. But seeing the AI finally able to project force this effectively is something I was never able to do in even GalCiv (I never was allowed this kind of time either).

Now, the AI never would have gotten this golden opportunity if I hadn’t arrogantly thought that my sovereign and flag force could take out a set of large trolls. I discovered the new (in FE) “prone” hit which is really devastating (basically a knock down where your unit loses a turn).

It is interesting how important champions have become because when my force was defeated, so too was much of my kingdom’s magical capability.

The spell book at the bottom right now represents the combined ability of all your units. This is, as you can imagine, a big deal. And thus, losing a champion is a big deal.

It’s also really fun because, frankly, I’m not that familiar with how many magical spells there are (I’m basically in the same position as other players for now). I deal with magical spells from the AI’s perspective which is through analysis (that is, the AI coder doesn’t care about specific spells, it cares about what is in the XML).

Now, again, I apologize for graphics and such as I have a lot of the lighting and such disabled as I play in the debugger.

Noooooooooooooo! So few spells now. NOOOOO. I miss my champions. They’re not just “tough units”. They are instruments of victory.

Mind you, this is a “small” battle.

Mind you, I’m playing in the debugger step by step so don’t use this as an example of the fluidity or whatever of battles...and there’s no sound…

The AI gets a lucky win.

Population (I’m red):

Research:

Military Might:

Toby (Associate Producer) and Derek (Producer & Lead Designer)

The AI is now “playing” the game. It just doesn’t play the game well.

Below are the end game graphs screens of me (red) vs. AI (blue).

One of the really nice things these days is how easy it is to take screenshots and videos and pass them around.

We use Jing made by TechSmith (a fellow Michigan software company).

Two examples from today:

Problem:

http://screencast.com/t/UZJ9cp5d11m

Monsters of the wildlands aren’t finding random tiles in their areas to walk around.

Here’s what it looks like in the debugger:

http://screencast.com/t/Zv4B1zEE

Stardock is a pretty silly place to “work” at.  So my new rule of thumb is, blame Derek for all my problems.  Compiler problem? Derek. VPN issue? Derek. Incredibuild glitch? You get the idea.

Now, if the airs are let out of my tires again…well, who knows what caused that.

…

Anyway, thanks to Derek, I get to work primarily on the parts of our games I’m traditionally used to working on.  With GalCiv, I knew exactly what I wanted.  With War of Magic, we kind of did the kumbaya approach (everyone gets to throw in something..).  In FE, Derek has the final word. And it has made a tremendous difference in terms of focusing the game design.

Sometimes, it means features get cut.  For example, I wanted to let players and the AI to trade items back and forth. But that could turn into a real time sink code-wise for all involved so we have had to put it up.  That leaves more time to focus on other parts of the AI.

Of course, my view of the world is ugly. Everything is turned off. But every day I get to see new stuff.

I don’t even know what this is, new today. Cool!

It is interesting to see where AI design and game design meet.  As the advocate for AI rights, I am constantly requesting game design changes. Sometimes they get in, sometimes they don’t.

I’ve been really pushing for a way to let players (ahem computer players especially) fast build things. I hate having to wait 18 turns or whatever for something to build if I’m “rich”. Punish me massively but let me get things out quickly if possible.

The tech tree and magical spells area are another area that I lobby a lot because the AI can do so much with these that you…humans…won’t because you guys just aren’t good enough at math to come up with optimal strategies compared to computer players. So the “richer” the tech tree and the more varied the spells are, the better.

Today’s updates to the tech tree start it out smaller but have it grow. You can now see how many turns it takes to get somewhere with your current research.

The AI is doing a lot of work on “scouting” the world. But today’s question is, how intelligently will the AI make use of this scouting? The AI can uncover squares quickly…

But it does not good if it squanders its knowledge.

and so…

FAIL.

Back to the drawing board.

This is not a story that will make all people happy.

In War of Magic, we had a requirement that the game would work on netbooks. And the good news was, it did.  But it came at a price: Pixel Shader 2.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with graphic tech, video cards support various types of on-chip programs with the best known one called Pixel Shader.

Pixel Shader 2 will work on really old machines going all the way back to the Radeon 9800 series and the Geforce FX cards and those crappy old Intel embedded cards. There were a lot of visual downsides, particularly in terms of lighting and shadowing. But the biggest had to do with memory consumption.

Because most modern video cards have lots and lots of memory on board (those would be cards that support Pixel Shader 4 and 5), when those cards had to go into Pixel Shader 2 mode, a lot of graphics got doubled up in memory because of the way we had to manually cache things in main memory to keep performance high.

The ironic result is that people with newer hardware ended up running out of memory. The better your video card, the faster it would happen.  It was a case of trying to be all things to all people. People with older video cards ended up with a much better experience.

With Fallen Enchantress, we bit the bullet and went with Pixel Shader 3. This not only gave us a lot of new lighting and shadowing options but largely eliminated the doubling of memory issue we had with Pixel Shader 2. The net result is that, voila, our memory use was halved. But it comes at a price. You need a much better video card to play Fallen Enchantress than you did War of Magic.

Now, bear in mind, what I mean by much is still a relatively low end video card. It just has to support DirectX 9c. So for instance a Radeon X1300 or a Geforce 7 series would now be the low end.  Put another way, if your video card has less than 512MB of memory on it, you will probably have problems.

A rule of thumb is, if your video card is older than 5 years…it’s probably time to upgrade it if you want to play Fallen Enchantress.

There’s been a lot of talking about the character portraits shown in screenshots.

One thing to bear in mind: Developer journals are not marketing screenshots. I take them in the debugger while I’m working. It’s the only way we are able to have so many developer journals.

That means the lighting, particle effects, etc. are disabled.

Here are some of the character portraits for FE:

In every Stardock game ever, from 1993 on, the “flavor text” was done by whoever had a moment to throw something in there.

Often times, it meant I did it since I type 120wpm and could crank out a lot of stuff.  The GalCiv technology descriptions are notorious for this.

In War of Magic, we decided that we would keep the tongue in cheek text to a minimum which in reality just made it dry and boring.

Since we didn’t enjoy doing it and our fans really wanted to see our games start having some “soul” to them, we hired Sci-Fi writer, Dave Stern full time. He’s been with us since January and the results will be pretty obvious in Fallen Enchantress.

Screenshots:

I’m not a marketing person so these screenshot are taken by me in the debugger so keep that in mind (i.e. all graphical enhancements are turned to min for max performance in the debugger):

So Dave would write up a lengthy story along with something short for the in-game part. We would then be inspired to come up with game mechanics around it.

For example, in WOM, the Urxen were described as “Like Trogs but less warlike but more productive”.

In FE, Dave wrote a story about the history of the Urxen and their lives under Lady Umber. This in turn allowed us to come up with some unique traits that simply didn’t exist in WOM like Wanderlust and Serpent’s pack. Wanderlust lets players have Exploration technology early and Serpent’s pack lets them recruit a special type of unit in game.

Goodbye…”Random” name generator

I am sure people will miss our random name generator.  Instead, Dave Stern wrote up hundreds of different names that made sense based on which faction they were for and whether they were male or female.

The creatures of Elemental have also gotten their lore updated.

So for example, Rock Spiders are no longer described as “big tough spiders” but rather:

And of course NPCs now are individually described:

Now, is all this necessary?

We think so because each game plays out very differently and these familiar creatures and characters will provide a general continuity.

Turn 1.

A big objective is for the world to seem alive and interesting worth exploring. Each tile should mean something. Every expansion to your empire a victory. Every character important and valuable.

Will it be worth it?  That’s hard to say.  We think it’s worth it. Our primary objective with Elemental has been to create a brand-new PC fantasy strategy franchise.  We learned a lot with War of Magic and have applied those lessons to Fallen Enchantress. And one key lesson was imbuing the world with lore to bring the player to the world and make it theirs.

How aggressive should monsters be?

Make them too nasty and people get frustrated.  Make them too passive and they’re a joke.

I’ve got to tweak them in both directions. Gonna have to be a lot of subtlety in the difficulty levels.

Derek and his team have been busy working on the sequel to Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, the sequel to last year’s War of Magic.The final release date for Fallen Enchantress hasn’t been set yet but we do expect to go into beta around Thanksgiving.

Beta and Release

The initial beta will only be available to those who already have War of Magic. A later beta will be available to anyone who wants to pre-order it.  The beta will be available via Stardock’s new digital store. We plan to run the beta exclusively via our digital updater (tentatively called Stardock Central) though the final version will be available through multiple channels.

Where things stand right now

In many respects, Fallen Enchantress is a lot closer to what we had initially envisioned for the first Elemental strategy game. Specifically:

1. Terrain matters for city placement
2. More differentiation between factions
3. Much better economic system
4. Much better magic system
5. Much better tactical battle system
6. Cleaner, more compelling tech tree.

Before the beta hits, we’ll be releasing some videos along with some AI vs. AI battles to show players how the new game plays.

A few highlights

There are more technologies in Fallen Enchantress for players to research.  However, we’ve consolidated them into three distinct trees – Civilization, Warfare, Magic (The Empires have their own equivalent). 

The display has been changed such that you can easily tell what each tech gives you. You can also choose a technology that has multiple steps to get to and it will take you through the intermediary techs automatically.

When your city levels up, it now gets to choose from a random assortment of special city improvements that it can build. The higher the city, the more powerful the selection becomes.

We have cleaned up the way armies are handled. At first, your armies will only be able to support 4 to 5 units (depending on your faction). Of course, each “unit” can be made up of many guys but the point being that researching the logistics to support larger army sizes becomes one of those strategic choices rather than a “must” to win.

This is a small thing but for grognards (like myself) every tooltip has been redone such that you get an instant display of where a given stat is derived from.

The Gameplay

While some artwork and music survived from War of Magic, not much else has.  So your skills at War of Magic aren’t really going to carry over here.  While Elemental: War of Magic did eventually become a fairly decent TBS game,  we were never satisfied with its underlying game mechanics. Specifically, the way production, research, farming, etc. worked. Rather than tweak it, we decided to take a different path.

In addition, the way heroes were handled was something that felt too much like luck.  Instead, you will find champions being powers unto themselves. They’re typically living in their fortress, keep, dungeon, or what have you. The more powerful they are, the better your recruiting skill will need to be to recruit them. 

In Fallen Enchantress you are also encouraged to kill off champions that are allied with the other side to prevent them from becoming allied with an opponent. 

The land is a dangerous place. Virtually all the prime spots are surrounded by serious dangers. The good news is, they won’t just run out and attack you normally. The bad news is, as soon as a city’s sphere of influence spreads to one of their enclaves, they will be all over that city.

Tactical Battles

Players have the choice to either instantly resolve a battle or go to a tactical battle screen. Once there, they can either watch the battle resolve turn by turn, fight it out themselves or just resolve it.

My personal preference right now is to handle the first few turns and then turn it over the the auto play and watch the gory results.

Fallen Enchantress combat works based on initiative. There are no “rounds”. The faster a unit is, the more turns they get. There’s no counter-attack (unless that unit has it as a special ability).

Some spells take time to cast and that spell will appear in the film strip on the left so that players know what’s coming up and can see if there’s time to counter it.

Some units are more effective than others. Mounted warriors are harder to hit via archers and thus a very effective counter.

There’s a lot of combat in Fallen Enchantress and the battles tend to be fairly quick.  They visually look a lot better as well (since every fighter in a given unit will take part in a given action rather than simply the lead one as was the case in WOM).

The most obvious difference in Fallen Enchantress, imo, is that nearly every unit has some sort of special ability. You can even design them into your soldiers if you have researched the appropriate techs.

Rewards after battle tend to be more meaningful.

Now that so much of the game has been put into XML, we and modders can throw in basically as many abilities and such into the game as our imagination comes up with.

Diplomacy

This is an area that is getting a lot of attention. With each faction playing in very different ways, we needed to make sure those ways were sufficiently apparent to players. That meant having players who were effective with diplomacy and giving diplomacy more teeth. That means more treaties, more opportunity for manipulation, more tools to play the puppet master.

AI

The AI challenges in Fallen Enchantress are significant. This is the area of the game I’m focused on.  I’ve written elsewhere on this but the AI is much more XML driven than anything I’ve done in the past. The less I hard-code, the more broad strokes I can take with regards to deciding what spells to cast, what special abilities to pick and use, what improvements to construct, what technologies to research.

Unlike a typical Stardock beta cycle, the first beta of Fallen Enchantress will have the first AI pass in (normally our first betas have no AI in it). So players will be able to quickly discern how we’re doing in this area.

Marketing

There will be no real marketing effort for Fallen Enchantress in 2011. Basically, the betas are going to have to speak for themselves.

In the meantime, assume it’s going to suck and give you a disease.