The release team went with v1.2b instead of v1.29 but it's the v1.3 beta.

Well? What do you guys think?

It’s looking possible that this week will see the first beta of War of Magic v1.3.  v1.3 is the most significant gameplay changes since the game launched.

We are anticipating having 3 beta phases of it. v1.29 (this build) will introduce most (though not all) the coding changes. v1.29a will being introducing the balance changes and the AI overhaul. And v1.29b and on will be polishing, bug fixing, and tweaking.

Here’s what is in the v1.29 build:

Brad

Elemental: War of Magic v1.29

Change Log

+ AI more reactive about updating strategy when a target city has been conquered / destroyed
+ Janusk has been removed.  Goodbye old friend. See you in the Fallen Enchantress tutorial...
+ AI now evaluates which player they care about the most with Dynasty ties being a big motivator. When a sovereign dies, it will give its kingdom to its heir.
+ Repeatable improvements now increase with cost as more are built.
+ World difficulty now sets the default AI player difficulty
+ Modders can set the base cost of repeatable improvements in the appropriate .xml file
+ Base unit CON reduced from 5 to 3
+ Special buildings now longer required to build special units. Instead, these buildings provide bonuses (i.e. no need for a command post to train groups)
+ Minimum number of units you can train has been increased to 4.
+ Trained units default HP reduced from 5 to 1
+ Trained unit groups that survive a battle will heal to full strength (i.e. If your group of 4 survives the battle with 1 guy left, it will be replenished to 4 over time). Hat tip to Konan.
+ Insufficient free tiles message added
+ Zone of control from improvements reduced
+ Tech costs increased
+ Number of starting quest locations increased
+ Pedastrians disabled (for now)
+ More aggressively freeing memory
+ Notable locations may now be explored regardless of your level.
+ Notable locations will be spawned NEAR you when you increase your exploration level (but now remember, your opponents can access them too so don't do it if you're surrounded)
+ Objects that have been marked as destroyed are now ignore by subsystems (performance improvement, stability improvement) This is throughout all game systems.
+ LOTS of code to handle the increasing costs in terms of people to run your improvements. If anyone thinks that getting highly talented people remains equally easy as you grow, ask google, microsot or apple about that. It's not.
+ Random events added (not many random events yet though)
+ Pioneers are still trained as individuals
+ Units move faster by default on the map (animation-wise)
+ Units move A LOT faster in tactical battle (let us know if it's too fast)
+ Minor factions removed. Sorry guys, they're just too lame to live for now.
+ New notable locations added to provide weapons, armor, and other "stuff"

IF it makes the window for this week, it will be Thursday evening EST. 

Update: We've staged the beta build but QA wants to give it more of a go so it won't be publicly available until tomorrow afternoon EST at the earliest.

Cheers!

I've been online since I was 15. That was 25 years ago. Back then, it was BBSes using C-net 10.0.

You could say that I've grown up entirely living online. Before people used twitter for facebook to express their every inappropriate thought, I was mouthing off on things that I really shouldn't be mouthing off on (or at least, things that shouldn't be held up to scrutiny).

This year I started to live life in "the real world". And to give you just an idea of how out of touch with "the real world" I was let me explain what my life has been like for the past 20 or so years:

In the morning, I'd get up, go to work, work on "stuff" on the computer until I was too tired or too hungry to continue, then come home, eat, and then get back online to do more work until I had to go to bed and repeat.  

I know I'm not alone in that. Some people squander that energy and time on MMOs and such. I know, I've squandered more than my fair share of time on everything from Ultima Online, WoW, Total Annihilation (boneyards), Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo, Counterstrike, L4D, Stellar Frontier, Demigod, countless internet forums.

But for the most part, I prefer to make stuff than consume stuff. Most of the stuff I've made in my career has failed. That's the thing about running any sort of business. Most of the time, you fail. Because a successful business person means you get used to failing a LOT. 

So anyway, last year kind of sucked. It shouldn't have. My business made money and our company had its best year ever. It was a huge benchmark year for Stardock

In 2010, Stardock's software was pre-loaded on a near majority of PCs. Every Dell came with the DellDock (made by Stardock) and every HP was coming with Fences. A royalty on every PC sold.  We had Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy which was awesome and we released Fences Pro.  And let's face it, Fences was probably the most significant non-game new piece of WIndows software released in 2010. Millions and millions of downloads. Not as sexy as a Minecraft or an Angry Birds but I'd bet more people are using Fences (more to the point, I KNOW more people are using Fences) than virtually anything else released for the PC last year.

The only downer for the whole year was Elemental: War of Magic. But what a downer it was. At least for me. I'm really the type of person who takes the good things in life for granted and fixates on the negative. Not a healthy thing but it is what it is.

The toxicity of the Internet really came home last year. It's interesting how toxic the net has gotten over the past decade. It's not been an overnight process either.

The sheer hate you see online is really breathtaking if you think about it. Endless September doesn't even begin to describe it.

Most people online I meet are great. So I don't want to paint the net as some sort of festering pit of asbergerism.  I'm just saying that there's enough man-childism going around on the net now that last year's War of Magic debacle managed to wake me up and spend some time in the real world.

And it turns out, the real world is pretty nice. And boy have I gotten out of touch with it.  They have self-checkout lines at grocery stores. I watered plants recently. I got a dog.  It's amazing how easy it is to become consumed with work, especially when work involves being online every waking hour.

Last year I felt the fatigue creeping up on me which is why I told my friends i was going to take a sabbatical in 2010. I didn't get to do that of course but now I am and it's great. As I type this, I'm at home, with my kids playing in the yard, my puppy napping and just relaxing.

The Internet is still a place of wonder and enjoyment but a little balance can go a long way. Just something to consider for fellow travelers who have grown up on the Internet.

Once upon a time…

A city level in War of Magic had two key game mechanics attached to it.

First, it determined what improvements you could build. The higher the level, the more powerful improvements you could construct.

But secondly, it limited the number of improvements you could build as well. 

Unfortunately, this had the effect of being very frustrating to users who quickly discovered that they couldn’t get their settlement to the next level without wrecking something which is highly annoying.  So it was taken out.

In v1.3, it’s back. But with a  twist. This time, housing improvements will always be available to construct. Thus, if you max out a settlement, you’re not stuck, you can still upgrade it with more housing.

This will add some teeth to crazy cities that have no local population but have immense numbers of studies and the like. While some users have expressed an interest in limiting what you can build based on the population of that settlement, I preferred to see this mechanic a bit more abstracted. After all, I live in Canton Michigan but work in Plymouth Michigan.  But there should still be some rough correlation between city expanse and population.

When combined with the fact that repeatable improvements will cost increasing amounts and you bring the world back to having a smaller number of important cities without quite so much sprawl.

The beta process will let us do some rebalancing based on this sort of thing.

Historically, I've done most of my work on weekends or on time off.  Regular business hours is when I do management, budgeting, meetings. It's in my off hours that I actually get to code and do "stuff".

And I tell ya, nothing sucks the desire to work faster than a visit to the forums where hyper-entitled man-children bitch endlessly about their $10 to $50 purchase.

Most of the excitement in the Elemental universe has been about Fallen Enchantress.  But War of Magic continues to move forward too, albeit in a different direction.

There’s a lot of changes in v1.3 to gameplay that I’ll talk about later but one change that I’m working on is the scaling of costs of things in terms of population.

As many people know, in “the real world” it’s one thing to find one specialist nearby for your company but it gets progressively more difficult to find more and more. This happens to work out as a nice game mechanic because in v1.3, the cost of a study, workshop, archivist, or anything else that has no duplicate limit will slowly get more expensive in terms of personnel cost.

Your first study will only cost 1 (instead of 5). Your second one will cost 2. Your third one a bit more and so on.  This helps get the game moving early on but also makes it hard to get the crazy, out of control, late game scaling that has been typical. It also makes bigger cities more important because higher level settlements are the ones with the best resource multiplying improvements.

It’s been an emotional month here at Stardock as many of our friends of many years get ready to move to Dallas (where Gamestop is relocating Impulse).  It’s going to be a bit of a ghost town for awhile here with so many people going. 

We’re a place where there’s virtually no turn over.  So culturally, having even one person leave is a big deal. So you can imagine what it’s like to have a dozen+ leave all at once. 

I myself am going to continue to lower my hours, particularly this Summer.  We’ve got some work to do on creating our own digital service for our own stuff in the future as well as integrating Free-To-Play features into our software but overall, it’s going to be nice to step back and have a life again.  I’m getting to indulge myself on Elemental: War of Magic for its upcoming v1.3 build.  Everyone else is on Fallen Enchantress and a couple of unannounced game projects (plus Sins: Rebellion).

I look forward to being able to catch up on my tech journals. I can see how easy it can be to fall behind the curve on this stuff.

After years of waiting, I’ve gotten the Chevy Volt.

I’ll be doing a more thorough review shortly after I’ve had more time to evaluate it.

Bailey and her mother Hara and 8 siblings.