One of my favorite shows on TV is Avatar, the last airbender (not to be confused with the recent movie).  One of my long term goals with the AI is to be able to have the AI in tactical battles be able to give the kinds of battles back and forth with  players (as well as eventually in MP as well) that I see on that show.  Of course, such an AI will take probably years to reach that level but we have the luxury of doing that sort of thing (like with GalCiv before it).

The engine team will eventually need to create more systems to do some of the things it would require (i.e. particle effects won’t be enough) but it should be cool.

For today, I’m going through the a lot of the values (weapons, defenses, city improvements) and relooking at their balance. I’m finding it way too easy to just “rush” nearby enemies because the values grow so much, so fast.

Another thing I’m looking to do in the next few weeks is to start porting my C++ APIs to Python. Not only will this make it much easier to do tweaks without recompling but other players can see what I’m doing directly and make suggestions or even try their own hand on it.

Update

[More dev journals to come this week but I'll be locking comments, people can discuss different pieces in the forums].

Our story so far…

On August 24th, Stardock released the long-anticipated PC strategy game Elemental on schedule…

Except, of course, that’s not quite what happened. Stardock released the game a couple days early to beta testers and pre-order customers – the same version reviewers were given (v1.0) and the results were painful in two basic ways:

1. The new engine that Stardock developed turned out to have a lot of compatibility problems resulting in crashing and out of memory errors for a significant percentage (I’d go as far as to say as many as 30% of users – which is a gigantic number – anything over 5% is considered unacceptable).  It’s not commonly known but the engine in our previous games (GalCiv II, The Political Machine, etc.) was developed originally in 1997 and enhanced over the years.  Nowadays, most companies just license their engine from Gamebryo (Civilization V, Oblivion, Fallout 3) or the Unreal engine. You are now seeing why they do. 

2. The above ensured ruinous reviews but even without them, the game UI and some of the game mechanics just didn’t live up to people’s expectations, and AI issues.

The purpose of this blog is to help answer questions so that we can move forward.

So here are some of the questions / comments I’ve gotten in emails and private messages and on various forums that I’ll try to answer:

Q: What is Stardock’s plan for Elemental going forward?

A: For the immediate future we’re going to go down two paths. First, the v1.0x versions will continue to focus largely on compatibility (crashing or weird video issues) as well as bugs and turning on multiplayer.

Then, we will work on v1.1 which will serve as our answer to player feedback. Enhanced AI, improved UI, a tutorial, updated quest system, new magic system, numerous other tweaks. This version will serve as the basis to make a demo version of the game.

Beyond that, we will be looking at player feedback. That will work towards v1.2 (October) and v1.3 (November). Once we are satisfied that the game has met reasonable expectations, we can then focus on the first expansion pack: Elemental: War of Magic – Book 2, Cerena.

Unlike Book 1, which is fairly short because it’s only meant as a kind of introduction (the game is mean to be played in sandbox mode. GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire didn’t even include campaigns, we are generally not very pro-campaign-y people as you can gather, campaigns have limited replayability).

Book 2, Cerena is the excuse to introduce more far reaching game mechanic changes and begin to add in the multiplayer modes we have long been thinking of (from custom servers that yes, will work on your LAN that has no Internet connection) to tactical-only modes.

That first expansion pack will be free to everyone who owns the game at the point of v1.3.

Q: Stardock should just put out an expansion and re-release the game as a Director’s Cut.

A: NO. While we do intend to release future new versions of Elemental beyond the War of Magic series, we will not be re-submitting Elemental “patched and fixed” for re-review.

A lot of people seem to think that Stardock knowingly released the game “full of bugs”. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.  As people who have played through the various versions can attest, weird stuff is very machine specific. For instance, the illustrative outline on graphics causes no difference (not even 1 frame) on our test matrix machines and yet results in 20+ frames for others who have, on the surface, similar hardware configurations for us.  The PC Gamer UK reviewer ran into a white tactical battle screen that we had never encountered before (nor had it shown up during the public beta). 

The low metacritic score for Elemental (about 3 out of 5 average) needs to serve as a long-term reminder to us and anyone else who might think that you can simply put out a major retail game in 2010 with its own custom engine without a massive massive long-term beta program and a long-term QA process. If you can’t do that, then either license your engine or don’t expect people to shell out $50.

Put another way, the blistering feedback on Elemental: War of Magic should serve as a scarlet letter to make us “never forget”. So no, no re-launch of Elemental: War of Magic. It is, what it is.

For fans who are disheartened, look at on the bright side. We will be able to see how much effect word of mouth is. If we do a good job making the game live up to its potential and expectations, then we can see what effect that has on sales. And we plan to share those details with you.

As it stands today, Elemental has sold approximately 82,000 copies.

Q: I heard Stardock is laying off people, I thought your non-games revenue funded the games team.

A: It does. It funds ONE games team. But Stardock has been hiring up across the board to build a second studio. Only Elemental can fund that.  “Stardock” is made up of 3 groups: Enterprise software (our #1 revenue source), Consumer software (Object Desktop, Fences, etc.) and Consumer Entertainment (the games). That’s not counting Impulse which is a separate, profitable entity that doesn’t get affected one way or the other by the success of the games or the enterprise software.

Q: Brad Wardell: You should just kill yourself! [I actually did get this]

A: I’m sorry our recent entertainment product didn’t meet your expectations but I don’t think it would be helpful if I manually modified my date of expiration.

Q: Brad Wardell – you have a martyr complex! You always take personal blame for everyone! Get off your cross! [yes, got this too]

A: That is my job. If you’re going to spend years railing about CEOs not taking responsibility when something goes wrong, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me not to take responsibility when things go badly on a launch.

In addition, some of the issues are directly related to my specific decisions.

Q: Your act is getting old. Fool me once on Demigod, fool me twice, shame on me! [got this too in various forms]

A: The Demigod debacle ultimately resulted from a fundamental communication failure between the publisher (Stardock) and the developer (Gas Powered Games). It took us a long time to figure out exactly how the connectivity issue occurred (i.e. many months). Ultimately, and sadly, it boiled down to a miscommunication. When you host a game in Demigod (even now), you are given a dialog for your port #. It was believed by the Stardock team that Demigod handled direct IP connections and thus its raknet  based port system would only be used when that failed.  GPG, by contrast, thought Stardock was handling direct connections too. It turned out that that port # part (even now) doesn’t have a function and so 100% of connections attempts when to the Raknet system which overwhelmed it.

The reason why Stardock rightly took the blame is because, as the publisher, we should have looked at the beta tester connectivity logs and seen that 100% of connections were being passed to Raknet for the socket rather than the 10% anticipated. Add tens of thousands of users quickly and bam. A different system had to be developed. 

But Demigod didn’t suffer from compatibility issues. It was very solid right out of the gate (for pretty much everyone) and was an excellent game on day 1. GPG did a great job making a great game. And Stardock did do a good job making a good backend. But one miscommunication between developers resulted in disaster.  Only a much larger beta test would have discovered the problem. The system wasn’t “buggy”. Not that it does anyone any good now, but at least people can see and learn from what happened.

Point being, the situations are not similar.

With Elemental, the issue is the game itself.  With Elemental’s MP, the system works because from day 1, Elemental’s servers are just hosted by Stardock. No P2P.

Q: What do YOU think of Elemental?

A: Elemental is the finest game we’ve ever released. Ever. At least, that's what I thought on the day we released it.  However, I have come to the painful conclusion that we will have to dedicate more effort to making the game live up to the expectations of our customers as a whole. You'd be surprised how easy it is to confuse the enjoyment of making a game to the enjoyment of playing it.

Q: My post was hidden on the forums! I have a right to post my anger!

A: No. No you don’t.  Believe me when I say I speak from first hand experience, there are entire forums dedicated to letting people post about their anger about something.  The Stardock forums have never ever been some forum of free speech. And they never will be. If you’re looking for that, you should go elsewhere.  I’ve been moderating “forums” since my Commodore 64 days as a “Sysop” and “Subop”. A few toxic users can wreck a community. 

If someone needs/wants technical support, has a question, has a suggestion, wants to interact with the community, that’s great. Go for it.  But if your purpose is to vent your rage on other users, us, the game, small animals, what have you, the moderates are instructed to take a very dim view of that. 

After the release of v1.08 (this week) I intend to instruct moderators to be even more stringent on that sort of thing because we (as a community) need the Stardock developers themselves to participate on the forums. 

While I have two decades of people telling me that I should kill myself or that <product X> is a “piece of shit” as well as various wishes that I get cancer and die “bleeding from every orifice) (yes, there are people out there that post these things) my development team are just normal people who are excited to talk to gamers who have cool ideas and we’re not going to subject them to haters (and most haters don’t have any idea they’re being hateful).  Rule of thumb: Just treat people as if they’re right in front of you.

Q: You’re getting screwed in the reviews! I can’t believe <website X> wrote <Y>

A: NO. We’re not getting screwed. While some of the review scores do have a bit of “dogpiling” to them (relative to review scores given to other games) I have yet to read a single review that I felt was unfair in terms of the text.

If anything, I feel bad about putting some of my friends through this.  It’s no secret that Tom Chick and Troy Goodfellow are friends of mine.  The question isn’t how I feel about them criticizing or giving negative reviews of the release version of Elemental. The question is how they felt having to give a negative review of a game of someone who’s their friend? It’s called integrity.  I’ll take a 1 friend who will tell it like it is over a 100 yes men.  

So when I read the reviews, my first reaction isn’t anger but sorrow at having put people I respect through having to give something I know they were inclined to like and wanted to like through that. It’s also the reason I will not be re-submitting some “patched” version for review.

It also redoubles our collective efforts to live up to the standards we have set.  We will be working on Elemental for a long time. We love it. We live it. And together, we will make it awesome.

Now, let’s move past the drama. Let’s do the things that need to be done going forward to have fun and create something that will stand the test of time.

It is great to be back to the land of high speed Internet connections. 

The team got v1.07 out this week which addresses some of the issues reported by players. There’s a lot more to do of course.  Here’s a few notes on what’s on our plate right now:

• Enabling multiplayer. Why isn’t it up now? Because the same problems that would cause a user a problem in single player would happen in MP too except now there are now multiple human beings involved which increases the frustration.  I’m going to look at the response to v1.07 this weekend and see where things stand.
• Improving the AI Part 1. There is a little (lot) of confusion on the AI.  Minor factions aren’t supposed to build. They’re just there.  I think we’ll have to change that to either make it more obvious that they don’t do anything (like change the style of city to be more obvious) or have them behave more like major factions. 
• Improving the AI Part 2. I am hoping to be able to get my AI updates into v1.08 (next week) to make the major faction AI substantially more capable. The basic problem with the AI is that a lot of data changes were made very late in development (values for weapons and armor and how much various improvements do) that heavily altered the AI’s evaluation of what was “worth” constructing or how much it needed to protect its sovereign and such. This is the kind of thing that will have to be addressed – for starters.
• Game Mechanic Changes. There are going to be quite a few game mechanic changes based on our own experience and reading on the forums.  Keep posting your suggestions. 
• Magic System Changes. This is an area that’s going to get a lot of changes. For instance, Essence will become a boolean (true or false). Your mana will come from a global pool of mana that is from the shards. The elemental spell books (earth, air, fire, water) will get moved out of character creation and into the tech tree so that players can determine what spell books they want.  Various spells will gain a mana “maint” rather than using “enchantment slots”. This all brings us to the next part
• General UI. There are some outstanding posts on the forums with suggestions about the UI that we’re looking at. But generally speaking, we want to eliminate a lot of what I’d say (with the benefit of hindsight) gratuitous complexity (enchantment slots, tile limitations on cities, obscured game mechanics, etc.).  We’ll get very specific with the community as we start to put these in.
• Performance, Compatibility, Memory.  These three things remain the most troubling and frankly, heart breaking issues.  On a personal note, nothing pains us more than when someone accuses us of “rushing” the game.  The phrase “works on my machine” is not an acceptable excuse. We just blew it on so many levels that it will require a detailed post-mortem (which I do plan to provide so players, customers, and others can learn from our mistakes in general and my personal mistakes in particular).  When I read the check-in logs, I wince at how specific each “crash” is (“Crash caused by user having 8X AGP card in 4X AGP motherboard with soft lighting turned off when in the unit design window”).  There’s a reason most games license their engines (Civilization and Fallout 3 use Gambryo for instance, other games use Unreal, and so on).   We use our own home grown one “Kumquat” which is proving to have serious teething issues that we are most definitely suffering the consequences for.

There’s a ton more to add here but these are a few of the things on our mind. It’s been, as you can imagine, a horrible horrible couple of weeks.  We’re doing out best to make sure Elemental lives up to its potential which brings me to the final part.

Elemental’s original release schedule was to have the first release (War of Magic – Book 1: Relias) and 2 expansion packs (Book 2: Cerena and Book 3: Magesta). 

What we’re going to do is that for users who own the game by a certain date will get (at least) the first expansion pack for free as a token of our appreciation for hanging in there with us.  As some long-time Stardock gamers can tell you, our expansion packs aren’t minor things. 

Have a good weekend!

Greetings!

I'm pretty far from a good net connection so I'll keep this brief  

Let me say that I'm glad that most people seem to like the game.  This message, however, is for those who are disappointed with Elemental so far.

Stardock is not just a game studio but it is also a publisher.  What does this mean?  Well, historically, the way it works is a game is released and if people don't like it, they're supposed to buy some expansion pack for it that "fixes" things that people thought should be in the original version. 

We don't have to do that because we're both the studio and the publisher.

That means we can release free "expansion packs" for Elemental until such a high percentage of players love the game that only then can we discuss sequels or paid expansions.

Having had the opportunity to finally get out of the office for the first time in months has let me look at the game (and ahem, play the game for crazy amounts) of time from a new perspective.

I should also say that regardless of sales or reviews, our commitment to Elemental will not be affected. As some of you know, most of our company's revenue doesn't come from developing games. Even if the game didn't sell another copy, we would still continue our update schedule. 

So what will be the concrete results of this?

1. In September we will release v1.1 which will be the first major revision to the game that takes into account the feedback we're getting from players. This will be a  pretty substantial change. In particular, character creation, magic (think, shared mana pools), 

2. We are going to go ahead and make a more traditional tutorial. I'm not a fan of tutorials but some of my grognard friends have had trouble figuring out the mechanics which means to me that we have to do something about that.

3. We are going to move Book 2: Magesa out of a future expansion pack and into the base game in a future "mega" update, likely late Fall.

4. As mentioned on the forums back in July-ish, we plan to make a new DVD gold master available to those with limited Internet connections later this Fall.

5. As discussed (I think) last Winter, I will be taking a sabbatical this Fall specifically so I can dedicate time to AI and modding so that others, long after me, can use the Elemental engine to create other things (you will need to know Python to really go crazy with it).

6. I will NOT be ceasing my postings on other forums.  The guys on Qt3 and Octopus Overlords and elsewhere are my friends. I'm no more going to stop posting there then I would stop going out with my friends to movies and other "public places" where, heaven forbid, someone datamining my comments might find a "gotcha moment". Those people are my friends both on the forums and outside the forums. Interacting with you guys is a major reason I like making games in the first place.

7. To those reviewing the game: I would urge you to review the game prior to v1.1. I say this because v1.05 (the release day version) is the version of the game that was originally released and if that version of the game is considered flawed then my view is that Stardock should suffer the consequences for that. We appreciate the kindness and patience many people have shown.  I just think game studios, including Stardock, need to be conscious of what they release and not expect to "patch themselves out of trouble". I do believe Elemental is, by far, the best game we've ever made but I also agree with most of the criticisms I've read too. The state of PC entertainment has changed since 2006 (when we released GalCiv II) and it is our responsibility to stay with the times. 

In short, we love this game. And we love this community.  We're not going to be leaving this game to work on some other game.  We're with it and you guys for the long haul. 

I won't be around to answer questions until next week so I hope this answers some questions.

So here I am, minding my own business in my home computer room working on AI stuff for a future Elemental update when my wife comes in.

“Why aren’t you packed?” she asks.

“I’m packed,” I say, referring to my duffle bag with my iPad, laptop, and various computer books.

"We’re supposed to be leaving and all you have are gadgets and work books.”

“They’re not all work books.”

“Oh?” she asks. “Which of these isn’t?”

“Well, see ‘The Halls Below’, that’s not a computer book.” I respond.

“Isn’t a Penny Arcade book?” she demands.

“Well, sure, but it’s not a computer book.” I try to assure her.

“You’ve spent all afternoon and this evening on the computer instead of packing clothes, tooth brush, swimsuit, and other real people stuff?” she asks.

“Well, look, something came up.”

“Oh, tell me, husband.” she says.

“Well look at this, I can assassinate the AI’s sovereign with just a regular army.”

“So?”

This is where I, understandably, became shocked.

“So? So?!” I exclaim. “These are Channelers. Imbued by the Destiny to rebuild the world and I wiped one out with a bunch of guys with Lord hammers while my sovereignw as out on a quest. That’s an outrage.”

“Well there’s nothing you can do about that right now.”

“Ah, but I can! I wrote a function AIUnit::EvaluateAreaThreat(x,y,radius)! The guys have all these cool vectors where I can quickly determine what’s in an area quickly. It’s amazing stuff that I can use to make the AI wipe the floor with these bloody humans.” I explain.

“Vectors are just glorified arrays anyway,” my wife (CS major) says. “Besides, we are supposed to leave and we’re missing out on a beautiful full moon.”

“I saw it, you can tell it’s fake.”

“What? Fake? What are you talking about?” My wife says.

“It’s an uncanny  valley thing. I saw the moon earlier. They rendered it wrong. There’s clearly two light sources.”

“ARE YOU INSANE? Who is ‘they’?” my wife demands.

“I dunno who exactly. I don’t want to get into a blame game here. The model seems right, I think it’s just a lighting issue.”

“GET. OFF. THE. COMPUTER. NOW.”

See you guys in a week or so.

For everyone who has Elemental whether you love the game, hate it or somewhere in-between we now have a poll up to see how the community at large feels.

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Subway Wednesday

At Stardock, Wednesday is usually “Subway Wednesday”. We go to the local subway together and talk gaming. I substitute the potato chips with cookies.  We usually talk about all manner of things (nerd talk).

Today was a tough day.  It has definitely changed the way I look at certain gaming “journalists”. I do want to say we really appreciate the support from the community and have really appreciated the way some in the media have stuck up for us too.

Street Dates

Elemental marks 2 of 2 in terms of broken street dates and it really biting us in the rear end. There’s a reason why most games today require you to install and get the instant update and are locked out until release day.  It’s something we’re going to have to really think about in the future. With Demigod, one could have said it was a fluke. But with Elemental, it’s a pattern.

What’s next?

For me, it’s AI AI AI.  Elemental is a lot more complex of a game than Galactic Civilizations was.  I do want to emphasize that the difficulty level at the world setup is not related to AI difficulty. It has to do with how tough the monsters and such will be (crazy shrills late game type stuff).  The player intelligence is set up on the opponent set up screen.

If you’re able to beat the AI at harder settings, please feel free to post your strategies and such.  I am not only happy to incorporate your strategies into the AI but relish doing so.

Compatibility. This isn’t my area of expertise but I’m getting a new found respect for the engine coders. Talk about frustration and scary.  You get one video card that leaks memory (think megs per turn) if you use feature X, but if you turn it off, then it causes alt-tab to break.  You got Windows XP Sp5 with older video cards having one weird issue while first generation quad core having a different issue. 

Makes me long for the days of DOS.

Today, you’ve got Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64, Windows 7 and Windows 7 64. Then you’ve got a plethora of video cards and CPUs to go along with it along with different versions of the drivers in all these various cases.

There’s a case of white screens happening along with terrible performance afterwards on some setups. That’s been apparently fixed internally based on the checkin logs.

There’s a case where some machines aren’t even using the GPU. I’m a total lay person on that but isn’t that what DirectX is supposed to take care of? Oye. But they tell me they’ll be able to figure it out.

My understanding though is that the day 0 version of the game has largely resolved stability issues that some people ran into. That is, the version of the game available on release day should work fine. But if you have problems, feel free to speak loudly and specifically in the support area. 

Expanding the world

One of the areas we’re really interested in going into is in the realm of expanding the world.  More spells. More special abilities. More characters. More quests and so forth.

The Modding World

There are already some amazing mods being made.  Keep an eye here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/756

You can share maps you create via Impulse::Reactor which is built into the game. We will be enabling the sharing of other types of mods once the moderation guidelines are firmed down which should be after we have a chance to catch our breath a little.

You guys are awesome

We’re a small dev team as you can imagine so your kindness and support really puts wind in our sails. We love you guys. I think many of you love Elemental for the same reasons we do.  Personally speaking, I feel like too many games come out these days to be “consumed” and then moved onto. As an  “old time” gamer, I want to have a game that I’m playing for years and years to come.  That’s why updating the AI matters so much to me because the AI needs to get better over time to keep up with players.

I can tell you this: Regardless of whether Elemental gets good or bad reviews or sells well or sells poorly, this game is the ONLY game Stardock’s development studio will be working on for 2010 and much of 2011. 

One of the benefits of being a small, privately owned company is that we can focus on things for reasons besides quarterly earnings. This is a game we love and will be expanding for years to come. And I don’t mean just the single player game either but the multiplayer as well.

A bit of a vacation

Anwyay, this may be my last post for a bit. I’m going to take some days off. The last few days have been pretty challenging. But I will leave you in the capable hands of the game’s producer, Boogiebac (Scott Tykoski) who will keep you up to date.

There was an article posted earlier today on PC Gamer UK outlining some of the frustrations that the reviewer had with the pre-day 0 version of the game as well as a problem he was having with tactical battles.

In the article, he quoted an inflammatory forum posting I made on a site I participate in called Quarter to Three.  This is a site I’ve been a participant in for many years and many of the people I discuss things on there are personal friends of mine. 

During one such exchange with my friend Ben Sones, I angrily responded with a statement “Ben, please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”

This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel. Ben’s a friend of mine and his comment that the game felt like a “beta” to him upset me and I responded inappropriately.  I post a lot on many forums and unfortunately, sometimes the things I say are inappropriate or inflammatory.

As the CEO of Stardock, I want to be clear that my comments on the Quarter to Three forums do not reflect my team at large. They were words spoken out of frustration and sleep deprivation and I am truly sorry. We stand behind what we feel is a great product, one that we will continue to support for a number of years.

With regards to a post on Rock Paper Shot Gun, which picked up the PC Gamer UK story, they erroneously point to a 2+ year old URL to a Stardock news item that is no longer active (we switched news systems a year or so ago). Their article falsely implies that we have stepped away from our commitment to the Gamer’s Bill of Rights.

The site, www.gamersbillofrights.org was set up and is run by Stardock. We stand by it.  It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is. 

However, it also became clear that the pre-day 0 version of the game was problematic as outlined in the PC Gamer UK article. The official day 0 version of the game, what is available right now, should address most, if not all the issues that have been described.  That said, as is our long-standing policy, we will continue to release updates and improvements Elemental just as we do for the other titles we develop.

I anticipate us putting out regular updates for Elemental for months or years to come based on player feedback, suggestions, and yes, bug reports.

I hope this offers some explanation as to the events that have come up. I sincerely apologize and feel terrible for the effect my forum posting on Qt3 may have had not just on our fans but also my team that has worked incredibly hard over the past 3 years to produce what we hope, is a game that you will enjoy for years to come.

We put up v1.05.016 in the early hours of the morning.

Fixes:

- We finally found and killed a battle engine related crash that we think was the cause of virtually all end of turn related crashes.

- Archers and units with special abilities can perform actions as long as they have action points available. This will likely be altered in a future update but there is the issue of some equipment lowering the combat speed of units enough to where they wouldn't be able to use their weapon. 

- We increased the default combat speed from 1 to 2. This has had a positive impact on tactical battles.

- Fixed a couple of misleading tooltips.

- We have temporarily disabled the empire faction portion of the Faction creation mod tool since it was creating Imperial factions with invalid tech trees.

Elemental has arrived!

August 24th. The day we at Stardock have been working towards for THREE years.

Download the Day 0 version: v1.05!

Screenshot Highlights:

More intuitive user interface

Updated minor factions!

Tactical Battles enhanced

More Mod tools added!

Faction Editor tool added!

The Campaign has gotten a lot of love to help new users learn the game

Here’s the change log:

---------------------------------------------------
Elemental Day0 Change Log

Game Version 1.05
---------------------------------------------------
* Gameplay / Balance *
+ Several new spells added
+ Boats will no longer disband due to dissertion
+ Absolute elimination of duplicate NPCs
+ Vigilant Demon now has mana
+ Combat Speed can only be increased 0.25 per level
+ Shop values for weapons lowered
+ Elementium description added
+ Outposts and such now provide +HP to units stationed
+ Fewer resources are spawned at the start of the game
+ Summoning spellbook no longer available at start
+ Tech trees can now reach level 5 notable locations and quest locations
+ Fixed issue that would prevent people from completing the Old Enchanter quest (a.k.a. the midnight stone quest); it wasn’t checking the items of the unit that reached the quest destination, rather those of the  unit that started the quest, which could be a different unit.
+ Random quest locations should no longer spawn on hills.
+ Snathi now has a new, non-Drake leader

* AI *
+ AI manages ships better
+ AI Sovereign’s spouse will seek the safety of a friendly settlement rather than travel with their spouse
+ AI more effective in establishing strong armies prior to going on the offensive
+ AI better at determining whether it is in their best interests to declare war
+ AI will notify player of tiles they should be using and how to use them.
+ Janusk provides a lot more useful information
+ AI difficulty levels tweaked for more challenge at higher levels
+ AI tweaks to XML

* Battles *
+ Added "Auto-Move Camera in Tactical" which is OFF by default
+ Clarified some language for the hurl boulder spells (that it does non-defendable damage).
+ Auto resolve draws will now favor the defender.
+ Added message boxes to tactical battles when action points are too low to do some action.
+ Added the ability to bring message boxes up as forced popups (always on top).
+ Added checks in auto resolve to be sure a unit can counter attack and its target can be counter attacked.
+ Added more robust checks to see if tactical actions can be done.
+ The tactical action check will now return a string if the action cannot be done.
+ Casting a spell will now properly check action points for special abilities and ranged attacks.
+ Moved the logic to refresh troop numbers to happen when a unit's health changes.
- Updating troop numbers should now be a bit more logical.
- A unit's max health is now properly based on the maximum amount of troops they have (not their current troop number).
+ In tactical battles units that have no spell can no longer open the spellbook.
+ Fixed a few temporary cursors in tactical battles.
+ Added sound effects to all the spells that were using FlameBurst1 (which doesn't exist)
+ Added the IsSpecialAbility tag to SpellDefs.  Enabling this makes the spell cost 1 ap instead of 2 ap to use
- Updated all the core ability spell defs with the IsSpecialAbility tag.
+ Casting spells in tactical battles costs 2 action points now.
+ Using special abilities in tactical battles costs 1 action point now.
+ Shooting a ranged weapon in tactical battles cost 2 action points now.
+ The tooltip for a unit’s hit points in the tactical battle window will now show any bonuses applied to the health.
******
* UI *
+ added ESC key support for closing common popups.
+ new tutorial messages added to the campaign, explaining the basics, including: camera movement, unit selection and movement, founding a kingdom, tapping a resource, visiting an item shop, etc.
+ Added a bunch of new shortcut keys
+ Fixed unit shortcut keys while in a city (now clicking on a unit portrait in the city will do that unit action instead of overriding to the city keys)
+ Fixed cases that you could click a unit, then click a goodie hut (for example), and still use the previous units shortcut keys
+ Enabled shortcut keys for items that don't belong to the local player (details, propose, recruit, etc.)
+ Fixed the hiergamenon resource breakdown page to include houses under construction for food
+ Added code to reset minimap for new game
+ New game tray implemented (now has next unit and next city buttons)
+ Added shortcut keys for next unit and next city (shift+u and shift+c, respectively [shift+s already jumps to sovereign so consistent])
+ Tool tips cleaned up
+ hooked up new for when disband unit action is disabled
+ Faction Editor “Faction Creator” hooked up
+ Mod Library button added to workshop
+ clicking someone without a soundpack uses a UI sfx, not a grunt/yes/ etc (less annoying)
+ Champion Lorebook/Context area Tweaked, adding ‘Equip’ button that brings up EQUIPMENT, remove list of items
+ unit context: removed equip icon on medallion (redundant...button directly to the right had same functionality)
+ Map Notifications now display HUD icons on the map, event icons on the side, and when you click the event list icon it’ll take the player to the event they need to see

* Engine *
+ LOD levels on main map are now back to what they used to be for better performance
+ New shard effects, both dormant and tapped, that over 1/2 as intensive as their older versions (the joys of beam particles over billboard particles)

* Impulse Overlay *
+ Support for swedish, finnish, icelandic and spanish keyboards which have the @ symbol on an alt-gr modifier key.  It is also now possible to enter some more unusual symbols too!
+ Wheel scrolling in friends list.

* Bug Fixes *
+ Fixed issue that was preventing quests from placing locations with their preferred type (CQuestDef wasn’t saving the preferred type, so when the data zip was loaded, it would be null).
+ Fixed some crashes on load from if a unit type was retired while a unit of that type was in a training queue, since the unit type would be removed from the global vector but some things would still be looking for it on load.  Now the function to remove a retired unit type checks the training queues of all the cities, too, and when the AI retires a unit type, it removes it from its list of designs.
- I think this also fixes some crashes on load from the testers downstairs, where I would see units looking for AI designed unit types that weren't in the unit type list anymore, as well as the loading in of the AI designed unit type vector, but I'm just making an educated guess based on the fact that the AI automatically retires unit types it designs itself.  This does fix a reproducible crash related to training units at least, though.
+ Campaign: AI cities named correctly to match lore
+ Lost Library and Ancient Temple now using proper cloth icons for their built versions (lost library used to like ancient temple)
+ Fixed bug where using a soverign for a race not their own (ex. Relias with Capitar) then playing against the race you would have led (Altar, in this example) the random sovereign would retain your name (2 relias’ talking to each other)

Known Issues

- We did find a crash bug where monsters attack the player, the player survives and a bad thumbnail causes the game to crash. We have fixed this internally. But it wasn’t in time for tonight’s build. It should be a rare scenario. Next update will add this fix in. [update, it has been decided to release that fix tonight rather than wait,  you may [probably] won’t be affected by it so you won’t need to re-update unless you feel you need to].

- We are going to add an event so that if the user clicks on a global resource it will remove the notice.

- There are a number of AI improvements that were checked in for the next build. [Editor’s note: Brad always has AI improvements he wants in right now now now. ].

- The Sand Golem token may need to be nerfed (quest item).

What’s next?

• After the team gets a day of rest, we’ll be back to put the final touches on the MP servers.  Those involved on it have used the extra time to get more multiplayer maps in, add better custom game support, etc.  MP should be turned on early next week.
• If you have an ATI card with Windows 7 64-bit, make sure you have updated to the latest drivers. We have verified with AMD that the pre-July cards had a memory issue.
• As some of you know, starting in October I will be going on a sabbatical from my day job at Stardock (President & CEO) for a month or two so that I can spend my time making mods, getting better at Python (so that we can expose the AI APIs and Gameplay APIs to modders via Python) and focus on new AI ideas I’ve had while playing the game these past couple months (these updates to the game will be free of course).
• The book, Elemental: Destiny’s Embers is available at most bookstores now.  We are releasing a series of goodies for those people who buy the book.
• The Stardock team will be releasing a free Quest Pack for Elemental in September.  If you have any requests for quests, please feel free to share them on the forums.
• In general, we welcome your ideas and suggestions. You bought the game, we consider release day the BEGINNING of our support, not the end.  Please feel free to post any requests you’d like to see in future updates. We can’t promise we’ll be able to implement them but we’ll do our best to do what we can.

Where to get Elemental in North America

• Walmart, Best Buy, EB, GameStop, and most other retailers are carrying both the standard edition and the Limited Edition. We don’t plan on making more units of the Limited Edition so once they’re gone, they’re gone.

What to get Elemental elsewhere

• Elemental will be available in Australia in September (so I’m told) and in Russia in late September. A native Russian language version is still a ways out (there’s a lot of text in Elemental to translate).
• In Europe and Asia, your best bet is to get it digitally directly from Stardock.

Help Help! How do I play?

• Check out the video tutorials for a hand’s on demo

What about a Demo version?

• As soon as our Multiplayer customers are taken care of, we will start work on a demo. No specific ETA though.