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.
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. Where to get Elemental in North America
What to get Elemental elsewhere
Help Help! How do I play?
What about a Demo version?
AUGUST 24th, 2010.
This is a day that the team has been waiting for for three years!
As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didn’t get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).
It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.
First, tonight we released a new interim build. This version is basically bug fixes and such based on player reports. You can see what’s new in it here. Looking at the change log gives you an idea of the complexities of making a new PC game in 2010 with a brand new engine.
But tomorrow (or later today as I write this) is the big one. The official day 0 update that the team and I have been working on since Beta 4 (the beta group can go into more detail on this but in brief: After beta 4, the game tree was split in two. One version went on to be the gold version which is what those people who have it early are playing. The other tree went on to become day 0. These two trees were merged today already and will be going up tomorrow.
So what can you expect?
Here’s a few highlights:
The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.
Now, a couple words on multiplayer. The servers are up but we are not going to enable multiplayer until next week. Part of this is, to be honest, team exhaustion. The early release meant a lot of people who were expecting this weekend off to rest from the grueling last few weeks had to come in. So we’re going to let them get a couple of days off later this week and open up the MP next week.
One piece of good news on MP. Originally we had planned to eliminate tactical battles from MP entirely because of balance. Some people correctly guessed the misguided (in hindsight) reason for this: We were approaching MP from a purely competitive point of view. Based on the persuasive arguments made by our players, we have decided that tactical battles will be made available in MP – as an option – at a later date as a free update.
So that’s all for now. After the day 0 update, I plan to take a day or two off too. I hear sleeping is the new “in thing” and you guys know me, I’m all about being cool and…um..what not.
Tomorrow marks the official release of Elemental. We will have a “day 0” update available as well.
But for those who are interested in trying out an interim version, we’re gearing up to release one tonight.
Here is what was implemented in the past 12 hours:
Only 24 hours until the actual official release of Elemental: War of Magic!
Elemental is here!
Want some tips from the Stardock gang? We’re putting together a video tutorial.
Part 1: Setting up your first game
http://www.screencast.com/t/ZWQyMTcwO
Part 2: You’re in the world
http://www.screencast.com/t/MmM3ODVlNDU
Part 3: Building up
http://www.screencast.com/t/MWQzYzI4M
Part 4: Questing
http://www.screencast.com/t/MTkwZGJkOWEt
Part 5: Plotting
http://www.screencast.com/t/OTBhZGRlZ
Part 6: Tactical Battle
http://www.screencast.com/t/Zjc1ZmJhMWUt
Part 7: Tips & Tricks
Over the next 72 hours as thousands of people come into the forums looking for help we're looking to keep the signal to noise ratio somewhat under control.
If you want to post your impressions (be they positive or negative) do so with a title such as "My impressions of the game" or "This is my review" or something like that.
If you have a technical problem of some kind, go to the support forum and try to be as specific with your post title as possible.
What we DO NOT want in the forums are posts with titles like "This game SUX" or "This game ROX" or other declaratory titles.
Once the initial onrush of new players is through, we'll lighten up on moderation some so that people can advocate or detract to their hearts content.