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:

1. The UI is updated to be somewhat more intuitive.
2. The campaign is significantly updated (though only for those starting fresh).
3. Resources are treated more like units. This is hard to explain but essentially the game will let you know of what resources you’re not using and how to make use of them.
4. There’s a lot of performance improvements the day 0 build, particularly for those with lower end CPUs.
5. The “day 0” AI is in it.
6. There’s been a polish pass to the spell books and tactical battles.
7. There’s been a general polish pass to the main game UI overall.
8. There’s been a lot of balancing to monsters, units, etc.

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:

• Lots of new seed maps (particularly for medium and large)
• Enemy Unit caching modified so that they are released from the game after death (this should address the “game gets slower over time” issue some have reported)
• In tactical battles, the camera will only move IF the unit is off screen
• Fixed a crash related to city tiles on DirectX 11 based setups with a game within a game
• Removed non-terrain based tactical battle bonus modifiers (an interesting idea but unintuitive)
• There are technologies that will spawn more shards on the map.
• Fixed tactical heal spell to ensure that it doesn’t do any 0 point healing.
• Fixed issue that caused failed spells to say “miss”
• Disabled the use of the L8 texture format to use the A8R8G8B8 format as it was incompatible with certain video cards and causing the game to crash (fog of war issue)
• Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.
• Fixed a crash related to children being born during a reloaded saved game that could cause a crash on 64-bit machines
• Fixed a crash related to reference counting on the Dynasty screen that happens on 32-bit Windows XP machines
• Tactical Battles now support edge scroll
• Fixed a buffer overrun issue that caused random crashing on SSD SATA drives while saving a game.
• Cosmetic fix to the object tool in th map editor
• Fixed a bug that would cause the goodie hut graphics not to be removed when they were no longer relevant.
• Fixed minimap bug where unhiding and dragging the minimap without first resizing it would cause the map part to get offset from the rest of the minimap window, leaving it blank
• Fixed bug on loading a game or starting a new game within a game where clicking on a city would leave its resource tab blank until it was clicked on again
• Improved performance of units joining into an army
• Hooked up the draggable window showing the list of players who have requested a new turn or not in multiplayer, automatically shows up in multiplayer but does not get filled or ever unhide in single player [NOTE: Multiplayer servers will NOT be enabled until AFTER day 0]
• Fixed crash related to very very fast machines loading up data.zip before initialization causing data to not be fully enabled which would result in a crash when the object in question was accessed.
• Ice Bolt spell removed
• New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage.
• Sion Unit given special abilities and rebalanced

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

http://www.screencast.com/t/ZTY4MjhhYz

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.

Greetings!

We’re hoping those of you who got the early edition of the game are having a good time with it.  We’re on the chat channel (you can get to it in game by hitting Shift-Tab).

Some modders have already submitted some really cool maps which you can get to by hitting Shift-Tab and clicking on Mods.

We have a pretty big list of new things for the day 0 version over what was in the “gold” version that some people got and the pre-day 0 that we put out last night for those who pre-ordered and the beta group.

So here’s what to expect:

• Lots of new Seed maps
• Fixes for some crash issues that have been reported
• There is an Alt-Tab crash issue on ATI cards that we have a call in to AMD about (the game uses a particular driver feature that is having an ugly side effect). If you can, run the game in a window (if you run it at the same resolution as your desktop, it effectively is the same as full screen).
• Lots of little polish things being fixed, particular in tactical battles with regards to camera control and such.
• Some various balancing tweaks here and there.

Stay tuned!

Waiting to play Elemental? Come visit and hang out with us while they upload it to the servers around the world for you to download.

The official release date of Elemental is August 24th. However, some retailers have broken the street date and to make sure that those who helped us in the beta as well as those who pre-ordered it don’t miss out, we are going to release a pre-day 0 version of Elemental tonight.

This version is beyond the digital gold version that reviewers currently have but it is not quite the day 0 version either.  There’s been a lot of polish, tweaks, and other improvements to the game in this version.

If you did happen to get Elemental early from retail, you will want to load up Impulse (which was installed) and update to the latest version.

This version should go live in approximately 90 minutes.

Hi guys,

We're play testing through a pre-day 0 version of Elemental. It is beyond the digital gold version but it isn't day 0 either.  We hope to have it up in the next couple of hours.

Stay tuned.

Update: And we do plan to make it available for pre-order users today too.

Rise of the Paladins

The Order of the Paladin was the result of the miracle at Hinern. The mighty Crusaders, armed with the best Capitar could offer, had fallen almost instantly in battle while the Channeler, Roland alone had brought low the mighty Emperor of Yithril.

A whole sale movement towards equipping soldiers with magical equipment had thus grown to fruition with the Order of the Paladin being the result.

The 23rd year of Roland’s reign..

The Empire of Yithril had constructed Hinern in such a way to bottle up the fledgling Kingdom of Capitar [AI note: That’s right, the shape of your city does have strategic importance and the AI does and will make use of that].

The known world

Umber a friend, but not an ally.

… Time

Passes…

Roland’s second daughter, Kalypso had grown up.

And a powerful sorceress she would become.

Resolve had also grown.

A break down of how it is researching so much

A Dance with Dragons

  So powerful had Roland’s daughter become that it was said that even the mighty dragons preferred her company.

But in truth, Roland, having mastered the art of diplomacy, had put great effort into seeking out and gaining the trust of the legendary creatures.

[Developer’s note: We have since tweaked the defense of dragons to be somewhat higher]

Dragons are immensely powerful but one little known fact about them, they are expensive to keep fed. Over 6 gildars a month was spent feeding them.

And so it was with dragons and other creatures of might that Kalypso, the most powerful Channeler of her generation, marched to war to deal with the menace of Yithril once and for all.

You can see a quick video of the dragon and Kalypso approaching here:

http://screencast.com/t/ZDZlNzFk

And the battle:

Only Kalypso would survive the battle.

“Perhaps,” Roland said to his daughter, “If we cannot defeat them on the battle field, we can starve them out.”