Part 2 of my critique and walkthru

Tactical Battles

These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.

Magical Speed Up

You start out with spells now. But the spells are still not interesting enough and the UI for accessing them is still painful.

A Dangerous World

There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.

Combat & Conquest

The conquest technology tree continues to be an issue in the beta. Too long to get boring stuff. This is something that is high on our list to do something about.  It just takes way too long to get the conquest stuff going.

I’m 37 turns into my game and I have no armor items and my only decent weapon is a boar spear.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is coming along nicely. Of all the aspects of Elemental that still need work, this is the area that seems to be potentially the most interesting.  Unlike GalCiv which was goblygook, Elemental’s diplomacy system is much more straight forward and provides a lot more potential opportunities for trading.

This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.

This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.

The New Economy

We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.

The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.

Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.

The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.

The most common resources are:

1. Fertile Land.  Produces Food
2. Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
3. Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
4. Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
5. Gold. Produces (well gold)

Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.

So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.

Magical Speed Up

A Dangerous World

There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.

Tactical Battles

These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.

Combat & Conquest

The conquest technology tree continues to be an issue in the beta. Too long to get boring stuff. This is something that is high on our list to do something about.  It just takes way too long to get the conquest stuff going.

I’m 37 turns into my game and I have no armor items and my only decent weapon is a boar spear.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is coming along nicely. Of all the aspects of Elemental that still need work, this is the area that seems to be potentially the most interesting.  Unlike GalCiv which was goblygook, Elemental’s diplomacy system is much more straight forward and provides a lot more potential opportunities for trading.

This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.

This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.

The New Economy

We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.

The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.

Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.

The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.

The most common resources are:

1. Fertile Land.  Produces Food
2. Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
3. Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
4. Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
5. Gold. Produces (well gold)

Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.

So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.

Magical Speed Up

A Dangerous World

There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.

Tactical Battles

These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.

Combat & Conquest

The conquest technology tree continues to be an issue in the beta. Too long to get boring stuff. This is something that is high on our list to do something about.  It just takes way too long to get the conquest stuff going.

I’m 37 turns into my game and I have no armor items and my only decent weapon is a boar spear.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is coming along nicely. Of all the aspects of Elemental that still need work, this is the area that seems to be potentially the most interesting.  Unlike GalCiv which was goblygook, Elemental’s diplomacy system is much more straight forward and provides a lot more potential opportunities for trading.

This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.

This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.

The New Economy

We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.

The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.

Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.

The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.

The most common resources are:

1. Fertile Land.  Produces Food
2. Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
3. Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
4. Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
5. Gold. Produces (well gold)

Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.

So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.

Magical Speed Up

A Dangerous World

There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.

Tactical Battles

These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.

Combat & Conquest

The conquest technology tree continues to be an issue in the beta. Too long to get boring stuff. This is something that is high on our list to do something about.  It just takes way too long to get the conquest stuff going.

I’m 37 turns into my game and I have no armor items and my only decent weapon is a boar spear.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is coming along nicely. Of all the aspects of Elemental that still need work, this is the area that seems to be potentially the most interesting.  Unlike GalCiv which was goblygook, Elemental’s diplomacy system is much more straight forward and provides a lot more potential opportunities for trading.

This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.

This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.

The New Economy

We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.

The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.

Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.

The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.

The most common resources are:

1. Fertile Land.  Produces Food
2. Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
3. Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
4. Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
5. Gold. Produces (well gold)

Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.

So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.

Magical Speed Up

A Dangerous World

There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.

Tactical Battles

These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.

This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.

This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.

The New Economy

We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.

The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.

Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.

The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.

The most common resources are:

1. Fertile Land.  Produces Food
2. Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
3. Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
4. Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
5. Gold. Produces (well gold)

Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.

So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.

It took me all night but it was worth it. That was a city. Brigands took it out.

There were so many checks to make sure that “monsters” don’t attack your city that had to be taken out in order to make the monsters have teeth again.

So we’re going to create a new option “World Difficulty”.  If World Difficulty is normal or higher, then monsters and other such things will take out players if they can.

Before, monsters were prevented from even going into your zone of control.

As we clean up the bugs in preparation for beta 3B (due today or tomorrow) I have some pretty serious qualms still that need to be addressed before release which I’ll outline below:

#1 It is NOT engaging enough. The UI, over the months, got so streamlined that there’s just not enough interaction between your Kingdom and you.  There’s a lot to do but little game-provided direction to take you there.  The pieces are there but the player is left to just “know”. That’s bad.

#2 The UI requires far too many steps to do stuff. It just needs a lot of love still.

#3 The magic spells aren’t compelling enough yet.

#4 Tactical battles require too many clicks (you move your guys each turn to the tiles they can move to, you don’t “auto pilot them”).

I am pleased to say that tactical battles are pretty decent, though visually buggy (it’s very difficult to choreograph all the animations and strikes in an interesting way. This is the first game Stardock has done that actually has animation like this and unfortunately, it shows. 

We can do idle animations great and we have a lot of great animations. It’s the fighting choreographing that we’re sucking at. We want battles to look good but believe it or not, this turns out to be very very hard if you want to have any sort of complexity.  I now know why so many games have such repetitive attacking. When there’s two objects (attacker and defender) it’s nasty stuff.

I miss phasors.

Here’s a video preview of Beta 3B.

At heart, I’m a modder. So part of me really hates shipping games. I prefer them to stay in beta. Forever. But eventually, products have to be shipped and judged based on their state when they’re shipped.

As a modder, the ship date is irrelevant. As a capitalist, I need the game to be good enough to get sufficiently positive buzz to generate the sales to continue my modding.

Ostensibly, my main coding job on Elemental is supposed to just be AI. But that’s because all our previous games weren’t very moddable.

With Elemental, the world is very moddable.  For instance, tactical battles have a lot of modding opportunities I’ve made use of.

Example: I made a quest today where your group is attacked in a huge temple.  Well, the quest xml lets me specify a map. So I made a series of tiles with the tile editor and then a map that used those tiles to create a temple where my guys were attacked by a bunch of Crypt Warriors. I could even name the individual monsters in the room (I named one Dennis, sorry, I can’t help myself).

But the idea of being able to load up a dungeon within the game from XML is the kind of fun I haven’t had since playing with Never Winter Nights.  Which, I admit, Elemental feels a lot like to me at times in terms of tools.

The evil capitalist in me isn’t totally happy about the modding. As I go through the assets available to modders, I see where the budget has gone.   There are so many assets (artwork, models, etc.) that will never see the light of day in the main game but available for modders that it’s a bit…well upsetting. 

I’m at home right now or I’d show you a bunch of a screenshots of the crazy amounts of stuff.

The team also worked out how uploading would work from within the game so you can share your creations seamlessly with others.  It’ll all be in game. But you don’t have to use our system. People can still set up their own sites for mods if they want.

Beta 3-B should really be called Beta 4 I hate to say it. It’s the most significant set of changes to the game rules since Beta 1. 

Your suggestions do get recorded and looked at. It doesn’t necessarily get implemented immediately but they do get looked at and if we like them, we’re not afraid of radical changes as Beta 3B will make clear. There will be riots I’m sure but it’s so much more fun.

Working at Stardock isn’t for the faint of heart. I have no qualms about making radical direction changes if I don’t like how things are going.  I was finding Beta 3A boring. And I don’t think I was alone in that thought.

The problem with making games is that we tend to always want to look at how others did it and repeat the flaws made in the past.  

Nowadays, it’s very very rare to see a new AAA PC-title that isn’t a sequel. So we have an opportunity to take a fresh look at things.

Thank goodness for the beta community and their constructive ideas.  If you’ve ever had a negative view of Internet forums, I recommend joining our community and reading through the work of our community here. It’s amazing.