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. 

Beta 3-B is the big one. It’ll be the first beta build that should start to feel like a game.

First off, there are the major features being enabled in the public beta:

1. Tactical Battles
2. Master Quests
3. Near Final technology tree
4. Near final city improvement list
5. Tons of game play tweaks
6. Lots of bug fixes

This beta will start to show just how much impact the beta community has had on the game.  I’ll be doing a video preview in the next day or so.

Coming up: Tactical Battle Preview

As some of you know, Elemental BETA 3-B is the last public beta prior to the Modding beta (Beta 4). The modding beta will take things into a different direction while the team focuses on polishing, fixing bugs, and adding your requests into the main game in time for both the DVD release version (August 6)  and the Day 0 release version (August 24).

Having done these beta programs over the past 17 years, we’ve gotten a lot better at addressing beta tester concerns after the beta closes. Part of that is obviously the tech – until 2003, we had to do all our communication using public Usenet groups or static web pages. Not an ideal format as you can imagine.

In addition, starting with Galactic Civilizations I (2003) the retail gold and digital gold versions started being different.  This was fairly nice as it gave us an extra couple weeks to add other niceties based on player feedback.

So here are some FAQs we have gotten over the years and I’ll do my best to answer them:

Q: How much will the the released version be different from the last beta version?

A: Historically, a LOT.  Sins of a Solar Empire’s last public beta didn’t have infinite resources for instance.

Q: Why does so much change between the last betas and the release versions?

A: During the final stages of the beta, stability becomes our primary concern. The last beta cycles allow us to catalog the typically massive amount of crash and other stability problems that we then address as the beta closes. Then, with the game stable we get to look closer at all the great ideas people had and start incorporating that in. Tweaking gameplay and such is not time consuming.

Q: What is Stardock’s position of Elemental’s multiplayer?

A: Elemental has multiplayer. To ensure that it is robust, we basically threw money at the problem (i.e. set up servers around the world to just host the game) rather than monkey around with trying to get players to connect with one another.  However, Elemental IS a single player game that happens to have multiplayer.  Out of the box, Elemental’s multiplayer will be essentially skirmish on fixed maps that have been pre-balanced (i.e. not randomly generated). 

Our standing policy continues to be that we won’t sacrifice the single player experience for multiplayer. That is, if we want to have a cool feature in single player that would de-balance multiplayer, we’ll just disable it from multiplayer rather than not have it in the game at all.

Over time, we will gauge the interest in expanding the multiplayer to see how many resources to put on it. 

Q: I want to know more about tactical battles

A: Without putting too fine a point on it, Elemental’s tactical battles are designed to be fairly similar to Master of Magic’s tactical battles. If you liked those, you’ll probably like these.  It’ll be an area getting the most refinement over the next 30 days and beyond since we hope to release mini-game modes that let players just play tactical battles.

On a personal note, I don’t like tactical battles normally. However, I do like MoM’s tactical battles and I do like Elemental’s tactical battles.

What is the most challenging in terms of doing tactical battles “nowadays” is that the bar on visuals is so high now. So we’re having to gather together a lot of animation assets, spell effects, unit moves, etc.  That’s what has made doing tactical battles so lengthy.  Elemental has a lot of monsters and each one has to have its own series of attack, hit, defense, casting, etc. animations. Beta 3B will basically have just a core set of these that will get greatly expanded over the next 2 weeks internally (though I did make a fuss about units “stabbing” with a club).

Q: How come there doesn’t seem to be a lot of worry about stability?

A: I’m going to show my age here. The tools for debugging nowadays are simply insane. In MY day, if we wanted to find a crash, we had to use beeps. We’d ask people for saved games and then try to reproduce it.  We’d measure crash fixes by N per week.

Now, if we get a .dmp file, we can load it up in Visual Studio and see the line of code it crashed in and the call stack.  That’s sick. Now, one person can go through an entire forum of crash dumps and fix them all before lunch (as in literally, before 12:00pm EST).  Modern developers are sissies.

Luckily, I personally try to add as many bugs each week as I can to help even the odds.

Q: How are you dealing with video card stuff?

A: Now this is trickier. There are certain video cards that are giving us fits, especially with advanced lighting. That includes blurred graphics. Corrupted graphics. White textures, etc.

In the old days, I’d email a user having the problem and ask them if I could call them on the phone and go back and forth (hey, we’re one of the few indie developers left).  We couldn’t afford to buy every video card out there.

Luckily, now, nVidia and ATI send us their cards and because of our non-game work, we have a compatibility lab set up which we’re hijacking starting this week to speed up the process.

Q: Where does the AI stand?

A: That’s what I’m working on from here on out. I’ve had to do a bit more on other areas of the game than I had intended but now I’m getting back to it.  My position on AI, however, doesn’t change. If the AI can’t use a feature, it comes out of the game. Period. Sorry.  Modders are certainly free to go nuts but in terms of officially sanctions “stuff” I only let that stuff in if the AI is able to use it.

One of the reasons why the game has changed (improved) so dramatically in the past month is because of the AI. The same frustrations you humans have the AI has double. Economics too slow or research too long? The AI notices it very fast.

Q: Will you keep us informed on what happens after the beta ends?

A: Absolutely. Users would be shocked I think to find out just how much of the forums we read and how many ideas we get that aren’t necessarily directly suggested.  Plus, I have Jason Ocampo (former editor at IGN and Gamespot) and Brian Clair (former editor of Avault) yelling at me every day on the things they don’t like.

One feature that players haven’t gotten to really see yet because they’re mainly applicable in tactical battles only are special abilities.

Special abilities could be likened (and are actually implemented) much like a spell.

For instance, a spider might have an ability where it can poison a unit. A ghoul might be able to send a unit into panic for a turn.

The way it works is that in tactical battles, you will want to click on the various opponents to see what special abilities they have.

The good news for beginners is that early monsters have none. They just have tooth and fang. But as they get more lethal, they start to have increasingly powerful abilities.

For modders, the above screenshot shows how they work. Most of it is self explanatory but let me explain the others:

• Range determines how far away the target has to be be used on them.
• Spell Level is how advanced the caster’s faction must be in arcane knowledge. For monsters, this works out to the monster spawn level.  This way, we can keep bringing in spiders wargs or whatever and allow them to get nastier over time.
• The Spell Class is important. The AI isn’t hard coded on what spells to use. Instead, it will look at whether a spell is offensive or Defensive and whether the target is itself, friends, or EnemyUnits.
• The GameModifier is something modders will become very familiar with because it’s our universal system for changing something in the game.

The whole thing will need to be surrounded by <Spells> </Spells>

So you’d save this in say “MySwellSpell.xml” and put it in my documents\my games\elemental\units

Then you’d make a spell book.

And save this as say MySwellSpellBook.xml.  You could also put this all together in one file too but I like to keep them separate. Then put this into your \my documents\my games\elemental\units directory also.

Now, next time you load the game those spells are in there.

If you want to be really tricky, you can even go to your \my documents\my games\elemental\units directory and open up one of your created sovereigns in there and give him the spell book.

Of course, it won’t do much good until tactical battles.

If you want it to be a strategic spell (one you can cast on the main map you’d need to add that tag:

This is the XML for the summon familiar. 

You could go and take this spell and make your own spell book put it in your my documents\my games\elemental\units directory, add it to your custom sovereign’s xml and in theory be able to summon some new spells.

Here’s some other units you can try it with for fun:

(replace UnitCall’s entry with one of the below)

• Umderdroth
• AirShrill
• Lurk
• Garrote

Note that I haven’t tried this with the public beta build that streams a lot of its content but it should work. If not, you still have gotten some hands on practice for modding.

So how will you share these?

In the modding betas, you will get access to a beta version of Impulse::Reactor that will let you upload and download mods. At first, these mods will be specific to Elemental (maps, units, spells, items, etc.).  But eventually, total conversion mods will be supported too (we just need to come up with a package format for that to give to the Impulse team.

You won’t have to monkey around with anything to get this stuff to work because it just goes into your my documents\my games\elemental directory which is read in.  The names of the files are irrelevant. It only cares about the XML tags.

For anyone who’s interested in modding, be sure to show them this.  I am hoping users are starting to see just how different an animal Elemental is and why Stardock is able to make so many changes to the same so quickly and easily.  90% of our work was on making this kind of thing possible so easily.

Greetings!

Oh how I love this part of the beta.

First off, you guys are doing a wonderful job getting us great feedback. There have been several crashes that even our internal QA team hadn’t found yet. The net effect of the public beta team is that it effectively adds engineering hours available to us because we’re able to find and eliminate bugs quicker than we had originally projected.

Jesse and I were debugging through the ridiculously slow movement issue when you have an army. A N^2 number of calls were being made to update the army list creation which of course is just crazy.

A rather nasty crash that was occurring very regularly was found and eliminated today as well and a hard to find but nasty memory leak was found.

Balance, Polish, Game Play

We’ve gotten so much good feedback in the past week you guys that by the time the game comes out, it’ll seem like a very different (and much better) game than it would have otherwise been.

Let me outline some of the crucial things you guys have helped us consider and re-evaluate:

1. Pacing Pacing Pacing.  This is always a tough thing but it just takes too long to do cool stuff.  We’re going to eliminate the requirement to build a special building in order to train units.  This was a holdover from Galactic Civilizations (it required a shipyard) and Sins of a Solar Empire (shipyard) that really has no purpose in Elemental other than act as a needless speed bump.
2. Acquiring resources. Similarly, forcing a player to snake out to build a resource (OR be forced to spam cities) in order to make use of various resources IS NOT FUN. Instead, players will be able to simply select a resource and choose build if the resource is in their territory.  This not only “gets things moving” but also makes your area of influence matter more (since bigger cities generate a LOT more of it). 
3. Custom Factions.  This is something that I think people will like a lot more in practice than they will like on paper.  Simply put, we want to let people do a lot more customization on RACE creation and faction creation than can realistically be done in the setup of a game. We’d like to see race creation and subsequently, faction creation to be something much more involved and interesting than it currently is.  As a result, we’re moving it to the Workshop area (modding aera).  Thus, you won’t have to create factions in the middle of setting up your game but rather can create them at your own pace outside the game and then use them as you see fit.  This also allows us to make the race creation a lot more custom and less cosmetic (i.e. we can have Elves and Orcs and other templates in the modding that players can then create their own custom technology trees for and their own custom tiles for, etc.).
4. MAGIC. A lot of our time is being focused on streamling the magic system and making things more fun and interesting here.  Basically we want to make sure players can do a lot of magic stuff early on that’s fun and interesting. 
5. Tactical Battles. You guys haven’t gotten to see this part yet but you will this week.  Let me set expectations here: Our tactical battles are very much like Master of Magic except that units have morale and there are terrain bonuses. So if you don’t like Master of Magic, you probably won’t like Elemental’s tactical battles (then again, if you don’t like MoM you probably won’t like Elemental in general).
6. UI UI UI. Too many clicks. As outdated concepts start to go away, we can massively clean up the UI and start making better use of the empire tree and other systems in place to let the game be the focus.

Anyway, I hope some of you are enjoying the beta process as much as we like having you part of it.  If you’ve never been part of a real beta program before, this has probably been quite a trip so far.  You guys are truly part of our team.

Have a good weekend!

Greetings!

Keep those reports coming. We're reading them all. We are particularly paying attention to reports of crashing that include the dump files (the .zip that's in programdata\stardock\elementa..)

https://forums.elementalgame.com/386178

We're getting a lot of awesome feedback. Thank you!

Scott and I take a look at some of the things in Elemental beta 3A that we need to focus on for next week.