In Beta 2 and Beta 2-A, we disabled the Adventure, Diplomacy, and Magic technology trees and enabled Civilization and Warfare.

In Beta 2-B, we are disabling Civilization and Warfare and enabling Adventure and magic.

But wait! How will wars be conducted? It is just going to be a mob of NPC recruits? How do we get food? How do we design better units? How do we better equip our sovereign and our champions?

The answer: Magic and Adventuring.  Summon units. Get rare items. Enchant the land. Enchant your cities. Go on better quests to get much better stuff. Get access to far more powerful heroes.

I don’t even have a city and I am already summoning units such as this Imp.

 

Update:

Another instance:

I left my iPad up at the cottage and I’m bummed.

 

It has been exactly one week since we released Beta 2.  Below is what’s new since last week:

Overview: Lots of fixes to how the game plays out and the overall pacing.

+ Faction ability "Egalitarian" implemented, players with this ability will get female soldiers interspersed with the male soldiers when randomizing a unit type in the unit design window. [Note that in Beta 2A, custom factions are disabled but Tarth is egalitarian).

+ Fortify unit action now unlocked with the "Training" tech in the kingdom tech tree and the "Armies" tech in the fallen tech tree, no longer available for units off the bat
-  Added "UnlockAction" player game modifier to support this

+ Right-clicking on an NPC now talks to them by default instead of attacks them, and right-clicking on a friendly unit talks to their leader rather than attacks them (though, because negociations are disabled for Beta 2, this doesn't actually do anything right now)

+ Only Sovereigns can create cities under any circumstances.
+ Core Items overahaul to be more balanced, more of them.
+ Core Items have better descriptions
+ UnitStats updated to support damage and defense types (cutting, piercing, blunt, crushing, fire, etc.)
+ Overhaul of City Hubs to require fewer houses and such to upgrade.
+ Modified rarity and handling of rarity on map generation
+ Revamped CoreGoodieHuts similarly to CoreItems
+ Revamped CoreResources similarly to CoreItems
+ Rebalanced CoreMonsters
+ Only can build one lumber mill per town
+ Rebalancing and cleanup of various "claimed" improvements.

+ Cost to recruit an NPC doubles for every tech missing by the player that would be required to spawn that NPC on their own (so, if there is a spawn level 3 NPC and the player has no recruiting techs, they would cost 4x as much)

+ Added A_NPCSpawnRating player ability [modding]

+ Added A_CityDefense player ability, granting a hit points bonus to units stationed in any city owned by the player, City Defense tech gives a 25% bonus to the player
- Unit context for stationed units shows the city HP bonuses in the base HP display now
+ Siege tech now unlocks the siege action for units owned by the player, keeps the action from showing up otherwise
+ Added "UnlockSpellbook" player game modifier, for the Spellbooks tech [modding]

+ New Tiny Seed Map
+ Tweaks to Resourcefulness faction ability (only 25 resources)
+ ALERT: GameXMLLoaded and CoreXMLLoaded are now multithreaded (ALERT: Keep an eye for unintended consequences)
+ Faster loading on multi-core systems.
+ Crimon Ring increases HP by 5, not 20.
+ General Reduction of armor and weapons available for sovereign customization.
+ General nerfing of monsters that are running around.
+ NPCs are generally worth a LOT less XP (10 XP versus 50) if you kill them.
+ Revive Land now costs 3 essence
+ On Level Up, player gets 1 point (not 10) with leveling up incrementing a trait typically by 1.
+ Increasing sovereign base abilities on sovereign design now costs 3 instead of 1.
+ Research Pacing increased by default to counter fewer studies being able to be built
+ Cities require less housing to go up levels but have higher population caps.
+ Most improvements are now only 1 per city
+ Tracking ability costs 15 intead of 10
+ Critical Section added around Tile Designer

+ Added support for "TrainingResourceCostDiscount" city modifier, whose value represents the percentage discount on resource costs for training any unit in that city
+ In the interest of making player abilities that provide a multiplier to resource production across the whole kingdom less dependent on code changes, I've made it so that
city production of a resource always looks for the player ability "A_<ResourceTypeName>", and uses that as the multiplier from a player ability, instead of having a bunch of hard-coded cases for different resource types
+ Added a bunch of player ability types for resource production bonuses to CorePlayerAbilities.xml for various techs to use
+ Added player ability "A_SpellRange", where each point adds a tile of range to any spell cast by the sovereign

+ only champions can trigger quest locations, with all other units (whose players can see the quest location) being blocked by the tile
+ Champions need to set a quest trigger as their destination now to trigger the quest, instead of happening to walk over it, and units that can't trigger that quest location won't accidentally trigger it
+ Fixed bug where visited quests were set to block all units, meaning that if the questing unit needed to return there as an objective, they were unable to
+ Witch's Hut goodie hut added
+ Harvesting technology added
+ Improvements generally are somewhat less expensive to compensate for fewer repeatable buildings
+ Weeds tile design added
+ Roads upgrade to better roads at a much slower rate
+ Ship movement increased from 1 to 4.
+ Beta map tweaked
+ Dragons made a high level spawn.
+ Fixed typo of referring to a rat as the innkeeper's daughter.
+ Further balancing of creatures (PLEASE BE CAREFUL ABOUT CHECKING IN CREATURES)
+ New rare resource: VentiOre - provides 1.5X metal
+ New rare resource: Elementium - required for some very rare equipment
+ Removed Ale from the game (thanks ESRB...)
+ Added telescope item (needs graphic)
+ Traveling boots now available at shop to make units faster
+ Further nerfing of creatures (who checked in horses with 23 attack?)
+ New shop item: Recruiting shirt. Adds +1 Charisma.
+ Clean up of sovereign design customization costs

+ Ranged Attack Improved
- If a unit with ranged attack is in an army, at least one ranged attack unit will show up in the army's gfx
- If you use a ranged attack with an army, only the ranged attack unit that is displayed will fire whether or not he is the leader of the army
- Target will play an on-hit animation when the projectile hits the target
- New CUnitSetAnimationStatusProcess implemented
- Added new animation status UNIT_ANIMATION_STATUS_RANGED_ATTACK_ONCE 
- Fixed bug where after attacking with a ranged attack, and then taking a unit out of an army, the left-over unit would play an attack animation
- Fixed warning message
- Changed annotation system to work with ranged attack units
+ New Quest: The lost HOrse
+ New Quest: The Terrorize Village
+ New Quest: Darklings in the Workshop
+ New Improvement: Basic Garden
+ New (and first) Royal Achievement: Hosten's Library
+ New Quest Tile: Inn2
+ New Tile: Witch's Hut
+ Cleaned up Breakthrough Window
+ Updated New Technology window to not be redundant
+ Updated Beta map
+ Libraries require Civics
+ Markets require Civics
+ General trending in Tech balancing: Fewer techs that do more.
+ Removed legacy extraneous improvements
+ Relias re-designed
+ Training quality significantly more powerful
+ Unit training times reduced
+ Spell book cost reduced from 5 to 3 in custom sovereign
+ Default research pacing increased

***************

* AI Improvements *

Overview: AI now plays a smarter game.

+ Added many new AI definitions for managing relations

+ Improved AI's ability to find new places for cities
+ Sovereign will now take out targets of opportunity

+ AI will Call for reinforcements if a given city is in trouble

+ AI difficulty levels partially added
+ AI slightly smarter about deciding when to go to war.

*****************

* Sovereign Abilities * 

Overview: Hooked up the various abilities that you can use to customize your sovereign.

+ Hooked up "Resourceful" ability
+ Hooked up "Influential" ability
+ Added code to handle the "Daring" ability
+ Added code so that ability techs wouldn't show up in the list (ability techs given a rarity of 0 so they can't be researched)
+ Added PlayerAbilityType Influence (range of influence modifier) and Learning (cost of learning new spells)
+ Modified rarity of ability techs
+ Added techs Organized and Daring for abilities
+ Created functions GetAbility_Influence() and GetAbility_Learning() to handle the new abilities

+ Hooked up abilities Diplomatic, Organized, Stupid and Daring

+ Modified GetLearnCost to read in a player for the Learning abilities
+ Modified IsMissingRequirements to return the correct value

+ Removed deprecated function GetResearchPointsNeededForSpell
+ Modified calls to SpellDef::GetLearnCost to include the player data (needed for the Learning abilities

**********

* Bug Fixes *

+ Fixed bug where if unit was removed from the moveable list (like from being stationed in a city after a battle) the turn could not progress

+ Fixed crash for completed improvements built by a pioneer without a city

+ Changing NO_GFX and NO_AUDIO checks in ElementalData.cpp in order to prevent asserts on the server.
+ When the game ends the player should no longer get a message about their sovereign being gravely wounded.
+ The empire tree should now properly clear its entries.
+ Game Within a Game Fix: Tile Designs now clear out their cached scene nodes so that tile designs now get recreated and show up in new games
+ Fixed bug where unit gfx would appear to stand on top of cities, if you equip or unequip items on a unit while it was stationed in a city
+  Can no longer build on inns and other quest locations.

+  Offset single-tile improvements appearing when cities update have now been fixed.  Once and for all.  For all time.  To never break again.

+ Modified how the mouse detects what object the mouse is at by grabbing the nearest object in the tile (fixes Improvement tooltips)
+ Modified how the screen offset is saved to prevent the "meandering window" issue people have been having when closing/loading a lot

+ Removed code that disabled tooltips when an object was selected
+ Hide the proper controls when a spell had no requirements
+ Hide proper controls when the user owned no shards

+ Fixed some places where you could still bring up the negotiation screen for Beta 2
+ Units removed from an army at the same time are able to set a target unit destination now, would only set the tile destination before
- This gives nicer attack action behavior when splitting up an army

+ when a caravan establishes a trade route, the dirt road graphic now shows up to give some feedback that a road has been created
- However, there are 4 road levels but only 2 sets of graphics, so after the second road level all the roads look the same until more graphics get added
+ Fixed an issue that was preventing water environment colors from working after loading a saved game.

+ Made it so that you can't delete pre-made sovereigns from the choose sovereign list.
+ Added another check to model batch code to prevent an obscure crash

+ Fixed ALT-ESC "Invalid Call" crash
- Water graphics were not releasing a dynamic texture (dynamic textures must be freed or D3D device cannot be reset)

+ Fixed possilbe crashes in AutoResolveBattle (for loops iterating backwaurds using a ULONG counter)

+ Fixed bug where cities without a multiplier bonus to stationed unit stats would still display "x0" for that stat (which isn't even what it was doing, it just wasn't applying a multiplier at all)
+ Fixed memory leak with sound code in tactical units
- We had made a similar change in regular units, applied same change to tactical units

+ Fixed memory leak in main game window's event list.  CReportItems were not getting deallocated.  (Saved over 100MB when pressing CTRL+R key)

+ Fixed bug where a player ability to summon units would summon the units every time the game was loaded

+ Fixed crash/bug where tile designs would not load their XML before tile designs were used
- Added critical section around tile design vector code in tile design manager

+ CUnitType’s default spawn rating is now set to -1 rather than 1, which will prevent units with undefined spawn ratings from being placed on the map.

+ Fixed bug where after killing an NPC, when you right-clicked to move into the tile where the NPC used to be, you were prompted to talk to the NPC to recruit it

+ Fixed bug where, if any unit of a particular unit grouping type was killed or hurt in a battle, all units with that unit grouping type would have their troop counts affected, basically screwing up that grouping type for the rest of the game and giving too few troops to everyone
+ Fixed bug where loading a game with armies or any units stacked in the same tile would cause them to get placed in the same army multiple times when they auto-joined while being created, now only spawn unit events auto-join friendly units, keeping loaded games from trying to as well as they recreate everyone

+ Building/destroying improvements now applies/cancels any player modifiers in that improvement type's xml, also applies/cancels player modifiers if the improvement changes ownership

+ Fixed problems with quests not popping up condition completion messages, choice result messages, displaying incorrect pop-ups multiple times in a row, and not setting images in the quest choice pop-up.

*****

* UI *

+ hooked up new icons for spell details: spell cost, spell radius, spell range, and spell cooldown
+ changed the entry for displaying which spellbook a spell comes from to use the short entry instead of the long one.

+ Added additional text for the labels on the ResearchSubWnd (now shows upcoming techs and such)

+ "Death Fly Back" is now supported in both tactical and quick battles
- If a unit's combat rating is 10 or more higher than its opponent, when it deals the death blow, it will cause the opponent's units to go flying into the air

+  Improvements that have had their per-city limit reached will no longer appear in the improvement build list.

+ Build list wnd now shows the city level requirement for an improvement instead of the placement number restrictions
+ Added city level icon to build list and city context wnd
+ Mousing-over the entries in the build list now brings up the info card for that improvement type

+ Pre-Made Custom Sovereign Descriptions
- If the sovereign picks a new history, and custom text hasn't been entered into the backstory wnd, update the random backstory
- Parses out tags to fill players info correctly
- selecting MALE and FEMALE instantly setting those values in the unit type (fixes bug where every description used the female gender strings)

+ Spell Info Card uses the proper Essence Icon
+ Combined the best of the build list and train list resizing and placement functions to make them more robust, less hard-coded, and in the case of the train unit wnd, change width for a scroll bar, and in the case of the build list wnd, use all the available vertical space instead of arbitrarily limiting it

+ added new code in GetTooltipBreakdownOfBattleBonuses() so that it would use army values if the unit was in an army. Fixes bug where the tooltip of selected armys stats would only be for the leader.

+ Can now specify a background image for the quest choice window using the ChoiceBackground tag in the quest XML. If this isn’t specified, it uses the choice medallion image instead. Updated the Damsel in Distress quest to feature this as an example.

Next Week: BETA 2-B (Custom Factions turned on, more balance, tweaking, quests, city improvements, royal achievements, and much more). (Next week we’ll have even more).

Screeenshots:

Introduction

Elemental is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantasy world filled with magic, monsters, quests, and danger.  The player takes on the role of a Sorcerer (or Sorceress) who can “channel” magic and perform increasingly powerful spells as they level up.

The setting of the game is approximately a century after a great war between the Titans. They are gone but the land was decimated. Life has started to return to the world and people are scraping by. The more ambitious have taken to exploring the world looking for signs of civilization to join their cause to. The less ambitious have, sadly, gathered in refugee camps or fallen into lawlessness.

The great gift that the player has is that they can bring the world back to life by sacrificing some of their very finite life essence. Known as the spell “Revive Land”, it is, at first, the only spell the player knows. It will bring the land back to life enough that it can support a small settlement. Fear not, once the spark of life is reignited, it tends to spread out.

This walkthrough will hopefully help you understand the game and how to play it.

The Campaign

New players are recommend to play the Campaign (Elemental: War of Magic – Book 1). The campaign isn’t available in the beta so we’ll skip to the “sand box mode” which is where most people will play the game.

Setting up a new game

The World

When you begin a new game, you can choose how large you want your world to be (Micro, Tiny, Small, Medium, Large) as well as the Land Mass (Single continent, Multiple Continents, Islands).

This screen also allows players to determine what victory conditions are present:

• Conquest. The traditional method of victory – destroy them all.
• Diplomatic. Ally with all the players in the game.
• Master Quest. Complete the exceptionally challenging master quest and win the game.
• Spell of Making. Gather the resources necessary to cast the ultimate spell and win.

[In beta 2, only conquest is enabled]

Who are you?

Players can choose amongst the 5 Kingdom sovereigns or the 5 Imperial sovereigns or you can make your own.

When designing your sovereign, you get a limited number of character points. If you’ve ever played a role playing game, it’s very similar.

When you are done designing your sovereign, you can design his/her “Info Card”. This will allow you to easily identify your sovereign at a galnce on the map and gives him a bit more uniqueness.

Choose your Faction

You can then choose among the 5 pre-made Kingdoms and 5 pre-made Empires or you can create your own.  The factions you create you can later play against.

[In beta 2, you cannot create your own faction].

The Early Game

Turn 1:

On Turn 1 your Kingdom’s population = 1 = You.

As a rule, Elemental tries to avoid too much abstraction. This is your kingdom. These are your people. You are building it from scratch.

SUGGESTION: Hit Control-G to turn on the grid.

SUGGESTION: Use the LEFT mouse button (press it down) to grab the map and move it around rather than using edge scrolling.

SUGGESTION: Use the middle mouse button to rotate the map around.

Walking over to the female on the map, we discover her name is Lejadiri. To build a kingdom, we will need all the help we can get.

Walking over to the crates next to Lejadiri is a potion left by some long lost wizard which, if drank, will increase my combat speed by 0.25 points.

Combat speed determines who many actions you get per battle turn. In tactical combat, it’s a very important number as it determines how many “moves” you get in tactical combat. In quick battles, combat speed is simulated and equally deadly there as well.

Founding my first city

Each city is more expensive than the last to build so make them count. I am building my first city here because it’s reasonably close to the scenic view and to a nearby beach.

Because the land is forsaken, I must sacrifice 3 of my life essence into the land itself. Players only start out with 15 essence total so every point is precious. Essence determines the maximum amount of spell mana a unit can hold.

We must sacrifice our essence to revive the land.

 

With the land revived, we can build our city and begin improving it immediately.

 

I’d like to build a study so I can start researching technology. Unfortunately, I need 2 materials.

This warehouse would let me build faster but I  need a level 3 city.

To raise my city level, I need more people. But to do that, I need food. The land, while revived, is not good enough for farming. However, with 2 materials, the city is capable of growing a small amount of food in a garden.

TURN 2

My First Quest

Oh the rats in the basement quest…

Meanwhile, Xander (my sovereign) is exploring as well.

He has found a weapon.

When you find a weapon, you will want to equip it. To do that, click on your player portrait.

Then click on the item you want to equip.

Researching

Once you have begun to gather knowledge, you can start researching technology

Kingdoms get 5 categories of knowledge:

1. Civilization
2. Warfare
3. Magic
4. Adventure
5. Diplomacy

[In Beta 2, Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy are disabled]

Civilization allows you to improve your Kingdom via mundane means.

Warfare allows you to train better combat units.

Magic allows you to improve your Kingdom via magical means.

Adventure gives you access to better quests and more useful recruitable characters.

Diplomacy provides you with options for dealing with other kingdoms and empires.

Through research, your kingdom’s capabilities will grow.

Caravans

Caravans are a crucial part of your kingdom.

Once researched, a player can train one (if the city has a command post) and send it to a target destination. Upon reaching that destination, a road is built. Over time, this road will get better and better.

A caravan will deliver to your kingdom a fractional amount of what a city produces each turn based on the quality of the road and the distance between cities.

[In beta 2 this has not been balanced].

 

MID GAME

[In the public beta 2 series, because there’s no diplomacy, magic, or adventure, the mid game is somewhat sparce]

Luckily for the player, the AI in the beta 2 series is still relatively weak. So the AI isn’t exactly catching the world on fire with its uint design (i.e. it builds a lot of cheap units).

The mid game in beta 2 largely consists of acquiring the technologies necessary to conquer. 

More to come…

This is what my level 4 city looks like in Beta 2-A with the HUD turned off (the HUD will let me see at a glance what a city is producing but that won’t be in until beta 3).

Generally speaking, we’ve been cleaning through city improvements that had been lurking around for a long time that had been marked for deletion for awhile but we hadn’t gotten to it.  You can still build some pretty hefty cities but they’re a lot less redundant and as you get to know the game, you can, at a glance, tell what is what.

In Elemental BETA 2, the strategic objectives are strictly limited because the player does not have access to magic. The goal is to see what the strategic strengths and weaknesses of Elemental’s mechanics are when magic has been restricted.  Elemental Beta 2 is Elemental: Mundania.

In Elemental: Mundania, food is the critical resource. Materials are fairly easy to come by and metal can be found. But ultimately, food is the key strategic element. Food allows for larger populations which in turn allows for more city specialization which allows for larger armies and so forth.

But Magic changes everything.

The Power of Sorcery

A few points to consider:

• Magic is already needed to revive the land enough to build on. With an even greater essence sacrifice Sorcerers can revive the land to become fertile.
• Citizens default to only 5 hit points. Far too few points to bother spending money equipping such fragile beings. Spells, Shards, and Essence sacrifices can vastly change this. In The Silmarillion, Morgoth sacrificed much of his inherent strength into his minions. Players can choose to do this as well via Sorcery.
• Potential Champions wander the world. What makes them special? What makes an Adventurer or Loremaster worthy to stand out from the average peasant? The difference is that they have the rare gift of being potential Sorcerers. You can imbue them with some of your essence and then they too can start to contribute to your Kingdom of Magic.

The Strategic Elements

Food is important in a mundane world. The shards, however, are the most important resource in a magical world.

These things and more you will see during the Beta 3 series. Stay tuned!

This week we plan to release Beta 2-A of Elemental. 

Once Beta 2-A goes out, we will be closing the beta for new users until Beta 3. To join the beta, simply pre-order the game.

Now, for those of you not used to being in a Stardock beta, let me emphasize once again: These betas are NOT fun. They are not supposed to be fun. They are NOT demos or representative of the final game play or even the final graphics. 

What to expect from Beta 2-A

There have been a lot of game play changes based on player feedback.

In no particular order these are the areas we’ve been heavily modifying:

• Major changes to city building.  Generally, a lot fewer improvements being built and the ones there have more impact. Generally speaking, you will only build 1 of a given improvement in a city. Better improvements will require higher level cities. 1 to 2 housing units is typically sufficient to go up (but food is more precious since you can’t crank out gardens anymore).
• More mobility in general (units get more moves)
• Monsters properly spawn based on toughness (i.e. generally no more crazy monsters right outside your base)
• AI improvements (still primitive though)
• More items
• More quests
• Beginning of cleanup to the tech tree
• Customize Sovereign enabled
• Lots of bug fixing (alt-esc crash fixed)
• Balance work on items, equipment, etc.
• Some graphics and animation improvements

 

A more typical early game city.

We are pouring through player feedback and I think users will be surprised at how quickly and how many user suggestions we can get in (unless you’ve been in a previous Stardock beta in which it’s typical).  We ask those users who are new to our beta programs to keep sending in ideas but to please remember at this point, it is just a visual software program rather than a “game” per se. Those who want to “have fun” I highly recommend waiting until release.

Stay tuned and keep the bug reports, feedback, and suggestions coming!

 

UPDATE

We understand that many of you are finding Beta 2 fun. We're not saying that Beta 2 is completely horrible. We're just saying that we are only at the beginning of the balancing process and major elements (the WAR and the MAGIC) parts of disabled in Beta 2.

Greetings!

We’re glad to see the beta has gone out relatively painlessly. For those of you who have been with us since back in the GalCiv I betas, I think you will agree this one went off a lot smoother.  After a decade or so, you eventually start to get the hang of this.

That isn’t to say we are free of hicups. There’s people with video issues. There’s people who can’t even get the game to run. That will be our big priority next week.

Vorlons: Who are you? Shadows: What do you want?

Our favorite part of the development cycle began with Beta 2. This is where ridiculously rapid changes to the game start to occur.

Given the notoriously massive suckitude of Stardock betas, we now have the collective opportunity to roll up our sleeves and decrease the crappiness of the game from nightmarish to merely painful.

So let’s walk through the areas (in no particular order) in which you can flex your power:

#1 City Improvements

These are trivial for us to add. And we’ve only started touching the capabilities here.

• We can have improvements that require adjacency. That is, we can have a farm and require a second improvement be adjacent to a farm tile.
• We can have improvements in which you can build as many as you want per city, only 1 per faction, or one per city level.
• Improvements can use either 1 tile or 4 tiles.
• City tiles that meet a criteria can be merged. So if you built N of the same type of improvement in 4 tiles, we can visually merge them together. You won’t get to see it during the beta phase but you can make requests on this still.

Examples

1. Maybe there should be an improvement that you can put next to a farm (or garden) that magnifies the output of the farm. You should be able to put as many as you want so long as they are adjacent to the farm tile.
2. Same for Metal resources.
3. Same for Crystal Resources.
4. Same for Shard resources.

#2 Research

The research screen is still pretty rough. The tech tree button is disabled and there’s too little information on it.

Feel free to discuss different ideas on what information you’d like to see. How you would like to see it presented.  Bear in mind, we are not going to toss out the general research concept (the one in there came from the 9 month beta 1 cycle and we like it as a game mechanic).

#3 HUD options

Beta 3 will have a Head’s up Display toggle that will allow you to get information about your cities.

#4 NON-HUD Information

That said, we don’t users to have to use a HUD to get basic info at a glance.  Thus, feedback and suggestions of looking at a unit, city, etc. and telling if they are defended, how strong they are, the general output, etc. We have our own thoughts on this but we’d love to hear yours.

We do NOT, however, want to have units running around with flags or other things of the sort.  We want subtle (non-HUD) and hard core (HUD).

#5 Visual Distinctions between Factions.

The Beta 2 series will begin to show how factions are different from one another much better. However, we’d love to hear your thoughts on making different factions more distinct and interesting. Bear in mind, from a RAM point of view, it’s not practical for every faction to have a completely different building design setup (when we’re all 64-bit then we can talk about that).

#6 Other types of World Resources

The Beta 2 series will start to add horses as a global resource that is used to create mounted warriors. But we’d like to hear your thoughts on other resources that one might control – rarer ones.

We have plenty of ideas of things about a given kingdom that might be affected by this or that but we don’t want to bias the direction of suggestions. I will say, however, we want to stay away from the GalCiv “Approval/Happiness” concept.

The XML allows us to create any type of resource, define a graphic, a 3D tile, and what stats it changes and how much. The random generator will make use of it automatically (and this same thing will happen through modding no doubt). So it’s not a big deal to add more resources as long as they’re fun and not simply there for the sake of “complexity”.

Ideally, we can define resources that are all very rare and thus would only occasionally show up in a game (but yet every game would have a couple of these different rare resources).

What’s coming up next…

The Beta 2 series will start to re-enable the other technology trees. Right now, building up your kingdom has limited choices because you’re effectively a mundane. The Magic tech path takes the view that rather than building up your cities with improvements you can also do things to enchant them to do better. It’s just an alternative direction (or you can mix and match).

Next build will be next week.

 

UPDATE!

One thing I've been reading on the forums has to do with weapons and defenses available. Right now, a lot of them aren't in (for instance, you only get daggers on melee weapons) because we still have to update the UI to handle the different types of damage and defense types.

For instance:

So a club does blunt damage, a dagger does piercing damage, etc.  But we need to display this in a way that easy to understand for the user so that when they go into battle, these modifiers can be understood.

 

UPDATE #2!

Great stuff in the comments area! Keep it up! Now you're getting into the spirit of the beta. We'll look at all of this and see which things make sense to put in, which things make sense to put in after release and which things make sense to put in some future update.

 

The weekend is just about here and most of the team is going to get some rest. I’ll be working on the AI since I’m currently the one slowing things up. I have lots of help on the AI this time (in terms of making functions for me) but I still have to do things with those functions.

As mentioned elsewhere, we’re running a bit ahead of schedule at present so it looks like Beta 3 is going to arrive sooner than originally anticipated.

That said, we plan to have weekly updates between now and Beta 3.  The first beta update will mostly deal with the most egregious issues being reported.

Here are some of the things we’ve already found:

1. Certain nVidia cards with newer graphics drivers (how’s that for a change?) are having lighting issues. If you turn off advanced lighting, that’ll fix it as a temporary workaround.
2. There are a number of repeatable crash issues we’re already fixed internally that will go into the next public build.
3. The multiplayer will continue to get love between now and beta 4. 
4. We are anxious to re-enable the sovereign and faction unit designs. Whether that’ll happen next week or not remains to be seen.
5. Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy are waiting on some assets from Random House (writing, descriptions, etc.) along with AI design to make use of the spells.

Here are some things to expect:

1. Gameplay improvements will likely start occurring at an extremely rapid pace.
2. Random Map work will start to really show up during the beta 2 cycle.
3. General balance will rapidly improve during the beta 2 cycle.
4. Stability should dramatically improve as we move through the beta 2 cycle.

Other things of note:

1. Art assets and visual eye candy are being held back for release purposes. We don’t need “beta testing” of them and it allows the final game to be visually much nicer than what’s in the beta.  Hence, the attack animations and sounds are intentionally gimped.  The same is true of ground textures and other items.

Things we are concerned about:

1. Memory use.  If you run the game with a /w parameter, it’ll run in a window. We are looking for things that cause the game to run out of memory. There are some memory leaks in there that we’ll be looking to eliminate as quickly as possible.

Have a good weekend!

We are pleased to announce that Elemental: War of Magic – BETA is now available.

To those who have pre-ordered the game and would like to subject themselves to misery, agony, famine, and grief, you may voluntarily take part in the buggy, unfun, imbalanced, flakey, psychologically damaging beta.

Here are two helpful links:

• Beta Tester Info
• Beta 2 Tour

Be aware that Beta 2 is not representative of what the final game will be like. We do, however, invite beta testers to give any feedback they would like at this point even if they think it’s something we’re going already planning to address.

The anticipated release date of Elemental is August 24, 2010. We are currently running ahead of schedule so that date is looking pretty firm.