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.

Greetings!

Here’s a walk through of Beta 2.

Game Mechanics

Things that are Disabled

In nearly all cases, things are disabled because we’re in the process of hooking the AI up to them which introduces stability issues that would complicate the public beta.

OPTIONS

MULTIPLAYER

Hope this helps.  We anticipate Beta 2 being released within the next 24 hours.

Greetings! 

We’re doing some final testing on Beta 2 and expect (but we’re not promising) to release it this week.

This article will walk you through the beta and help you understand what is and isn’t in the game and what kinds of feedback we’re looking for.

If you’re in the beta or joining the beta program, please become very familiar with the reporting guidelines.

General Objectives

1. Compatibility Testing.  Does it work on your PC?  If not, why not?
2. Feature Feedback.
3. Balance Feedback.
4. Stability Feedback. 

Major Features that are NOT in this beta:

1. Tactical Battles are NOT in. Beta 3 is dedicated to that.
2. The Workshop is NOT in. Beta 4 is dedicated to that.
3. The Campaign is NOT in. That won’t be unveiled until the game ships.

Game Elements Disabled for this beta

1. The Imperial Factions are not enabled
2. Non-Canon custom races are not enabled (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Goblins, Drengin,  Drath, etc.)
3. The map is hard-coded
4. Diplomatic Victory disabled
5. Master Quest victory disabled
6. Spell of Making disabled
7. Diplomacy is Disabled
8. Custom Multiplayer Games are disabled

Game Play Notes:

1. Most of the Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy techs have not been checked into the public build.

Gameplay feedback we’re looking for:

1. The HUD

We plan to have a HUD option where users can play the game with a head’s up display (HUD) that provides additional on screen details. We’d like to have it configurable (more than just HUD enabled or disabled).

2. General Balance

Make sure you play the game a few times first before deciding on what the game “needs”. But we are looking for your feedback on everything from balance to pacing.

3. Multiplayer

The multiplayer part of the game is pretty primitive. Our main interest in this build is to make sure you are able to connect with each other. This was something in Demigod that we felt didn’t get enough attention during the beta that we want to make sure is very solid.  Playing against the AI is also a good test in multiplayer because you have to connect to an AI on one of our servers. 

So sum up multiplayer: Our interest is whether you can connect. Once you’re in the game, it’ll be pretty crummy for now.  Once we are satisfied with connectivity, we’ll enable and clean up the actual in game-multiplayer experience.

4. The Empire & Event Trees

What would make the game easier to play and easier to manage?

5. Performance, Stability, Bugs

‘nuff said except absolutely be specific on your hardware.

What we’re not looking for

• Ideas that would significant alter the scope of the game
• Suggestions that would involve significant changes to core game play

Other Notes

As anyone who has ever worked on a large commercial software project can tell you, particularly a game, changing interface and usability (game play, balance) is not the long part. 

To use an analogy, it would be like first having to write Adobe Photoshop in order to create a really cool image on it. Most of the effort/expense was put on making the program first. Tweaking and enhancing the image is certainly crucial to determining whether the final image is a good one or not but relatively speaking, it isn’t time consuming compared to making the underlying “engine”.

In the case of Elemental, half the effort is making the engine. Nearly another half is making the assets (graphics, models, etc.). And the tiny piece left are the game specific elements.  It’s a huge undertaking and we are so very glad to have you guys as part of it. Hence, when making suggestions and requesting changes, things that require changes to the engine or creation of new assets are much tougher than things that involve changing game play, variables, etc.

Hope that helps.

Here is the map of Elemental (map made for Random House’s Elemental: Destiny's Embers novel).

A cloth map (made of canvas specifically) will be included in the Limited Edition.

Testing out the map generation.

I’ve been getting a lot of messages. Let me first say that I get between 20 to 30 a day (just messages, not counting my regular email) so I tend to be very very slow in getting back to them (I apologize in advance for this).

But the most common question I have been getting these past few days is “How will I know if the AI is “good enough”?

Now, I understand that people want the game to come out on August 24th (the scheduled release day). I very much want this too. But we’ve been working on this game for a long time and we want to get it right and the AI is a big part of that. If the AI isn’t ready, we’ll push it back to the next retail slot available to us (February 2011).

I am pretty confident that the AI will be ready.  So again, how will I know if it’s ready?

The basic answer is, if it can beat me on my test map, it’s probably ready to go.  The test map consists of a main continent and 4 islands.  Thus, the AI has to be able to handle everything from me simply walking to him and crushing him to taking care to not let me take over the islands and wipe him up with magical spells (the shards are on the islands). 

There’s lots of other strategies in between I’ll try out on it and have it learn.  But that’s the basic minimum I expect – be able to play a good game without having to cheat.

Today, I focused more on the nuts and bolts. Getting the AI to build a decent army and start carefully targeting cities and units that it thinks it can take.  One AI player ultimately beat out the other 3 and won the game (I wasn’t participating in this game).  It didn’t do it very well IMO. It was inefficient and sloppy but it did, after many new functions being added, eventually get its act together beat its AI competitors.

But it has a looong way to go.  The TACTICAL battle AI I won’t get to for another 2 weeks. That’s why we haven’t been showing it yet.  Then there’s the matter of it using magical well both tactically and strategically.

The part I’m really not looking forward to is dealing with islands and human cheese (build up via magic a wall of mountains or turn your area into an island).

I am happy to say that right now, the AI does do some critical (and difficult) things even now such as designing its own units (non trivial), intelligent building up a city under many different circumstances (again, non trivial, the GalCiv AI never built its planets well ). It can recruit NPCs. It can marry and have children.  It can gather together units and form a combined arms army. It can research technologies intelligently.

So even at this stage, other than the island hopping and the tactical battle AI (and having it cast spells) we could toss out a “challenging” AI if I let it cheat enough.  Of course, that’s not acceptable. The AI needs to play well without having to cheat.

I’m going to toss in a disclaimer here – EVERY AI I’ve ever written has guys who have just gotten incredibly good or found some loophole and said “The AI sux!11!”.  This will be the case here too.  I’ll be working on this AI for years to come.

If you have any questions on AI development, feel free to ask here.

p.s. Hello to my friends on CanardPC.